 | CHAPTER I.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON. West Lawn and The rector of St. Mark's |  |
1. CHAPTER I.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON.
THE Sunday sermon was finished, and the young
rector of St. Mark's turned gladly from his study-table
to the pleasant south window where the
June roses were peeping in, and abandoned himself for a
few moments to the feeling of relief he always experienced
when his week's work was done. To say that no secular
thoughts had intruded themselves upon the rector's mind,
as he planned and wrote his sermon, would not be true,
for, though morbidly conscientious on many points and
earnestly striving to be a faithful shepherd of the souls
committed to his care, Arthur Leighton had all a man's
capacity to love and to be loved, and though he fought
and prayed against it, he had seldom brought a sermon to
the people of St. Mark's in which there was not a thought
of Anna Ruthven's soft, brown eyes, and the way they
would look at him across the heads of the congregation.
Anna led the village choir, and the rector was painfully
his devotional feelings during the moments when, the
singing over, he walked from his chair to the pulpit, and
heard the rustle of the crimson curtain in the organ-loft
as it was drawn back, disclosing to view five heads, of
which Anna's was the centre. It was very wrong he
knew, and on the day when our story opens he had prayed
earnestly for pardon, when, after choosing his text, “Simon,
Simon, lovest thou me?” instead of plunging at
once into his subject, he had, without a thought of what
he was doing, idly written upon a scrap of paper lying
near, “Anna, Anna, lovest thou me more than these?”
the these referring to the wealthy Thornton Hastings, his
old classmate in college, who was going to Saratoga this
very summer for the purpose of meeting Anna Ruthven,
and deciding if she would do to become Mrs. Thornton
Hastings, and mistress of the house on Madison Square.
With a bitter groan for the enormity of his sin, and a fervent
prayer for forgiveness, the rector had torn the slips
of paper in shreds and given himself so completely to his
work, that his sermon was done a full hour earlier than
usual, and he was free to indulge in reveries of Anna for
as long a time as he pleased.
“I wonder if Mrs. Meredith has come,” he thought,
as, with his feet upon the window-sill, he sat looking
across the meadow to where the chimneys and gable
roof of Captain Humphreys' house were visible, for Captain
it was there she had lived since she was three years old.
As if thoughts of Mrs. Meredith reminded him of
something else, the rector took from the drawer of his
writing-table a letter received the previous day, and
opening to the second page, read as follows:
“Are you going anywhere this summer? Of course
not, for so long as there is an unbaptized child, or a bedridden
old woman in the parish, you must stay at home,
even if you do grow as rusty as did Professor Cobden's
coat before we boys made him a present of a new one.
I say, Arthur, there was a capital fellow spoiled when
you took to the ministry, with your splendid talents,
and rare gift for making people like and believe in you.
“Now, I suppose you will reply that for this denial
of self you look for your reward in heaven, and I suppose
you are right; but as I have no reason to think I
have stock in that region, I go in for a good time here,
and this summer I take Saratoga, where I expect to
meet one of your lambs. I hear you have in your flock
forty in all, their ages varying from sixteen to fifty. But
this particular lamb, Miss Anna Ruthven, is, I think,
the fairest of them all, and as I used to make you my
father confessor in the days when I was rusticated out in
Winsted, and fell so desperately in love with the six
Miss Larkins, each old enough to be my mother, so now
I confide to you the programme as marked out by Mrs.
in the field.
“We, that is, Mrs. Meredith and myself, are on the
best of terms. I lunch with her, dine with her, lounge
in her parlors, drive her to the park, take her to operas,
concerts, and plays, and compliment her good looks,
which are wonderfully well-preserved for a woman of
forty-five. I am twenty-six, you know, and so no one
ever associates us together in any kind of gossip. She
is the very quintessence of fashion, and I am one of the
danglers whose own light is made brighter by the reflection
of her rays. Do you see the point? Well, then,
in return for my attentions, she takes a very sisterly interest
in my future wife, and has adroitly managed to let
me know of her niece, a certain Anna Ruthven, who, inasmuch
as I am tired of city belles, will undoubtedly
suit my fancy, said Anna being very fresh, very artless,
and very beautiful withal. She is also niece to Mrs.
Meredith, whose only brother married very far beneath
him, when he took to wife the daughter of a certain old-fashioned
Captain Humphreys, a pillar, no doubt, in your
church. This young Ruthven was drowned, or hung, or
something, and the sister considers it as another proof of
his wife's lack of refinement and discretion, that at her
death, which happened when Anna was three years old,
she left her child to the charge of her parents, Captain
Humphreys and spouse, rather than to Mrs. Meredith's
stood as sponsor for the infant, an act which you will
acknowledge as very unnatural and ungrateful in Mrs.
Ruthven, to say the least of it.
“You see I am telling you all this, just as if you did
not know Miss Anna's antecedents even better than myself;
but possibly you do not know that, having arrived
at a suitable age, she is this summer to be introduced
into society at Saratoga, while I am expected to fall in
love with her at once, and make her Mrs. Hastings before
another winter. Now, in your straightforward way
of putting things, don't imagine that Mrs. Meredith has
deliberately told me all this, for she has not; but I understand
her perfectly, and know exactly what she expects
me to do. Whether I do it or not depends partly
upon how I like Miss Anna, partly upon how she likes
me, and partly upon yourself.
“You know I was always famous for presentiments or
fancies, as you termed them, and the latest of these is
that you like Anna Ruthven. Do you? Tell me, honor
bright, and by the memory of the many scrapes you got
me out of, and the many more you kept me from getting
into, I will treat Miss Anna as gingerly and brotherly as
if she were already your wife. I like her picture, which
I have seen, and believe I shall like the girl, but if you
say that by looking at her with longing eyes I shall be
guilty of breaking some one of the ten commandments,—I
fair, and will prove to you that, although not a parson
like yourself, there is still a spark of honor, if not of
goodness, in the breast of
“If you were here this afternoon, I'd take you to
drive after a pair of bays, which are to sweep the stakes
at Saratoga this summer, and I'd treat you to a finer
cigar than often finds its way to Hanover. Shall I send
you out a box, or would your people pull down the
church about the ears of a minister wicked enough to
smoke. Again adieu.
“T. H.”
There was a half-amused smile on the face of the rector
as he finished the letter, so like its thoughtless, light-hearted
writer, and wondered what the Widow Rider,
across the way, would say of a clergyman who smoked
cigars, and rode after a race-horse with such a gay scapegrace
as Thornton Hastings. Then the amused look
passed away, and was succeeded by a shadow of pain, as
the rector remembered the real import of Thornton's
letter, and felt that he had no right to say, “I have a
claim on Anna Ruthven; you must not interfere.” For
he had no claim on her, though half his parishioners had
only natures like his can love, since that week before
Christmas, when their hands had met with a strange,
tremulous flutter, as together they fastened the wreaths
of evergreen upon the wall, he holding them up, and she
driving the refractory tacks, which would keep falling, so
that his hand went often from the carpet or basin to
hers, and once accidentally closed almost entirely over the
little soft white thing, which felt so warm to his touch.
How prettily Anna had looked to him during those
memorable days, so much prettier than the other young
girls of his flock, whose hair was tumbled ere the day's
work was done, and whose dresses were soiled and disordered;
while hers was always so tidy and neat, and
the braids of her chestnut hair were always so smooth
and bright. How well, too, he remembered that brief
ten minutes, when, in the dusky twilight which had crept
so early into the church, he stood alone with her and
talked, he did not know of what, only that he heard her
voice replying to him, and saw the changeful color on
her cheek as she looked modestly into his face. That
was a week of delicious happiness, and the rector had
lived it over many times, wondering if, when the next
Christmas came, it would find him any nearer to Anna
Ruthven than the last had left him.
“It must,” he suddenly exclaimed. “The matter
shall be settled before she leaves Hanover with Mrs.
shall not take her from me. I'll write what I lack the
courage to tell her, and to-morrow I will call and deliver
it myself.”
An hour later, and there was lying in the rector's
desk a letter, in which he had told Anna Ruthven how
much he loved her, and had asked her to be his wife.
Something whispered that she would not refuse him, and
with this hope to buoy him up, his two miles' walk that
warm afternoon was neither warm nor tiresome, and the
old lady by whose bedside he read and prayed was surprised
to hear him as he left her door, whistling an old
love-tune which she, too, had known and sang fifty years
before.
| CHAPTER I.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON. West Lawn and The rector of St. Mark's | |