A Bachelor's Comedy. J. E. Buckrose
warned the rest.
Andy smiled inwardly and settled his collar. Of course they referred to his brain. Well, it was rather a wonderful thing to have a living presented to one at twenty-five by a man who had only chanced to hear a single sermon. He thought it all over again. The old friend of his Vicar attending morning service—the interview three days later—the astonishing offer of a living that was a rich one, as livings go in these days.
“Of course,” said Andy to himself, stepping into the railway carriage, “I was rather trenchant that morning.”
He glanced out of the window as the train slipped away through the spring afternoon, and congratulated himself on the impression he seemed to have made on his new neighbours. They would be eager to see him again. Ridiculous for the London clergy to talk of apathy in the face of such interest as he had seen at Millsby station. The parishioners were already discussing the mental qualifications of the new Vicar with a keenness that was perfectly delightful.
And in the next compartment three women bent together, discussing a wonder.
“Was it six cheesecakes that Thorpe’s groom said?”
“And eight tarts! And you know Mrs. Thorpe’s tarts.”
“Besides ham and fowl and half one of her great trifles.”
“He must have got some complaint.”
“Oh, I hear them London curates is half starved. P’raps he’d never seen a meal like that before, and he couldn’t stop.”
“But you’d think he’d burst!”
“That’s just it. That’s just where the wonder comes in. Cool and thin as a lath after it all.”
“I shall go to hear him preach.”
“So shall I. Good as the Sword-Eating Man at Bardswell Fair. Ha-ha!”
Poor Andy!
CHAPTER II
As Andy passed through his own hall between his own umbrella-stand and eight-day clock on his way to pay a parochial call, he stepped lightly, less like the proud incumbent of an excellent country living than a schoolboy who endeavours to escape a maiden aunt.
But it was no use. Before he reached the porch a door was opened, and Mrs. Jebb, the housekeeper, fluttered forth from the back regions. She had previously fluttered in and out of matrimony in rather the same way, and seemed to have brought nothing from it but a wedding ring and a black satin dress trimmed with beads.
She had, however, brought something hidden as well—a profound conviction that she was fascinating to the gentlemen. Her late husband had been wont to remark, during their brief married life, that there was a something in her way of looking out of her eye-corners that was enough to upset an aconite. He meant a rather different thing, but he was not as cultured as Mrs. Jebb would have liked him to be. Still the habit of—as she inwardly phrased it—“eye-cornering” clung to her still.
Andy’s aunt chose her solely because she and sex seemed to have no connection—which is only another proof that nobody knows anything at all about anybody else—and she called herself a lady-cook-housekeeper.
She “eye-cornered” Andy now as she came flitting after him to the front door, but more for the sake of practice than from any ulterior motive.
“Might I ask you—you do pass the grocer’s shop—and we are out of soft sugar?” She had a way of talking in gasps until she got fairly started, when nothing would stop her. “I am so sorry to make mistakes, but I must ask you to try and remember that I never expected to serve even in the—er—higher reaches of domestic—when Mr. Jebb——”
“Excuse me,” said Andy, seizing his hat from the peg, “I am rather pressed for——”
“And a pound of rice, if you would be so very kind?”
“Delighted. Of course,” said Andy incoherently, escaping down the steps.
He had already learned that the reminiscences of life with Mr. Jebb were so long and varied that it seemed strange a year could have held them all, and of so intimate and pathetic a nature that, once fairly started, it were sheer brutality to cut them short.
But half-way down the drive a thin voice floated out to him—
“Candles—a pound of candles—if you could?”
He looked back, and there she stood on the doorstep, eye-cornering Andy from afar, with strands of brownish hair and odd bits of cheap white lace fluttering about her.
“All right,” he shouted back; but to himself he grunted, “Silly old kitten. What on earth did Aunt Dixon get me an old fool like that for?”
Then a sudden waft of lilac scent warmed by sunshine, which is the essence of spring, swept across Andy’s freckled nose, and he felt kind to all the world.
“Oh, let her be a kitten! I don’t care. It’s hardish lines on an old woman like that having to go out into service——”
Old woman!
What a glorious thing it is that nobody can see into the mind of anybody else.
Andy turned into Parson’s Lane, where the birds sang, and wild flowers bloomed earlier than anywhere else, and lovers walked silent on summer evenings; and he began to whistle from pure happiness. Then he remembered his position and hummed the “March of the Men of Harlech” instead.
The widow’s house stood at the farther end of the village, and when Andy went in at the farm gate he saw preparations going forward for that little tragedy, a country sale. The room into which he was ushered stood carpetless, miraculously swept and garnished, its large table crowded with glass and china that had remained for years hidden in the great storeroom, excepting on rare festivals, when it was brought out with care and put away by the hands of the mistress. A big sideboard filled one wall.
“I’m afraid,” said Andy, “that I’ve come at the wrong time, Mrs. Simpson. I’ll call again.”
Mrs. Simpson, who was a fair woman with a meek brow and an obstinate mouth, motioned him to a seat.
“Everything’s ready,” she said. “We go into the little cottage near you to-night. My husband’s cousins, the Thorpes, wanted us to stop with them for a few days, but I felt I couldn’t.”
“I hope—I hope you’ll be comfortable in your new home,” said Andy, who was not glib at consolation.
Mrs. Simpson crossed her hands on her lap.
“Oh, I shall be comfortable enough. My husband’s family have behaved well. They have clubbed together to make me and the children a little allowance—and they’re buying in all the furniture we need.”
Andy rose. He could not find anything to say to a woman years older than himself, who had lost her husband and her home—so, of course, he was a poor sort of parson.
“Is there a garden in your new home? May I send you some flowers?” he asked, going towards the door.
“Thank you; but flowers make dirt in a little house.”
They were near the big sideboard now, and in his confusion Andy caught his elbow in the corner.
“That is going to be sold, too,” said Mrs. Simpson. “The Thorpes won’t buy that in.”
“Ah—yes,” said Andy.
Then, suddenly, Mrs. Simpson’s face began to work like a child’s before it cries aloud, and she passed her hand over the smooth surface of the top.
“Nobody’s ever polished it but myself. We bought it in London on our honeymoon. Now Mrs.