The Curate in Charge. Oliphant Margaret

vicarage in the evening by that path which his patient feet had made, to play backgammon with the vicar and talk to Hester. I cannot see, for my part, why they should not have married, and occupied the vicarage together; but such an arrangement would not have suited Mr. Maydew, and Hester was well aware of the impossibility of serving two masters. So year came after year, and hour after hour, as if there were no changes in human existence, but everything was as steady and immovable as the surface of that tranquil rural world.

      When Mr. Maydew died at last it was quite a shock to the curate; and then it was evident that something must be done. They hoped for a little while that Lord Weston might have given the living to Mr. St. John, who was so much beloved in the parish; but it had been promised years before to his old tutor, and there was an end of that expectation. I think Hester had almost come to doubt whether her curate had energy to marry her when she was thus set free; but there she did him injustice. Though he had not a notion how they were to live, he would have married her on the spot had decorum permitted. It was some time, however, before he heard of anything which would justify them in marrying. He had little interest out of the parish, and was shy of asking anything from the few people he did know. When they were told of Brentburn, and the rector’s bad health, they both felt it a special providence that Mr. Chester’s lungs should be weak. There was the rectory to live in, and two hundred pounds a year, which seemed a fortune to them both; and they married upon it with as much confidence as if it had been two thousand. They were almost old people when they set off from the little church at Weston bride and bride-groom; yet very young in the tranquillity of their souls. Mr. St. John was thoroughly happy – not much more happy indeed than when he had walked down across the grass to the vicarage – but not less so; and if Hester felt a thrill of disappointment deep down in her heart at his calm, she loved him all the same, and knew his goodness, and was happy too. She was a woman of genius in her way – not poetical or literary genius – but that which is as good, perhaps better. She managed to live upon her two hundred a year as few of us can do upon three or four times the sum. Waste was impossible to her; and want appeared as impossible. She guided her house as – well, as only genius can – without any pitiful economies, without any undue sparing, making a kind, warm, beneficent, living house of it, and yet keeping within her income. I don’t pretend to know how she did it, any more than I can tell you how Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. It was quite easy to him – and to her; but if one knew how, one would be as great a poet as he was, as great an economist as she. Mr. St. John was perfectly happy; perhaps even a little more happy than when he used to walk nightly to her father’s vicarage. The thought that he was only curate in charge, and that his rector might get better and come back, or get worse and die, never troubled his peace. Why should not life always go as it was doing? why should anything ever happen? Now and then he would speak of the vicissitudes of mortal existence in his placid little sermons; but he knew nothing of them, and believed still less. It seemed to him as if this soft tranquillity, this sober happiness was fixed like the pillars of the earth, and would never come to an end.

      Nor is it possible to tell how it was, that to this quiet pair two such restless atoms of humanity as the two girls whose story is to be told here should have been born. Hester’s old nurse, indeed, had often been heard to tell fabulous stories of the energy and animation of her young mistress in the days of her youth, but these had always been believed in Weston to be apocryphal. The appearance of her children, however, gave some semblance of truth to the tale. They were the most living creatures in all the parish of Brentburn. These two children, from the time they were born, were ready for anything – nothing daunted them or stilled them – they did not know what fear was. Sometimes there passed through the mind of their mother a regret that they were not boys: but then she would think of her husband and the regret was never expressed. Their very vitality and activity made them easy to train, and she taught them, poor soul, and spent her strength upon them as if she knew what was coming. She taught them her own household ways, and her economy as far as children could learn it, and to read and write, and their notes on the old piano. This was all she had time for. She died when Cicely was twelve and Mab eleven. God help us! what it must be when a woman has to consent to die and leave her little children to fight their own way through this hard world, who can venture to tell? For my part, I cannot so much as think of it. Something comes choking in one’s throat, climbing like Lear’s hysterica passio. Ah, God help us indeed! to think of it is terrible, to do it – Poor Hester had to accept this lot and cover her face and go away, leaving those two to make what they could of their life. Her death stupefied Mr. St. John. He could not believe it, could not understand it. It came upon him like a thunderbolt, incredible, impossible; yet, to be sure, he had to put up with it like other men. And so tranquil was his soul that by-and-by he quite learned to put up with it, and grew calm again, and made himself a path across the common to the churchyard gate which led to her grave, just as he had made himself a path to her father’s door. Everything passes away except human character and individuality, which outlive all convulsions. The parish of Brentburn, which like him was stupefied for the moment, could not contain its admiration when it was seen how beautifully he bore it – “Like a true Christian,” the people said – like himself I think; and he was a good Christian, besides being so placid a man.

      The two children got over it too in the course of nature; they had passions of childish anguish, unspeakable dumb longings which no words could utter; and then were hushed and stilled, and after a while were happy again; life must defend itself with this natural insensibility or it could not be life at all. And Mr. St. John’s friends and parishioners were very kind to him, especially in the matter of advice, of which he stood much in need. His “plans” and what he should do were debated in every house in the parish before poor Hester was cold in her grave; and the general conclusion which was almost unanimously arrived at was – a governess. A governess was the right thing for him, a respectable, middle-aged person who would have no scheme for marrying in her head – not a person of great pretensions, but one who would take entire charge of the girls (whom their mother, poor soul, had left too much to themselves), and would not object to give an eye to the housekeeping – of ladylike manners, yet perhaps not quite a lady either, lest she might object to the homelier offices cast upon her. Mrs. Ascott, of the Heath, happened to know exactly the right person, the very thing for poor Mr. St. John and his girls. And Mr. St. John accepted the advice of the ladies of the parish with gratitude, confessing piteously that he did not at all know what to do. So Miss Brown arrived six months after Mrs. St. John’s death. She was not too much of a lady. She was neither old nor young, she was subject to neuralgia; her complexion and her eyes were grey, like her dress, and she had no pretensions to good looks. But with these little drawbacks, which in her position everybody argued were no drawbacks at all, but rather advantages, she was a good woman, and though she did not understand them, she was kind to the girls. Miss Brown, however, was not in any respect a woman of genius, and even had she been so her gifts would have been neutralized by the fact that she was not the mistress of the house, but only the governess. The maid who had worked so well under Hester set up pretensions to be housekeeper too, and called herself the cook, and assumed airs which Miss Brown got the better of with great difficulty; and the aspect of the house changed. Now and then indeed a crisis arrived which troubled Mr. St. John’s peace of mind very much, when he was appealed to one side or the other. But yet the life of the household had been so well organized that it went on tant bien que mal for several years. And the two girls grew healthy, and handsome, and strong. Miss Brown did her very best for them. She kept them down as much as she could, which she thought was her duty, and as what she could do in this way was but small, the control she attained to was an unmixed advantage to them. Poor Hester had called her eldest child Cecil, after her father, with a touch of tender sentiment; but use and fondness, and perhaps a sense that the more romantic appellation sounded somewhat weak-minded, had long ago improved it into Cicely. Mabel got her name from a similar motive, because it was pretty. It was the period when names of this class came into fashion, throwing the old-fashioned Janes and Elizabeths into temporary eclipse; but as the girls grew up and it came to be impossible to connect her with any two-syllabled or dignified word, the name lent itself to abbreviation and she became Mab. They were both pretty girls. Cicely had her mother’s softness, Mab her father’s more regular beauty. They spent their lives in the pure air, in the woods, which were so close at hand, in the old-fashioned garden which they partly cultivated, or, when they could get so far, on those bleaker commons and pine forests,