The maid’s countenance became grave. ‘He ’ave worked in’s study since afore I was up, Miss, I do fear it; working and thinking, thinking and muttering to ’isself. Not that it’s my place to sy anything, Miss Nelly; but us remembers what us do remember, and how ’twas like this afore ’ee wrote that letter to them great ones wot worrited ’ee so dreadful. I didn’t mean like to trouble ’ee with what ’ee do know as well as I, Miss. But I ’eard the Master with my own ears telling Mr Lintot only yesterday that there ’baint no God in Heaven.’ Twas terrible to listen to ’un, strike me blind, if it weren’t; for ’a did carry on so about one thing and another that Mr Lintot he up and said he couldn’t listen to any more on’t.’ Tweren’t right nor natural that he should listen to such things, spoke by one of Master’s holy profession. There, Miss Nelly,’ ee mustn’t take on. What must be must be; what’s writ to come’ll surely come; and them as calls down Tuesday’s rain on Monday’s roses will never see the gates of Jerusalem.’
Saying this with a consolatory leer, as if it were a piece of the most cynical worldly wisdom, Grace picked up her mistress’s shoes, still all covered with gold-dust from the walk through the buttercups, and left the room.
Nelly jumped hastily out of bed and pulled the curtains across the open windows. She bathed and dressed rapidly today, cutting short the long leisurely peeps she was accustomed to take in intervals of her dressing at the familiar face of the distant Downs.
The little house they lived in had quite recently been ‘done over’, and as the girl ran down and entered the breakfast room she felt proud of the effect of the labour she and Grace had bestowed upon it. Everything looked so peculiarly cheerful with fresh-painted wood and whitewashed walls and clean chintz covers and curtains.
She had got rid of a drawing room altogether and she and her father had their meals in a lightly furnished south-aspected room which she used during the rest of the day as her own resort.
But the nicest room in the house was her father’s study, a large airy place with a low ceiling and french windows opening on the garden.
Here her father kept his natural history collections — cabinets of birds’ eggs and bureau drawers full of butterflies and moths — and here he read an endless sequence of scientific volumes.
The Vicar of Littlegate was a lean Don Quixote-looking old man with a long narrow face and melancholy blue eyes. He was very tall and his knotted fingers, as he stooped over his food, touching, the bread as if it were a botanical specimen laid out to be examined, hung from his thin arms like the fantastic hands of a withered ash tree.
On this particular morning Mr Moreton seemed to have no appetite for anything but bread, which he ate in large mouthfuls, washing it down with enormous cups of sugarless, milkless tea. He kept rising from his chair when his daughter needed anything from the sideboard, and was always putting things on her plate and encouraging her to eat, with little friendly exclamations as if she were some pet animal rather than the mistress of the house.
‘Some more furniture came yesterday for that little place of Canyot’s,’ he remarked with a glance at the window. ‘He ought to be able to move in in a day or two. It’ll be nice for him after the farm. I hope Betsy-Anne’s Rose will look after him all right. She’ll be able to be there most of the days. She’s a funny rough girl; but a good girl I daresay. She comes to the Sacrament.’ And he sighed heavily.
‘Yes, it’ll certainly be much nicer for Robert up there than down at the farm,’ responded Nelly, looking anxiously at the old man’s troubled face.
‘It’s what he’s been aiming at ever since you and he were engaged,’ continued Mr Moreton. ‘He’s good to me, is Rob Canyot. He understands my difficulty. He agrees with me that I can’t go on as I’m going on now. It was because he saw how I love this place for the sake of the plants and the birds and the insects that he first thought of taking it, I believe. It was a good kind thought of his, my dear, and I hope you’ll make a good wife to him.’
Nelly’s delicate transparent cheeks lost every drop of colour. ‘But, dear Father, you don’t mean to say that Robert wants us to be married quite soon? I thought — oh, I thought — that it wasn’t to be for several years! I didn’t dream that he intended me to live in Hill Cottage.’
The old man fidgeted a little and looked uneasy. ‘Well, I ought to tell you, perhaps,’ he said, ‘that I did discuss things with Rob Canyot quite openly the other night. I told him frankly that if I resigned my living I should be totally without an income. He agreed with me that at my age and with my book on Sussex flora unfinished it would be wrong for me to try my hand at any other work. And so — to cut it short — he was very kind and said that of course I could live with you at the cottage. He said that his pictures had begun to sell well and that in addition to what he made that way he had a generous allowance from his mother. In fact he told me not to worry about the matter any further, but to consider it settled. He put it in such a way as to make me feel quite happy about living with you — as if my being with him, you know, and our conversations about science and the local flora and the insects and everything, were a real help to him in his work.‘
As Nelly looked at her father uttering these words, the old man’s fanatical head, with the furrowed forehead and the noticeable wart on the high-bridged nose, took to itself the appearance of some ancient remorseless idol upon whose mechanical decision, entirely divorced from all reason and pity, her whole future depended. Her delicately moulded white face stiffened into a rigid mask of nervous tension and little twitching wrinkles appeared between her eyebrows.
The low-voiced crooning of the doves, in the sycamore outside, teased her as something ill-timed, and the flowers on the table, picked by herself the day before, assumed the curious look which flowers have when they attend on some mortal disaster.
The more she contemplated the fatal cul-de-sac, into which an evil focusing of apparently malleable circumstances had pushed her, the more devastating the prospect looked.
The trap she had so innocently, step by step, walked into, narrowed upon her at that moment with what seemed like iron bands. She felt almost afraid of making the least movement of resistance lest the thing’s remorseless teeth should close with a snap. And yet, resist she must! A way of escape in some direction there must be. Life couldn’t intend to crush her with a stone before she had even begun to live.
‘I suppose, Father,’ she began, in a voice that sounded like someone else’s voice, some voice of a harassed young woman in some unreal story. ‘I suppose there’s no chance of the bishop being willing to let you keep your work, in spite of your change of views?’
The old man looked fiercely at her. ‘Haven’t I told you, child? It’s not our bishop. It’s the authority in London. But it’s not really that either. It’s my own conscience and self-respect. How can I go on reading the services here when I have ceased to believe a word of it? My plain duty, as an honest man, is to resign.’
The corners of Nelly’s mouth drooped piteously. Tears came into her eyes. She bit her lip. ‘I don’t believe it would have happened — any of it — if mother had lived.’
‘Your mother would have completely understood me,’ said the old man severely. ‘She always did understand me. However, if you’re determined to make it harder for me—’
With a brave effort she swallowed her tears and spoke more calmly. ‘But, Father dear, I know you still believe in Christ. You couldn’t not believe in Him and consecrate the Sacrament every morning as you do. It is only some theological difficulty you have, quite separate from what is really important. You know what the bishop said when you went to see him.’