pease let Fore tum in. Pease do, pease do, pease do. Me ‘ost me ummy top. Oh you naughty bad door!”
Then another kick was administered by small but passionate toe–toes. Of course your mother did not send you, innocent bright–haired popples, and with a lie so pat and glib in that pouting pearl–set mouth. Foolish mother, if she did, though it seal Attalic bargain!
Sir Cradock went to the door, and gently ordered the child away. But the interruption had been enough —ibi omnis effusus labor. When he returned and faced John Rosedew the manner of his visage was altered. The child had reminded him of her mother, and that graceful, gushing, loving nature, which tried so hard not to doubt the minister. So he did what a man in the wrong generally does instinctively; he swept back the tide of war into his adversaryʼs country.
“You take a very strong interest, sir, in one whose nearest relations have been compelled to abandon him.”
“I thought that your greatest grievance with him was that he had abandoned you.”
“Excuse me; I cannot split hairs. All I mean is that something has come to my knowledge – not through the proper channel, not from those who ought to have told me – something which makes your advocacy seem a little less disinterested than I might have supposed it to be.”
“Have the kindness to tell me what it is.”
“Oh, perhaps a mere nothing. But it seems a significant rumour.”
“What rumour, if you please?”
“That my – that Cradock Nowell is attached to your daughter, who behaved so ill to me. Of course, it is not true?”
“Perfectly true, every word of it.” And John Rosedew looked at Sir Cradock Nowell as proudly as ever a father looked. Amy, in his opinion, was peeress for any mortal. And perhaps he was not presumptuous.
“Ah!” was the only reply he received: an “ah” drawn out into half an ell.
“Why, I would have told you long ago, the moment that I knew it, but for your great trouble, and your bitterness towards him. You have often wished that a son of yours should marry my daughter Amy. Surely you will not blame him for desiring to do as you wished?”
“No, because he is young and foolish; but I may blame you for encouraging it, now that he is the only one.”
“Do you dare to think that I am in any way influenced by interested motives?”
“I dare to think what I please. No bullying here, John, if you please. We all know how combative you are. And, now you have forced me to it, I will tell you what will be the conviction, ay, and the expression of every one in this county, except those who are afraid of you. ‘Mr. Rosedew has entrapped the future Sir Cradock Nowell, hushed up the crime, and made all snug for his daughter at Nowelhurst Hall.’”
Sir Cradock did not mean half his words, any more than the rest of us do, when hurt; and he was bitterly sorry for them the moment they were uttered. They put an impassable barrier between him and John Rosedew, between him and his own conscience, for many a day and night to come.
Have you ever seen a pure good man, a man of large intellect and heart, a lover of truth and justice more than of himself, confront, without warning, some black charge, some despicable calumny, in a word (for I love strong English, and nothing else will tell it), some damned lie? If not, I hope you never may, for it makes a manʼs heart burn so.
John Rosedew was not of the violent order. Indeed, as his sister Eudoxia said, and to her own great comfort knew, his cistern of wrathfulness was so small, and the supply–pipe so unready – as must be where the lower passions filter through the intellect – that most people thought it impossible “to put the parson out.” And very few of those who knew him could have borne to make the trial.
Even now, hurt as he was to the very depth of his heart, he was indignant more than angry.
“It would have been more manly of you, Sir Cradock Nowell, to have said this very mean thing yourself, than to have put it into the mouths of others. I grieve for you, and for myself, that so mean a man was ever my friend. Perhaps you have still some relics of gentlemanly feeling which will lead you to perform a hostʼs duty towards his visitor. Have the kindness to order my horse.”
Then John Rosedew, so punctilious, so polite to the poorest cottager, turned his broad back upon the baronet, and as he slowly walked to the door, these words came over his shoulder: —
“To–day you will receive my resignation of your two benefices. If I live a few years more, I will repay you all they have brought me above a curateʼs stipend. My daughter is no fortune–hunter. She never shall see your son again, unless he renounce you and yours for ever, or you come and implore us humbly as now you have spoken arrogantly, contemptibly, and meanly.”
Then, fearing lest he had been too grand about a little matter – not his daughterʼs marriage, but the aspersion upon himself – he closed the door very carefully, so as not to make any noise, and walked away towards his home, forgetting Coræbus utterly. And, before his fine solid face began to recover its healthy and bashful pink, he was visited by sore misgivings as to his own behaviour; to wit, what claim had any man, however elate with the pride of right and the scorn of wrong, to talk about any fellow–man becoming humble to him? Nevertheless, he could not manage to retract the wrong expression in his letter of resignation; not from any false pride – oh no! – but for fear of being misunderstood. But that very night he craved pardon of Him before whom alone we need humbly bow; who alone can grant us anything.
CHAPTER IV
What is lovelier, just when Autumn throws her lace around us, and begs us not to begin to think of any spiteful winter, because she has not yet unfolded half the wealth of her bosom, and will not look over her shoulder – when we take that rich one gaily for her gifts of beauty; what among her clustered hair, freshened with the hoar–frost in imitation of the Spring (all fashions do recur so), tell us what can be more pretty, pearly, light, and elegant, more memoried of maidenhood, than a jolly spiderʼs web?
See how the diamonds quiver and sparkle in the September morning; what jeweller could have set them so? All of graduated light and metrical proportion, every third pre–eminent, strung on soft aerial tension, as of woven hoar–frost, and every carrying thread encrusted with the breath of fairies, then crossed and latticed at just angles, with narrowing interstices, to a radiated octagon – the more we look, the more we wonder at the perfect tracery. Then, if we gently breathe upon it, or a leaf of the bramble shivers, how from the open centre a whiff of waving motion flows down every vibrant radius, every weft accepts the waft slowly and lulling vibration, every stay–rope jerks and quivers, and all the fleeting subtilty expands, contracts, and undulates.
Yet if an elegant spider glide out, exquisite, many–dappled, pellucid like a Scotch pebble or a calceolaria, with a dozen dimples upon his back, and eight fierce eyes all up for business, the moment he slips from the blackberry–leaf all sense of beauty is lost to the gazer, because he thinks of rapacity.
And so, I fear, John Rosedewʼs hat described in the air a flourish of more courtesy than cordiality, when he saw Mrs. Corklemore gliding forth from the bend of the road in front of him. Although she had left the house after him, by the help of a short cut through the gardens, where the rector would no longer take the liberty of trespassing, she contrived to meet him as if herself returning from the village.
“Oh, Mr. Rosedew, I am so glad to see you,” cried Georgie, as he tried to escape with his bow: “what a fortunate accident!”
“Indeed!”
