IMMNMW ^ ■.1'' ,' '*. ! y' .. ■.^v/' / LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE HU n /O e • '^'• '^ STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS. STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS ">^A.j^«//,7??rs- 777a rt/QlzJiU-l^ BY THE AUTHOR OF •LADY AUDLEFS SECRET," "AURORA FLOTD" £IC. ETC. £TC. " Egypt, thou knewst too well. My heart wm to thy redder tied by the strings. And thou ehouldst tow uic after ; o'er my spirit Thy full supremacy thou knewst ; and that Thy beck misrht from the bidding ci tl.e goda Cuiuiuuiid lut)." Sifrwtptii ^iiitiiin LONDON JOHN AND ROBEKT MAXWELL 4, SHOE LANE, FLEEX SIKEEI [AVi righXa rccrri'ed.j e> STRANGEKS AND PILGRIMS. 9SooU t^f jFirat. CHAPTER I. " Give me a look, give me a face, That makes simplicity a grace ; Robes loosely flowing, hair as free ; Such sweet neglect more taketh me Than aU the adulteries of art ; They strike mine eyes, but not my heart." The scene was an ancient orchard on the slope of a hill, in the far west of England : an orchard bounded on one side by an old- fashioned garden, where roses and carnations were blooming in their summer glory; and on the other by a ponderous red-brick wall, heavily buttressed, and with a moat at its outer base — a wall that had been built for the protection of a more important habitation than Hawleigh Yicarage. Time was when the green slope where the rugged apple-trees spread their crooked limbs in the sunshine was a prim pleasance, and when the hill was crowned by the grim towers of Hawleigh Castle. But the civil wars made an end of the gothic towers and machicolated galleries that had weathered maiiy a storm, and nothing was now left save a remnant of the old wall, and one solitary tower, to which some archeologically-minded vicar in time past had joined the modest parsonage of Hawleigh parish. This was a low white building, of the farmhouse type, large and roomy, with bow- windows to some of the lower rooms, and diamond-paned case- ments to others. In this western land of warm rains and flowers the myrtles and roses climbed to the steeply- sloping roof, and every antique casement was set in a frame of foliage and blossom. It was not a mansion which a modern architect would have been 2 Strangers and Pilgrimi% proud to liave built, by any means, but a dwelling-place witb whicli a painter or a poet would have fallen madly in love at first sight. There were pigeons cooing and boop-boop-booping among the moss-grown corljels of the tower ; a blackbird in a wicker cage hanging outside one of the narrow windows; a skylark in a little green wooden brtc decorating another, llie garden where the roses and carnations flourished had somewhat of a neglected look, not weedy or forlorn, only a little unkempt and over-luxu- riant, like a garden to which the hireling gardener comes once a week, or which is left to the charge of a single outdoor labourer, who has horses and pigs upon his mind, nay perhajis also the daily distraction of indoor duties, in the boot-and- knife-cleaning way. Perhaps, looking at the subject from a purely poetical point of view, no garden should ever be better kept than that garden at Hawleigh. What ribbon-bordering, or artistically variegated mosaic of lobelia,, and petunia, and calceolaria, and verbena, could ever eqnal the wild beauty of roses that grew at their own sweet will against a background of seriuga and arbutus — shrubs that must have been planted by some unknown benefactor in the remote past, for no incumbent of late years had ever been known to plant anything? What prim platter-like circles of well- behaved bedding-out plants, spick nnd span from the green- house, could charm the sense like the various and yet familiar old-world flowers that filled the long wide borders in Parson Luttrell's flower-garden ? Of this small domain about half an acre consisted of meadow- like grass, not often improved by the roller, and sometimes permitted to flourish in rank luxuriance ankle-deep. The girls — that is to say, Wilmot Luttrell's four daughters — managed to play croquet upon that greensward nevertheless, being at the croquet-playing stage of existence, whesi a young woman hard driven would play croquet in an empty coal-cellar. Near the house the grass assumed form and dignity, and was bordered by a rugged sweep of loose-gravel, called the carriage drive; and just opposite the drawing-room windows there stood an ancient stone sun dial, on which the ladies of Hawleigh Castle had marked the slow passage of the empty hours in centuries gone by. Only a hedge of holly divided the garden from a strip of waste land that bordered the dusty high-road ; but a row of fine old elms grew on that intervening strip of grass, and secured the Luttrell damsels from the gaze of the vulgar. But for seclusion, for the sweet sense of utter solitude and retirement, the orchard was best — that undulating slope of mossy turf, cropped close by occasional sheep, which skirted the flower-garden, and stretched away to the rear of the low white Strangers and Pilgrims. 3 house. The very wall, crowned with gaudj dragon's-mouth, and creeping yellow stone-crop, was in itself a picture; and in the shelter of this wall, which turned its stalwart old back to the west, was the nicest spot for an afternoon's idleness over a new book, or the.worthless scrap of lace or muslin which constituted the last mania in the way of fancy-work. Thi?, at least, was ■what Elizabeth Luttrell said of the old wall, and as she had been born and reared for the nineteen years of her young life at Hawleigh, she was a tolerable judge of the capabilities of garden and orchard. She sits in the shadow of the wall this June afternoon alone, with an unread book in her lap. Elizabeth Luttrell is the beauty of a family in which all the daughters are or have been handsome — the peerless flower among four fair sisters, who are renowned through this part of the western world as the pretty Miss Luttrells. About Gertrude the eldest, or Diana the second, or Blanche the youngest, there might be differences of opinion — a question raised as to the length of Gertrude's nose, a doubt as to the width of Diana's mouth, a schism upon the merits of Blanche's figure; but the third daughter of the house of Luttrell was simply perfect; you could no more dispute her beauty than that of the Florentine Venus. What a picture she made upon this midsummer afternoon, as she sat in the shade of the ruddy old wall, in a holland dress, and with a blue ribbon twisted in her hair, profile of face and figure in full relief against the warm background, every line the perfection of grace and beauty, every hue and every curve a study for a painter ! O, if among all the splendid fashion-plates in the Royal Academy — the duchess in black-velvet train and point-lace flounces and scarlet-silk peticoat and diamonds; the marchioness in blue satin and blonde and pearls : the countess in white silk and azaleas; the viscountess in tulle and rose-lnuls — if in this feast of millinery Elizabeth Luttrell could but shine forth, sitting by the old orchard wall in her washed-out holland gown, what a revelation that fresh young beauty would seem ! It was not a rustic beauty, however — not a loveliness created to be dressed in white muslin and to adorn a cottage — but splendid rather, and worthy to rule the heart of a great man. Nose, a small acquiline ; eyes, that darkly-clear gray which ip some lights deepens to violet; complexion, a warm brunette; forehead, low and broad ; hair of the darkest brown, with ruddy golden beams lurking in its crisp waves — hair which is in itself almost a sufficient justification for any young woman to setup as a beauty, if her stock-in-trade were no more than those dark- brown tresses, those delicately-arched brows and upward curling lashes. In all the varying charms of expression, as well as in regularity of feature, Nature has gifted Elizabeth Luttrell with 4 tStrangers and Pilgrims. a lavisli hand. She is the crystallisation of centuries of dead* and-^^one Luttrells, all more or less beautiful; for the race ia one that can boast of good looks as a family heritage. She sirs alone by the old wall, the western sunlight shining through the red and yellow flowers of the dragon's-mouth above her head; sits alone, with loosely-linked hands lying idle in her iap, and fixed dreaming eyes. It is nearly an hour since she has turned a leaf of her book, when a ringing soprano voice calHng her name, and a shower of rose leaves thrown across her face, scare away her day-dreams. She looks up impatiently, angrily even, at Blanche, the hoyden of the family, who stands above her on the steep grassy slope, with a basket of dilapidated roses on her arm. The damsel, incorrigibly idle ahke by nature and habit, has been seized with an industrious fit, and has been clipping and trim- ming the roses. " What a lazy creature you are, Lizzie ! " she exclaims. " I thought you wee going to put the ribbons on your mushn dress for this evening." " I wish you'd be good enough to concern yourself about your own clothes, Bkinche, and leave mine alone. And please don't come screaming at me when I'm — asleep." " You weren't asleep ; your eyes were ever so wide open. You were thinking — I can guess what about — and smiling at your own thoughts. I wish I had anything as nice to think about. That's the worst of having a handsome sister. How can I suppose that any one will ever take any notice of poor little me?" " Upon my honour, Blanche, I beHeve you are the most pro- voking girl in creation ! " " You can't believe that, for you don't know all the girls in creation." " One of the most, then ; but that comes of sending a girl to school. You have all the schoolgirl vulgarities." "I'm sure I didn't want to go to Miss Derwent's, Lizzie. It was Gertrude's fault, making such a fuss about me, and setting papa at me. I'd much rather have run wild at home." " I think you'd run -^fild anywhere, in a convent, even." " I daresay I should ; but that's not the question. I want to know if you're going to wear your clean white mushn, because my own toilet hinges on your decision. It's a serious matter for girls who are allowed only one clean muslin a week." "I don't know; perhaps I shall wear my blue," replies Elizabeth, with a careless air, pretending to read. " You won't do anything of the kind. It's ever so tumbled^ Hnd I know you like to look nice when Mr. Fordeis here. You're Buch a mean girl, Elizabeth Luttrell. You pretend not to car« Strangers and Pil^rimo. 6 a straw how yon dress, and dawdle here making believe to read that stupid old volume of travels to the Victoria Thingerabob, which the old fogies of the book-club choose for us, instead of some jolly novel; and when we've put on our veriest rags you'll scamper up the back- stairs just at the last moment, and comt^ down a quarter of au hour after he has come, all over crisp muslin flounces and fresh pink ribbons, just as if you'd a French milliner at your beck and call." "I really can't help it if I know how to put on my things a little better than you and Diana. I'm sure Gertrude is always nicely dressed." " Yes, Gertrude has the brand of Cain— Gertrude is a born old maid ; one can see it in her neck-ribbons and top-knots. Now, how about the white muslin ? " "I wish you wouldn't worry, Blanche; I shall wear exactly what I please. I will not be pestered by a younger sister. What's the time?" The fourth Miss Luttrell drags a little Geneva silver watch from her belt by a black ribbon — a silver watch presented to her by her father on her fifteenth birthday — to be exchanged for a gold one at some indefinite period of the Vicar's existence, when a gleam of prosperity shall brighten the dull level of his finan- cial career. He has given similar watches to all his daughters on their fifteenth birthdays; but Lizzie's lies forgotten amongst disabled brooches and odd earrings in a trinket-box on her dressing-table. Elizabeth Luttrell does not care to note the progress of her days on a pale-faced Geneva time-piece, value something under five pounds. " Half-past five by me," says Blanche. " Are you twenty minutes slow, or twenty minutes fast r '^ "Well, I believe I'm five-and-twenty minutes slow." " Then I shall come to dress in half an hour. I wish you'd iust tack those pink bows on my dress, Blanche — you're evidently at a loss for something to do." "Just tack," repeats the younger sister with a wry face; " you mean sew them on, I suppose. That's like people asking you to ' touch ' the bell, when you're comfortably coiled up in an easy-chair at the other end of the room. It sounds less than asking one to ring it; but one has to disturb oneself all the same. I don't see why you shouldn't sew on your own ribbons ; and I'm dead tired — I've been standing in the broiling sun for the last hour, trimming the roses, and trying to make the garden look a little decent." "0, very well; I can get my dress ready myself," says Elizabeth with a grand air, not lifting her eyes from the volume in which she struggles vainly to follow the current of the Vic- toria Njanza. Has not Malcolm Forde expressed a respectful 6 t^trangers and Pilgrims, wish that she were a little less vague in her notions of all that vast worldwhich lies beyond the market- town and rustic suburbs of Hawleigh ? "Don't be offended, Lizzie; you know I always do anything you ask me. "Where are the ribbons ? " " In the left-hand to^D drawer. Be sure you don't tumble my bounces." " I'll take care. I'm so glad you're going to wear your white : /or now I can wear mine \vithout Gerti'ude grumbling about my extravagance in beginning a clean muslin at the end of the week ; as if people with any pretence to refinement ever made any dif- ference in their gowns at the end of the week — as if anybody but utter barbarians would go grubby because it was Friday oi Saturday ! Mind you come up-stairs in time to dress, Lizzie." " I shall be ready, child. The people are not to be here till seven." *' Tlie people ! as if you cared one straw about Jane Harrison or Laura Melvin and that preposterous brother of hers ! " " You manage to flirt with the preposterous brother, at any rate," says Lizzie, still looking down at her book. " 0, one must get one's hand in somehow. And as if thei-e were any choice of a subject in this God-forsaken place !" " Blanche, how can you use such horrid expressions ?" "But it is God-forsaken. I heard Captain Fielding call it so the other day." " You are always picking up somebody's phrases. Do go and tack on those ribbons, or I shall have to do it myself." "And that would be a calamity," cries Blanche, laughing, "when there is anybody else whose services you can utilise !" It was one of the golden rules of Elizabeth Luttrell's life that she should never do anything for herself which she could get any one else to do for her. What was the good of having three unmarried sisters — all plainer than one's self — unless one made some use of them P She herself had grown up like a flower, as beautiful and as useless ; not to toil or spin — only to be admired and cherished as a type of God-given idle loveliness. That her beauty was to be profitable to herself and to the world by-and-by in some large way, she regarded as an inevitable consequence of her existence. She had troubled herself very little about the future; had scarcely chafed against the narrow bounds of her daily life. That certainty of high fortune awaiting her in the coming years supported and sustained her. In the meanwhile she lived her life — a life not altogether devoid of delight, but into which the element of passion had not yet entered. Even in so dull a place as Hawleigh there were plenty of ad- mirers for such a girl as Elizabeth Luttrell. She had drunk freely of the nectar of praise; knew the full measure of her Slranger nd Pihjrims. beauty, and felt that slic w;is bcnnid tu conquer. All the li_ttl(3 victories, the trivial flirtations of the present, were, in her mind, mere child's play ; but they served to give some variety to an existence which would have been intolerably monotonous with- out them. She went on rjading, or trying to read, for half an hour after Blanche had skipped up the green slope where the apple-trees spread a fantastic carpert of light and shade in the afternoon sun- shine ; she tried her hardest to chain her thoughts to that book of African travel, but the Victoria Nyanza eluded her like a will-o'-the-wisp. Her thoughts went back to a little scene under an avenue of ancient limes in Hawleigh-road— a scene that had been acted only a few hours ago. It was not very much to think of : only an accidental meeting with her father's curate, Malcolm Forde; only a little commonplace talk about theparisli and the choir, the early services, and the latest volumes obtain- able at the Hawleigh book-club. Mr. Luttrell had employed four curates since Lizzie's six- teenth birthday ; and the first, second, and third of these young Levites had been Lizzie's devoted slaves. It had become an established rule that the curate — Mr. Luttrell could only afford one, though there were two churches in his duty — should fall madly in love with Elizabeth. But the fourth curate was of a different stuff from the material out of which the three sim- pering young gentlemen fresh from college were created. Mal- colm Forde was five-and-thirty years of age ; a man who had been a soldier, and who had taken up tliis new service from conviction ; a man who possessed an income amply sufficient for his own simple needs, and in no way looked to the Church as an honourable manner of solving the great enigma of how a gentle, man is to maintain himself in this world. He was a Christian in the purest and widest sense of the word; an earnest thinker, an indefatigable worker ; an enthusiast upon all subjects relating to his beloved Church. To such a man as this all small flirtations and girlish follies must needs appear trivial in the extreme; but Mr. Forde was not a prig, nor was he prone to parade his piety before the eyes of the world. So he fell into the ways of Hawleigh with con- summate ease: played croquet with the mallet of a master; disliked high-jinks and grandiose entertainments at rich people's houses, but was not above an impromptu picnic with Jiis intimate associates, a gipsy-tea in Everton wood, or a friendly musical evening at the parsonage. He had little time to devote to such relaxations, but did not disdain them on occasion. At the outset of their acquaintance the four Luttrell girls vowed they should always be afraid of him, that those dreadful cold grey eyes of his made them feel uncomfortable. 8 tStrangers and i'ilgrim*. " Wlien he looks at me in tliat grave searching way, I posi« lively feel myself the wickedest creature in the world," cried Diana, who was of a sprightly disposition, and prone to a candid confession of all her weaknesses. " How I should hate to marry such a man ! It would be like being perpetually brought face to face with one's conscience." " I think a woman's husband ought, in a manner, to represent her conscience," said Gertrude, who was nine-and-twenty, and prided herself upon being serious-minded. " At least I should like to see all my faults and follies reflected in my husband's face, and to grow out of them by his influence." "What a hard time your husband would have of it, Gerty! " exclaimed the flippant Blanche, assisting at the conversation from outside the open window of the breakfast-room or den, in which the four damsels were as untidy as they pleased ; Eliza- beth's colour-box and drawing-board, Gertrude's work-box, Diana's desk, Blanche's Dorcas bag, all heaped pell-mell upon the battered old sideboard. " If you spent more time among the poor, Diana," said Ger- trude, not deigning to notice this interruption, '"you need not be afraid of any man's eyes. When our own hearts are at peace " " Don't, please, Gerty; don't give me any warmed-up versions of your tracts. The state of my own heart has nothing to do with the question. If I were the most spotless being in creation, I should feel just the same about Mr. Forde's eyes. As for district-visiting, you know very weU that my health was never good enough for that kind of thing ; and I'm sure if papa had six daughters instead of four, you do enough in the goody-goody line for the whole batch." Miss LuttreU gave a gentle sigh, and continued her needlework in silence. She could not help feeling that she was the one bit of leaven that leavened the wliole lump; that if a general de- struction were threatened the daughters of Hawleigh by reason of their frivolities, her own sterling merits might buy them off— as the ten vighteous men who were not to be found in Sodom might have r^iasomed that guilty population. Elizabeth had been busy painting a little bit of still-life — an over-ripe peach and a handful of pansies and mulberry-leaves lying loosely scattered at the base of Mr, Luttrell's Venetian claret-flask, She had gone steadily on with her work, laying on little dabs of transparent colour with a quick light touch, and not vouchsafing any exiDression of interest in the discussion of Mr. Forde's peculiarities. " He's very good-looking," Diana said meditatively. " Don't you think so, Lizzie ? You're an authority upon curates." Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders, and answered in her most indiflferent tone : Strangers and Pilgrims. ,j " " Tolerably ! He has rather a good forehead; " Eatlier good ! " exclaimed Gertrude, grinding industriously across an expanse of calico with her cutting-out scissors. " He has the forehead of an apostle." " How do you know that ? You never saw an apostle," cried Blanche from the window, with her favourite line of argument. " And as for the pictures we see of them, that's all humbug ! for there were no pliotographcrs in Judea." " Come indoors, Blanche, and write a German exercise," said jcrtrude. " It's too bad to stand out there all the morning, idling away your time." " And spoiling your comj^lexion into the bargain," added Diana. " What a tawny Uttle wretch you are becoming ! " " I don't care two straws about my complexion, and I'm not going to cramp my hand with that horrid German ! " _ " Think of the privilege of being able to read Schiller in the original ! " said Gertrude solemnly. " I don't think much of it ; for I never see you read him, though you do pride yourself on your German," answered the flippant Blanche. And then they went back to Mr. Forde, and discussed his eyes and forehead over again; not arrivingat any very definite expression of opinion at the last, and Elizabeth holding her ideas in reserve. " I don't think this one will be quite like the rest, Liz," said Diana significantly. " What do you mean by like the rest ? " " Why, he won't make a fool of himself about you, as Mr. Horton did, with his flute-playing and stuff; and he won't go on like Mr. Dysart; and he won't write sentimental poetry, and languish about all the afternoon spooning at croquet, like little Mr. Adderley. You needn't count upon making a conquest of Mm, Lizzie. He has the ideas of a monk." " Abelard was destined to become a monk," rephed Elizabeth calmly, " but that did not prevent his falling in love with Eloise." " 0, I daresay you think it will end by his being as weak aa the rest. But he told me that he does not approve of a priest marrying — rather rude, wasn't it ? when you consider that wo should not be in existence, if papa had entertained the same opinion." " I don't suppose we count for much in his grand ideas of re- ligion," answered Elizabeth a little contemptuously. She had held her small flirtations with previous. cura,tes as the merest trifling, but the trifling had beenpieasant enough in its way. She had liked the incense. And behold, here was a man who withheld all praise ; who had made his own scheme of life — a scheme from which she, Elizabeth Luttrelb was excluded. It was a new thinar 10 Strangers a 'id Fih/rlms. for lier to fiad that she counted for nothing in the existence of any young man who knew her. This conversation took place when Mr. Forde had been at Hawleigh about a month. Time slipped past. Malcolm Forde took the parish in hand with a firm grip, Mr. Luttrell being an easy-going gentleman, quite agreeable to let his curate work aa hard as he liked. The two sleepy old churches awoke into new life. Where there had been two services on a Sunday there were now four; where there had been one service on a great church festival there were now five. The dim old aisles bloomed with flowers at Easter and Ascension, at Whitsuntide and Harvest-thanksgiving-feast; and the damsels of Hawleigh hat? new work to do in the decoration of the churches and in the embroidery of chalice-covers and altar-cloths. , But it was not only in extra services and beautification of the temples alone that Mr. Forde brought about a new aspect of affairs in Hawleigh. The poor were cared for as they had never been cared for before. Almost all the time that the soldier- curate could spare from his public duties he devoted to private ministration. And yet when he did permit himself an after- noon's recreation, he came to gipsy tea-drinking or croquet with as fresh an air as if he were a man who lived only for pleasure. Above all, he never preached sermons — out of the pulpit. That was his one merit, Lizzie Luttrell said, in a some- what disparaging tone. " His one fault is, to be so unlike the other curates, Liz, and able to resist your blandishments," said Diana sharply. Mr. Forde had made himself a favourite with all that house- hold except Elizabeth. The three other girls worshipped him. She rarely mentioned him without a sneer. And yet she was thinking of him this midsummer afternoon, as she sat by the orchard wall, trying to read the volume he had recommended ; she was thinking of a few grave words in which he had confesseif his interest in her ; thinking of the dark searching eyes whicl» had looked for one brief moment into her own. " I really thought I counted for nothing," she said to hersel, " he has such ofi'-hand ways, and sets kimself so much above other people. I don't think he quite means to be grand ; if seems natural to him. He ought to have been a general at leus^ in India, instead of a twopenny-halfpenny captain ! "' The half-hour was soon gone. It was very ])leasant to her, that idling in the shadow of the old wall ; for the thoughts of her morning's walk were strangely sweet — sweeter than any flat- teries that had ever been whispered in her ear. And yet Mr. Forde had not praised her; had indeed seemed utterly uncon« Bcious of her superiority to other women. His words had been ■Tank, and grave, and kindly: a little loo much bke a lecture StraHf/era and Pihjrims. 11 perhaps, and yet sweet; for they were the firat words in which Malcolm Porde had betrayed the faintest interest in her welfare. A-nd it ia a hard thing for a young woman, who has been a god- dess and an angel in the sight of three consecutive curates, to find the fourth as indifferent to her merits as if he were a man of stone. Yes, he had decidedly lectured her. That is to say, he had spoken a little regretfully of her trivial wasted life — her neg- lected opportunities. " I don't know what you mean by opportunities," she had an- swered, with a little coutemptuous curl of the rosy upper lip. " I can't burst out all at once into a female bishop. As for district- visiting, I have really no genius for that kind of thing, and I'eel myself a useless bore in poor people's houses. I know I have been rather idle about the church embroidery, too,'' she added with a deprecating air, feeling that here lie had cause for com- plaint. " I am very anxious that our churches should be made beau- tiful," he answered gravely; "and I should think it only natural for you to take a delight in that Icind of labour. But I do not consider ecclesiastical embroidery the beginning and end of life. I should like to see you more interested in the poor and in the schools, more interested in your fellow-creatures altogether, in short. I fancy the life you lead at Hawleigh Vicarage among your roses and apple-trees is just a little the life of the lotus-eater. * All its allotted length of clays TLe tlower ripens in its place, Eipens and fades and falls, and Iiatli no toil, Fast rooted in the fruitful soil. ' It doesn't do for a responsible being to live that kind of life, you know, leaving no better memory behind than the record of its beauty. I should hai'dly venture to say so much as this Miss Luttrell, if I were not warmly interested in you." The clear pale face, looking downward with rather a mood v air, like the face of a wayward child that can hardly suilV-r a rebuke, flushed sudden crimson at his last words. To Jli-. Forde's surprise ; for the interest he had confessed was of a purely priestly kind. But young women are so sensitive, and ne was not unused to see his female parishioners ]}lush and tremble a little under the magnetism of his earnest gaze and low grave voice. Conscious of that foolish blush, Elizabeth tried to carry o.'T her confusion by a rather flippant laugh. " You read your Tennyson, you see," she said, " tliough you 12 Strangers and Pilgrims. lecture me for my idleness. Isn't poetr\- a kind of lotoa. eating P" " Hardly, I think. I don't consider my duty stern enough to cut me off from all the flowers of life. I should be sorry to moon about with a duodecimo Tennyson in my pocket when I ou^ht to be at work ; but when I have a stray half-hour, I can give myself a little indulgence of that kind. Besides, Tennyson is something more than a poet. He is a teacher." '• You will come to play croquet for an hour this evening, won't you ? Gertrude wrote to you yesterday, I think." " Yes, I must apologise for not answering her note I shall be most happy to come, if possible. But I have two or three sick people to visit this afternoon, and I am not quite sure of my time. The poor souls cling to one so at last. They want a friendly hand to grasp on the threshold of the dark valley, and they have some dim notion that we hold the keys of the other world, and can open a door for them and lei them through to a better place than they could win for them- selves." " It must be dreadftil to see so much of death," said Elizabeth, with a faint shudder. "Hardly so dreadful as you may supjDose. A deathbed develops some of the noblest qualities of a man's nature. I have seen so much unselfish thoughtfulness for others, so much tenderness and love in the dying. And then for these poor people life has _ been for the most part so barren, so troubled, it is like passing away from a perpetual struggle to a land that is to be all brightness and rest. If you would only spend more time among your father's parishioners, Miss Luttrell, you would learn much that is worth learning of life and death." " I couldn't endure it," she answered, shrugging her shoulders impatiently ; "I ought never to have been born a parson's daughter. I should do no good, but harm more likely. The people would see hc'^ miserable I thought them, and be all the more discontented with their wretched lots after my visits. I tan't act goody-goody as Gertrude does, and make those poor tvretches believe that I think it the nicest thing in the world to live in one room, and have hardly bread to eat, and only one blanket among six. It's too dreadful. Six weeks of it would kill me." Mr. Forde sighed ever so faintly, but said no more. What a poor, selfish, narrow soul this lovely girl's must be ! Nature does sometimes enshrine her commonest spirits in these splendid temjoles. He felt a httle disappointed by the girl's selfishness and coldness; for he had imagined that she needed only to be awakened from the happy idleness of a young joy -loving spirit. He said no more, tbouirh they walked side l/y side as fai us Slrangert and Pilgrims. 18 St. Mary's, the red square-towered church at the beginning of the town, and parted with perfect friendliness. Yet the thought of that interview vexed Malcolm Forde all day long. "I had hoped better things of her," he said to himself. " But of course I shan't give up. She is so young, and ssems to have a pliant disposition. What a pity that Luttrell has let his daughters grow up juat as they please, like the foxgloves in his hedges !" In Mr. Forde's opinion, those four young women ought to have been trained into a little band of sisters of mercy — a pioua rsisterhood carrying life and light into the dark alleys of Haw- leigh. It was not a large place, that western market-town, numbering eleven thousand souls in all; yet there were alleys enough, and moral darkness and poverty and sickness and sorrow enough, to make work for a nunnery of ministering women. Mr. Forde had plenty of district-visitors ready to labour for him ; but they were for the most part ill-advised and frivolous ministrants, and absorbed more of his time by their need of counsel and supervision than ho cared to give them. They were of the weakest order of womanhood, craving per- petual support and assistance, wanting all of them to play the ivy to Mr. Forde's oak ; and no oak, however vigorous, could have sustained such a weight of ivy. He had to tell them sometimes, in plainest words, that if they couldn't do their work without continual recourse to him, their work was scarcely worth having. Whereupon the weaker vessels dropped away, admitting in their High-Church slang that they had no " vocation ; " that is to say, there was too much bread and too little sack in the business, too much of the poor and not enough of Mr. Forde. For this reason he liked Gertrude Luttrell, who went about her work in a womanUke way, rarely applied to him for counsel, had her own opinions, and really did achieve some good. It may have been for this reason, and in his desire to oblige Gertrude, that he made a little effort, and contrived to play croquet in the Vicarage garden on this midsummer evening. CHAPTER II. •• Best ]eave or take the perfect creature, Take all she is or leave comjjlete ; Transmute you will not form or feature. Change feet for vrings or wings for feet." Ir waa halcyon weather for croquet; not a cloud in the warm summer sky, and promise of a glorious sunset, red and glowing, I! 14 Stranrjers and Pilrjrims. for " the shepherd's delight." The grass had iDeen snorn that morning, and was soft and thick, and sweet with a thymy perfume : a little uneven here and there, but affording so much the more opportunity for the players to prove themselves superior to small difficulties. The roses and seringa were in their midsummer glory, and from the white walls of the Vicarage came the sweet odours of jasmine and honeysuckle, clematis and myrtle. All sweet-scented flowers seemed to grow here vnth a wider luxuriance than Malcolm Forde had ever seen anywhere else. His own small patrimony was on a uorthern soil, and all his youthful recollections were of a bleaker land than this. "An enervating climate, I'm afraid," he said to himself; and it seemed to him that the roses and the seringa might be a " snare." There was something stifling in the slumberous summer air, the Arcadian luxury of syllabubs and cream, the verdure and blossom of this flowery land. He felt as if his soul must needs stagnate, as if life must become too much an affair of the senses, in so sweet and sensuous a clime. This was but a passing fancy which flashed upon him as he opened the broad white gate and went into the garden, where the four girls in their white gowns and various ribbons were scattered on the grass : Blanche striking the last hoop into its place with her mallet; Diana trying a stroke at loose croquet; Gertrude busy at a tea-table placed in the shade of a splendid Spanish chestnut, which spread its bi-anches low and wide, making a tent of greenery beneath which a dozen people could dine in comfort. Elizabeth, apart from all the rest, standing by the sun-dial, tall, and straight as a dart, looking like a Greek princess in the days when the gods fell in love with the daughters of earthly kings. Mr. Forde was not a Greek god, but a faint thrill stirred his senses at the sight of that gracious figure by the sun-dial, never- theless; only an artist's delight in perfect beauty. The life which he had planned for himself was in most things the ,ife of a m»nk ; but he could not help feehng that Elizabeth Luttrell was perfectly beautiful, and that for a man of a weaker stamp there might be danger in this friendly association, which brought them together somehow two or three times in every week. *' I have known her a year, and she has never touched my heart in the faintest degree," he told himself, with some sense of triumph in the knowledge that he was impervious to such, fascinations. " If we were immortal, and could go on knowing each other for thirty years — she for ever beautiful and young, I forever in the prime of manhood — I do not think she would be any nearer to me than she is now." Strangers and Pilgrims. 16 Mr. Forde was the first of the guests. The three girls ran forward to receive him, greeting him with a kind of rapture. It was so good of him to come, they gushed out simultaneously. They felt as if a saint had come to take the first red ball and mallet. Gertrude always gave Mr. Forde the red-ringed balls ; she said they reminded her of the rubric. Elizabeth stirred not at all. She stood by the sun-dial, her face to the west, contemplative, or simply indiff'erent, Mr. Forde could not tell which. Did she see him, he wondei'ed, and deliberately refrain Irom greeting him ? Or was she so lost in thought as to be unconscious of his presence? Or did she resent his little lecture of that morning ? She could hardly do that, he considered, when they had parted in perfect friendshij). " It is so good of you to be punctual," said Gertrude, making a pleasant little jingb'ng with the china teacups ; the best china, all blue-aud-gold, hoarded away in the topmost of cupboards, wrapped in much silver paper, and only taken down for festive tea-drinkings like this. It was not a kettledrum tea, but a rustic feast rather ; or a " tea-shufiie," as young Mr. Melvin the lawyer, called it. There was a round table, covered with a snowy table-cloth, and laden with home produce: a pound-cake of golden hue; pre- served fruits of warm red and amber tint in sparkling cut-glass jars; that standing-dish on west-country tables, a junket; home-made bread, with the brown kissing-crust that never comes from the hireling baker's oven ; teacakes of featheiy lig»iitness ; rich yellow butter, which to the epicure might have been worth a journey from London to Devonshire; and for the crowning glory of the banquet, a capacious basket of straw- ben-ies and a bowl of clotted cream. " The Melvins are always late," said Diana ; " but we are not going to let you wait for your tea, Mr. Forde — are we, Gertrude P Here comes Ann with the kettle." This silver tea kettle was the pride of the Luttrell household. It had been presented to Mr. Luttrell at the close of his minis- trations in a former parish, and was engraved with the Luttrell loat of arms in all the splendour of its numerous quarterings. ft spirit-lamp burned beneath this sacred vessel, which Gertrude tended as carefully as if she had been a vestal virgin watching ihe immortal flame. Mr. Forde insisted that they should wait for the rest of the company. He did not languish for that cup of tea wherewith Miss Luttrell was eager to refresh his tired frame. Perhaps in such a moment his thoughts may have glanced back to the half-forgotton mess-table, and its less innocent banquets ; the long table, glittering in the low sunshine, with its bright array of ^'ry 8fi","'» and costly silver — was not his corps renowned for iO Strangers and Pilgnim. ito tnste in these trifles? — the pleasant familiar facos, the talk and laughter. Time was when he had Hved his life, and thai altogether another life, difiering in every detail from his exist- ence of to-day, holding not one hope, or dream, or project which he cherished now. He could look back at those idle pleasures, those aimless days, without the faintest sigh of regret. Sad- dened, discouraged, fainthearted, he had often been since this pilgrimage of his was begun ; but never for one weak moment had he looked longingly back. He said a few words to Blanche, who blushed, and sparkled, and answered him in little gasps, with upward worshipping gaze, as if he had been indeed an apostle ; talked with Diana for five minutes or so about the choir — she played the har- monium in St. Mary's, the older of the two churches, which did not boast an organ ; and then strolled across the grass to the sundial, where Lizzie was still standing in mute contemplation of the western sky. They shook hands almost silently. He did not intend to apologise for what he had said that morning. If the reproof had stung her, so much the better. He had meant to reprove. And yet it pained him a little to think that he had offended her. How lovely she was as she stood before him, smiling, in the western sunshine ! He never remembered having seen any- thing so beautiful, except a face of Guido's — the face of the Virgin-mother — in a Roman picture-gallery. That smile re- lieved his mind a little. She could hardly be offended. " You have had a fatiguing day, I suppose, with your sick people P " she said suddenly, after a few words about the beauty of the evening and the tmpunctuality of their friends. " Do you know, I have been thinking of what you said to me this morning, all day long ; and I begin to feel that I must do some- thing. It seems almost as if I had had what evangelical people describe as ' a call.' I should really like to do some- thing. I don't suppose any good will come of it — I know it i.s not my line — and I am rather sorry you tried to awaken my ..), thanks; I don't want any strawberries. Now, please, don't sprinkle a shower of them on my dross ; I shall have to wear it a week. How awkward you are ! " "Who could help being awkward?" pleaded the youth, blushing. " Sir Charles Grandison would have made a fool of himself in your society." " I don't know anything about Sir Charles Grandison, and I don't believe you do, either. That's the way with you young men ; you get the names of people and thiuss out of tha Strangers and JPilgrims. 19 Saturday lleview, and pretend to know everything under the sun." "Wasn't he a fellow in some book — Pamela or Joseph Andrews ? something of Smollett's P some sort of rubbish in sixteen volumes? Nobody reads it now-a-days." " Then I wouldn't quote it, if I were you. But the Saturday Beview is the modern substitute for the Eton Latin Grammar. Please, go and flirt with Blanche. You always stand so close to one, making a door-mat of one's dress ! " " O, very well, I'll go and talk to Blanche. But remember " — this with a threatening air — " when you want to go on the Tabor " " You'll take me, of course. I know that. Run and play, that's a dear child ! " He was her senior by three years, but she gave herself ineffable airs of superiority notwithstanding. Perhaps she was not displeased to exhibit even this trumpery swain before the eyes of Malcolm Forde — who went on talking of parish matters with her father, as if unconscious of her presence. Very little execution was done upon the pound-cake or the syllabub. The atmosphere was too heavily charged Avith flirtations for any serious consumption of provisions. It is the people who have done with the flowers and sunshine of life who make most havoc among the lobster- salads and raised pies at a picnic — for whom the bouquet of the moselle is a question of supreme importance, who know the difference between a hawk and a heron in the way of claret. So, after a Httle *trifling with the dainty cates Miss Luttrell had hospitably provided, the young people rose for the business of the evening. " Wouldn't you rather have a cigar and a glass of claret here, under the chestnut?" said Mr. Luttrell, as Malcolm Fortfe prepared to join them. V^' *' That would be a breach of covenant," answered the Curate, jaughing, " I was invited for croquet. Besides, I really enjoy the game ; it's a sort of substitute for billiards." " A dissipation you have renounced," said the Vicar, iu his careless way. " You modern young men are regular Trappists!" Whereby it will be seen that Wilmot LTittrell was of the Broad-Church party — a man who had hunted the Devonian red- deer in his time, who had still a brace of Joe Manton's in hia study, was good at fly-fishing, and did not object to clerical billiards or a social rubber. They played for a couple of hours in the balmy summer evening, the Luttrell girls and their four visitors — played till the sunlight faded into dusk, and the dusk deepened into the 20 Strangers and Pilgrims, Boft June night — which was hardly night, but rather a tender mixture of twihght and starshine. Gertrude had taken Mr. Forde for the leader of her side, Miss Harrison and Blanche Luttrell making up their four. The Beauty headed a skirmish- ing party, that incorrigible Frederick for her supporter, Df Xiuttrell and Laura Melviu bringing up the rear. To hei Malcolm Forde addressed no word throughout the little tonma* ment. It may have been because he had no opportunity ; foi she was laughing and talking more or leas all the time, in the ■wildest spirits, with the young solicitor perpetually at her elbow. And Gertrude had a great deal to say to the Curate ; chiefly on the subject of her parish work, and a little of a more vague and metaphysical nature concerning the impressions pro- duced upon her mind by his last Sunday-evening sermon. Ha listened kindly and respectfully, as in duty bound, but thai frivolous talk and laughter upon the other side worried him not a little. Never had Elizabeth seemed to him so vulgarly pro- vincial ; and he was really interested in her, as indeed it was his duty to be interested in the welfare of his Vicar's daughters. "It is all the father's fault," he said to himself; "I do not believe he has ever made the faintest attempt to train them." And then he thought what an estimable young person Gertrude must be to have evolved out of her inner conscious- ness, as it were, all that serious and practical piety which made her so valuable to him in his ministrations. As to the future careers of the other three — of Blanche, who talked slang, and seemed to consider this lower wf>^Ad designed to be a perpetual theatre for flirtation ; of Diani., who was selfish and idle, and set up a pretence of weak health as a means of escaping all the cares and perplexities of existence; of Elizabeth, who appeared in her own character to embody all the faults and weaknesses he had ever supposed possible to a woman — of the manner in which these three were to tread the troubled paths of life, he could only think with a shudder. Poor lampless virgins. Btraying blindly into the darkness ! Yet, measured by a simply sensuous standard, how sweet was that low rippling sound of girlish laughter ; how graceful the white-rebed figure moving lightly in the summer dusk; how exquisite the dark-blue eyes that looked at him in the starlight, when the game was ended, and the Church Militant, as Blanche said pertly, had been triumphant over the Devil's Own, in the person of the mild-eyed Frederick Melvin ! Mr. Forde's un- erring stroke, mathematically correct as the pendulum, had brought them home, in spite of some rather feeble playing on the {)art of Gertrude, whose mind was a little too much occupied by ast Sunday-evening's sermon. Mr. Luttrell had strolled up and down the garden walk. Strangers and Pilgrims. 21 ■moking his cigar, and had loitered a little by the holiy liedge talking to some people in the road, while the croquet players amused themselves. He came forward now to propose an ad- journment to the house, and a claret-cup. So they all went crowding into a long low room with a couple of bow windows, a room which was lined with bookshelves on one side, contain- ing Taylor and Hooker, and Barrow and Tillotson, and South and Venn, and other ecclesiastical volumes, freely intermingled with a miscellaneous collection of secular literature; a room which served Mr. Luttrell as a library, but which was neverthe- less the drawing-room. There was a grand piano by one of the bow windows, a piano which had been presented to Diana by a wealthy aunt and godmother, and the brand-new walnut-wood case whereof was in strong contrast with the time-worn old chairs and tables; the chetfoniers of the early Georgian era; the ponderous old cane- seated sofa, with its chintz-covered pillows and painted frame — a pale, pale green picked out with gold that was fast vanishing away. The attenuated crystal girandoles upon the high wooden mantelshelf were almost as old as the invention of glass ; the Chelsea shepherd and shep- herdess had been cracked over and over again, but held together as if by a charmed existence. The Derbyshire-spa vases were relics of a dead-and-gone generation. The mock-venetian mir- ror was of an almost forgotten fashion and a quite extinct manufacture. Blanche vowed that Noah and his wife, when they kept house before the flood, must have had just such a drawing-room. Yet this antiquated chamber seemed in no wise displeasing to the sight of Mr. Forde as he came in from the starlit garden. He liked it a great deal better than many finer rooms in which he was a rare but welcome visitor, just as he preferred the ill-kept Vicarage lawn and flower-borders to the geometrical parterres of millionaire cloth manufacturers or pompous squires on the outskirts of Hawleigh. Frederick ^Melvin and his sister pleaded for a little music, upon which the usual family concert began: a showy fantasia by Gertrude, correctly played, with a good firm finger, and not a spark of expression from the first bar to the bang, bang, hang ! at the end ; then a canzonet from Blanche, of the " 0, 'tis merry when the cherry and the blossom and the berry, tra-la- la-la, tra-la-la " school, in a thin little soprano ; then a sonata — Beethoven's " Adieu " — by Miss Melvin, which Mr. Forde thought the longest adieu he had ever been obliged to listen to. He lost patience at last, and went over to Elizabeth, whose ripe round mezzo-soprano tones he languished to hear. "Won't you sing something?" he asked. " What, does not singing come within your catalogue of for* 22 Strangers and Pilgrims. bidden pleasures — a mere idle waste of time — lotos-eating, in short?" " You know that I do not think anything of the kind. Why do you try to make me out what I have never pretended to be — an ascetic, or worse, a Pharisee ? Is is only because I am anxious you should be of a little more use to your fellow-creatures ? " "And of course singing can be no use, unless I went about among your cottage people leading off hymns." "Does that mean that you won't sing to-night? " he asked in his coldest tone. "Yes." " Then I'll wish you good-night. I've no doubt the music we've been hearing is very good in its way, but it's hardly my way. Good-night. I'll slip away quietly without disturbing your friends." He was close to the open bow- window, that farthest from the piano, and went out unnoticed, while Miss Melvin and her cousin Miss Harrison were debating whether they should or ohould not play the overture to Zampa. He went out of the window, and walked slowly across the grass, but had hardly reached the sun-dial, when he heard the voice he knew so well swell out rich and full in the opening tones of a ballad he loved, a plaintive lament called " Ettrick." " 0, murmuring waters, have you no message for me?" He stopped by the sun-dial and heard the song to the end; heard Fred Melvin supplicating for auother song, and Eliza- beth's impatient refusal — " She was tired to death," with a little nervous laugh. He went away after this, not offended, only wor.dering that any woman could be so wilful, could take so much j^ains to render herself unwomanly and unloval)le. He thought how keenly another man, whose life was differently planned, might have felt this petty slight — how dangerous to such a man's peace Elizabeth Luttrell might have been; but that was all. He was not angry with her. What would he have thought, if he could have seen Elizabeth Luttrell half an hour later that night, if he could hp"<^, seen her fall on her knees by one of the little French beds m the room that she and Blanche occupied together, and bury her face in the counterpane and burst into a passion of tears .'* "What is the matter, Liz — what is it, darling?" cries Blanche the impulsive. The girl answers nothing, but sobs out her brief passion, and then rises, calm as a statue, to confront her sister. " If you ai-e going to worry me, Blanche, I shall sleep in the Stranc/ers and Pilgrims, 28 passage," she exclaims in impatient rebuke of the other's sympa- thetic caress. " There's nothing the matter. I'm tired, that's all, and that absurd Fred of yours has persecuted me so all the evening." " He's no Fred of mine, and I think you rather encouraged his persecutions," said Blanche -with an aggrieved air. " I'm sure I can't make you out, Lizzie. I thought you liked Mr. Forde, and yet you quite snubbed him to-night." " Snubbed him," cried Elizabeth. " As if anybody could snub St. Paul!" CHAPTER III. *' I know thy forms are studied arts, Thy subtle ways be narrow straits ; Thy courtesy but sudden starts, And what thou call'st thy gifts are baita," The Curate of Hawleigh, modest in his surroundings as the incorruptible Maximilian Piobespierre himself, had lodgings at a carpenter's. His landlord was certainly the chief carpenter of the town, a man of unblemished respectability, who had even infused a flavour of building into his trade ; but the Curate's bedroom windows commanded a view of the carpenter's yard, and he lived in the odour of chips and shavings, and that fresh piney smell which seems to breathe the ]ierfume of a thousand shii:)s far away from the barren main. He had even to submit meekly to the dismal tap, tap, tap of the hammer when a coffin was on hand, which might fairly serve as a substitute for tho " Frere ilfaut mourir f of the Trajipist brotherhood. It must not be sujoposed, however, that this choice of a lodging was an act of asceticism or wanton self-humiliation upon the part of Malcolm Forde. The Hawleigh curates lodged, as a rule, with Humphreys the carpenter: and Hawleigh being self-governed, for the most part, upon strictly conservative principles, it would have been an outrage against the sacred existing order of things if Mr. Forde had pitched his tent else- whithc". Mrs. Humphreys was a buxom middle-aged woman of spotless cleanliness, who kept a cow in a neat little paddock behind the carpenter's yard ; a woman who had a pleasant odour of dairy about her, and who was sujjposed by long prac- tice to have acquired a special faculty for " doing for curates." " I know their tastes," she would say to her gossips, " and 24 Strangers and Pilgrims. it's astonishing how little their tastes varies. *0, give me a chop, Mrs. Humphreys,' they mostly says, if I werrifc then? about their dinner. But, lor, I know better than that. Their poor stomachs would soon turn against chops if they had thera every day. So I soon leaves off asking 'em anything about dinner, and contrives to give 'em a nice variety of tasty little dishes — a whiting and a lamb cutlet or two with fried p;irsley one day ; a red mullet and a split fowl broiled with half-a-dozen mushroome the next, a spitchcook, they c-a\\ it; and then the day after I curry what's left of the fowl, so as their bills come moderate ; and I never had a wry word with any curate yet, except Mr. Adderley, who didn't like squab-pie, and I did give him a piece of my mind about that." The rooms were comfortable rooms, though of the plainest: lightsome and airy ; fui-nished with chairs and tables so sub- stantial that their legs had not been enfeebled by the various fidgetinesses of a whole generation of curates : honest wide- seated leather-bottomed chairs bought at the sack of an ancient manor-house ; stalwart Avalnut-wood tables and brass-handled chests of drawers made when George the Second was king. Mrs. Humphreys was wont to boast that her Joe — meaning Mr. Joseph Humphreys — knew what chairs and tables were, and did not choose them for their looks. There were no ornaments of the usual lodging-house type, for Mrs, Humphreys knew that.it is in the nature of curates to bring with them sundry nicknacks, the relics of university extravagances, wherewith to decorate their chambers. Mr. Forde had furnished both sitting-room and bedroom "amply with books, nay even the slip of a chamber where he kept his baths and sponges and bootstand was encumbered with the shabbier volumes in his collection, 'piled breast-high in the angles of the walls. He was not a collector of bric-a-brac, and the sole ornaments of his sitting-room were a brass skeleton clock which had travelled many a league with him in his soldiering days ; a carefully painted miniature of an elderly lady, whom, by the likeness to himself, one might reasonably suppose to be his mother, on one side of the mantelpiece ; a somewhat faded daguerreotype of a sweet fair young face on the other ; and a breakfast cup and saucer on a little ebony stand under a glass shade. Why this cup and saucer should be so preserved would have been a puzzling question for a stranger. They were of ordinary modern china, and could have possessed no value from an artistic point of view. He had performed his early morning duty at St. Clement's, and spent lialf an hour with a sick parishioner, before his nine- o'clock bieakfast on the day following that little croquet party at the Vicarage. He was dawdlinc; a little as he sipped his 8lrangei*9 and Pilgrims. 25 flecond cup of tea, with one of Southey's Commonplace Books open at his elbow, turning over the leaves now and then with a somewhat absent air, as if in all that jetsam and flotsam of the poet's studious hours he hardly found a paragraph to enchain his attention. What manner of man is he, in outward semblance, as he sits there absent and meditative, with the broad summer daylight on his face ? It would be a question if one should call him a handsome man. He is distinguished-looking, perhaps, rather than handsome; tall and broad-shouldered, like the men who come from beyond the Tweed; straight as a dart; a man who is not dependent upon dress and surroundings for his dignity, but has an indefinable air of being superior to the common herd. His features are good, but not pai-ticularly regular, hardly coming within the rule and compass of archetypal beauty; the nose a thought too broad, the forehead too dominant. His skin is dark, and has little colour, save when he is angry or deeply moved, when the stern face glows briefly with a dark crimson. The clear cold gray eyes ai'e wonderful in their variety of expression. The firmly-moulded yet flexible mouth is the best feature in his face, supremely grave in repose, infinitely tender when he smiles. He smiles suddenly now, in the course of his reverie, for it is clear enough that he is thinking, and not reading Southey's agreeable jottings, though his hand mechanically turns the leaves. He smiles a slow thoughtful smile. " What a child she is," he says to himself, " with all a child's perversity ! I am foolish ever to be angry with her." He heard a double-knock from the little brass knocker of Mr. Humphreys' private door, shut his book with an impatient sigh, got up and walked to the window. The Humphreys' mansion was in one of the side streets of Hawleigh, a street known by the rustic title of Field-lane, which led up a gentle hill to the open countrjr ; a vast stretch of common-land, sprinkled sparsley on the outskirts with a few scattered houses and a row or two of cottages. Nor had Mr. Humphreys any opposite neighbours ; the houses on the other side stopped abruptly a few yards below, and there was a triangular green, with a pond and a colony of ducks in front of the Curate's casements. Malcolm Forde looked out of the window, expecting to see his visitor waiting meekly on the spotless doorstep ; but the door had been opened promptly, and the doorstep was unoccupied. He looked at his watch hastily. " I've been wasting too much time already," he said to him- Bolf, " and here is some one to detain me ever so long. And 1 want to make a good morning's round out Filbury way." The medical practitioners of Hawleigh prided themselves oo 26 Stranc/crs and Pilgrims. the crushing nature of their duties, yet there were none among them who worked so hard as this healer of souls. Here was some tiresome vestryman, perhaps, come to prose for half an hour or so about some jset grievance, while he was languishing to be up and doing among the miserable hovels at Filbury, where, amidst the fertile smiling landscape, men's souls and bodies were consuming away with a moral dry-rot. The door of his sitting-room opened, but not to admit a prosing vestryman. The smiling handmaiden announced " Miss Luttrell, if you please, sir." And, lo, there stood before him on the threshold of his chamber the wilful woman he had been thinking about just now, gravely regarding him, the very image of decorum. There was some change in her outward aspect, the details whereof his masculine eye could not distinguish. A woman could have told him in a moment by what means the Beauty had contrived to transform herself. She was dressed in a lavender- ootton gown, with tight plain sleeves, and a linen collar — no bright-hued ribbon encircling the long white throat, no flutter of lace or glimmer of golden locket, none of the pretty frivo- lities with which she was accustomed to set-off her loveliness. She wore an old-fashioned black-silk scarf, a relic of her dead mother's wardrobe, which became her tall slim figure to perfec- tion. She, who was wont to wear the most coquettish and capricious of hats, the daintiest conceit in airy tulle by way of a bonnet, was now crowned with a modest saucer-shaped thing of Dunstable straw, which at this moment hid her eyes altogether from Malcolm Forde. The rich brown hair, which she had been accustomed to display in an elaborate structure of large loose plaits, was neatly braided under this Puritan head gear, and packed into the smallest possible compass at the back of her head, She had a little basket in one hand, a red-covered account-book in the other. " If you please, Mr. Forde, I should like you to give me a round of visits amongst your poor people," she said, offering him this little volume. " I am quite ready to begin my duties to-day." He stood for a moment gazing at her, lost in amazement. The provoking saucer-shaped hat covered her eyes. He could only guess the expression of her face from her mouth, which was gravity itself. '•' What, Miss Luttrell, do you mean to help me, after all you said last night ? " " Did I really say anything very wicked last night ? " she asked naively, lifting her head for a moment so that her eyes shone out at him under the shadow of the saucer-brim. Peer- less eyes they seemed to him in that brief flash, but hardly th j Stranfjrrs and Pilr/rims. 27 most appropriate eyes for a district-visitor, whose beauty sliould be of a subdued order, like the colours of her dress. "1 don't know that you said anything wicked; but you ex- pressed a profound disgust for district-visiting." " Did I ? It was the last rebellious murmur of my unre- generate heart. But you have awakened my conscience, and I mean to turn over a new leaf, to begin a new existence in fact. If the piano were my property instead of Diana's, I think I should make a bonfire on the lawn and burn it. I have serious thoughts of burning my colour box — Winsor and Newton's too. and papa's last birthday present. But you must be kind enough to make me out a list of the people you'd like me to visit. I don't want to be a regular district-visitor, or to interfere with your established sisterhood in any way; so I won't take any tickets to distribute. I don't Avant the people to associate me with sacramental alms. I want to have a little flock of my own, and to see if I can make them like me for my own sake, without thinking how much they can get out of me. And if you could coach me a little about what I ought to say to them, it would be a great comfort to me. Gertrude says that when she feels herself at a loss she says a little jarayer, and waits on the doorstep for a few minutes, till something comes to her. But I'm afraid that plan would not answer lor me." Mr. Forde pushed one of the heavy chairs to the writing-table near the window, and asked Miss LuttreU to sit down while he wrote what she wanted in the little red book. She seated her- self near one end of the table, and he sat down to write at the other. " I shall be vei-y happy to do what I can to set you going," he said, as he wrote; "but I should be more assured of your sin- cerity if you were less disposed to make a joke of the business." "A joke!" exclaimed Miss Luttrell with an aggrieved air, " why, I was never in my life so serious. Is this the way in which you mean to treat my awakening, Mr. Forde ? " He handed her the little book, with a list of names written on the first leaf. " I think you must know something of these people," he said, " after living here all your life." " Please don't take anything for granted about me with re- ference to the poor," she answered hastily. " Of course it is abominable in me to admit as much, but I never have cared for them. The only ideas about them that I have ever been able to grasp are, that they never open their windows, and that they always want something of one, and take it ill if one can't give them the thing they want. Gertrude tells quite a different story, and declares that the serious-minded souls are always languish- -Tig for spiritual refreshment, that she can make them quite happy with her prim little sermons and flimsy little tracts, 28 Strangers and Piigrimi. Did you ever read a tract, Mr. Forde ? I don't mean a contro- versial pamphlet, or anything of that kind; but just one of those little puritanical booklets that drop from Gertrude like leaves from a tree in autumn ? " " I have not given much leisure to that kind of study," re- plied Malcolm, with his grave smile. "I hope you won't think me unappreciative of the honour involved in this viSit, Miss Luttrell, if I am obliged to run away. I have a round of calls at Filbury to get through this morning." " You remind me of poor mamma," said Elizabeth, with a tribu- tary sigh to the memory of that departed parent ; "she had alwaya a round of calls, and they generally resolved themselves into three — a triangle of calls, in short. But they were genteel visits, you know. Mamma never went in for the district business." The loose slangy style of her talk grated upon his ear not a little. He took his hat and gloves from the sideboard — a gentle reminder that he was in haste to be gone. " I won't detain you five minutes more," she said. " How nice the room looks with all those books! I know Mrs. Humphreys' drawing-room very well, though this is my first visit to you. Papa and Gertrude and I came once to drink tea with Mr. Horton. He gave quite a party ; and we had concertante duets for the flute and piano — * Non piu mesta,' and ' Di piacer.' and so on," this with a faint blush, remem- bering her own share in that concerted music. " You should have seen the room in his tenancy — Bohemian-glass vases, and scent caskets, and stereoscopes, and photograph albums ; but very few books. I think I Hke it best with all those grim- looking brown-backed volumes of yours." She made the tour of the room as she spoke, and paused by the mantelpiece to examine the skeleton clock, the cup and saucer, the two portraits. " What a grand-looking old lady ! — your mother, of course, Mr. Forde ? And, 0, what a sweet face ! " pausing before the photograph. " Your sister, I suppose ? " •' No," Mr. Forde answered, somewhat shortly. " And what a pretty cup and saucer, under a glass shade ! It looks like a reHc of some kind." " It is a reUc." The tone was grave, repellant even, and Elizabeth felt she had touched upon a forbidden subject. " It belonged to his mother, I daresay," she thought ; " and ne keeps it m memory of the dead. I suppose all his people are dead, as he never talks about them." After this she made haste to depart with her little book, knowing very well that she had outraged all the convention- Strangers and £ilgnm^. 29 alities of Hawleigh, but rather proud of having bearded this lion of Judah in his den, Mr. iTorde left the house with her, and walked a little way by her side ; but was graver and more silent than his wont, as if he had hardly recovered from the pain those injudicious questions of hers had given him. He parted from her at the entrance to a row of cottages, in which dwelt two of the matrons whose names he had entered in her book. " Good-bye," he said. " I hope you will be able to do some good, and that you will not be tired of the work in a week or two." " That's rather a depressing suggestion," said Ehzabeth. " I know you have the worst possible opinion of me ; but I mean to show you how mistaken you have been. And you really ought to feel flattered by my conversion. Papa might have preached at me for a twelvemonth without producing such an effect." " I am sorry to hear that your father has so little influence with you. Miss Luttrell," the Curate answered gravely. He left her with the coldest good-bye. The proud face flushed crimson under the mushroom hat as she turned into the little alley. This morning's interview had not been nearly so agreeable to her as yesterday's lecture under the limes at the entrance to the town. She began her missionary work in a very bad humour; but brightened by degrees as she went on. She was a woman in whom the desire to please dominated almost every other attribute, and she was bent upon making these people like or even love her. It was not to be a mere spurt, this adoption of a new duty. She meant to show Malcolm Forde that she could be all, or more than all, he thought a woman should be — that she could be as much Gertrude's superior in this particular line as she surpassed her in personal beauty. "Gertrude!" she said to herself contemptuously. "As if poor people could possibly care about Gertrude, with her little fidgety ways, and her Low-Church tracts, and her passion for Boapsuds and hearthstone ! She has conti-ived to train her people into a subdued kind of civility. They look upon her visits as a necessary evil, and put up with them, just as they put up with the water coming through the roof, or a pig- stye close to the parlour window. But I shall make my people look forward to my visits as a bright little spot in their hves." This was rather an arrogant idea, perhaps ; but Ehzabeth Luttrell succeeded in realising it. She contrived to win an unfaiUng welcome in the twenty cottages which Mr. Forde had assigned to her. Nor was her popularity won by bribery and corruption. She had very little to give her people, except Q 30 Strangers and Pilgrims. an occasional packet of barley-sugar or a paper of biscuits for the children, or now and then some cast-off ribbon or other ecrap of genteel finery for the mothers. For the sick children, indeed, she would do anything — empty her own slenderly- furnished purse, rob the cross old parsonage cook of her arrow- root, and loaf-sugar, and isinglass, and cornflour, and ground rice, and Epps's cocoa, and new-laid eggs ; but it was not by gifts of any kind that she made herself beloved. It was the brightness and easy grace of her manner rather, that delightful air of being perfectly at home in a tiny chamber with a reeking washtub at her elbow, a cradle at her knee, and a line of damp clothes steaming in close prosdmity to her hat. Nothing disgusted her. She never wondered that people could live in such dirt and muddle. She made her little suggestions of improvement — no blunt plain-spoken recommendation of soap- suds and hearthstone, but insinuating hints of what might be done with a little trouble — in a manner that never offended. And then she was so beautiful to look upon ; the husbands and wives were never tired of admiring her. " Ay, but she be a rale right-down beauty," they said, " and thinks no more of herself than if she was as ugly as sin;" not knowing that the fair Eliza.beth was quite conscious of her own loveliness, and hoped to turn it to some good account by-and-by. Nor did Elizabeth forget, in her desire for popularity, that the chief object of her mission among these people was of a spiritual kind : that she was to carry enlightenment and religion into those close pent-up hovels where the damp linen was ever dangling, the waehtub for ever reeking ; where the larder was so often barren, and the wants of mankind so small and yet sometimes perforce unsatisfied. Although she was not her- self, as Gertrude expressed it, " seriously mmded," though her thoughts during her father's sermons, and even during those of Mr. Forde, too often wandered among the bonnets and mantles of the congregation, or shaped themselves into vague vision* of the future, she did notwithstanding contrive to bring about some improvement in the theory and practice of her clients. She persuaded the women to go to church on Sunday evenings, if Sunday-morning worship was really an impossible thing, as the poor souls protested ; she induced the husbands to clean themselves a couple of hours earlier than had been their Sabbath custom, and to Bhamble into the dusky aisle of St. Clement's or St. Mary's while the tinkling five-minutes bell was still calling to loiterers and laggards on the way ; she taught the little ones their catechism, rewarding proficiency with barley-sugar or gingerbread; and she sat by many a washtub reading the Evangelists in her full sweet voice, while the industrious noasewife rubbed the sweats of labour from her Strangers and Pilgrimi. 31 husband's shirt-collars. She would even starch and iron a handful of collars herself, on occasion, if the housewife seemed to set about the business clumsily. " I have to get-up my own fine things sometimes, or I should fo cuffless and collarless," she said. "Papa is not rich, you uow, Mrs. Jones." Whereat Mrs. Jones would be struck with amazement by her haiidiness. " I don't believe there's a thing in this 'varsal world as yo'vi can't do, Miss Elizabeth," the admiring matron would cry witk uplifted hands ; aiid even this humble appreciation of her merits pleas'^d Lizzie Luttrell. Her reading was much liked by listeners who were not com- pelled to sit with folded hands and a brain perplexed by the thought of neglected housework. She had a knack of choosing the most attractive as well as the most profitable portions of Holy AVrit, an acute perception of the passages most likely to impress her hearers. " I do like your Scriptures, Miss Elizabeth," said one woman. " When I was a gal, I used to think the Bible was all Saul and the Philistings — there seemed no end ot 'em — and David. I make no doubt David was a dear good man, and after the Lord's own heart; but there did seem too much of him. He wasn't like Him as you read about ; he didn't come home to us like that, miss, and you don't read as he was fond of little children, except that one of his own that be was so wrapt up in." "The Gospel sounds like a pretty story, when you read it, miss," sfiid another ; " and when Miss Gertrude read, it did seem 80 sing-song like. Sometimes I couldn't feel as there was any sense in it, no more than in the Lessons of a hot summer's afternoon, when it seems only a droning, like a hive of bees." So Ehzabeth went on and prospered, and grew really interested in her work. It was not half so bad as she had supposed. There was muddle'and there was want, but not such utter ti-loom and misery as she had imagined in these hovels. The spirits of these people were singularly elastic. Ever so little sunshine warmed them into new life; and, above all, they liked her, and praised her, and spoke well of her to Malcolm Forde. She knew that from his appi-oving manner, not from anything he had dis- tinctly said upon the subject. Earely had she met with him on her rounds. The list he had trlven her included only easy subjects — jseople who would not be likely to repulse her attentions, homes in which she would not iiear foul language or see dreadful sights— and having allotted her path-way, he was content that she should follow it with very little assistance from him, and even took pains to time his own visits, so as to avoid any encounter with h«r. 82 Strangers and Pilgrims. He did, however, on rare occasions find her among his flock. Not easily did he forget one summer afternoon, when he saw her sitting by an open cottage window with a sick child in her lap. That figure in a pale muslin dress, with tho afternoon sunshine upon it, lived in his memory long. " If I could only believe that she was quite in earnest," he said to himself, "that this new work of hers has some safer charm than its novelty, I should think her the sweetest woman I ever met— except one." jlizabeth had been engaged in these duties for two months, and had done her work faithfully. It was the end of August, the brilliant close of a summer that had been exceptionally fine ; harvest just begun in this western land, and occasional tracts of tawny stubble baking under a cloudless blue sky; hazel-nuts and wortle-berries ripening in the woods ; great sloe- trees shedding their purple fruit in every hedge; a rain of green apples falling on the orchard grass with every warm eouth wind; the red plums swelling and purphng on the garden wall — a vision of plenty and the perfume of roses and carnations on every side. "If we don't have that picnic you talked about very soon, Gerty, we shan't have it at all," remarked the youngest and the pertest of the four sisters at breakfast one _ morning, when Mr. Luttrell had mthdrawn himself to his daily duties, and the damsels were left to enjoy half an hour's idleness and talk over empty coffee-cups and shattered eggshells and other fragments of the feast. " The summer's nearly over, you see, Gerty, and if we don't take care we shall lose all the fine weather. I've no doubt there'll be a deluge after all this sunshine." Blanche always called her eldest sister "Gerty" when she wanted some indulgence from that important personage. "Well, I'm sure I don't know what to say, Blanche," T?plioi Miss Luttrell with provoking coolness, as if picnics and f-ifsuch sublunary pleasures were utterly beneath her regard; strong, too, in her authority as her father's housekeeper, and conscious that her sisters must bow down and pay her homage for whatever they wanted, like Joseph's brethren in quest of corn. " I really think," she went on with a deliberate air, " as the summer is nearly gone, we may as well give up any notion of a picnic this year, especially as papa doesn't seem to care much about it." "Papa never seems to care about anything that costa money," cried the disrespectful youngest. " He'd like life well enough if everything in it could be carried on for nothing; If his children could be born and educated, and fed and clothed. Strangers and Pilgrims. 33 And doctored and nursed, and introduced to society gratis, so that he could have all the pew-rents and burial-fees and things to put in the bank. It's very mean of you to talk like that, Gertrude, and want to sneak out of the picnic, wheu it's about the only return we're likely to make for all the croquet jiarties and dinners and teas and goodness knows what that our friends have given us since Christmas." "Really, Blanche, you are learning to render yourself eminently disagreeable," Miss Luttrell observed severely, " and I fear if papa does not face the necessity of sending you back to school to be finished, your deficiency in manner will be your absolute ruin in after-life." " Never mind Blanche's manner," interposed Diana, " but let's talk about the picnic. Of course we must have one. We always have had one for the last five years, since the summer after poor mamma's death, — I know we were all in slight mourning at the first of them, — and our friends exjject it. So the only question is, where are we to go this year ? " This was intended in somewise as an assertion of indepen- dence on the part of the second Miss Luttrell, who did not intend to be altogether overridden by the chariot of an elder sister, even though that elder had bidden a long farewell to the golden summer-tide of her twenty-eighth year. " Elizabeth won't go, of course, now she's turned serious,'* said Blanche, with a sly glance at Lizzie, who sat leisurely watching the skirmish, with her head against the clumsy frame of the lattice, and the south wind gently stirring her dark- brown hair, a perfect picture of idle loveliness. " You'll have nothing to do with the picnic, of course, Lizzie, not even if Malcolm Forde goes," pursued the " Pickle " of the family. "Who gave you leave to call him Malcolm?" flashed out Elizabeth. " No one ; but why shouldn't one enjoy oneself in the bosom of one's family. I like to call him Malcolm Forde, it's such a pretty name ; and one ought to get accustomed to tha Christian name of one's future brother-in-law." Two of the Miss Luttrells flushed crimson at this speech : Gertrude, who turned angrily upon the speaker, as if about to retort; and Elizabeth, whose swift reply came like a flash of lightning, before her senior could reprove the oflender. " How dare you say that, Blanche P Do you supj^ose that i would marry Mr. Forde — a Curate — even if he were to ask me?" " I won't suppose anything till lie does ask you," answered the incorrigible; "and then I know pretty well what will happen. Whatever fine notions you may have had about a rich husband, and a house in London, and an opera-box, and 34 Strangers and Pil/jrims. goodness knows what, will all count for nothing the day that Malcolm Forde makes you an offer. "Why, you worship the ground he walks on. Do you think we can't all of us see through your district- visiting ? A pretty freak for you to take up, after admitting that you detested such work ! " " I suppose it is not (juite unnatural that one should try to overcome one's dislikes, and to do some good in the world," replied Elizabeth with dignity. " Have the goodness to bridle your tongue a little, Blanche; and rest assured that I shall never marry a Curate, be he whom he may." "But Mr. Forde is not like common Curates. He is independent of the Church. He has private means." " Yes ; three or four hundred a year from a small estate in Aberdeenshire." " 0, you have been making inquiries, then P " "No; but I heard papa say as much, one day. And now, Blanche, be so kind as to abandon the discussion of my aflfairs, and of Mr. Forde's, and let us talk of the picnic. I say Law- borough Beeches." This " I say " was uttered in a tone of authority, unbefitting a third sister; and Gertrude immediately determined not to brook any such usurpation ; but it somehow generally happened that Elizabeth had her own way. She had a happy knack of suggesting the right thing. " Lawborough Beeches is a jolly place ! " said Blanche ap- provingly. " When will you learn to abandon the use of that odious nr^eciive ? " cried Gertrade with a shudder. " Lawborough Beeches is low and damp." " Well, I'd as soon have it on the moor, and we could have donkey races and no end of fun." "Was there ever a girl with such vulgar ideas? Donkey races ? Imagine Mr. Forde riding a donkey with a piece of white calico on its back ! And imagine picnicking on the moor, without a vestige of shade ! A nice blistered state our faces would be in ! and I should have one of m;^ nervous headaches," said Diana, who had a kind of copyright in several interesting ailments of the nervine type. Lawborough Beeches was a little wood of ancient trees, with silver-gray trunks and spreading crests; beecnes which had been pollarded in the days when Cromwell rode rough-shod oyer the land, and had stretched out their mighty limbs low and wide in the centuries that had gone by since then. It was a little wood lying in a green hollow, through which the Tabor meandered— a silvery stream dear to the soul of the tiy-fisher; here dark and placid as a lake, under the broad shadow of the trees ; there flowing with swift current towards the distant weir. strangers and Pihjrinis. 35 Miss Luttrell acknowledged somewhat unwillingly, after a good deal of discussion, that the Beeches was perhaps the best place for the picnic, if the picnic were really a social necessity. "I must confess that I do not see it in that light," she said, " and I rather wonder that you should do so, Elizabeth, now that your mind has been awakened to loftier interests. 'fhe sum which thLs picnic will cost would be a great help to our blanket club next winter." Elizabeth pondered for a few moments. Of course she was anxious to help those poor people who were so fond of her ; but the winter was a long way off. Providence might increase lier means in some unthougM-of manner by that time. And the near delight of a long summer afternoon with Malcolm Forda imder Lawborough Beeches was very sweet to her. She had seen so httle of hmi of late. The very change in herself, which she had fancied would bring them nearer together, seemed to have only the more divided them. She did not meet him halt Bo often as in her unregenerate days, when she had been always strolling in and out of Hawleigh, to change books at the library; or to buy a new song, or a yard or two of ribbon ; or to look at the last Paris fashions, which the chief linendraper had just received — from Plymouth. " We ought to make some return for people's hospitality," shft said. " I consider the picnic unavoidable." So Blanche produced a sheet of foolscap, and began to make out a formidable list of comestibles : pigeon-pies, chicken-salads, lobsters, plovers' eggs, galantine of veal, hams, tongues, salmon en mayonnaise, and so on, with a wild profusion that seems so easy in pen-and-ink. " I wish you would not be so officious, Blanche," exclaimed the eldest Miss Luttrell. " Of course, I shall arrange all those details with Susan Sims." Susan Sims was the cook — an important functionary in the Vicar's household — who managed Miss Luttrell. " That means that we are to have whatever Susan likes to give us ! " said Blanche. " You do give way to her so, Gertrude. I think I'd rather have a bad cook, and one's dinner spoilt occa- sionally, if one could order just what one hked. However, I suppose, if I mayn't make out a hst of the dinner, I may make a list of the people P " " Yes, you can, if you'll take your inkstand to another table. Tou've made a blot upon the table-cloth already." Upon this, the three elder damsels separated to pursue their divers occupations: Gertrude to hold solemn converse with Susan Sims ; Diana to practise Mendelssohn's sonatas on the drawing-room piano; Elizabeth to her district- visiting ; leaving Blanche wallowing in ink, and swelling with importance, as she 86 Strangers and Pilgrimt. wrote the names of her father's friends on two separate sheet* of foolscap — the people who must be invited upon one, the people who might or might not be invited upon the other. Mr. Luttrell happened to be at home for luncheon that day — a privilege which he was not permitted to enjoy more than once or twice a week — so the sisters were able to moot the question of the picnic without delay. The Vicar rubbed his bald forehead thoughtfully, with a per- plexed sigh. " I suppose we must do something," he said dolefully. " It's H long time since we've had a dinner-party ; and if you think people really like their dinner any better on damp grass, Gertrude, and with flies dropping into their wine, why, have a picnic by all means. There's always an immense deal of wine drunk at these ttffairs, by the way ; young men are so officious, and go opening bottles on the least provocation. Be sure you remind me to write and order some of the Ball-supper Champagne and the Racecourse Moselle we saw advertised the other day." The matter was settled, therefore, pleasantly enough, and the invitations were written that afternoon, and distributed before nightfall by the parsonage gardener or man-of-all-work, Mr. Forde's invitation among them ; a formal Uttle note in Gertrude's hand, which he twisted about in his fingers for a long time while he meditated upon his answer. Would it do him any good to waste a summer day under Law- borough Beeches ? He had been working his hardest for some weeks without relaxation of any kind. He felt that he wanted rest and ease ; but hardly this species of recreation, which would involve a great deal of trouble; for he would be required to make himself agreeable to all manner of people — to carry umbrellas and camp-stools ; to point out interesting objects in the land- scape; to quote the county history — and, in fact, to labour assi- duously for the pleasure of other people. Nor had he ever felt himself any the better for these rustic pleasures ; considerably the worse rather, especially when they were shared with Elizabeth Luttrell. No; better to waste his day in utter loneliness on the moor, under the shadow of a mighty tor, with a book lying unread at his side. Better to give himself a pause of perfect rest, in which to think out the great problem of his life. For without inordinate eelf-esteem, Malcolm Forde was a man who deemed that his existence ought to be of some use to the world, that he was destined to fill some place in the scheme of creation. He felt that al-frcsco banquetings and junketings were just the idlest, most worthless use that he could make of his rare leisure ; and yet, with very human inconsistency, he wrote to Mifiu Luttrell i.ext mornini; to accept her kind invitation. Strangers and Filgrimu 87 CHAPTER IV. ' ' you gods ! Why do you make us love your goodly gifts, And snatch tbem straight away ? We, here below, Recall''uot what we give, and therein may Vie honour with yourselves." A PERFECT lull in the summer winds, a sultry silence in the air ; Tabor lying stilly under the beeches, dark and polished as a mirror of Damascus steel, not a bulrush on its niargent, not a lily trembling on its bosom. There seemed almost a profanity in happy talk and laughter in that silent wood, where the great beeches that were crop-eared by Cromwell spread their gnarled Umbs under the hot blue sky. Mr. Luttrell's party, however, do not pause in their mirth to consider the fitness of things. It boots not them to ask whether Lawborough Beeches be not a scene more suited to Miltonio musings than to the consumption of lobster-salad and galantine de veau. They ask each other for salt, and bread, and bitter ale, while the lark pierces the toijmost heavens with purest melody. They set champagne corks flying against the giant beechen trunks. They revel in clotted cream and syllabub, and small talk and flirtation, amidst the solemn shadows of that leafy dell; and then, when they have spent nearly two hours in a business-like absorption of solids and fluids, or in playing trifling with the lightest of the viands, as the case may be, the picnickers abandon the scene of the banquet, and wander away in little clusters of three or four, or in solitary couples, dispersing themselves throughout the wood, nay even beyond, to a broad stretch of rugged heath that borders it on one side, or to the slope of a hill which shelters it on the other. Some tempt the dangers of smooth-faced Tabor in Fred Melvin's trim-built wherry, or in the punt which has conveyed a brace of Oxonians, James and Horace Elgood, the sons of one of the squires whose broad pastures border the town of Hawleigh. Mr. Melvin has been anxious that EHzabeth should trust herself upon that silver flood. "You know you're fond of boating," he pleads; "and if you Haven't seen much of the Tabor this way, it's worth your while to come. The banks are a picture — no end of flowers—' I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,' and that kind of thing. One would think Shakespeare had taken his notion from here- abouts." " As if the Avon had no thymy banks! " exclaimed Elizabeth contemptuously. "I don't care aboiit boating this afternoon, thank you, Mr. Melvin. T am going for a walk." 'CS Strangers and Pilgrims. She glanced at Malcolm Forde as she spoke, almost plead* \ngly, as if she would have said, Give me one idle hour or your life. They had sat apart at the banquet, Gertrude having con- trived to keep the Curate at her side ; they had travelled from Hawleigh in different carriages, and had exchanged hardly hall a dozen sentences up to this stage of the entertainment. It seemed to Elizabeth as if they were fated never to be together. Already she began to think the picnic a failure. " I only wanted it for the sake of being with him," she said to herself hopelessly. And here was that empty-headed Fred Melvin worrying her to go ill his boat, while Malcolm Forde stood by, leaning against the gray trunk of a pollard willow, hstlessly gazing at the river, and said never a word. " Let Forde punt you down the river as far as the weir," cried one of the Oxonians, coming unconsciously to her relief. " There's an empty punt lying idle yonder, the one that brought the Towers party; and Forde was one of the best punters at Oxford." Mr. Forde had gone up for his degree at a late stage of his existence, after he left the army, and his repute was known tc these youngsters. " There's nothing like a punt in this kind of weather, Miss Luttrell," said the Oxonian, as he rolled up his shirt-sleeves and prepared himself to convey a boatload of young ladies in volu- minous muslin skirts ; " such a nice lazy way of getting along." He stood up high above his freight, plunged his pole deep into the quiet water, and skimmed athwart the river with a slow noiseless motion soothing to see upon a summer afternoon, while Elizabeth was silently blessing him. Mr. Forde did at last awake from his reverie. " Shall I get the punt ? " he asked ; " and will you come ? " "I should like it of all things," she answered gently. She was not going to hazard the loss of this perfect happiness by any ill-timed coquetry. Yes, it was perfect happiness to be with him. She acknowledged as much as that to herself, if she did not acknowledge any more. " I suppose I think so much of him simply because he thinks nothing of me," she said to herself musingly, while Mr. Forde had gone a httle way down the bank to fetch the punt. He came back presently, with his coat off and his sleeves rolled up like the Oxonian's, skilfully navigating his rude bark with lengthy vigorous arms that had pulled in the university eight. It was the first time that Elizabeth had seen him on the river, and she wondered a little to find him master of this Becular accomplishment. He brought the broad stem of the punt against the bank at her feet. " Wouldn't your sister Blanche like to go with us? " he asked. Strangers and Pilgrims. 30 lo'ilving round in quest of that youag lady. But Blanche had guue off in the wheiTy with the Melvin set— Miss Pooley, the doctor's daughter; the Miss Cumdens, the nch manufactnrer'a daughters; Captain Danvers, and Mr. Pynscnt. Slirill laughter sounded from the reedy shores beyond the sharp curve of the river. Even James Elgood's punt was out of sight. They had the river all to themselves. Utter loneliness secnied to have come upon the scene. The sound of that shrill laughter dwindled and died away, and these two stood alone in the Bweet summer silence, between sunlight and shadow, on the brink of deep still Tabor. Elizabeth lingered on the bank, doubtful whether it would not be the properer course to wait for some stray reveller to join them before she took her place in the boat. A tcte-d-tete excursion with Mr. Forde would entail sundry lectures from Gertrude, a general sense of disapproval perhaps in her small world. But Malcolm Forde stretched out his strong arm and calmly handed her into the punt. It was quite a luxurious kind of boat, as j)unt3 go, provided with a red cushion on one of the broad clumsy seats, and a tin vessel for bailing out unnecessary water. She seated herself in the stern, and thoy drifted away slowly, doftly over the still blue water. It was the first time they had been together, and alone, since the morning when she called upon him at his lodgings. For some time there was silence, sweet silence, only broken by the hum of insect life around them, and the skylark's song in the clear vault above. The navigation of a puut is not a very difficult business ; but it requires some attention, and Tabor's windings involved some small amount of care in the navigation. This made a fair excuse for i\Ir. Forde's silence, and ElizaLelli was content — content to watcli the dark thoughtful face, the firmly-cut profile, the deep gray eyes, grave almost to severity ; content to ponder on his life, wondering if it were hard work and careful thought for others thtit had blanched the ruddier tints from his somewhat sunken cheek, or whether he was by nature pale; wondering if that grave dignity, which made him different from the common race of curates, wpre << earnest of future eminence, if he were verily liorn to greatness, an^ a bishopric awaiting him in the duys to come; wondering iJly about this thing aud that, her iancies playing rour.d him, like the flickering shadows on his figure as the boat shot under the trees, and she supremely content to be in his company. Eerhaps, since she had more than all a woman's faults and weaknesses, it may have been some gratification to her to con- sider that this boating excursion would occasion some jealous twinges in the wrll-crdered mind of her eldest sister. 4U Strangers and Pilgrims. ** Gertrude has such a way of appropriating people," she saii to herself, "and I really believe Mr. Forde considers her a paragon." The navigation grew easier by-and-by, as Tabor became less weedy. The banks, now high and broken, now sloping gently, were rich in varying beauty; but it was not of wild flowers or shivering rushes that Elizabeth thought in that slow summer voyage. The banks slid by like j^ictures gently shifting as she looked; now a herd of lazy kine, fetlock deep in the odorous after-math, and then a little copse of ancient hawthorn, and then a silveiy creek darkly shadowed here and there by drooping willows that had grown aslant the stream. She was faintly consciows of these things, and felt a vague delight in them ; but her thoughts were all of Malcolm Forde. " Did you ever hear that story of Andrew Marvell's father? " he said at last, breaking that lazy silence which had seemed only a natural element of the warm summer afternoon. There was a straight stretch of water now before him ; so he laid down his jiole, and seated himself in the bows with a pair of sculls. " He was a Hull man, yow. know, and a clergyman, and was going across the Humber to marry a couple in Lincoln- shire. He was seized with a strange presentiment on stepping into the boat, and flung his walking-stick ashore, crying, ' Ho, for heaven ! ' The presage was not a false one, for old Marvell was drowned. The story came into my mind just now, when we left the bank, and I couldn't help feeling that it would be a pleasant way of solving the problem of life to shoot mid-stream at random, crying out, ' Ho, for heaven ! ' like that old puritac parson." " It would be very nice if heaven could be reached so easily," said Elizabeth, who had a feeling that for her the pilgrimage from this world tr a better one must needs be difiicult. She had never yet felt herself heavenly-minded; of the earth, earthy rather, with mimdane longings for an opera-box and a barouche- and-pair. " But I did not think you were tired of life, Mr. Forde," she added, after a little pause. "ISloi «xa?tlv tired, but at times perplexed. I sometimeL doubt whether I am doing much good in Hawleigh — whether, indeed, I am doing anything that a man of less energy and ambition might not do just as well." " You feel like an eagle doing the work of a crow," she answered, smiling. " I can fancy that Hawleigh must seem a narrow field for you. When you have persuaded people to de« corate the churches, and attend the early services, and taught the choir to sing a little better, and bought surplices for the boys, it eeems as if there was nothing left for you to do. I should think in Strangers and Pilgrims. 41 a populous seaport, now, wliere there are narrow streets and a great many wicked people, you would have a wider sphere." " There might be more to do in a place of that kind," he said thoughtfully. " It wouldn't seem quite so much like a gardcner'a work in a trim smooth garden, always going over the same flower- beds, dragging up a little weed here and there, or cutting a withered branch. But that is not my dream. The field ot action that I have thought about and longed for lies far away from England." He was looking, not at Elizabeth, but above her head, along the shining river, as if he did indeed with his bodily eyes be- hold that wider land, that distant world of which he spoke. Elizabeth grew pale with horror. " You surely don't mean that you have ever thought of turn- ing missionary ? " she exclaimed. " That has been my thought sometimes, when my work here has seemed wasted labour." She was inexpressibly shocked. The very idea was disagi-ee- able to her. There was even a kind of commonness, in hei mind, in the image of a missionary. She imagined him a Low Church person, not very far removed from a dissenter, a mar who let his hair grow long and was indifferent as to the fashion o . his garments; such a man as she had heard hold forth, in short trousers and thick boots, at a meeting for the propagation of the Gospel. She did not imagine that the commonness was in her own mind, which could not perceive the width and gran- deur in that sublime idea of gathering all the nations into one Hock. It had never occurred to her that South Sea Islanders were of any importance in the scheme of creation, that univer- sity men in this privileged quarter of the globe owed any duty to dusky heathens dancing strange dances in distant groves of palm and breadfruit trees under a hot blue sky. " 0, I hope you will never think of such a desperate thing," she said with a little piteous look that touched him strangely. " It seems a kind of moral suicide." " Say rather a second birth," he answered : " the beginning of a new and wider life — a life worth living." " You must care very little for any one on this side of tha world, when you can talk so calmly of going to the other." " I have very few to care for," he replied gravely. " My family ties are represented by a bachelor uncle in Aberdeenshire — a grim old man, who firms a wild sheep-walk of five thousand acres or so, and lives in a lonely homestead, where he hears few sounds except the lowing of his kiue and the roar of the German Ocean. I tbmk 1 am just the right kind of man for a missionary ; and if j ou knew the story of my life, and the cir- cumstance that led to my change of profession, I fancy you would agree with va( ." 42 Stranrjers and Pilgrims. " But I know nothing of your life," Elizabeth cried im« patiently. She was unreasonably angry with him for this mis- sionary project, almost as angry as if it had been a deliberate wrong done to herself. " You came to us a stranger, and you have remained a stranger to us, though you have been at Hawleigh more than a year. You are so reserved — not like papa's other curates, who were only too glad to pour out their inmost feelings, as it were. I'm sure I knew every detail of Mr. Dysart's family — his papa's opinions, his mamma's little pecu- liarities, the colour of all his sisters' hair, even the history oi the gentlemen to whom the sisters were engaged. AnditVaa almost the same with Mr. Horton. Mr. Adderley was fonder of prosing about himself than his surroundings, and I don't think the poor young man ever had an idea in his rather narrow brain that he did not impart to us." " You see I am not of so communicative a disposition," said Mr. Forde, smiling; "and when there has been one great sor- row in a life, as there has in mine, it is apt to assume an un- natural proportion to the rest, and obscure all minor details. I had a great loss five years before I came to Hawleigh. I Jiava often been inclined to tell you all about it, especially of late, since I have seen your character in its most amiable light. But these things are painfril to speak of, and my loss was a very bitter one." " You are speaking of the death of your mother? " inquired EUzabeth, trembling a little, with a strange sharp dread. "No; my mother died fifteen years ago. That loss waa bitter, but it was one for which I had been long prepared. The latter loss was utterly unexpected, and shattered the very fabric of my life." " I should like to hear about it," said Elizabeth, her face bent over the water, one idle hand drawn loosely through the tide. "I am assured that you are kind and sympathetic," he said, " or I should never have touched upon this subject. I never had a sister, and perhaps on that account have not acquired the habit of confession. But — but — " very slowly, and with a curioua hesitation, " I think I should like to talk to you — about her. About AHce Eraser, the woman who was to have been my wife." The face bent over the river flushed crimson, the little whito hand shivered in the tide ; but Elizabeth spoke no word. "When I went to India with my regiment — it was just after the Mutiny — I left my promised wife behind me. We were old friends, had been playfellows even, though the little Scottish lassie was seven years younger than I. She was the daughter of a Scotch parson, a mm of noble mind and widest reading, and the best friend and •'■•.Hsellor I ever had. I will not try to tell you what she v^.t >fce. To me she seemed perfection, pretty enough t<> eo charm-.", fu^ -"'viqhtness and vivacity, yet with a derth Strangers and Pilfjrimt. 43 and earnestness in her nature, that made me — her senior by seven years — feel that here was a staff to lean upon through all the iourney of life. I cannot tell you how I revered this girl ot' nineteen. You will perhaps think that she was self-opinionated, or what people call strong-minded ; but there was never a more simple unassuming nature. She had been educated by her father, and on a wider plan than the common scheme of a woman's teaching. Of late years she had shared his studies, and had been his chosen companion in every hour of leisure. Of her goodness to the people round about her I cannot trust myself to speak. Her memory is cherished in Lanorgie as the memory of a saint. I doubt if, among all who knew her well in that simple flock, there is one who could speak of her even now without t>ears." He paused for some few minutes, perhaps lost in thought, re- calling that remote Scottish village, and the sweet girlish face that had been the delight of his life six years ago. The oars dipped gently in the river, the boat glided on with imperceptible motion, and EUzabeth sat silent with her face still bent over the water, dragging the long green river-weeds through her cold white fingers. " She had the very sHghtest Scottish accent — an accent that gave a plaintive tone to her voice, like music in a minor key. She was slender and fragile, just about the middle height, very fair but very pale, with soft brown hair — the sort of woman a painter would choose for Imogen or Ophelia; not an objective nature, strongly marked with its own individuality ; subjective rather, yet strong enough to resist all evil. ^ bad husband might have broken her heart, but he would never have sullied her mind." He stopped again, laid down his sculls, and drew the boat under the reedy bank. EUzabeth was obliged to look up now. The little gray straw hat with its convenient shadow hid the change in her face, in some measure; but not entirely, for Mr. Forde observed that she was very pale. *' I fear you are tired," he said, " or that my dreary talk has wearied you." " No, no ; go on. She must have been very good." " She had less of humanity's alloy than any creature I ever knew," he answered. " I used to think that it would be a privilege for any man — the best evcci —to spend his life in her company. There was one subio".^. I'liat gave her great pain, anii that was the fact of my pro^oigica. To her gentle spirit there was something horrible in j .jOidier's career. She could not ace the nobler side of my calli..^. And I loved her too well to hoM by anything that gave her pain. I promised her that I would sell out immediately on my return from ^"r.«ign service, u-sd l:ept my wc»d " 44 ' Strangers and JBilgnnts. " It was not of your own accord, then, that you left the army ? " asked Elizabeth absently, as if only half her brain were following his words. " No, it was entirely to please Alice. I sacrificed my own inclinations in the matter. That conviction which has become the very keystone of my life since then is a faith that grew out of my great sorrow. I cannot tell you the rest of the stoiy too briefly. I went back to Lanorgie a free man. I was to be a farmer — a country gentleman on a small scale — anything Alice pleased, in the district where I was born. My sweet girl was to live for ever among the i^eople she loved. Our life was to be Arcadian — a pastoral poem. We were both very happy. I can safely declare that there was not left in my mind one spark of mankind's common desire of success or distinction. The long calm years stretched themselves out before me in sweet event- less happiness." " You must have loved her very much ? " " If you could measure my love by the change it made in me, you would have good reason to say so. I had been as eager as other young men for name, position, wealth, jjleasure — per- haps even more eager. But Alice's love filled my mind with a great content. She made herself the sun of my life. I desired nothing beyond the peaceful circle of the home that she and I were to share together. "Well, Miss Luttrell," — this with a sudden abruptness, as if the words were wrenched from him, — " it was a common trouble enough when it came. Our wedding- day was fixed; her old father, every one was happy. The last touch had been 43ut to our new home ; a house I had built for my darling upon a hill-side facing the sea, on my own land. Everything was arranged — our honeymoon trip southwards to the Cumberland lakes had been planned between us on the map one sweet summer evening. We parted at her father's door ; she a little graver than usual — but that seemed natural on the threshold of so great a change. When I went to the manse next morning, they told me that she was not quite well — that her father's old friend, the village doctor, recommended her to keep her room for a day or two, and to see no one. She had had a little too much excitement and fatigue lately. I re- 23roached myself bitterly for our long walks on the hills and by the rugged sea-shore we both loved so well. AH she wanted was perfect rest. " They kept me off like this for nearly a week ; now confessing reluctantly that she was not quite 60 well ; now cheering me with the assurance that she was better. Then one morning I heard they had sent to Glasgow for a physician. After that, I insisted upon seeing her. " She did not know me. I stood beside her bed, and the sweet blue eyes looked up at me, but she was unconscious. Th« Strangers and FiJfjrims. 45 physician acknowledged that it was a case of typhoid fever. Tliere was very little ground for hope. Yet we did hope — blindly — to the last. I telegraphed for other doctors. But we tould not save her. She died in my arms at daybreak on the day that was to have seen us married. " I will not speak of the dead blank that followed her death— of the miserable time in which I could think of nothing but the one fact of my, loss. The time came at last when I could think of her more calniy, and then I^et myself to consider what I could do, now she was gone, to ^ove that I had loved her — what tribute I could render to my dead. It was then I thought of entering the Church— of devoting myself, so far as in me lay, to the good of others — of leading such a Hfe as she would have blessed. That is the origin of all I have done, of all I hope to do. That is the end of my story, Miss Luttrell. I trust I have not tired you very much. I thought we should be better friends, if you knew more about my past." " I am very glad," she jmswered gently. _" I have sometimes fancied there must be something in your life, some sorrowful memory: not that there has ever seemed anything gloomy in your character ; but you are so much more in earnest, altogether BO unlike papa'o other curates." A faint blush ht up the pale face as she said this, remembering that he differed most widely from these gentlemen in his total inability to appreciate herself. Yes, she had fancied there was some bitter memory in hia fast, but not this. His confidence had strangely shocked her. t was inexpressibly painful to her to discover that his love — and 60 profound, a love — had all been lavished upon another woman years ago ; that were she, Elizabeth Luttrell, twice as lovely, twice as fascinating as she was, she could never be anything to him. He had chosen his type of womanly perfection ; he had giveq away all the feeling, all the passion that it was in him to give, long before he had seen her face. " Did he suppose that — that I was beginning to think too much of him," she said to herself, blushing indignantly, "and tell me this story by way of a warning ? O, no, no ! his manner was too straightforward for that. He thinks that I am good, thinks that I am able to sympathise with him, to pity him, to be sorry for that dead girl. And I am not. I think I am jealous of her in her grave." The boat glides softly on. They come to a curve in the river, and to Mr. iielvin'a party returning noisily. " You are not going to take Miss Ehzabeth any farther, ar« you?" cries Frederick. " "We are going back to tea. How slow you've been ! We went as far as the Bells, and had some »handy-gafiEl" 46 Strangers and Pilgrims. • Mr. Forde turned his clumsy bark, and all tte voyage back was noisy with the talk of the Melvtn party and the Oxonians' punt-load of vivacious humanity. They were all in holiday spirits, laughing on the faintest provocation, at the smallest imaginable jokes. Elizabeth thought it the most dismal busi- ness. AU the sunshine was taken out of her afternoon ; Tabor seemed a sullen stream flowing between flat weedy banks. But fihe could not afi'ord to let other people perceive her depression — Mr. Forde above all. She was^obliged to affect amusement at those infinitesimal jokes, those stale witticisms, while she was thinking all the time of that thrice-blessed woman whom ]\Ialcolm Forde had loved, and who had timely died while his passion was yet in its first bloom and freshness. " I daresay if she had gone on living he would have been tired of her by this time," she said to herself in a cynical mood, " She would have been his wife of ever so many years' standing, with a herd of small children, perhaps, on her mind, and just as commonplace as all the wives one knows — women whose in- tellects hardly soar above nursemaids and pinafores. How much better to be a sacred memory of his life than a prosaic fact in his everyday existence ! " After this, Ehzal^eth felt as if she could have no more pleasure in Malcolm Forde's society. Her selfish soul revolted against the idea that the memory of his dead was more to him than any favour her friendship could bestow, that she waa divided from him by the width of a grave. " I wish his Alice had lived, and he stayed among his native hills with the rest of the Scotch barbarians," she said to herself. " 1 don't think I've been qiaite happy since I've known him. He makes one feel such a contemptible creature, with has grand ideas of what a woman ought to be ; and then, after one has tried one's hardest to be good against one's very nature, he coolly informs one that there never was but one perfect woman in the world, and that she lies among the Scottish hills with hir heart buried in her grave." CHAPTER V. • * Well, you may, you must, set down to me Love that was life, life that was Icve ; A tenure of breath at your lips' decree, A passion to stand as your thoughts approve, A rapture to fall where your foot might be." The gipsy-tea went off" brilliantly. The fuel-collecting and fir©- makinpr and kettle-boiUng aff'orded ampL? sport for those wilder Strangers and Pilgrimg. 4lt ajd more youthfnl spirits whose capacity for flirtation was not yet cxhansted. Fred JMelvin belonged to that harmless class of young men who, although in the dull round of daily life but moderately gifted, shine forth with unexpected lustre on such an occasion as this, and prove themselves what their friends cail "an acquisition." He fanned life and light into a hopelessly obstinate fire, with his straw hat for an extemporaneous bellows ; he showed a profound knowledge of engineering in his method of placing the kettle on the burning logs, so as not immediately to extinguish the flames he had just coaxed into being. " I don't think there was anything so very wonderful i^i Watt inventing the steam-engine," said Miss Melvin, standing by and admiring her brother's dexterity ; " I believe Fred would have been quite as likely to hit upon it, if it hadn't been done before his time." They drank tea in little scattered groups: the elders fore- gathering in small knots to talk scandal or parish business, or to indulge in mild jeremiads upon the frivolity and gener£c empty-headedness of the rising generation, their own sons ana daughters and nephews and nieces not excepted ; the juniors to disport themselves after their kind with inexhatistible nothings, vapid utterances which filled the soul of Elizabeth with con- tempt. She carried her teacup away to a lonely little bit of bank where the rushes on the shelving shore grew high enough to screen her from the rest of the company, and sat here alone, absorbed in languid contemplation of the quiet water and all the glories of the sunset reflected on that smooth tide. Fred Melvin, seeing the white dress vanishing beyond the trees, would fain have gone in pursuit, but the Luttrell sistera prevented him. " Elizabeth has one of her headaches, I daresay," said Diana. " It would be no use going after her." " One of her tempers, you mean, Di," exclaimed Blanche with sisterly candour. " That's always the way with Lizzie if every- thing doesn't happen exactlj^ as she wants it to happen. I think she would like a world made to order, on purpose for her." " I hope we haven't done anything to offend her," cried the anxious Frederick, whose adoration of "the beauty," as chief goddess of his soul, had never suffered diminution, not even when he amused himself by offering his homage at lesser shrines. " Perhaps she didn' t like our going off in the boat without her; but it really couldn't have held so much as a lap-dog beyond our load." " As if anything you could do would offend her ! " exclaimed the impetuous Blanche, always ready to rebuke Mr. Melvin 's vain passion. " Do you think she wanted to come in our boat ? She 48 Strangers and Pilgrims. would have given lier ears for that tete-a-tete row with Mr. Fordo, caily I suppose it didn't answer." "Blanche, how can you be so absurd!" cried Gertrude. " If you don't learn to behave yourself with common decency, we really must leave you at home in the nursery another time," eaid Diana. Mr. Forde was happily beyond the hearing of this little explosion. He was in infinite request among the matrons of the party, who all regarded him more or less as a modern St. Francis de Sales, and who gave him not a little trouble by their insistence upon communicating small facts relating to their spiritual progress ; little sentimental gushes of feeling which he did his best to check, his ideas of his duty being of the broadest and grandest character. He would rather have had the conver- sion of all the hardened or remorseful felons at Portland or Dartmoor on his hands than those gushing matrons and senti- •aiental spinsters, who could not travel the smallest stage of their journey towards the heavenly Jerusalem without being propped and sustained by him. Nor was it pleasant to listen to little laments about the Vicar. " A kind, generous-minded man, Mr. Forde, and very good to the poor, I believe, in his own careless way, — but so unspiritual ! We hardly knew what light was till you came among us." And so on, and so on. He was glad to slip away from the elder tea- drinkers, and stroll in and out among the giant beech boles, with the gay sound of youthful laughter and happy idle talk filling the atmosphere around him. He Hngered to say a few words to Gertrude Luttrell and her party, and then looked round the circle curiously, as if missing some one. " I don't see your sister," he said at last, " Miss Elizabeth." Miss Luttrell coloured furiously. " Lizzie has strayed off somewhere," she said. " She appears to prefer the company of her own thoughts to our society. Perhaps had she known you would express so much anxiety about her she would have stayed." " I am not pai-ticularly anxious," replied Mr. Forde, with hia thoughtful smile, a smile which lent sudden life and brightness to the dark grave face. " Only I have it on my conscience that I kept your sister on the river a long while under a blazing sun, and I feared she might be too tired to enjoy herself with the rest of you. Can I take her a cup of tea? " " I don't think I would if I were you," cried Fred Melvin, who »^as in a picturesque altiiude, half kneeling, half reclining at the feet of Blanche Luttrell, while his cousin, Jane llarrisou, for whom there was some dim notion of his ripening into a husband by-and-by, sat looking nn ■^'\\h. an aggrieved air. " I took her Strangers and Pilgrims. 49 a second cup just now," grumbled Fred, " and very nearly got my nose snapped off for my pains." Not an encouraging statement ; but Mr. Forde was not afraid of any attacks upon his nose : was not that feature in a manner sanctified by his profession, and the very high rate at which the curate race is held two hundred and fifty miles from London P He was in nowise deterred by Mr. Melvin's plaint, but went otf at once in quest of Elizabeth. " I saddened her with that melancholy story," he thought. " Perhaps I ought not to have told her. Yet I think she is the kind of woman a man might dare to choose out of all other women for his friend. I think she is of a different stuff from the rest of Hawleigh womankind. She has shown herself superior to them all in her power to win the love of the poor. And we could never be friends until she knew my story, and knew that the word ' love ' has been blotted from the book of my Ufe." It was a new fancy of Mr. Forde's this desire that there should really be friendship— something more than the every-day superficial acquaintance engendered by church decoration and croquet — between himself and Elizabeth Luttrell. It was not to be in the slightest degree sentimental — the popular platonic idea. The Madame-Recamier-and-Chateanbriand kind of thing had never entered into his thoughts, nor did he mean that they should see any more of each other than they had done hereto- fore ; only that there should be confidence and trust between them instead of strana-eness. He found her presently on Her lonely bank by the Tabor, seated in a thoughtful attitude, and casting little turfs of mosa and lady's-slipper idly upon the tide. She had arrayed herself with a studied simplicity for this rustic gathering; perhaps fully conscious that she was one of the few women who can afford to dispense with frillings and pufiings and ruchings— the whola framework of beauty, as it were. She wore a plain white muslin gown, high to the throat, round which she had tied a dark-blua ribbon — the true Oxford blue, almost black against the ivory- white of her neck. The long dark ribbon made a rippling line to the perfect waist; perfect in its exquisite proportion to the somewhat full and stately figure — the waist of a Juno rather than a sylph. Her head was uncovered, and the low sunlight lit up all the bronze tints in her dark brown hair, shone, too, in the luminous grey eyes, fixed dreamily upon the gleaming water. Mr. Forde stood for a few moments a little way off", admiring her — simply as he would have admired a picture, of course. His footsteps made a faint rustling among the rushes as he came nearer to her. She looked round suddenly, and all her Ikce Hushed crimson at sight of him. 60 Strangers and Pilgrims. That blush would have elevated Fred Melvin to the seventh heaven ; but Malcolm Forde was no coxcomb, and did not attri- bute the heightened tint to any magical power of his own. She was nervous, perhaps, and he had startled her by his sudden ajjproach ; or she might be indeed, as her friends had suggested, a httle out of temper, and annoyed at being tracked to her lair. " Don't be angry with me for disturbing your solitary musings, Miss Elizabeth," he said, very much detesting the ceremonial Miss ; " but I really don't think you're enjoying your father's picnic quite so much as you ought, for your own satisfaction and that of your friends " " I hate picnics," she an s«Fered peevishly ; " and if papa gives one next year, I'U have nothing to do with it. I'm sure I wish I'd stayed in Hawleigh and gone to see my poor people. I should have been much happier sitting by Mrs. Jones's wash- tub, or reading to Mrs. Brown while she mended her husband's Btockings." " If you speak like that, I shall think I spoiled your pleasure by that egotistical talk in the boat." She only shook her head and looked away from him at a dis- tant curve of the river. There was an awkward sensation of eemi-strangulation in her throat. For her very life she could not have answered him. Yes, it was a bitter disapj^ointment to discover that he had flung away his heart before he came to Hawleigh ; that he was a kind of widower, and pledged never to tiarry again. " I am so sorry that I told you that story. Of course it was JO fitting time. I was a brute not to have thought of that ; but we so rarely have time for a confidential talk, and I have been so much interested in your work lately, so much pleased by your hearty manner of taking up a duty which I know did at first seem uncongenial to you, and I was anxious that we should be friends. Pray do not let the gloom of my past life weigh upon your spirits even for an hour. It was a most ill-advised confession. Try to forget that it was ever made." Silence still, and the head turned obstinately towards tho river. Was it temper ? or compassion for another's woes more profound than he had dreamed of ? " Say, at least, that you forgive me for having depressed you." Still no answer in words, but a hand stretched out towards his, a hand chiU as death. " Let me take you back to your friends," he said, alarmed by the cold touch of that little hand, which he clasped for a moment with a friendly pressure and then let fall. " I shall not forgive niyaelf till I see you haPDv with the others." Strangers and Pilgrims. 51 She rose slowly and took the arm which he offered her. That choking sensation had been conquered by this time, and she was able to answer him quite calmly. " Pray don't distress yourself about me," she said ; " I am very glad that you told me your story, that you think me worthy of your confidence." He took her back to the cii-cle under the Beeches. Cups and saucers were being gathered up, the bustle of preparation for departure had begun. Wagonette, omnibus, and dogcart stood ready for the homeward journey, and the usual discussions and disputes as to the mode and manner of return were going on : elderly spinsters languishing to travel on the roof of the omni- bus, and prote.sting their aliection for the perfume of cigars ; fastish young ladies pleading for the same privilege ; and all tlie male kind thinly disguising the leaven of selfishness that waj in them, and the desire to appropriate the roof to their own accommodation, by an affected solicitude as to the hazard ol cold-catching. «' We ought to have had a dance," grumbled Blanche; "it would have been the easiest thing in the world to bring a couple of men with a harp and a fiddle, but I suppose it would have been considered unclerical. It would have been so nice. We should have fancied ourselves fairies tripping lightly under the greenwood tree. I declare it seems quite a shame to go home so early — ^just when the air is pleasantest, and all the stars are beginning to peep out of their nests in the sky — as if we were a children's tea-party." The fiat, however, had gone forth, the vehicles were ready, the fogy-ish element in the pai-ty eager to depai-t before dewa began to fall, and toads, bats, owls, spiders, and other rustic horrors to pervade the scene ; the juvenile population loth to go, yet eager for the excitement of the return journey, with all its opportunities for unlimited flirtation. Fred Melvin was the proud proprietor of the dogcart, a con- veyance usually apijroprialed to the uses of his father — the family carriage, in short — which, if it had only possessed one of those removable Amencan-oven tops pojjular in the rural dis- tricts would liave even done duty for a brougham. Urged thereto by his sister, and with considerable reluctan..;<;, the young sohcitor entreated Mr. Forde, who had come on the box of the omnibus, to accept a seat in his chariot — a variety in the mode of return being esteemed a privilege by the picnickers. " Mr. Forde won't want to go back on the omnibus, I dare- say, Fred," argued Laura Melvin. " You might as well offer him a seat in the dogcart." To which suggestion Frederick growled that he wanted no 52 Strangers c^ Pilgrims. parsons, and that he was going to ask one of the Liittrell girls. " You can ask one of the Miss Luttrells, too, Fred. There'll only be you and me and Mr. Forde, Jenny's going home inside the omnibus. She has a touch of her neuralgia ; and I don't wonder, poor girl, you've been flirting so shamefully with Blanche Luttrell. I wonder how a girl hardly out of pinafores can go on so." So Fred went away to offer the vacant seats ; first to Mr. Ford», with reluctant politeness. "You don't like too much smoke, I daresay, and those fellows on the 'bus will be smoking like so many factory chimneys every inch of the way. You'd better have your quiet cigar in my trap." " You're very good. I don't like bad tobacco, certainly ; and the odours I enjoyed coming were not by any means the perfumes of Arabia. But are you sure I shall not be in \he way ? " " 0, you won't be in the way. I am going to ask Lizzie Luttrell, and that'll make up the four." Mr. Fordo winced at this familiar mention of the damsel in whom he had permitted himself to become interested; but that kind of familiarity is a natural attribute of brothers in their intercourse with their sisters' friends. "A different race, these provincial brothers, from the rest of mankind," Mr. Forde thought. " I'm going to ask her," repeated Frederick, as he tightened the chestnut mare's kicking-strap, " but I don't suppose she'll come, unless her temper's undergone some improvement since I took her that cup of tea." Elizabeth Luttrell drew nigh at this moment, in grave con- verse with a little silver-headed gentleman, the ancient banker of Hawleigh. To Mr. Melvin's surprise, she accepted his offer with extreme graciousness. " I hke a dogcart above all things," she said, " especially if I may sit behind. I do so like the excitement of the sensation that one will be jerked off if the horse shies." But against this Fred protested vehemently. "You must sit next the driver," he said; "La^ara din sit behind with Mr. Forde. Not that Bess ever shies, but you must have the post of honour." " Then I'll go home in the omnibus," said Lizzie; "I know riding behind always makes Laura nervouB." Miss Melvin, pressed hard upon this point, acknowledged that the jerky sensation which was pleasant to Elizi..beth's bolder spirit was eminently appalling to herself. So Elizabeth had Strangers and Pilijrims. 53 her own wa}', and occupied the back seat of the dogcart, witt Mr. Forde by her side. The journey back to Hawleigh was a ten-mile drive through west-country lanes, bordered by steep banks and tall tangled hedges that shut out the landscape, except for those privileged travellers on the roof of the omnibus. Only now and then did the dogcart emerge from the shadow of hawthorn and wood- bine, wild rose and wild apple, into the moonlit open country ; but the odour of those leafy lanes was sweet, and beyond them, far away in the soft silver light, spread fair hill-sides and wooded slopes, and brief flashes of the winding river. It only lasted an hour and a quarter, that homeward journey, the dogcart keeping well ahead of the heavier vehicles, and Bess the mare performing the distance in so superior a manner as almost to justify that pride in her which was one of the chief articles of faith in the household code of the Melvins. Elizabeth would have thought better of the animal had she loitered a little on the way. Not often could she enjoy a moonlight tete-a-tete with Mr. Forde — for it mattered little that Fred interjected his trivial little remarks every now and then across Miss Luttrell's shoulder; not often had he unbent to her as he unbent to-night, talking to her as if she were verily in some measure a ])art of his inner life, and not a mere accident in the outer world around him. That confession of his past soiTows seemed really to have brought them a little closer to- gether, and Elizabeth began to think there might indeed be such a thing as friendship between them ; friendship that would brighten the dull round of district-visiting, sweeten all her hfe, and yet leave her free to dream her favourite day-dream of a wealthy marriage in the days to come ; a splendid position won suddenly by her beauty ; a swift and easy translation to a land flowing with silks and laces and all kinds of Parisian mil- linery; a little heaven here below in the way of opera-boxes and races and flower-shows and moruLiig concerts; while Mr. Forde remained at liberty to fulfil that scheme of a monkish life which he had in his own quiet manner avowed to his more familiar friends of the district-visiting class. " And perhaps some day, after I am married, he will really go to the South-Sea Islands, or the centre of Africa, as a mis- sionary," she thought, with a little regretful sigh ; " and years afterwards, when I am middle-aged and his hair is growing gray, he will come back to England as Bishop of Tongataboo, or some fearful place, and I shall hear him preach a charity sermon at a fashionable London church." It seemed hardly worth her while to be sorry about so remote a contingency; but she could not help feeling a pang at the thought that this part of her vision was the most likely to be 64 Strangers and Pilgrims. realised; that whether the hypothetical baronet, with thirt;^ thousand a year, did or did not appear upon the narrow sceiia of her life, Malcolm Forde would spi-ead his pinions and soai away to a wider field than this small provincial town. The dogcart arrived at the gate of Hawleigh Vicarage quite half an hour in advance of the other vehicles. It was past ten o'clock, and rare lights burned dimly in the uf)per casements o. the houses that wei-e scattered here and there along the high- road on this side of the town, the more exclusive and suburban quarter, adorned by the trim gotliic lodges of the villas that half aspired to be country seats. The vicarage servants — Ann the sometime nurse and general factotum, Susan the coolc, Rebecca the housemaid, and Jakes, the man-of-all-work — were clustered at the gate, waiting to witness the return of the pic- nickers, as more sophisticated domestics might stand at gaze to Bee all the drags and wagonettes and hansom cabs of the famous Derby pilgrimage file slowly past Clapham-common. "You'll come in, won't you, Laura?" said Elizabeth, who did not wish her evening to close abruptly with brief farewells at the gate. " Jakes can take care of your horse, Mr. Melvin , You'll wait for papa, won't you Mr. Forde, and to say good- night to every one P " " If you are sure that you are not tired, and would be glad to get rid of us and go in and rest," said Mr. Forde doubtfully. " I am not in the least tired. I feel more in the humour to begin a picnic than I did at one o'clock to-day. Why, in London fashionable people are only just beginning to go out to parties ! We seem to cut off" the best end of our lives in the country with our stupid humdrum habits. Don't you think the night is best, Mr. Forde ? " " For study, I admit." " 0, for pleasure, for everything ! " cried Elizabeth impatiently. " I feel another creature at night, out of doors, in summer moonlight like this. There is a kind of intoxication : one's soul seems to soar away into clearer air, into dreamland. What would dancing be like at eleven o'clock in the morning, or at three on a sultry afternoon? Why, it would seem perfect lunacy ! But at night, with o^sen windows, and the moonlight outside, and the scent of the flowers blowing in from the garden, it is simply rapture, because we are not quite the same people, you see, towards midnight. For my own part, on a summer evening I always feel as if I had wings." She said this in a rapid excited tone, as if this particular moonlight had indeed produced an abnormal effect upon her spirits. They had all strolled into the garden, Frederick having reluc- tantly committed the mare to the man-of-all-work. Mr. Forde was walking bc^^weeu the two young ladies, Miss Melvin feeling Strangers and Pilgrims. 55 that it was mere foolishness to hope for any attention from a curate while Elizabeth ran on in that wild and almost dis- reputable way of hers, not in the least like a well-brought-up young lady. But then it was a well-known fact that the Luttrell girls had received only a desultory training, not the regular old-established boarding-school grinding: but sometimes a morning governess, and sometimes an interregnum of inter- mittent instruction from their father; sometimes masters for music and drawing, sometimes nothing at all. They were all clever girls, of course, said the genteel matrons of Hawleigh, or they could hardly have grown up as well as they had ; but they had not enjoyed the advantages of the orthodox discipline for the youthful mind, and the consequences of this irregular education cropped up occasionally. The girls had read ahnost what they liked, and had stronger opinions than were becoming in a vicar's daughters. To Laura Mc'lvin's gratified surprise, Mr. Forde did not take any notice of Ehzabeth's tirade about moonlight, but turned to her, Laura, and began to question her politely respecting her enjoyment of the day, while Fred, eager to snatch his oppor- tunity, flew to Elizabeth. " Didn't Bess do the ten miles well? " he asked by way of a lively beginning, quite prepared to have his advances ill received. But Elizabeth was still under the intoxication of the moon- light. She was a person of singularly variable spirits, and the sullen gloom that had come upon her after that interview in the boat had now changed to a reckless vivacity. "The drive was delightful," she said. "I should like U scamper all over Devonshire and Cornwall in such a dogcart, with just such a horse, stopping at all manner of wild places, and being benighted, and camping on the moors. What a mistake it is to live all one's life shut up between four walls, in the same place, with no more variety from year's end to year's end than a fortnight in seaside lodgings ! 0, how I wish Providence had made me a gipsy, or a Bedouin Arab ! " Awfully jolly, I should think, the Bedouins," replied Fred doubtfully. "They tumble, don't they? I remember seeing some Bedouin tumblers at Vauxball when I was a youngster, and was up in London with the paternal party. But those were all men and boys. I don't think the women tumbled ; and their lives must have been uncommonly dull, shut up somewhere in London lodgings, while their husbands and brothers were performing, not being able to speak English, you know, poor creatures, or anything." " you stupid Fred ! " cried Elizabeth, who sometimes deigned to address the young man in this familiar way. " As if I meant performing Araba ! I should like to be the daughter of som© 56 Strangers and Pilgrlmt. Arab chief in the great desert, with my own darling horse to carry me on the wings of the wind, and only a tent to live in, and locusta and wild honey for my dinner, like John the Baptist. I should like to be one of those nice brown-faced girls who go about the country with a van-load of mats and brooms. There seema Boniething respectable in brooms. They would hardly send me to prison as a rogue and vagabond ; and 0, how nice it must be never to stay very long in the same place ! " *' And to have no friends and no home, and no books or piano, and to be of no particular use in the world ; only always toiling more or less hopelessly for one's daily bread : and to die some day by the roadside, of hard work and exposure to all kinds of weather," continued Mr. Forde, who had soon exhausted his little stock of civihties to Miss Melvin, and turned to listen to Elizabeth's random talk. " I'm afraid you must be very tired of us all, Miss Luttrell, when your soul yearns for the broom- girl life." " Not so tired as you confess yourself to be of us when ;you contemplate convertmg the heathen," answered the girl, turning her back upon the hapless Frederick. " It is not because I am tired of you that I think sometimea of a broader field and harder work," he answered gravely, " but for quite a difierent reason — because I sometimes find my life here too easy, too pleasaut ; an enervating hfe, in short. It is not always wise for a man to trust himself to be happy." " I thought you had done with happiness, after — what you told me this afternoon," said Elizabeth, almost bitterly. Her speech shocked him a little. He answered it in his coldest tones. " With one kind of happiness, yes, and that perhaps the only perfect happiness in this world — companionship with a perfect woman." " A very good way of reminding me that I'm an imperfect one," thought Elizabeth, not unconscious of deserving the im- plied rebuke. They walked slowly round the garden in the moonlight, side by side, but somewhat silent after this, leaving Frederick to straggle in their rear with his sister, an ignominious mode of /reatment which he inwardly resented. Nor was he sorry when the omnibus and wagonette drove up to the gate to release him from this humiliating position. He felt himself rehabilitated in his own self-esteem when Blanche, who really came next_ to Elizabeth in the scale of prettiness, skipped gaily up to bim, telling him that she had had the dullest imaginable drive inside the omnibus, and that she had been dreadfully jealous of Lizzie, who of course had been having capital fun in the doo;cart. " I don't know whether Forde is particularly good fun," Mr Slranyers and Pilgrims. 57 Melvia replied with a sulky air. "Tour sister had /tn;i all to herself. There was no getting in a word edgeways. I think when a man as good as gives out from the pulpit that he never means to marry, he ought to give up flirting into the bargain." " 0, Fred, how shameful of you to say such a thing ! Aa if Mr. Forde ever flirted ! " " I should like to know what he's doing now," grim? bled Fred. " If that isn't the real thing, it's an uncommonly good imitation." Elizabeth had taken up her favourite position by the sun- dial, and Malcolm Forde was standing by her, talking earn- estly, or at least with an appearance of earnestness -, and it is one of the misfortunes of youth that two persons of opposite sex cannot converse for ten minutes with any show^ of interest without raising suspicions of flirtation in the minds of the beholders. " Doesn't it seem absurd," exclaimed the aggrieved Frederick, " after all Elizabeth has said about never marrying a clergy- man '>■ " She is not obliged to marry Mr. Forde because she talks to him for five minutes, is she, you stupid creature ?" cried Blanche, disapproving this appearance of concern in her admirer — eligible young men were so rare at Hawleigh. And now, after some consumption of claret-cup or sherry- and-soda among the elders in the low candle-lit drawing-room, and a straggling flirtation among the juniors here and there about the garden, there came a general good-night, and Mr. Luttrell's guests dispersed, in carriages or on foot, to that gentleman's supreme contentment. This kind of thing was one of the penalties that went along with a flock of daughters. " Thank heaven, that's over," he said ^vith a faint groan, and in a tone of voice strangely diflferent from the friendly warmth of his last farewell. "And now mind, I am not to be bothered about any more party-giving on this side of Christmas." " I am sure I shouldn't care if there were never to he an- other party on the face of the earth," said Elizabeth drea'-'Jy. Whereby it might be supposed that, so far as the prettiest Miss Luttrell was concerned, the day's festivities had been a failure. Blanche questioned her by-and-by up in their tower chamber — the ancient octagon room, with its deep-set casements and litter of girUsh trifles, its bird-cages and bookshelves, and glove- boxes and scent-bottles — questioned her closely, but at the outset could extort very little from those firm proud lips. " You know you were glad to have that nde home with him,* said the girl persistently. "You know you quarrelled with him in the boat, and were miserable afterwards. You k now you are fond of him, Lizzie. What's the good of trying to hide it from me ? " 68 Strangers and Pilgrims. " Fond of him ! " cried Elizabeth passionately. "Fond of a man who scarcely ever says a civil word to me ! Fond of a man who, if he ever wei'e to care for me — and he never will — would want to make me a district-visitor or a female mission- ary ! You ought to know me better, Blanche." '* I know you are fond of him," the girl repeated resolutely. " Wliy, you've changed your very nature for his sake ! As if we didn't all of us know the influenoe that has made you take up Gertrude's work !" Elizabeth burst out laughing. "Perhaps I wanted to take the shine out of Gertrude's Bupernal virtues," she said. " Perhaps I wanted to show him that I was just as v/ell able to do that kind of a thing as his Hawleigh saints, v '^o call it their vocation — that I was able to make the poor people love me, which very few of his saints can manage." " Upon my word, Lizzie, I'm afraid you're very wicked," exclaimed Blanche, staring at her sister with an awed look. Elizabeth was sitting on the edge of the low French bed, her brown hair falling round her like a sombre drapery, her eyea fixed with a dreamy look, a half-mischievous, half-triumphant emile upon hfv lips. " I'm afraid you're right," she said with a sudden burst of candour. " I feel intensely wicked at this moment. Can you guess what I should like to do, Blanche ? " " Not I. You are the most uni'athomable girl in creation." " r should like to bring that man to my feet, to make him as deej^ly in love with me as — as ever any miserable slavish woman was with a man who did not love her, and then spurn him ; fool him to the top of his bent, Blanche ; and when I had become the very apple of his eye — perhaps while he was deliberating in his slow dull soul as to whether he should make an election between me and the conversion of the South- Sea Islanders — astonish him some fine morning by announcing ftiy engagement with somebody a little better worth marrying. He would have his South-Sea Islanders left to console him." She flung the cloud of hair back from her face impatiently, with a bitter little laugh and a downward glance of the dark eyes, as if she did indeed see Malcolm Forde at her feei^ and were scorning him. Blanche gazed at her \vith unmitigated horror. " Goodness gracious, Lizzie ! What can put such dreadful ideas into your head? _-Whai hos M.alcolm Forde done to make you so savage ? " " What has he done? O, nothing, I suppose," half hysteri- cally. " But I should like to punish him for all he has mado me suffer to-day." Strangers and Pilgrims, 69 CHAPTER VI. Wlicn God smote His hands together, and struck out thy soul ns a sp.irk Into the organized gloiy of things, from deeps of the dark, — Say, didst thou shine, didst thou burn, didst thou honour the power ii? the form, Ab the star does at night, or the fire-fly, or even the little ground-wcrm i. " I have sinned," she said, " For my seed- light shed Hag smouldered away from His first decrees. The cypress praiseth the fire-fly, the ground-leaf praiseth the worm ; I am viler than these." What had Malcolm Forde done? The question was one which that gentleman demanded of himself not unfrequently during the next few weeks. Was it wise or foolish to have bared this old wound before the pitying, or unpitying, eyes of Elizabeth Luttrell; to have made this appeal for womanly sympathy, he who was by nature so reticent, who had kept his griefs so sternly locked within his own breast until now ? Was it wise or foolish ? Was he right in deeming her nobler than the common herd of women, a soul with whom it might be sweet to hold friendship's calm communion, a woman whom he dared cultivate as his friend ? He was not even yet fully resolved upon this point ; but of possible peril to himself in any such association he had never dreamed. Long ago he had told himself that his heart was buried in Alice Eraser's grave, laid at rest for ever in the hill-side burial ground beneath the mountains that shelter Lanorgie; long ago he had solemnly devoted all the power of his intellect, all the vigour of his man- hood, to the pursuit of a grander aim than that mere earthly happiness for which the majority of mankind searches. From that burial of all his human hopes there could be no such thing as resurrection. To be false to the memory of his lost bride, to forswear the oath he made to himself when he took his priestly vows, with a wider or a sterner view of the priestly office than is common to English churchmen — to do this would be to stamp himself for ever in his own esteem the weakest and meanest of mankind. Such a thing was simply impossible. He had therefore no snare to dread in friendly companionship with a bright generous-hearted young creature wlio was infinitely superior to her surroundings, a faulty soul vaguely struggling towards a purer atmosphere, a woman vinom he might help to be good. He felt that here was a noble nature in sore peril of shipo ^reck, a creature with the grandest capabilities, vAio might lor 60 Strangers and Pilgrims. lack of culture achieve nothing but evil; a soul too easily led astray, a heart too impulsive to resist temptation. " If she were my sister I would make her one of the noblest women of her age," he said to himself, with a firm faith in his own influence upon this feebler feminine spirit. " Her very faults would seem charming to some men," he told himself sagely. " That variableness which makes her at times the most incomprehensible of women, at other times the sweetest, would lead a fool on to his destruction. There was a day when I deemed her incapable of serious thought or un- selfish work; yet, once awake to the sense of her obligations, there has been no limit to her patience and devotion." And he was the author of this awakening. He felt a natural pride and dehght in the knowledge of this. He was the Pro- iiietheus who had l^reathed the higher and more spiritual life into the nostrils of this lovely clay. He had snatched her from the narrow influences of her home ; from the easy-going thoughtless father, whose mind hardly soared above the consideration of his cellar or his dinner-table ; from the petty provincial society, with its petty gossip about its own works and ways, the fashion of its garments, and its dinings and tea- drinkings and trivial domestic details, from Mrs. Smith's new parlour-maid to Mrs. Brown's new bonnet. It was something to have hfted her from this slough of despond even to the outermost edge of a better world. Yet she had flashes of the old leaven, intervals of retrogres- sion that afflicted him sorely. During that homeward drive from the picnic she had been all that the most exacting of mankind could desire; sympathetic, confiding, understanding his every thought, and eager to be understood ; candid, un- affected, womanly. But when the drive was over she had changed, as quickly as Cinderella at midnight's first fatal stroke. All the glorious vestments of her regenerated soul had dropped away, leaving the old familiar rags — the flippancy, the fastness, the insolence of conscious beauty. That earnest talk by the sundial, which Frederick Melvin had watched from afar with jealous eyes, had been in reality expostulation. The Curate had presumed to lecture his Yicar's daughter, not in an insolent hectoring spirit, not in a tone to which she could fairly object, but with a gentle gravity, regretful that she who had so many gifts should yet fall short of perfection. "How can you talk such nonsense?" she exclaimed im- petuously, with an angry movement of her graceful shoulders. '' You know there is no one perfect, you know there is no one good. Are you not always hammering that at us in your sermons, making believe to consider us the veriest dirt — yes, eveu Mrs. Polwhele, of the Dene, in her new French bounet ? I don't Stranijers and Iftlgrt-mt. 61 lee any use in trying to please you. There never was 1 ^ut one perfect woman, and she is dead." " I do not think it veiy kind of you to speak like that/" said Mr. Forde, " as if you grudj^^ed my praise of the dead." " No, it is not that; but it seems hard that the living should Buffer because — because you choose to brood upon the memory of some one who was better than they. I will not shape myself by any model, however perfect. Why," with a little bitter laugh, "if I were to become the faultless being you tell me I might make myself, my perfection would only be a plagiarism. I would rather be original, and keep my sins. Besides, what can my shortcomings matter to you?" " They matter very much to me. Do you think I am in- terested in my congregation just for twenty minutes, while I am preaching to them, and that when I come down the pulpit-stairs all interest ceases till my next sermon P " "You should reserve your lectures for Gertrude. She enjoys sermonising and being sermonised. I believe she keeps a journal of her spiritual progress. I daresay she would like to show it to you. No doubt you would find jjlenty of my sins duly booked en loarenthese." " Your sister Gertrude is a very admirable person, and I was beginning to hope you would grow like her." "Thanks for the compliment. If I am in any danger of resembling Gertrude, I shall leave off trying to be good the first thing to-morrow morning." " Good-night, Miss Luttrell " " I am not Miss Luttrell. My name is Elizabeth." " Good-night, Elizabeth," he said, very coldly ; and before she could speak again he was gone, leaving her planted there by the sundial, angry with herself, and still more angry with him; passionately jealous of that memory which was more to him than the best and brightest of living creatures. " Alice Eraser ! " she said to herself. " Alice Eraser ! A Scotch clergyman's daughter, a girl who never had a well-made gown in her life, I dare say. It was her portrait I saw over the mantelpiece in his sitting-room, no doubt. A poor little namliv- pamby face, with pleading eyes always seeming to say, ' For- give me for being a little better than everybody else.' And that cup and saucer under the glass shade ! Hers, no doubt, used in her last illness. Poor girl ! it was hard to be stricken down like that; and yet how sweet to die with his arms holding her, his agonised lace bent over hers, his quiveiing lips bent close to hers to catch the last faint breath ! What was there in that poor little meek-souled thing to hold him in life, and after death — to set a seal upon his strong heart, and keep it even ip, hor gruye ? It is more than I can understand."' E 62 Strangers and Pilyrms. In tte brief intervals of leisure whicli his daily duties left him — very brief at the best — Mr. Forde found his thoughts return with a strange persistency to the image of EUz;abeth Luttrell. It was not that he saw her often, for they had not encountered each other since the picnic, the young lady having been absent when he paid his duty-call at the Vicarage. It was perhaps because she was less agreeable than other women ; because shs rebelled and defied him, and argued with him flippantly, where other damsels bowed down and worshipped; because she had never weakened her optic nerves by a laborious course of tent- stitch and satin-stitch; because she had refused to lead the choir of Sunday-school children, or to take a class in the Sun- day-school; because she was in every respect, save ii her late amendment in the district-visiting way, exactly what a clergy- man's daughter ought not to be, that Malcolm Forde suifered his mind to dwell upon her in the dead watches of the night, and gave her a very disproportionate amount of his consideration at all times and seasons. Of late he had been seriously disturbed about her ; for shortly after the picnic there came a change in the damsel's conduct, a sad falling away in her district- visiting. The women whom she had attached to her bewailed this fact to Mr. Forde. " I thought as how she'd been ill, poor dear," said one ; " biit when I went to church last Sunday, there she was, with her head held as high as ever, like a queen, bless her handsome face, and more colour in her cheeks than she used to have. She sent me a gownd last week by the vicarage housemaid, and a regular food one, not a brack in it ; but though I was humbly thankful, 'd rather have seen her, as I used when she'd come and sit agen my wash-tub reading the Gosjoel." He heard this lamentation, in different forms, from several women, and after some inquiry discovered that, exceptto visit a sick child, Elizabeth had not been among her people since the day of the picnic at Lawborough Beeches. She had sent them ^a, and small benefactions of that kind, by the hand of a menial, — benefactions for which they were duly grateful, — but they missed her visits not the less. " She's such good company," remarked one woman : " not like most of your districk-visitors, which make you feel that down-hearted as if you'd had a undertaker talkin' to you. She's got such pleasant lively ways, and yet as pitiful as j)itiful if there's sickness. And she do make herself so at home in one's place. 'Let me dust your chimbleypiece, Mrs. Mon-is,' she says to me ; and dusts it before I can look, and sets the things •>ut so pretty, and brings me that there blue chaney vaise next my, bless her kind heart !" Mr. Forde was deeply grieved by this falling ofiP. It seemed Strangers and Pilf/rims. 63 as if the Promethean spark had been untimely blown out. The beautiful clay was once more only clay. He felt unspeak- ably disheartened by the straying of this one lamb, which he had sought to gather into the fold. Once possessed of his facts, he went straightway to the Vicarage to remonstrate. " I do not care how obnoxious I render myself to her," he thought. " I am not here to speak smooth words. If her father neglects his duty, there is so much more reason I should do mine." The year had grown six weeks older since the picnic. In summer time the Luttrell girls — with the exception of Gertrude, who was always busy— lived for the most part a stragi^ling hfe, scattering themselves about garden and orchard, and doing all things in a desultory manner. In summer the Curate might have felt tolerably sure of finding Elizabeth alone under some favourite tree, reading a novel, or making believe to work. To- day it was different. The October afternoon was fine, but chill. He would have to seek his erring sister in the house, to inquire for the Vicar and the young ladies alter the usual manner of visitors, and to take his chance of getting a few words alone with Elizabeth. He looked right and left of the winding path as he went from the garden-gate to the house, but saw no ghmpse of female apparel athwart the tall hollyhocks ; so he was lain to go on to the hall-door. He was not particularly observant of details ; but it struck him that the gray old house had a smarter aspect than usual. The carriage drive had been lately rolled; there was even some indication of a thin coating of nev/ gravel. Muslin curtains that were unfamiliar to his eyes shrouded the bow-windows of the drawing-room, and a little yapping black- and-tan terrier — the veriest abbreviation of the dog species — flew out of a half-open door to gird at him as he rang the bell. The vicarage parlour-maid — a young woman he had prepared for confirmation twelve months before — came smiling to admit him. Even she had an altered air — more starch in her gown, a emart white apron, cherry-coloured bows in her cap. " Is Mr. Luttrell at houie .? " " No, sir. Master went to Bulford in the pony-chaise with Miss Luttrell directly after lunch. But the otheryoung ladiea are in the drawing-room, sir, and Mrs. Cheveuix." He went into the hall — a square low-ceilinged chamber, em- bellished with antiquated cabinets of cracked oriental china ; an ancient barometer ; a pair of antlers, with a fox's brush lying across them, both trophies of the Vicar's prowess in the field"; a smoky-looking piece of still-life, with the usual cut lemon and dead leveret and monster bunch of impossible grapes ; the still 64 Strai^gers and Pilgrims. emokier portrait of an old gentleman of the pig-tail period ; and Bundry other specimens of art, which, massed into one lot of oddments at an auction, might iA^Bsibly have realised a fi'^e- pound note. "Mrs. Chepenix? " said the Curate interrogatively. •' Yes, sir — the yonng ladies' aunt, sir — master's sister ? " " 0," said Mr. Forde. He faintly remembered having hoard of this lady — the well-to-do aunt and godmother who had given Diana the grand piano; an aunt who was sometimes alluded to confidently by Blanche as an authority upon all matters of taste and fashion ; a person possessed of a universal knowledge, of the lighter sort; whose judgment as to the best book or the cleverest picture of the season was a judgment beyond dispute ; who knew the ins and oiits of life aristocratic and life diplomatic, and would naturally be one of the first persons to be informed of an approaching marriage in fashionable circles or an im- pending war. Without ever having seen this lady, Mr. Forde had, from his inner consciousness, as it were, evolved some faint image of her, and the image was eminently distasteful to him. He disliked Mr8. Chevenix, more or less on the Dr. Fell principle. The reason why he could not tell, but he most assuredly did dislike her. He could understand now that tlie new muslin curtains and the sprinkling cf new gravel were expenses incurred in honour of this superior jjerson. He kept his hat in his hand, — he •would ha.ve left it in the hall most likely, had the young ladies been alone, — and thus armed, v/ent in to be presented to Mrs. Chevenix. " 0, how do yon do, Mr. Forde P" cried Diana, bouncing up from the hearthrug, where she had been caressing the infinitesi- mal terrier. " You are quite a stranger. We never set -"^ou now, except in church. Let me present you to my aunt, Mrs. Chevenix." He had a sense of something large and brown and i-ustling rising with a stately air between him and the light, and then slowly sinking into the luxurious depths of a capacious arm- chair ; a chair not indigenous to the vicarage drawing-room, evidently an additional luxury provided for aunt Chevenix. He had shaken hands with Diana, and bowed to aunt Cheve- nix — who maintained an aristocratic reserve on the subject of hand-shaking, and did not go about the world offering her hand to tke first comer — in a somev/hat absent-minded manner. He haa performed th^se two ceremonies with his eyes wandering in quest of that oCner Miss Luttrell for whose special behalf he had come to the Vicarage. She — Elizabeth — sat in a low chair by the ire, reading a Strangers atd Pilgrims. 65 novel, tne very picture of contented idleness. She too, Uke the house, seemed to him altered. Her garments had a more fashionable air. That Puritan simplicity she had assumed at the beginning of her career as a district-visitor was entirely dis- carded. She wore lockets and trinkets which he had not seen her wear of late, and rich plaits of dark brown hair were piled high on the graceful head, like the pictures in fashion-books. She rose now to greet him with a languid air, an elegant indif- erence of manner which he surmised had been im[.iHrted by the stately personage in histrous brown silk. They shook handf coldly cinough on both sides, and Elizabeth resumed her seat, with her book open in her lap. Mrs. Chevenix sat with her portly brown-silk back towards the bow window. It was one of Mrs. Chevenix's principles to sit with her back to the light, whereby a soupfon of pead- powder and hair-dye was rendered less obvious to the obsei-ver. A beauty had Mrs. Chevenix been in her time, ay, and as acknowledged a beauty as Elizabeth Luttrell herself, although it would have cost Malcolm Forde a profound effort of faith to believe that vivid flashing brunette loveliness of Elizabeth's could ever develop into the fleshly charms of the matron. But in certain circles, and in her own estimation, Mrs. Chevenix still took high rank as a fine woman. She had arrived at that arid full-blown stage of existence in which a woman can only be distinguished as fine, in which a carefully preserved figure and a complexion eked out by art are the last melancholy vestiges of departed beauty. She was a large person, with a large aquiline-nosed counten- ance framed by broad-plaited bands of flaxen hair. Her cheeks bloomed with the florid bloom of middle age, delicately toned down by a judicious application of pearl-powder ; her arched eyebrows were several shades darker than her hair, and a little too regular for nature ; her eyes were blue — cold calculating eyes, which looked as if they had never beheld the outer world as any- thing better than a theatre for the advancement and gratification of self; or at least this was the idea which those chilly azure orbs inspired in the mind of Mr. Forde as he sat opposite the lady, talking small talk and telling Diana Luttrell the news of his parish. Mrs. Chevenix had a certain good-society manner which was as artificial as her eyebrows, or the bluish-white tints that toned her cheek-bones; and of this manner she kept two samples always in stock — the gushing and vivacious style which she affected with people whom sh# deemed her superiors, the listless and patronising, or secondary manner, wherewith she gratified her niferiors. It wai of course not likely she would take the trouble to guall 66 Strangers and Pilf/rims. for her brother's curate, even though he might be a person ol decent family, and possessed of independent means. Had he been an " Honourable," a scion, however remote, of aome dis- tinguished house in the peerage, she would have beamed upon him with her most entrancing smiles. But an unknown Scotchman ; a man who had been described to her as terribly in earnest; a person of revolutionary principles, who set him- self against the existing order of things, wanting to reform this and that, and perhaps to level the convenient barriers which keep the common herd in their proper places ; a dismal person, no doubt, full of strange wailings, Uke the ancient prophets, whom she heard wonderingly sometimes at church, giving them just as much attention as she could spare from the fair vista of new bonnets shining in a shaft of light from the gothic window, and who seemed to her to have been distracted personages eminently ineligible for dinner-parties. " Aunt Chevenix missed your sermon last Sunday morning, Mr. Forde," said Diana. " She had one of her headaches, and was afraid the church might be hot." " In October ? " said Mr. Forde, smiling. "Our congregation is not vast enough for that." He did not express any regret about his loss of such a hearer as aunt Chevenix. "I am really fond of a good sermon," remarked the lady blandly, trifling with a shining black fan, wherewith she was wont to flap the empty air at all times and seasons. This fan, a gold-rimmed eye-glass, and a double-headed scent-bottle, were Mrs. Chevenix's only means of employment, after she had read the Morning Post and accomplished her diurnal tale of letter- writing. "And good sermons are become so rare," she went on in her slow pompous way. " I have heard no eloquent preacher for the last live years, except the Bishop of Granchester." " You would not say that if you had heard Mr. Forde," said Diana. Mrs. Chevenix put up her eyeglass and looked at the Curate with a languid smile, as if with the aid of that instrument she were able to make a precise estimate of his powers. " Mr. Forde is a young man, my dear. It is hardly fair to name him in the same breath with the bishop." Elizabeth, who had been turning the leaves of her book list- lessly with an air of absolute inattention, flashed out at this. " Mr. Forde is natural," she said, " which is more than I can say for the bishop. I admit his eloquence, his grand bass voice, sinking to an almost awful solemnity at every climax. But it Beems to me a tutored eloqufeice. I could fancy him an actor in a Greek play, declaiming behind a mask. Mr. Forde"— a Budden pause, as if she had been going to say a great deal, an.lity. There is r\ trading spirit, an assumption of fiishion, in om very temples. Indeed, I am sometimes doubtful whetlif- our floral decorations and embroidered altar-cloths are not a dekisicn and a snare. It should be good to make our churchis beautiful: yet there are moments when I doubt the witdom of these things They make too direct an appeal to the senses. I hud myself yearning for the stern simplicity of thp Scottish Ch irch — that unembellished service which Edward living could make so vast an instrument for the regeneration ot rnaukind. He had no flower-decked chancel, no white-robed choir. It was only r. voice crying in the city-wilderness." This he said meditatively, straying from the chief subject of his discourse, and giving expression almost involuntarily to u doujii' that had been tormenting him of late. He broutrht him- 70 Strangers and Pilgrims. self back to the more personal question of Elizabeth's spiritual welfare presently. " Why did you keep away from your people ? " he asked. " Were you really ill? or was it your aunt's influence?" Slie looked at him with a mischievous daring in her eyes. "Neither one nor the other." "Then why was it? You had been going on so well and so steadily, and I was beginning to be proud of you. I trust — " this slowly, and -with hesitation — " I trust there was nothing I said that day at the picnic which could have a deterring influence, or which could have off"ended you." "I was not ofi'ended," she answered, her lips quivering faintly, her face turned away from him. " What was there to offend me P Only you made me feel myself so poor a creature, my highest efforts so infinitely beneath your ideal of perfect woman- hood, my feeble sti'uggles at self-improvement so mean and futile measured by your heroic standard, that I did perhaps feel a little discouraged, and a little inclined to give up striving to make myself what nature had evidently not intended me to be — an estimable woman." " Nature intended you to be good and great," answered Mr. Forde earnestly. " But not like Alice Fraser," said Elizabeth, with a bitter smile. " There are different kinds of perfection. Hers was an innate and unconscious purity, a limitless power of self-sacrifice. She was the ideal daughter of the manse, a creature who had never known a selfish thought, to whom the labours which I presa upon you as a duty were a second nature. She had never lived except for others. I cannot say less or more of her than I told you that day — she was simply perfect. Yet you have gifts which she did not possess — a more energetic "nature, a quicker intelligence. There is no good or noble work a woman can do in this woi-ld that you could not do, if you chose." Elizabeth shook her head doubtfully. " I have no endurance," she said ; " I am vain and feeble. O, believe me, I have by no means a lofty estimate of my own character. I require to be sustained by constant praise. It is vU very well while you are encouraging me, I feel capable of anything ; but when I have gone plodding on for two or three months longer, and yea take my good conduct for granted, I shall grow weary again, and fall away again." "Not if you will iook to a higher source for support and inspira- tion. My praises are a very poor reward. Trust to the approval of your own conscience rather ; and forgive me if I urge you to keep yourself free from the influence of Mrs. ChevenLx. It seems imj^ertinent in me, no doubt, to presume to judge a lady I have only seen for half au hour " Strangers and Pilgrivis. 71 "0, pray don't apologise," exclaimed Elizabeth in her careless way ; " I have a perfect appreciation of aunt Chevenix. She ia the family idol ; the goddess whom we all worship, conciliating her with all manner of sacrifices of our inclinations. She pre- sides over us in spirit even when at a distance, imparting her oracles in letters. Of course she is the very essence of worldli- ncss. Is it not written in all the roses that garnish her cap ? But she married a clever barrister, who blossomed in due course into a county-court judge, and died five years ago of a fit of apoplexy, which was considered the natural result of a pro- longed series of dinners, leaving aunt Chevenix fifteen hundred a year at her own disposal. She never had any children, and we four girls are all she can boast of in the way of nephews or nieces, so it is an understood thing that the fifteen hundred a year must ultimately come to us, and we are paying aunt Chevenix in advance for her bounty, by deferring to her in all things. She is not half so bad as you might suppose from her little pompous ways and her fan and eyeglass; and I really think she is fond of us." Not a pleasing confession to a man of Malcolm Forde's tem- perament from the lij^s of a beautiful girl. This waiting for dead men's shoes was of all modex-n vices the one that seemed to him meanest. " I hope you wiU not allow your conduct to be influenced by any consideration of your reversionary interest in Mrs. Chevenix's income," he said gravely. " You need have no fear of that," she answered lightly. " I never took any one's advice in my life — except perhaps yours — and as to being dictated to by aunt Chevenix, that is quite out of the question. I am the only one of the family who defies her ; and, strange to say, I enjoy the reputation of being her favourite." " I don't wish you to defy her," said Mr. Forde, with his serious smile. She seemed to him at some moments only a wayward child, this girl whom he was urging to become good and great. "You may be all that a niece should be — kind, affectionate, and respectful— and yet retain your right of judg- ment." He looked at his watch. He had been at the Yicarage more than an hour, and half that time had been spent walking to and fro beside the autumnal china-asters and chrysanthemums, with Ehzabeth for his companion. " I have detained you longer than I intended," he said. " I shall tell Mrs. Morris and Mrs. Brown that you are coming td see them. Good-bye." He stood by the broad barred gate— a homely farmhouse looking gate, painted white — a tall vigorous figure, unclerical (A 72 Strangers and PiJgrimt. aspect, with the erect soldierly air that had not departed from him on his change of jorofession, a man who looked like a leader of men, the dark earnest eyes looking downward at Elizabeth, the broad strong hand clasping hers with the firm clasp of friendship. Verily a tower of strength such a friend as this, worth a legion of the common clay which men and women count as friends. Elizabeth stood by the gate watching him as he walked along khe white high-road towards Hawleigh. " He looks like a red-cross knight disguised in modern cos- tume," ^he said to herself; "he looks like Hercules in a frock-coat. How different from slim little Mr. Adderley, picking his steps upon the dusty causeway. And now he will go from house to house, and teach, and read, and exhort, and help, and counsel, till tea o'clock to-night, with only just time for a hasty dinner between his labours. And yet he is never weary, and never thinks his life barren, and never longs to be in London among happy crowds of refined men and women enjoying all the delights that the science of pleasure can devise for them — operas, and concerts, and races, and picture-shows, and flower shows, and a hundred gatherings together of taste, and beauty, and refinement.. Does he ever long for that kind of life, I wonder, the very fringe or outer edge of which is> delightful, if one may believe aunt Chevenix? Or does he languish for a roving life — as I do some- times — among fair strange countries, sailing on the blue waters of the Adriatic or the Archipelago, among tiie sunny islands of the old Greek world, or wandering in the shady depths of the black forest, or on thymy mountain tops, or amidst regions of everlasting snow? Has he no hours of vain despondency and longing, as I have ? Or did he concentrate all his hopes and desires upon Alice Eraser, and bury them all in her grave ?" She was in no hurry to return to the drawing-room fireside and the Chevenix atmosphere of genteel idleness. Instead of going back to the house, she went from the garden to the orchai"d, and paced that grassy slope alone, circulating slowly among the mossgrown trunks of the apple and cherry trees, '•'uinking of Malcohn Forde. " How good he is," she said to herself; " how earnest, how real ! What a king among men ! And yet what hope is there for him in life? what prospect of escape from this dull drudgery, which he must surely sicken of, sooner or later P He has no interest that can advance him in the Church — I have heard him say that — so his preferment will most likely be of tho slowest. I hardly wonder that he sometimes thinks of turning missionary. Better to be something — to win some kind of name in the centre of Africa, or among the South-Sea Islands— than to be buried alive in such a place as Ilawleigh. And if he ever Strangers and Pilgrims. 78 were to change liis mind and marry, what a brilliant career for his wife ! " She laughed bitterly at the thought. " How I ])ity that poor demented soul, whoever she may be ! And yet lie seems to consider this kind of life perfect, and that one might be good and great; goodness and greatness consisting in perpetual district-visiting, uidimited plain needlework for the Dorcas society, unfailing attendance at early services — all the dull, dull routine of a Christian life. Of the two careers, I should certainfy prefer Africa ! " Thus did she argue with herself, this rebellious soul, who coidd not understand that life was intended to afford her any- thing but pleasure, the kind of pleasure her earthly nature pined for — operas, and concerts, and horses and carriages, and foreign travel. She roamed the orchard for nearly an hour, meditating upon Malcolm Forde, his character, his aspirations, his prospects, and that hypothetical foolish woman who might bo rash enough to accept him for her husband ; and then went back to the drawing-room, to be sharply interrogated by aunt Chevenix. "My 'dear Elizabeth, what a dishevelled creature you have made yourself I" exclaimed that lady, lookiir^ with disfavour at Lizzie's loosened hair and disordered neck riubou. The young ladies of Eaton-place rarely exposed themselves to the wind, except at Brighton in November, when a certain license might be permitted. " I have been walking in the orchard, aunt. It's rather blowy on that side of the house." " I hope you have not had that Mr. Forde with you all this time." " Mr. Forde has been gone nearly an hour. I wish you wouldn't call him that Mr. Forde. You may not mean any- thing by it, but it sounds unpleasant." *' But I do mean something by it," replied aunt Chevenix, fanning herself more vehemently than usual. "I mean that your Mr. Eorde is a most arrogant, disagreeable, under-bred person to presume to dictate to my niece — to over-ride my authority before my very face ! The man is evidently utterly unaccustomed to good society." " You might have said that of St. Peter or St. Paul, aunt,'' replied Ehzabeth in her coolest manner; " neither of those be- longed to the Eaton-place section of society. But Mr. Forde is a man of good family, and was in a crack cavalry regiment be- fore he entered the Church. So you are out in your reckoning." " A crack regiment !" echoed the matron. "Elizabeth, yon have acquired a most horrible mode of expression. Perhaps you have learnt that from Mr. Forde, as well as a new version of your duty to your relations. If ever that man was in a cavalry regiment, I should think it must have been in the canacity of 74 Strangers and Pilgrims. rough-rider. What a man-mountain the creature is, too! I should hardly have thought any sane bishop would have ordained such a giant. There ought really to be a standard height for the Church as well as for the army, excluding pigmies and giants. I never beheld a man so opposite to one's ideal of a curate." " O, of course," cried Elizabeth impatiently. " Your ideal curate is a slim simpering thing with white hands — a bandbox- ical being, talking solemn small-talk like a fashionable doctor — a kettledrumish-man, always dropping in at afternoon tea. We have had three of that species, varying only in detail. Thank heaven Malcolm Forde is something better than that." " I cannot perceive that you have any occasion to feel grate- ful to Providence upon the subject of Mr. Forde's character and attributes, let them be what they may," said Mrs. Chevenix; " and I consider that familiar mention of your father's curate — a paid servant remember, like a governess or a cook — to the last degree indecorous." " But I do thank heaven for him," cried Elizabeth recklessly. " He is my friend and counsellor, — the only man I ever looked up to '" " Tou appear to forget that you have a father," murmured Mrs. Chevenix, sitting Like a statue, with her closed fan laid across her breast, in a stand-at-ease manner. " I don't forget anything of the kind ; but I never looked up to Mm. It isn't in human nature to revei'ence one's father. One is behind the scenes of his life, you see. One knows all his little impatiences, his unspiritual views on the subject of dinner, his intolerance of crumpled roseleaves in his domestic arrange- ments. Papa is a dear old thing, but he is of the earth, earthy. Mr. Forde is of another quality, — spiritual, earnest, self- sacrificing, somewhat arbitrary, perhaps, in the consciousness of his own strength, but gentle even when he commands ; capable of a heroic life which my poor feeble brain cannot even imagine ; his eager spirit even now yearning to carry God's truth to some wretched people buried in creation's primeval gloom ; ready to die a martyr in some nameless Isle of the Pacific, in some unknown desert in Central Africa. He is my modern St. Paul, and I reverence him." Elizabeth indulged herself with this small tirade half in earnest, half in a mocking spirit, amusing herself with the discomfiture of aunt Chevenix, who sat staring at her in speechless horror. " The girl is stark mad ! " gasped the matron, with a famt flutter of her fan, slowly recovering speech and motion. " Has this sort of thing been going on long, Diana? " "Well, not quite so bad as this," rephed Diana; "but I don't think Lizzie has been Quite herself since she took ud the Strangers and Pilgrims. 75 rlistrict-visiting. She has left off wearing nice gloves, and •liessing for dinner, and behaving in a general way like a CJiristian." " Has she, indeed ? " said aunt Chevenix ; " then the district- visiting must be put a stop to at once and for ever, or it will leave her stranded high and dry on the barren shore of old- maidism. You may be a very pretty girl, Elizabeth Lattrell — I dare say you know you are tolerably good-looking, so there's no use in my pretending you are not — but if once you take up ultra-religious views, visiting the poor, and all that kind of thing, I wash my hands of you. I had hoped to see you make a brilliant mari-iage ; indeed I have heard you talk somewhat over-confidently of your carriage, your opera-box, your town house and country seat. But from what I hear to-day, I conclude your highest ambition is to marry this preposterous curate— who looks a great deal more like a brigand chief, by the way — and devote your future existence to Sunday-school teaching and tea-meetings." Elizabeth stood tali and straight before her accuser, with clasped hands resting on the back of a pric-dieu chair, exactly as she had stood while she delivered her small rhapsody about Mr. Forde, stately and spiritual-looking as Joan of Are inspired by her " voices." " Perhaps, after all, it might be a woman's loftiest ambition to mate with Malcolm Forde," she said slowly, with a tender dreamy look in her eyes ; and then, before the dragon could remonstrate, she went on with a sudden change of manner, " Don't be alarmed, auntie ; I am not going to hold the world well lost for love. I mean to have my opera-box, if it ever comes begging this way, and to give great dinners, with cabinet ministers and foreign ambassadors for my guests, and to be mistress of a country seat or two, and do wonderful things at elections, and to be stared at at country race-meetings, and to tread in that exalted path in which you would desire to train my ignorant footstep. Mrs. Chevenix gave a half-despairing sigh. " You are a most incomprehensible girl," she said, "and give me more trouble of mind than your three sisters put together,. But I do hope that you will keep clear of any entanglement with that tall curate, a dangerous man I am convinced; any Hirtation of that kind would inevitably compromise you in the future. As to cabinet dinners and country seats, such marriages as you talk of are extremely rare nowadays, and for »■ Devonshire parson's daughter to make such a match would be a kind of miracle, lint with your advantages you ought certainly to marry well ; and it is better to look too high than too low. A season in London might do wonders." 76 Strangers and Pilgrimi. This London season was the shining bait which Mrg. Chevenix was wont to dangle before the eyes of her nieces, and by virtue of which she obtained their submission to her amiable caprices when the more remote advantage of in- heritance might have failed to influence them. Gertrude and Diana had enjoyed each her season, and had not profited thereby in any substantial manner. They had been " much admired," Mrs. Chevenix declared with an approving air, especially Diana, as the livelier of the two; but admiration had not taken that definite form for which the soul of the match- maker longeth. "There must be something wanting," Mrs. Chevenix said pensively, in moments of confidence. " I find that something wanting in most of the girls of the present day. Alfred Chevenix proposed to me in my first season. I was a thoughtless thing just emerged from the nursery, and his was not my only olfer. But my nieces made a very different effect. Young men were attentive to them — Sir Harold Haw- buck even seemed struck with Diana — but nothing came of it. There must be a deficiency in something. Gertrude is too serious, Diana a shade too flippant. It is manner, my dear, manner, in which the rising generation is wanting." "A season in town," cried Elizabeth, her dark eyes sparkling, her head lifted with a superb arrogance, and all thought of Malcolm Forde and the life spiritual for the moment banished. "Yes, it is my turn, is it not, auntie? and I think it is time I came out. Who knows how soon I may begin to lose what- ever good looks I now possess .5^ I am of a nervous temper; impressionable, as you suggested just now. I have a knack of sleeping badly when my mind is full of a subject, and excite- ment of any kind spoils my appetite. Even the idea of a new bonnet will keep me awake. I lie tossing from side to side all night trying to determ$ie whether it shall be pink or blue. Living at this rate, I rnay be a positive fright before I am twenty; no complexion can stand against such wear and tear." " You have been allowed to grow up with a sadly un- disciplined mind, my poor child," Mrs. Chevenix said sen- tentiously. "If your papa had engaged a competent governess, a person who had lived in superior families, and was experienced in the training of the human mind and the figure — your waist measures two inches more than it ought to at your age — his d:iughters would have done him much greater credit. But it was only like my brother Wilniot to grudge the expenditure cf sixty guineas a year for a proper instructress of his daughters, while frittering away hundreds on his pauper (iarishioners." "Now, tha+ is one of the tbJies for which I do reverenc« Strangers and Pilgrims. 77 papa," cried Elizabeth with energy. " Thank heaven, neither our minds nor our bodies have been trained by a professional trainer. Imagine growing like a fruit tree nailed against a -wall; every spontaneous outshoot of one's character cut back, every impulse pruned away as a non-fruit-beuring branch ! 1 do bless papa with all my free untutored soul for having spared us that. But don't let us quarrel about details, dear auntie. Give me my season in London, and see what I will do. I languish for my opera-box and barouche, and the kind of life one reads of in Mrs. Gore's novels." _ •' You shall spend next May and June with me," said Mrs. Chevenix with another plaintive sigh. " It will be hard work going over all the same ground again which I went over for Gerty and Di, but the result may be more brilliant." " Couldn't you manage to turn me off at the same time, auntie ? " demanded Blanche pertly. "I am sorry Gertrude and I were not fortunate enough to receive proposals from dukes or merchant princes," said Diana, whose aristocratic features had flushed angrily at her aunt's implied complaint. " Perhaps we might have been luckier if we had met more people of that kind. But of course Lizzie will do wonders. She reminds me of Mirabeau's remark about Kobespierre ; she will do great things, because she believes in herself." Elizabeth was prompt to respond to this attack ; and so, with email sisterly bickerings, the conversation ended. CHAPTER YII ** Je ne voudrais pas, si j'etais Julie, N'etre que jolie Avec ma beaute. Jusqu'au bout des doigts je serais duchesse. Comme ma ricbesse J'aurais ma fierte." Elizabeth, having in a manner pledged herself to a career of y had lived," exclaimed Blanche after a long silence, alluding to an infant scion of the house of Luttrell which had jDerished untimely. " Of course, I know he'd have been a nuisance to us all — brothers always are — but still ^e'd have been something. He must have imparted a little variety to the tenor of our miserable lives. Paj)a would have been obliged to send him to Oxford or Cambridge, where he would have got into debt for shirt-studs and meerschaum pipes and things, no doubt ; but he would have brought home nice young men, perhaps, in the long vacation, and that would be some amusement. He might have touted for papa in a gentle- manly way, and brought home young men to be coached." " Blanche," exclaimed Gertrude, " you positively grow more revoltingly vulgar in your ideas every day." " Let the poor child talk," cried Diana, with a stifled yawn. " I wonder she has spirit enough left to be vulgar. Any inverte- brate creature can be ladylike, but vulgarity requires a certain amount of animal spirits; and I am sure such a miserable Christmas as this is a damper for any one's vivacity." Elizabeth said nothing. She sat on a low seat opposite the fire, motionless as her slumbering father, but with her great dark eyes wide open, gazing dreamily at the smouldering yule log which dropped its white ashes slowly and silently into a deep chasm of dull red coal. She had sat thus for the last half- hour thinking her own thoughts, and taking no part in her sisters' desultory snatches of talk. " ' She sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief,' " exclaimed Diana presently, exasperated by this silence. " Upon my word, Lizzie, you are not the best of company for a winter's ni-ht by the fire." " I do not pretend to be good company," replied Elizabeth (sr^lly. " iicw different it would be if Lord Paulyn were here ! " said Diana, ryhose temper had been somewhat soured by the dreari- ness of that long evening ; " then you would be all smiles and bewitc'.iment." *' I should do my best to entertain a visitor, of course. I do Bict consider myself bound to entertain you." " Poor Lizzie," miirmured Diana, with an insolent air of com- passion. " We ought not to be hard upon you. It is rather a trial for any girl to have a coronet dangled before her eyes in that tantalising manner, and nothing to come of her conquest after all!" " Po you mean to say that I ever angled for Lord Paulyn^" 1 126 Stranffers and JPilgrime. cried Elizabeth, with a sudden flash of scornful anger, " or that I could not have him if I chose? " " I mean to say," replied Diana, in a provokingly deliberate manner, " that you and aunt Chevenix tried your very hardest to catch him, and did not succeed. Perhaps you look forward to seeing him in London, and sulijugating him there; but \ fancy that if a woman, cannot bring an admirer to her feet in ihe first flush of her conquest, she is hardly likely to bring him ihere later. He has time for reflection and distraction, you see; md a man who has snfiicient prudence tc keep himself uncom? mitted as cleverly as Ijord Paulyn did, would be the very man to cure himself of a foolish infatuation. I don't mean to say anything ofi'ensive, but of course a marriage with one of us would be a very disadvantageous alliance for a man in his position." " You are extremely wise, my dear Di, and have acquired your wisdom in the bitter school of experience. But I doubt if you are quite infallible; and to show you that I am ready to back my o])inion, as Lord Paulyn says, I will bet your poor dear mamma's pearl necklai;e, my only valuable possession, that if he and I Uve so long, I will be Lady Paulyn before next Christ- mas-day." A foolish wager to make, perhaps, when her heart was given utterly to another man; but these little sisterly skirmishes always brought out the worst points in Elizabeth's character. She had been thinking too, as she watched the softly-dropping ashes, of all the grandeurs and pleasures with which she might have surrounded herself at such a season as this, were she the wife of Viscount Paulyn ; thinking of that dismal old house at Ashcombe, and the transformation that she might effect there; the spacious rooms glowing with warm light, filled with pleasant people, new furniture, splendid draperies, life and colour through- out that mansion, where now reigned a death-Hke gloom and grayness, as if the du?t of many generations had settled and become fixed there, covering all things with one sombre hue. These visions were strangely sweet to her shallow soul: and mingled with the thoughts of those possible triumphs there waa always the thought of Malcolm Forde, and the impression that iuch a marriage would make upon him. " He would see that at least some one can care for me," she daid to herself; " that if I am not good enough for him, I may be good enough for his superior in rank and fortune." And then came a vi.sion of that tall figure and grave face among the witnesses of her wedding. He would take his sub- ordinate part in the service, no doubt ; " by the Vicar of Haw- leigh, father of the bride, assisted by the Reverend Malcolm Forde." SlrangerB and Pilgrinig. 127 " He would not care," she thought ; " he would not even be angry with me. But he would preach me a sermon about my increa»;d means of usefulness; he would expect me to become ». sister of mercy on a wider scale." After that joyless Christmas-time life seemed to Elizabeth Luttrell to become almost intolerable by reason of its dreariness- She gave up her spasmodic attempts at active usefulness alto- gether. She had emptied her purse for her poor ; wearied her- self in going to and fro between the Vicarage and their hovels; steeped herself to the lips in their difficulties and sorrows, and to some of them at least had contrived to render herself very dear; and having done this, she all at once abandoned them, stayed at home and brooded upon her vexations, sat for long hours at her piano, playing wild, passionate music, which seemed like a stormy voice answering her stormy heart. " Let him come to me and remonstrate with me again," she said to herself, looking up with haggard eyes at the drawing- room door, as if she expected to see that tall figure appear at her invocation. "Let him come to reprove me, and I will tell him that I am tired of working without any earthly reward ; that I have neither faith nor patience to labour for a recom- pense that I am only to win, perhaps half a century hence, in heaven. And who knows if I should see his face there, or hear Ids voice praising me.'*" But the days went by, and Mr. Forde took no heed of thia second defection. One thing only gave colour to Elizabeth's life in this hope- less time, and that was the daily service in the big empty church of St. Clement's, at which she saw the cold grave face that had usurped so fatal a power over her soul. Once in every day she must needs see him; once in every day she must needs hear his voice; and it was to see and hear him that she rose early ou those cheerless winter mornings, and ehared the devotions of a few feeble old women in poke bonnets, and a sprinkling of maiden ladies with frost-pinched noses, showing rosy-tipped beneath their veils. It was not a pure worship which was wafted heavenward with Elizabeth's orisons : rather, no worship at all, but an impious adoration of the creature instead of the Creator; in every word in the familiar prayers, every sentence in the morning lessons, she heard the voice of the man she loved, and nothing more. His voice with its slow solemn depths of music; his face with its earnest eyes for ever overlooking her. These were the sole elements of that daily service. She went to church to see and to hear Malcolm Forde, and knew in her heart of hearts that it was for this alone she went; and in some remorseful moments wondered that Heaven's swift vengeance did not descend upon so impious a creature. 128 Strangers and Pilgrims. " How could I bear my life if I were married to ar.oLher man, and it were a deadly stn to tliiuk of him? " she asked herself, wonderingly; and then argued with herself that in an utterly new life, a life filled to overflowing with the pleasures that luid never yet been within her reach, pleasures that would have all the freshness and delight of novelty, she must surely fini it an easy matter to shut Malcolm Forde's image out of her heart. " In what is he different from all other men that I should go on lamenting him for ever? " she thought. " If I lived in the world, I should meet his superiors every day of my life. But living out of the world — -seeing only such people as Frederick Melvin and his fellow-creatures — it is hardly wonderful that I think him a demi-god." And then, in the next moment, with a passionate scorn of her own arguments, she would exclaim: — " But he is above all other men ! There is no one like him in that great world I am so ignorant of. Thei'e is no one else whose coldest word could seem sweeter than the praise of other men. There is no one else whose very shadow ac^ross my path could be more to me than the love of all the world besides." In this blank pause of her life, when all the machinery of her existence, which had for a long time been gradually growing abominable to her by reason of its monotony, seemed all at once to become too hateful for endurance; like a long dusty road, which for a certain distance the pilgrim treads with a kind of hopefulness, until, gruwn footsore and weary long ere the end of his journey, that ioJg white road under the broiling sun, those changeless hedges, that pitiless burning sky, become an affliction hardly to be borne; — in this sudden fiiilure of happiness and Aope, it was not unnatural that Elizabeth's eyes should turn with some kind of longing to the dazzling prospect perpetuallj exhibited to them by aunt Chevenix. " Eemember, my dearest Lizzie," wrote that lady, wh ose longest epistles were always addressed to Elizabeth — " remember that you have a great future before you, and pray do not suffer yourself to be depressed bj"- any remarks which envy or vialice may dictate to those who feel themselves your inferiors in accom- plishments and 'personal appearance. Your fate is in your own bands, my dearest girl, and it is you alone who can hinder, by a foolish preference, of which I cannot think with common patience, the very high advancement which i/e^Z assured Fortune holds in reserve for you. But I venture to ])elieve that your absurd aci' miration of Mr. F is a thing of the past. Tliink, my love, of the delight you would feel in being mistress of a brilliant esta- blishment — in finding yourself the centre of an aristocratic and fashionable circle, invited to state balls and royal garden-partieg — and then contrast this picture with the vision of some obscpje Strangers and Pilgrims. 129 Jtarsonage, its Sunday-school, its old women in. black bonaeta — hat species of black bonnet which I imagine must be a natural product of the soil in agricultural districts, so inevitable is its appearance, and I can hardly believe there are people still living ■who would voluntarily make a thing of that shape. Look upon this picture, my dearest girl, and then on that. — as Pope, or some other old-fashioned writer, has observed, — and let reason be vour guide. Easter, I am pleased to see, falls early this year, by which means we shall have done with Lent before the fin« M-eat?ier begins. I shall expect you as soon after Easter Sunday' as your papa can manage to bring you." To this visit she looked forward as a release from that life which had of late become worse than bondage ; but even in this looking forward there was an element of despair. She might have balls and garden-parties, and pleasures without number; she might wear fine dresses, and sun her beauty in the light of admiring eyes ; but she would see Malcolm Forde no more. Would it not be happier for her to be thus divided than to see him day by day, and every day become more assured of his in- difference ? Yes, she told herself. And in that whirlpool of London life was it likely she would be for ever haunted by his image ? " It is this Mariana-in-the-moated-grange kind of life that is killing me," she said to herself, as she sat by her turret window, preferring her fireless bedroom to the society of her sisters, watching the winter rain fall slowly in the drenched garden, and the dripping sun-dial by which she had stood so often talking to Malcolm Furde in the summer that was gone. It was arranged that Mr. Luttrell and his third daughtm- should go to London on the 30th of March, the Yicar treating himself to a week's holiday in town, after the fatigue of the Easter services ; a burden which was chiefly borne by the broad shoulders of Malcolm Forde. Towards the end of February, therefore, Elizabeth was able to occupy herself with the pleasing task of preparing for the visit; a business which involved a good deal of dressmaking, and a greater outlay than the Vicar approved. He grumbled and endured, however, as he had grumbled and endured when Gertrude and Diana spread their young pinions for their brief flight into those fashionable skies. "It seems a nonsensical waste of money," he said, with a doleful sigh, as he wrote a final clearingup cheque for the Hawleigh dressmaker, " and I don't suppose that your visit will result in anything more than your sisters' visits. But Maria would lead me a life if I refuhcd to let you go." " I beg your pardon, papa," exclaimed Gertrude. " Praj "i^ not make any comjiarison between Elizabeth and us. The belongs to quite a diti'erent order of beings, ^ud is sure to make 130 Strangers and Filgrims. a brilliant match. It ia not to be supposed that the world can overlook her merits." " I don't know about that," said the Vicar, with a rueful glance at the figures on his cheque; "but this seems a large amount to pay for dressmaking. 1 think girls in your position — the daughters of a professional man — ought to make your own gowns." "The bill isn't all for dressmaking, papa; Miss March has found the material," said Elizabeth, waiving the question of what a girl in her position ought or ought not to do. "The trimmings are rather expensive, perhajDs; but dresses are so much trimmed nowadays." " Yes, that's what I hear on every side, when I complain of my bills," replied the Yicar. " Butcher's meat is so much dearer nowadays, says the cook; fodder has risen since last month, says the groom ; Russia is consuming our coals, and prices are mounting daily, says the coal-merchant. But un- happily my income is not so elastic — that is a fixed quantity ; and I fear the time is at hand when to make that square with our necessities will be something hke attempting to square the circle." The Luttrell girls were accustomed to mild wailings of this kind when the paternal cheque-book had to be produced, and cheques were signed as reluctantly as if they had been death- warrants waiting for the sign-manual of a tender-hearted king; so they were not deeply impressed by this threat of future des- titution. They gave their minds very cheerfully to the prepa- ration of their summer clothing ; envied Elizabeth those extra garments provided for her approaching visit; quarrelled and made friends again after the manner of sisters whose affection is tempered by certain individual failings. Frivolous as the distraction might be, this choosing of coloura and materials, and trying-ou of new apparel, served to brighten the bleak days of a blusterous March with a feeble light. Elizabeth thought just a little less of her hopeless wasted love, while Miss March's head apprenti.Te was coming to the Vicarage every day with patterns of gimps and fringes and laces and ruchings, for the selection whereof all the sisters had to be con- vened like a synod. Even Gertrude and Diana were not alto- gether ill-natured, acd gave themselves up to these deliberations with a friendly air ; while Blanche Hung herself into the subject with youthful ardour, and wound up her approval of every article by the declaration that she would have one like it when she went to aunt Chevenix for her London season. " Or perhaps you'll be married, and have a town-house, Lizzie, and I shall come to you ; which would be much nicer than being under aantie'n thumb. And of course you'd enjoy Strangers and Pilyrims. 131 bringing out a younger sister. Viscountess Paulyn, on ter marriage, by Lucretia Viscountess Paulyn; Miss Blanche Lutt- rell, by her sister, Viscountess Paulyn. Wouldn't that look well in the local pa^icrs ? " CHAPTER XII. ** A man can have hut one life and one death, One heaven, one hell. Let me fulfil my fate. Grant me my heaven now ! Let me know you mine, Prove you mine, write my name upon your brow, Hold you and have you, and then die away, If God please, with completion in my soul I " Mr. Forde's letters brought a more definite response than he had looked for. One of the chief members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel wrote, strongly urging him to lend himself to that vast work. It was just such men as he who were wanted, and the need for such was great. A new mission to a land of more than Cimmerian darkness was on foot ; the harvest was ready ; had long been waiting for the sickle, but fitting labourers were few. The letter was long and eloquent, and went home to Malcolm Forde's heart. From the first, from that first hour in which the slumbering depths of his spirit had been stirred with a sudden rush of religious enthusiasm — like that strange ruffling of Siloam's still waters beneath the breath of God's angel — from that iniliay hour in which, beside the clay-cold corpse of her who should have been his wife, he dedicated his life to the service of his God, he had meant to do soinethiiuj — to make a name which should mark him out from the unnoted ranks of the Church — to ac- complish a work which should be in itself the noblest monument that he could raise to the memory of his lost bride. Not in a quiet country parish could he find the fulness of his desires. It was something to have made a ripple upon this stagnant pool ; something to have stirred the foul scum of indifference that had defiled these tideless waters. But having done this successfully, having awakened new life and vigour in this slumberous fioclii he began to think in all earnestness that it was time for him to be moving forward. The life here was in no manner unpleasing to him ; it was sweet rather, sweet in its utter peacefulness, and the i'ruition of all his present desires. He knew himself beloved and honoured; knew himself to have acquired unwillingly the first place, and not the second, in the hearts and minds of thia congregation. But all this was not enough to the man wl^^ had made St. Paul his tyjiical churchman — to the mai. who 132 Strangers and Pilgrims. boasted of himself as a soldier aad servant of Christ, yer^' Bweet was this pleasant resting-place ; very dear the afFectioii that greeted him on every side ; the blushing cheeks and reve- rent eyes of school-children hfted to him as he went along the quiet street ; the warm praises of men and women ; the genial welcome that greeted him in every household ; the hushed expec- tancy and upward look of rapt attention that marked hia entrance to the pulpit. But precious though these things might be to him, thej^ were not the accomplishment of his mission. It was as a pilgrim he had entered the Church ; a teacher whose influence for good could not be used in too wide a field. Not in this smooth garden-ground could he find room for hia labour ; his^ soul yearned for the pathless forest, to stand witt the pioneer's axe on his shoulder alone in the primeval wilder- ness, with a new world to conquer, a new race of men to gather into the fold of Christ. This having been in his thoughts from the very first — a desirfe that had mingled with his dreams, sleeping and waking, from the beginning— it would have been curiously inconsistent had he shrunk from its realisation now. And yet he sat for a long time with that letter in his hand, deliberating, with a painful perplexity, on the course which he should take. Nor did that lengthy reverie make an end of his dehberation. He who had been won't to decide all things swiftly (his Ufe-path being so narrow a thread, leading straight to one given point, his scheme of existence hardly allowing room for irresolution) was now utterly at fault, tossed upon a sea of doubt, perplexed beyond measure. Alas, almost unawares, that mathematically adjusted scheme of his existence had fallen out of gear : the wheels were clogged that had gone so smoothly, the machine no longer worked with that even swiftness which had made his life so easy. He waa no longer able to concentrate all his thoughts and desires upon one point, but was dragged to this side and to that by contend- ing influences. In a word, he had given himself a new idol. That idea of foreign service, of toiling for his Master in an un- trodden world, of being able to say, " This work is mine, and mme only !" which a little while ago had been to him so ex- hilarating a notion, had now lost its charm. " Never to see her any more," he said to himself; " not even to know her fate ! Gould I endure that P O, I know but too well that she is not worthy of my love, that she is not worthy to divide my heart with the service of my God, not worthy that for her sake Ishouldbefalseto the vow that I made beside Alice Fraser's death-bed ; and yet I cannot tear mjr heart away from her. Sometimes I say to myself that this is not love at all, only a base earthly passion, a slavish worship of her beauty. Strangert and Pilgrims 133 Soflietimea I half bolieve that I never truly loved before, that my affection for Alice was only a sublimated friendship, that the true passion is this, and this only." He thought of David, and that fatal hour in which the King of Israel, the chosen of the Lord, walked alone up on the house- top, and beheld the woman whose beauty was to be his ruin ; thought and wondered at that strange solemn story with its pathetic ending. Was he stronger or wiser than David, when for the magic of a lovely face he was ready to give his sovl into bondage ? For three days and three nights he abandoned himself to the demon of uncertainty ; for three days and three nights he wrestled with the devil, and Satan came to him in but too fair a guise, wearing the shape of the woman he loved. In the end he conquered, or believed that he had conquered. There was no immediate necessity for a decisive reply to that letter, but he determined to accept the mission that had been offered him ; and he began to make his arrangements with that view. Having once made up his mind as to his future, it was of course his duty to communicate that fact to the Vicar without loss of time. So upon the first evening that he found himself at liberty, he walked out to the Vicarage to make this announce- ment. It was an evening in the middle of Mai'ch, — gray and cold, but calm witiial, for the blusterous winds had spent their fury in the morning, and there was only a distant mysterious Bound of fitful gusts sweeping across the moorland ever and anon, like the sighing of a discontented Titan. There was a dim line of primrose light still lingering behind the western edge of the hills when Malcolm Forde passed under the Bar, and out into the open country that lay beyond that ancient archway. He looked at the dim gray landscape with a sudden touch of sadness. How often had his eyes looked upon these familiar things without seeing them ! The time might soon come when to remember this place, in its quiet English beauty, would be positive pain, just as it had been pain to him some- times in this place to recall the mountains and the lochs ot his native land. " If I could but have lived here all the days of my life with Elizabeth for my fellow-worker and companion ! " he thought. " I can conceive no existence happier than that, if I could be satisfied with small things. But for a man who has set all his hopes on something higher, surely that would be a hving death. I should be stilled in the languid sweetness of such an atmosphere." He thought of himself with a wife and children, his heart and mind fi^lled with care for that dear household, all his desires, (dl his hopes, all his fears converging to that one centre— only 134 Strangers and Pilgrims. the remnant of his intellectual power left for the service of hia God. "A man cannot serve two masters," he said to himself. *' Sweet fancy, sweet dream of wife and home, I renounce you ! There are men enough in this world with the capacity for happiness. The men who are most needed are the men who can do without it." The Curate stood for some moments before the Vicarage gate with a thoughtful air, but instead of opening it, walked slowly on along the waste border-land of unkempt turf that edged the high-road. Just at the last moment that new habit of indecision took hold of him again. He had hardly made up his mind what to say. He would find Mr. Luttrell with his daughters round him most likely. Elizabeth's clear eyes would peruse his face while he pronounced his sentence of banishment. He was not quite prepared for this interview, and strolled on meditatively, in the cold gray twilight, wondering at his own Tinlikeness to himself. " Will she be sorry ? " he wondered, " just a little grieved to see me depart out of her life for ever? I remember when I Bpoke of my missionary schemes, that day I told her the story of my life, there was a shocked look iu her face, as if the idea were dreadful to her. And then she began to talk of mission- aries, with the air of a schoolgirl, as a low sort of people. She is such an unanswerable enigma. At times deluding one into a belief in her soul's nobility — at other times showing herself frivolous, shallow, empty in brain and heart. Yet I think— after her own light fashion — she will be sorry for my going." Then arose before him the image of Lord Paulyn, and the memory of that Sunday luncheon at the Vicarage; the two faces turned towards each other— the man's face ardent, en- raptured — the girl's glowing with a conscious pride in its loveliness; two faces that were of the earth, earthy — a brief scene which seemed like the prelude of a drama wherein he, Malcolm Forde, could have no part. He bethought himself of that mere fragment of conversa- tion he had overheard unawares on the threshold of the vestry, a gush of girlish confidence, in which Elizabeth had boldly ipoken of the Viscount *s her " slave." He remembered that common talk in which the Hawleigh gossips had coupled Lord Paulyn's narr.e with EUzabeth Luttrell's, and he thought, with a pang, that this was perhaps the future which awaited her. He thought of such a prospect with more than common pain, a pain in which selfish regret or jealousy had no part. He had heard enough of Lord Paulyn's career to know that the woman who married him would prepare for herself a doubtful future; in all likelihood a dark and stormy one. Strangers and Pilgrivia. 135 " If I can get a minute's talk alone with her before I leave thia place, I will warn her," he said to himself; "though. Heaven knows, if her heart is set on this business, she is little likely to accept my warning." He wasted half an hour idling thus by the way side, anc^ in all that time had been thinking wholly of Elizabeth, iustea( of pondering on what he should say to her father. But about that there need be no difiiculty. He had never yet found him- self at a loss for words : and though Mr. Luttrell would doubtless be reluctant to lose so energetic a coadjutor, his affliction wouW hardly be overwhelming. There was always a fair supply of curates in the ecclesiastical market of various qualities ; indeed, the supply of this article was apt to be in excess of the demand. It was past seven when Mr. Forde entered the Yicarage. Th« six-o'clock dinner was fairly over, the lamp lighted in the long low-coiled drawing-room, the four girls grouped round the fire in their favourite attitudes — Elizabeth on her knees before the blaze, gazing into the heart of the fire, like a prophetess intent on reading auguries iu the coals. She started to her feet when the servant announced Mr. Forde, but did not leave the hearth to greet him, though her three sisters crowded eagerly about him to give him a reproachful welcome. " It is such an age since you have been near tib," said Gertrude, almost piteously. " 1 cannot think what we have done to offend you. ' " You must know that I have had no possible roason for being offended, dear Miss Luttrell," he answered cordially, but with his glance wandering uneasily towards that other figure rooted to the hearth. " Your house is only too pleasant, and I have had very little time for pleasure. I see your papa else- where; and to come here is only another name for giving myself a holiday." Gertrude cast up her eyes in a kind of ecstasy. " AVhat a saint you are !" she exclaimed ; " and what a privilege to feel your blessed influence guiding and directing or.e's feeble efforts! I have felt myself almost miraculously assisted in my poor work since you have been with us, and I look back and remember my previous coldness with a shudder." " I have no consciousness of my saintship," said Mr. Forde, with a little good-natured laugh, making very light of an elderly- young ladylike worship to which he was tolerably accustomed. " On the contrary, I have a strong sense of being very human. But I am glad if I have been the source of enthusiasm in you, and trust that when 1 am no longer here to guide or inspire — quite unconsciouslf again — you will not be in any danger of falling away. But I do not fear that contingency " — this with 136 Strangers and Pilgrims. a somewhat severe pflance in the direction of that figui-e by the hearth—" for I believe that you are thoroughly in earnest. Thei-e is no such thing as earnestness without constancy." Elizabeth took up the challenge and flashed defiance upon the challenger. " O, Gertrude was born good! " she said. " I wonder papa took the trouble to christen her. It is impossible tJiat she could have been born in sin and a child of wrath, like the rest of us. She is never tired of church-going and district- visiting; she has no intermittent fever of wickedness, as I have." " When you are no longer here, dear Mr. Forde ! " cried Gertrude, deaf to her sister's sneers, with her hands clasped, and her somewhat-faded gray eyes opened very wide, and gazing at the Curate with a wild surmise. " You surely do not mean that you are thinking of leaving us ? " " I have been nearly two years at Hawleigh," he answered quietly ; "longer than I intended to remain when I fir.st came here — two very happy years ; but I have awakened lately to the conviction that Hawleigh is not ail the world, only a very pleasant corner of it; and that if I stamp my name upon nothing larger than a country j^arish, I shall scarcely have realised the idea with which I entered the Church." " You have been offered a church in London perhaps," gasped Gertrude dolefully. Diana and Blanche had seated themselves, and watched the little scene with a sympathetic air, regretful but not despairing. They would be very sorry to lose Mr. Forde, who was tall, and good-looking, and gentlemanlike, and had money of his own ; but perhaps the vast ocean of curates might cast up at their feet even a more attractive specimen of that order, a man better adapted for i^icnics, and small tea-drinkings, and croquet. " You are going out as a missionary," cried EHzabeth with conviction. They all turned to look at her, startled by the certainty of her tone. She had not stirred from her position by the hearth, but ^tood there confronting them, calm as a statue, a curious con- trast to the distressed Gertrude, who was wringing her hands feebly, and gazing at the Curate with a half-distracted air. The single lamj) stood on a distant table ; but even in the doubtful light Mr. Forde fencied that Elizabeth's face had grown suddenly pale. "You are going out as a missionary," she repeated, as if she had by some subtle power of sympathy shared all his thoughts from the hour in which he briefly touched upon his views in his one confidential talk with her. " You are good at guessing," he said. " Yes, I am going." *' " cried Gertrude, " it is like your apostolic nature to con- Strang eti and Pilgrims. 137 template such self-sacrifice. But, 0, dear Mr. Forde, consider your hcsiltli, — and the natives." " I don't think St. Paul ever gave much consideration to his health, or the question of possible danEfer from the natives," answered Mr. Forde, with his grave smile; "and if you insist upon comparing me with saints and apostles, you would at least expect me to be as regardless of any peril to myself as the numerous gentlemen who have spent the best part of their hves in this work." " Those lives may not have been so precious as yours, Jlr. Forde." " Or they may have been much more precious. There are very few to regret me, should the chances of war be adverse." Again he stole a glance at Elizabeth. She stood Hrm as a rock, and was now not even looking his way. Her eyes were bent upon the decaying fire, with that customary prophetic look. She might have been trying to read his fate there. " However," he continued, "the die is cast. I have arrived at the conviction that I am more wanted yonder, to dig and dtlve that rugged soil, than to idle among the delights of this flower- garden. And I came here this evening to announce my deter- mination to Mr. Luttrell. Do you know if I shall find him in his study P " " Papa has gone into the town, to the reading-room," said Blanche. " Then I can take my chance of finding hira there," said the Curate, preparing to depart. " 0, Mr. Forde, how unkind to be so anxious to run away, when this is perhaps almost your last visit. You must stop to tea, and you can tell us about your plans ; how soon," with a little choking noise, " you really mean to leave us." " I will stop with much pleasure, if you like, ' he answered, putting down his hat, which Gertrude took up with a reverent air, as if it had been a mitre, and removed to a convenient abiding place. " As to my plans, they are somewhat vague as yet. I have little to tell beyond the one fact that I am going. Only I thought it due to Mr. Luttrell to give him the earliest information of that fact, insignificant as it may be." " It is not insignificant," exclaimed Gertrude. " Hawleigh never had such a gain or such a loss as you will have been to it. ' "Will it be" — with another little choking interval, like a strangled semicolon — "very long before we lose you? " " I do I'.ot know what you would call long. About a month, perhaps." " Only a month — only four more blessed Sundays ! 0, Mr. Forde, that is sudden ! " " Do not suppose that I am not sorry to go," said Mr. Forde. 138 Strangers and Pilgrims. "I am very fond of Hawleigh. But that other work ia a pari of an old design. I have only been trying my strength here." " Only fluttering your wings like a young eagle betore soaring to the topmost mountain peaks," exclaimed Gertrude with a little gush of poetry, raising her tearful eyes to the ceiling, in the midst of which burst the maid brought in the tea-tray, a,nd Miss Luttrell seated herself to perform her duties in connection therewith, not without a consolatory pride in the silver tea- service. She was the kind of woman to whom even in the hour of despair these things are not utterly dust and ashes. Elizabeth had seated herself in an arm-chair by the fire, on which her gaze was still gravely bent. She made no farther attempt to join in the conversation, but sat silent while Gertrude persecuted the Curate with questions about his future career, not consenting to be put off with vague or careless answers, but evincing an insatiable thirst for exact information upon every point. Scarcely did Elizabeth lift her eyes from that mute contem- plation of the fire when Mr. Forde carried her a cup of tea. She took it from him with a murmured acknowledgment, but did not look up at him, or give him any excuse for lingering near her. He was obligrd to go back to his chair by the round table at the other end of the room, and sit in the full glare of the lamp, submitting himself meekly to Gertrude's cross-questioning. He bore this infliction perhaps with a greater patience than he might otherwise have shown, for the sake of that quiet figure by the hearth. Against his better judgment, even although the plan of his life was fixed irrevocably, and Elizabeth Luttrell's image excluded from it, there was yet a pensive sweetness in her presence — her silent presence — the sense of being near her. " What does it matter if the pleasure is a fooUsh one ? " he thought : " it must needs be so brief." He stayed about an hour, sipping orange pekoe, and talking somewhat reluctantly of his hopes and views, for he was a man who deemed that in these things silence is golden. He tried to turn the thread of talk another way, but Gertrude would not be put off. " O, let us talk of you and your future, dear Mr. Forde," she exclaimed, with her accustomed air of pious rapture. " It will be such a comfort when you are gone to be able to think of yon, and follow your footsteps on the map." The clock struck the half-hour after nine, and Mr. Luttrell had not yet appeared, so the Curate rose to depart, and went across to the hearthrug to bid Elizabeth good-night. " You had better say good-bye at the same time," said Diana. " Your visits are so few and far between that I daresay Lizzie will have gone away before we eee you again." " Gone away ! " Strangers and Pilgrims. 139 " Yes ; she is going to town in a fortnight to stay with aunt Chevenix." " Indeed." This in a disappointed tone, yet it could matter BO httle to him whither she went, when he was about to discon- nect himself altogether from Hawleigh. Only he disapproved of aunt (Chevenix in the abstract, and it was disagreeable to him to hear that the woman he had admired, and at times even believed in, was about to be subject to her influence. " I believe you are half a Puritan at heart, Mr. Forde," said Diana, " and that you look upon all fashionable pleasures as crimi- nal. I could read it in your face one day when auntie was holding forth upon her delectable land in the regions of Eaton-place." " I have no passion for that kind of thing, I admit," answered the Curate. " But I trust that your sister Elizabeth wiU pass safely through that and every other ordeal. If good wishes could insure her safety, mine are earnest enough to count for something." He shook hands with Elizabeth as he said tliia. The hand she gave him was very cold, and he fancied even that it trembled a little as his strong fingers closed on it. Then followed Gertrude's effusive fiirewells. He would come to see them oftener, would he not, now that his hours among them were numbered P Diana and Blanche were also efiusive, but in a milder degree, having already been speculating upon the possible attributes of a new curate. In so dull a life as theirs even the agony of such a part- ing was not unpleasing distraction, like that abscess in the cheek from which an Austi'ian archduchess derived amusement in her declining years. While these farewells were being somewhat lengthily drawn out, Elizabeth slipped quietly from the room. Mr. Forde heard the flutter of her dress, and looked round for a moment, to dis- cover that her place was vacant. How empty did the room seem to him without her ! He dragged himself away from the reluctant Gertrude at last, and felt not a little relieved when he found himself in the open air, under a windy sky ; the moon shining fitfully, with swift clouds scudding across her silvern face, the night winds sighing among the laurels on the leaty bank that shadowed the almost empty flower-border, where a fringe of daffodils showed pale in the moonlight. Mr. Forde walked slowly towards the gate, over the lawn on which he had condescended to foolish games of croquet in the summers that were gone, thinking of Elizabeth, and her curious apathetic silence, and the almost deathlike cold- ness of the hand that had touched his. " She is the strangest girl," he said to himself, "and there are moments when I am half tempted to think " He did not finish the thought even to himself, for looking up suddenly he beheld a figure standing before him on the edge of 140 Strangers and Pilffrimg. tlie lawn, a woman's figure, wifh a shawl of fleecy whiteness folded Arab-wise, and shrouding it almost from head to feet. Yet even thus muffled he knew the figure by its bearing ; a loftier air than is common to modern young-lady-hood — some- thing nearer akin to the untutored grace of an Indian princess. "Elizabeth!" " Yes, Mr. Forde. I have come out here to ask you if it ia true, — if you do really intend to fling away your life like that ? " " There is no question of my flinging away my life," he an- swered quietly, yet strangely moved by her presence, by the smothered passion in her tone. " I shall be a,s much in thehanda of God yonder as I am here." " Of course," she answered in her reckless way, " God is with as everywhere, watching and judging us. But He sufi'ers human Bacrifices, even in our day. It may be in the scheme of Provi- dence that you should be eaten, or scalped, or tomahawked, or \urnt alive by savages." " Be sure that if it is, the thing will happen." " 0, that is your horrible Calvinistic doctrine ; almost ai8 bad as a Turk's. But if you do not leave England you cannot fall into the hands of those dreadful savages." " And perhaps remain at home to be killed in a railway acci- dent, or die of smallpox. I hardly think the savages would be worse ; and if I felt I had done any good among them, there would be a kind of glory in my death, which might take the sting out of its physical pain." " ' The path of gloiy leads but to the grave,' " said Elizabeth gloomil_y. "Don't go, Mr. Forde. There are heathens enough to convert in England." " But I feel that my vocation calls me yonder." " It is a mere fancy. You were a soldier the other day, and cannot forget the old longing for foreign service." "Believe me, no; I have considered this business with more ieHberation than is usual to me, and I am quite convinced that my duty 1:63 in that direction." " A delusion ! You would be greater and more useful in England. Your countryman, Edward Irving, had once that fancy, I remember; he had his ideal picture of a missionary's life, and seriout-ly thought of trying to realise it." ■' Better for himself, perhaps, if he had achieved that early aim, than to be a world's wonder for a few brief years, and die the dupe of a disordered brain." " Don't go, Mr. Forde ! " clasping her hands, and looking up at him so piteously with her lovely eyes, so diSerent from the seraphic gaze of poor Gertrude's faded orbs. " I wish to Heavf r X were eloquent, and krew how to plead and argue as some -i j^ ia do" Strangers and Pilgrimit. 141 "You are only too eloquent; your words go to my heart. For God's sake, say no more ! " " Yes, yes, I will say mucli more ; if I can touch you, if my words can penetrate your obstinate heart, jow shall not go. I am pleading for Hawleigh, and all the jjcople who love you, who have drawn their very faith and hope from you, as if your soul were a fountain of righteousness. I have a presentiment that if you go to those savage islands it will be to perish ; to lose your life for a vain dream. Stay here, and teach us to be good. We were half of us pagans till you came to us." They had walked on towards the gate while they were talking. They now stood close beside it; Elizabeth with one bare hand clasping the topmost bar, as if she meant to hinder the Curate's exit till she had extorted the recantation of his vow. There was a little pause after her last speech. Malcolm Forde stood looking downward, thinking of what she had said; thinking of it with a passionate delight which Avas new and strange to his soul; a rapture which had been no element in his love of Alice Fi-aser. Suddenly he took the hand that hung loosely by Elizabeth's side. " If I were weak enough, mad enough, to prefer my own hap- piness to tho call of duty, I should stay here," he said ; " you ought to know that." " I know nothing except that you have been hard and cruel to me always, in spite of all my feeble endeavours to please you," answered the girl with the fiiint touch of the pettishnesa common to undisciplined beauty. " Your endeavours to please me ! " he repeated. " Could I think yi)U valued my opinion? If I had imagined that; if I could have supposed, for one presumptuous moment, that you loved me " " If you could have supposed !" she cried impatiently. " You must have known that I loved yon, that I have hated myself for loving you, that I hated you tor not loving me." No swift answer came from his lips, but she was clasped in his arms, held close against his heart, his passionate heart, which had never beaten thus until this moment. *' ]\[y darling, my darling ! " he said at last, in the lowest fondest tones that ever stole from a lover's lips. " I never knew what passionate love meant till I knew you." "Not when you loved Alice Fraser?" she asked doubtfully. " Not even for my sweet Alice. I loved her because she was as good as she was beautiful, because to love her seemed the nearest way to heaven. I love you even when you seemed to lead me away from heaven." " Because I am so wicked," she said with a shade of bitterness. "No, darhng; only because you are not utterly perfect? K. 142 Slrangen and Pilgrims. because to love yon is to be too fond of this sweet world, to be less eager for heaven. my dearest, what a slave you can make of me ! But beware of this passionate love which you have kindled in a heart that tried so hard to shut you out. It is jealous and exacting, tyrannic, perilous — perilous for you and for me. It is of the earth, earthy. I love you too much for the sake of your beauty, too much for the magic of those lovely eyes that seem sweeter to me than summer starlight." " And if something were to happen to me that would spoil my good looks for ever, you would leave off loving me, I suppose ? " she said. " No, dearest, you would still be Elizabeth. There is a name- less, indefinable charm which would be left even if your beauty had perished." " 'L'hen you do not love me for the sake of my beauty ? " she asked persistently, as if she were bent on plucking out the heart of his mystery. "Not now, perhaps; but I fear it was that which won me. I never meant to love you, remember, Elizabeth. No battle was ever harder fought than mine against my own heart and you, nor ever a battle lost more ignominiously," he added, with a faint sigh. " Thank Heaven it is lost!" she said; "not for my sake— I will not claim so unwilling a victim— but for your own. You will not go to the Antipodes to be eaten by savages ? " " Not if yoa offer me the supremest earthly happiness at home. I will try to do some good in my generation, and yet be happy. I will forget that I ever had any higher aspiration than to tread the beaten tracks. I will try to be useful in my small way — at home." This half-regretfully, even with her bright head resting on his shoulder, her lovely eyes looking up at him with an almost worshipping fondness. " And you will help me to lead a good life, will you not, Elizabeth ? " he asked earnestly. ' I will be your slave," she said, with a strange blending of scorn and pride — scorn of herself, intensest pride in him. " I r/ill be your dog, to fetch and carry; the veriest drudge in your parish work, if you hke. I can fancy our life : in the dreaiuest parsonage that was ever built, a wUd waste of marsh and fen round about us, a bleak strangling street of hovels for our town, not a decent habitation within ten miles of us, only the poor with their perpetual wants, and ailments, and afflictions. I can fancy all this, and yet my hfe will be spent in paradise — with you." Sweet fooling in which lovers delight ! Doubly sweet to Malcolm Forde, to whom it was so new. " My dearest and best," he said, smiling at her enthusiasm. strangers and Pilgrims. l^i "I will forgive you the marshes and fens; that is to say, we will not go out of our way to find them. But tve will go wher- ever we are most wanted." " To a nice manufacturing town, for instance, where there will be a perpetual odour of soap-boiling and size-making, and Boot blowing in at all our windows." " Perhaps to such a town, darling; but I would find you a nest beyond the odours of soap-boiliug." " Or if you have set your heart on a mission to the Dog-nb Indians, or the Maoris, or the Japanese, I will go with you. Why should I have less courage than that noble creature. Lady Baker? Indeed, on reflection, I think I should rather like such an adventurous existence. If one could go about in a yacht, now, and convert the heathen, it would be really nice." " I will not risk a life so precious to me. No, dearest, we will be content with a narrower sphere. After all, perhaps a clergy- man who has a wife may be of more use tlian a bachelor in an Enghsh parish ; she can be such a valuable ally if she chooses, almost a second self." " I will choose to be anything that you order me to be," she answered confidently. " But, 0, my darling, are you really in earnest P" he asked in his gravest tone, scrutinising the upturned face with a serious searching gaze. " For pity's sake, Elizabeth, do not fool me ! You have told me that you are fitful and inconstant. If— if — this love, which fills my soul with such a fond delight, which changes the whole scheme of my existence in a moment, — if, on your part, it is only a brief fancy, born perhaps of the very idle- ness and emptiness of your life, let us forget every word that we have said. You can trust me, darling ; I shall not think less of you for being self-deluded. Consider in time whether it is possible for you to change ; whether the kind of life which you speak of so lightly would not really seem dismal and unendur- able to you when you found yourself pledged to go on living it t