I disturb you if I come in here?” asked the curate, with a mellow sound in his voice which was not brogue—or at least he thought it was not, and was ingenuously surprised when he was recognized as an Irish-man. (“It will be my name, to be sure,” he would say on such occasions, somewhat puzzled.) He was a bony man, loosely put together, in a long coat, with rather a wisp of a white tie; for, indeed, it was very hot and dusty on the roads, and where the rector is an elegant man of very refined mind, the curate, like the wife, has generally a good deal to do.
“Indeed, the lessons have been so much disturbed as it is, that it does not much matter,” said Mrs. Damerel. “On Monday morning there are so many things to call me away.”
“How selfish of me!” said the curate. “Monday morning is just the time I’ve little or nothing to do, except when there’s sickness. What a brute I was not to offer meself,—and indeed, that’s just what I’ve come to speak about.”
“No, no, you are too kind, and do too much already,” said Mrs. Damerel, looking at him with a grateful smile, but shaking her head. “And, indeed,” she added, the cloud coming over her face again, “Rose ought to come and relieve me; but her father has to be attended to, and that takes up so much of her time.”
“To be sure,” said the curate cheerily, “and reason good. Besides, it would be wearing work for one like her—whereas the like o’ me is made for it. Look here, Dick, my boy, will you promise to learn your lessons like a brick to-morrow if I ask the mother for a holiday to-day?”
“Oh, hurrah!” cried Dick, delighted.
“Oh, mamma, like twenty bricks,” cried Patty, “though how a brick can learn lessons?—It’s so hot, and one keeps thinking of the hayfield.”
“Then be off wi’ you all,” cried the curate. “Don’t you see the mother smile? and Agatha too. I’m going to talk business. Sure, you don’t mind for one day?”
“Oh, mind!” said poor Mrs. Damerel, with a half-smile; then waiting till they were all out of hearing, an exit speedily accomplished, “if it were not for duty, how glad I should be to give it up altogether!—but they could not go on with Miss Hunt,” she added, with a quick glance at the curate to see whether by chance he understood her. Good curate, he could be very stolid on occasion, though I hope he was not fool enough to be taken in by Mrs. Damerel’s pretences: though it was true enough that Miss Hunt was impracticable. She could not afford a better; this was what she really meant.
“Out of the question,” said Mr. Nolan; “and I’m no scholar myself to speak of, notwithstanding what I’m going to have the presumption to say to you. It’s just this—I don’t do much visiting of mornings; they don’t like it. It takes them all in a mess as it were, before they’ve had time to get tidy, and these mornings hang heavy on my hands. I want you to let me have the three big ones. I might get them on a bit; and time, as I tell you, my dear lady, hangs heavy on my hands.”
“How can you tell me such a fib?” said Mrs. Damerel, half crying, half laughing. “Oh, you are too good, too good; but, Mr. Nolan, I can’t take anything more from you. Rose must help me, it is her duty; it is bad for her to be left so much to herself; why, I was married and had all the troubles of life on my head at her age.”
“And so she’ll have, before you know where you are,” said the good curate, which will show the reader at once that he entertained no absorbing passion for Miss Rose, though I am aware it is a curate’s duty so to do. “So she’ll have; she’ll be marrying some great grandee or other. She looks like a princess, and that’s what she’ll be.”
“She has no right to be a princess,” said the mother, overwrought and irritable, “and duty is better than ease surely. You, I know, think so.”
“For the like of me, yes,” said the curate; “for her, I don’t know.”
“I was once very much like her, though you would not think it,” said the mother, with the slightest tinge of bitterness, “but that is not the question—no, no, we must not trouble you.”
“When I tell you the mornings hang on my hands! I don’t know what to do with my mornings. There’s Tuesday I’m due at the schools, but the rest of the week I do nothing but idle. And idling’s a great temptation. A cigar comes natural when you’ve nothing to do. You don’t like a man smoking in the morning; I’ve heard you say so. So you see the young ones will save me from a—no, I won’t say cigar; worse than that; cigars are too dear for a curate, me dear lady—from a pipe.”
“Mr. Nolan, you are too good for this world,” said poor Mrs. Damerel, affected to tears; “but I must first try what can be done at home,” she added after a pause; “no, no, you weigh me down under your kindness. What would the parish be but for you?”
“It would be just the same if I were dead and buried,” said the curate, shrugging his shoulders. “Ah, that’s the worst of it: try for a little bit of a corner of work like a child’s lessons, and you may be of service; but try to mend the world, even a bit of a parish, and you’re nowhere. They don’t think half as much of me as they do of the rector?” he added, with a curious smile, which the rector’s wife only half understood. Was it satirical? or could it be possible that the curate was surprised that the people thought more of the rector than of himself? Mrs. Damerel was aware, no one better, of her husband’s faults. Many a time she was ready to say in bitterness (to herself) that he was wearing her to death; but nevertheless she looked at long, loosely-built, snub-nosed Mr. Nolan, with mingled amusement and surprise. Was it possible that he could entertain any hopes of rivalling her husband? Of course a visit from the rector was an honor to any one, for Mr. Damerel was a man who, notwithstanding a little human weakness, was the very picture and model of a gentleman; and the idea of comparing him with good Mr. Nolan was too absurd.
“Yes, no doubt they are pleased to see him,” she said: “poor people are very quick to recognize high breeding; but I am sure, my dear Mr. Nolan, that they are all very fond of you.”
The curate made no immediate answer. I am not sure that he had not in his private heart something of the same feeling with which his present companion had been thinking of her daughter, a feeling less intense in so far as it was much more indifferent to him, yet in a way stronger because untempered by affection. The rector was of his own kind, the ornamental and useless specimen, while he was the worker whom nobody thought of; but these secret feelings neither of the two confided to the other. Mr. Nolan would have been horrified had he detected in Mrs. Damerel that slight bitterness about Rose, which indeed would have shocked herself as deeply had she paused to identity the sentiment, and she would have been, and was, to some slight extent—suspecting the existence of the feeling—contemptuous and indignant of Nolan’s “jealousy,” as I fear she would have called it. They returned, however, to the educational question, which did not involve anything painful, and after considerable discussion it was settled that he should give the elder children lessons in the morning “if their papa approved.” It is impossible to say what a relief this decision was to the mother, who had felt these lessons to be the last straw which proverbially breaks the camel’s back. She was glad of the chat with a sympathizing friend, who understood, without saying anything about, her troubles—and doubly glad of the holiday exacted from her by his means—and gladder still to get rid of him and return to her many other occupations; for it was Monday, as has already been mentioned, and there was the laundress to look after, and a thousand other things awaiting her. The curate went out by the garden door when he left her, out upon the lawn, where he paused to look at as charming a scene as could be found in England: a fair country spreading out for miles its trees and fields and soft undulations under a summer sky, which was pale with excess of light, and ran into faint lines of misty distance almost colorless in heat and haze. Here and there the sunshine caught in a bend of the river,
