Whiteladies

Miss Augustine was too much absorbed in her own special interests to be a Ritualist or not a Ritualist, or to think at all of Church politics. She was confused in her theology, and determined to have her family prayed for, and their sins expiated, without asking herself whether it was release from purgatory which she anticipated as the answer to her prayers, or simply a turning aside of the curse for the future. I think the idea in her mind was quite confused, and she neither knew nor was at any trouble to ascertain exactly what she meant. Accordingly, though many people, and the rector himself among them, thought Miss Augustine to be of the highest sect of the High Church, verging upon Popery itself, Miss Augustine in reality found more comfort in the Dissenting fervor of the old woman who was a “Methody,” than in the most correct Church worship. What she wanted, poor soul, was that semi-commercial, semi-visionary traffic, in which not herself but her family were to be the gainers. She was a merchant organizing this bargain with heaven, the nature of which she left vague even to herself; and those who aided her with most apparent warmth of supplications, were the people whom she most appreciated, with but little regard to the fashion of their exertions. John Simmons, when he snored, was like a workman shirking work to Miss Augustine. But even Dr. Richard and his wife had not fathomed this downright straightforward business temper which existed without her own knowledge, or any one else’s, in the strange visionary being with whom they had to do. She, indeed, put her meaning simply into so many words, but it was impossible for those good people to take her at her own word, and to believe that she expressed all she meant, and nothing less or more.

There was a little prayer used in the almshouse chapel for the family of the founder, which Dr. Richard had consented, with some difficulty, to add after the collects at Morning and Evening Service, and which he had a strong impression was uncanonical, and against the rubrics, employing it, so to speak, under protest, and explaining to every chance stranger that it was “a tradition of the place from time immemorial.”

“I suppose we are not at liberty to change lightly any ancient use,” said the chaplain, “at least such was the advice of my excellent friend the Bishop of the Leeward Islands, in whose judgment I have great confidence. I have not yet had an opportunity of laying the matter before the Bishop of my own diocese, but I have little doubt his lordship will be of the same opinion.”

With this protestation of faith, which I think was much stronger than Dr. Richard felt, the chaplain used the prayer; but he maintained a constant struggle against Miss Augustine, who would have had him add sentences to it from time to time, as various family exigencies arose. On one of the days of Miss Susan’s absence a thought of this kind came into her sister’s head. Augustine felt that Miss Susan being absent, and travelling, and occupied with her business, whatever it was, might, perhaps, omit to read the Lessons for the day, as was usual, or would be less particular in her personal devotions. She thought this over all evening, and dreamed of it at night; and in the morning she sent a letter to the chaplain as soon as she woke, begging him to add to his prayer for the founder’s family the words, “and for such among them as may be specially exposed to temptation this day.” Dr. Richard took a very strong step on this occasion – he refused to do it. It was a great thing for a man to do, the comfort of whose remnant of life hung upon the pleasure of his patroness; but he knew it was an illegal liberty to take with his service, and he would not do it.

Miss Augustine was very self-absorbed, and very much accustomed (though she thought otherwise) to have everything her own way, and when she perceived that this new petition of hers was not added to the prayer for her family, she disregarded James Tolladay’s clerkly leading of the responses even more than John Simmons did. She made a little pause, and repeated it herself, in an audible voice, and then said her Amen, keeping everybody waiting for her, and Dr. Richard standing mute and red on the chancel steps, with the words, as it might be, taken out of his very lips. When they all came out of chapel, Mrs. Matthews had a private interview with Miss Augustine, which detained her, and it was not till after the old people had dispersed to their cottages that she made her way over to the clock-tower in which the chaplain’s rooms were situated. “You did not pray for my people, as I asked you,” said Augustine, looking at him with her pale blue eyes. She was not angry or irritable, but asked the question softly. Dr. Richard had been waiting for her in his dining-room, which was a quaint room over the archway, with one window looking to the road, another to the garden. He was seated by the table, his wife beside him, who had not yet taken off her bonnet, and who held her smelling-salts in her hand.

“Miss Augustine,” said the chaplain, with a little flush on his innocent aged face. He was a plump, neat little old man, with the red and white of a girl in his gentle countenance. He had risen up when she entered, but being somewhat nervous sat down again, though she never sat down. “Miss Augustine,” he said, solemnly, “I have told you before, I cannot do anything, even to oblige you, which is against Church law and every sound principle. Whatever happens to me, I must be guided by law.”

“Does law forbid you to pray for your fellow-creatures who are in temptation?” said Miss Augustine, without any change of her serious abstracted countenance.

“Miss Augustine, this is a question in which I cannot be dictated to,” said the old gentleman, growing redder. “I will ask the prayers of the congregation for any special person who may be in trouble, sorrow, or distress, before the Litany, or the collect for all conditions of men, making a pause at the appropriate petition, as is my duty; but I cannot go beyond the rubrics, whatever it may cost me,” said Dr. Richard, with a look of determined resolution, as though he looked for nothing better than to be led immediately to the stake. And his wife fixed her eyes upon him admiringly, backing him up; and put, with a little pressure of his fingers, her smelling-salts into his hand.

“In that case,” said Miss Augustine, in her abstract way, “in that case – I will not ask you; but it is a pity the rubrics should say it is your duty not to pray for any one in temptation; it was Susan,” she added, softly, with a sigh.

“Miss Susan!” said the chaplain, growing hotter than ever at the thought that he had nearly been betrayed into the impertinence of praying for a person whom he so much respected. He was horrified at the risk he had run. “Miss Augustine,” he said, severely, “if my conscience had permitted me to do this, which I am glad it did not, what would your sister have said? I could never have looked her in the face again, after taking such a liberty with her.”

“We could never have looked her in the face again,” echoed Mrs. Richard; “but, thank God, my dear, you stood fast!”

“Yes. I hope true Church principles and a strong resolution will always save me,” said the Doctor, with gentle humility, “and that I may always have the resolution to stand fast.”

Miss Augustine made no reply to this for the moment. Then she said, without any change of tone, “Say, to-morrow, please, that prayers are requested for Susan Austin, on a voyage, and in temptation abroad.”

“My dear Miss Augustine!” said the unhappy clergyman, taking a sniff at the salts, which now were truly needed.

“Yes, that will come to the same thing,” said Miss Augustine quietly to herself.

She stood opposite to the agitated pair, with her hands folded into her great sleeves, her hood hanging back on her shoulders, her black veil falling softly about her pale head. There was no emotion in her countenance. Her mind was not alarmed about her sister. The prayer was a precautionary measure, to keep Susan out of temptation – not anything strenuously called for by necessity. She sighed softly as she made the reflection, that to name her sister before the Litany was said would answer her purpose equally well; and thus with a faint smile, and slight wave of her hand toward the chaplain and his wife, she turned and went away. The ordinary politenesses were lost upon Miss Augustine, and the door stood open behind her, so that there was no need for Dr. Richard to get up and open it; and, indeed, they were so used to her ways, her comings and her goings, that he did not think of it. So the old gentleman sat with his wife by his side, backing him up, gazing with consternation, and without a word, at the gray retreating figure. Mrs. Richard, who saw her husband’s perturbed condition, comforted him as best she could, patting his arm with her soft little hand, and whispering words of consolation. When Miss Augustine was fairly out of the house, the distressed clergyman at last permitted his feelings to burst forth.

“Pray for Susan Austin publicly by name!” he said, rising and walking about the room. “My dear, it will ruin us! This comes of women having power in the Church! I don’t mean to say anything, my dear, injurious to your sex, which you know I respect deeply – in its own place; but a woman’s interference in the Church is enough to send the wisest man out of his wits.”

“Dear Henery,” said Mrs. Richard, for it was thus she pronounced her husband’s name, “why should you be so much disturbed about it, when you know she is mad?”

“It is only her enemies who say she is mad,” said Dr. Richard; “and even if she is mad, what does that matter? There is nothing against the rubrics in what she asks of me now. I shall be forced to do it; and what will Miss Susan say? And consider that all our comfort, everything depends upon it. Ellen, you are very sensible; but you don’t grasp the full bearing of the subject as I do.”

“No, my dear, I do not pretend to have your mind,” said the good wife; “but things never turn out so bad as we fear,” she said a moment after, with homely philosophy – “nor so good, either,” she added, with a sigh.

CHAPTER XIV

MISS SUSAN came home on the Saturday night. She was very tired, and saw no one that evening; but Martha, her old maid, who returned into attendance upon her natural mistress at once, thought and reported to the others that “something had come over Miss Susan.” Whether it was tiredness or crossness, or bad news, or that her business had not turned out so well as she expected, no one could tell; but “something had come over her.” Next morning she did not go to church – a thing which had not happened in the Austin family for ages.

“I had an intuition that you were yielding to temptation,” Miss Augustine said, with some solemnity, as she went out to prayers at the almshouses; after which she meant to go to Morning Service in the church, as always.

“I am only tired, my dear,” said Miss Susan, with a little shiver.

The remarks in the kitchen were more stringent than Miss Augustine’s.

“Foreign parts apparently is bad for the soul,” said Martha, when it was ascertained that Jane, too, following her mistress’s example, did not mean to go to Church.

“They’re demoralizin’, that’s what they are,” said Stevens, who liked a long word.

“I’ve always said as I’d never set foot out o’ my own country, not for any money,” said Cook, with the liberal mind natural to her craft.

Poor Jane, who had been very ill on the crossing, though the sea was calm, sat silent at the chimney corner with a bad headache, and very devout intentions to the same effect.

“If you knew what it was to go a sea-voyage, like I do,” she protested with forlorn pride, “you’d have a deal more charity in you.” But even Jane’s little presents, brought from “abroad,” did not quite conciliate the others, to whom this chit of a girl had been preferred. Jane, on the whole, however, was better off, even amid the criticisms of the kitchen, than Miss Susan was, seated by herself in the drawing-room, to which the sun did not come round till the afternoon, with the same picture hanging before her eyes which she had used to tempt the Austins at Bruges, with a shawl about her shoulders, and a sombre consciousness in her heart that had never before been known there. It was one of those dull days which so often interpose their unwelcome presence into an English Summer. The sky and the world were gray with east wind, the sun hidden, the color all gone out. The trees stood about and shivered, striking the clouds with their hapless heads; the flowers looked pitiful and appealing, as if they would have liked to be brought indoors and kept in shelter; and the dreariness of the fire-place, done up in white paper ornaments, as is the orthodox Summer fashion of England, was unspeakable. Miss Susan, drawing her shawl round her, sat in her easy-chair near the fire by habit; and a more dismal centre of the room could not have been than that chilly whiteness. How she would have liked a fire! but in the beginning of July, what Englishwoman, with the proper fear of her housemaid before her eyes, would dare to ask for that indulgence? So Miss Susan sat and shivered, and watched the cold trees looking in at the window, and the gray sky above, and drew her shawl closer with a shiver that went through her very heart. The vibration of the Church bells was in the still, rural air, and not a sound in the house.

Miss Susan felt as if she were isolated by some stern power; set apart from the world because of “what had happened;” which was the way she described her own very active agency during the past week to herself. But this did not make her repent, or change her mind in any respect; the excitement of her evil inspiration was still strong upon her; and then there was yet no wrong done, only intended, and of course, at any moment, the wrong which was only in intention might be departed from, and all be well. She had that morning received a letter from Reine, full of joyous thanksgiving over Herbert’s improvement. Augustine, who believed in miracles, had gone off to church in great excitement, to put up Herbert’s name as giving thanks, and to tell the poor people that their prayers had been so far heard; but Miss Susan, who was more of this world, and did not believe in miracles, and to whom the fact that any human event was very desirable made it at once less likely, put very little faith in Reine’s letter. “Poor child! poor boy!” she said to herself, shaking her head and drying her eyes; then put it aside, and thought little more of it. Her own wickedness that she planned was more exciting to her. She sat and brooded over that, while all the parish said their prayers in church, where she, too, ought to have been. For she was not, after all, so very tired; her mind was as full and lively as if there had been no such a thing as fatigue in the world; and I do not think she had anything like an adequate excuse for staying at home.

On the Sunday afternoon Miss Susan received a visit which roused her a little from the self-absorption which this new era in her existence had brought about, though it was only Dr. and Mrs. Richard, who walked across the field to see her after her journey, and to take a cup of tea. They were a pleasant little couple to see, jogging across the fields arm in arm – he the prettiest fresh-colored little old gentleman, in glossy black and ivory white, a model of a neat, little elderly clergyman; she not quite so pretty, but very trim and neat too, in a nice black silk gown, and a bonnet with a rose in it. Mrs. Richard was rather hard upon the old women at the almshouses for their battered flowers, and thought a little plain uniform bonnet of the cottage shape, with a simple brown ribbon, would have been desirable; but for her own part she clung to the rose, which nodded on the summit of her head. Both of them, however, had a conscious look upon their innocent old faces. They had come to “discharge a duty,” and the solemnity of this duty, which was, as they said to each other, a very painful one, overwhelmed and slightly excited them. “What if she should be there herself?” said Mrs. Richard, clasping a little closer her husband’s arm, to give emphasis to her question. “It does not matter who is there; I must do my duty,” said the Doctor, in heroic tones; “besides,” he added, dropping his voice, “she never notices anything that is not said to her, poor soul!”

But happily Miss Augustine was not present when they were shown into the drawing-room where Miss Susan sat writing letters. A good deal was said, of course, which was altogether foreign to the object of the visit: How she enjoyed her journey, whether it was not very fatiguing, whether it had not been very delightful, and a charming change, etc. Miss Susan answered all their questions benignly enough, though she was very anxious to get back to the letter she was writing to Farrel-Austin, and rang the bell for tea and poured it out, and was very gracious, secretly asking herself, what in the name of wonder had brought them here to-day to torment her? But it was not till he had been strengthened by these potations that Dr. Richard spoke.

“My dear Miss Susan,” he said at length, “my coming to-day was not purely accidental, or merely to ask for you after your journey. I wanted to – if you will permit me – put you on your guard.”

“In what respect?” said Miss Susan, quickly, feeling her heart begin to beat. Dr. Richard was the last person in the world whom she could suppose likely to know about the object of her rapid journey, or what she had done; but guilt is very suspicious, and she felt herself immediately put upon her defence.

“I trust that you will not take it amiss that I should speak to you on such a subject,” said the old clergyman, clearing his throat; his pretty, old pink cheek growing quite red with agitation. “I take the very greatest interest in both you and your sister, Miss Susan. You are both of you considerably younger than I am, and I have been here now more than a dozen years, and one cannot help taking an interest in anything connected with the family – ”

“No, indeed; one cannot help it; it would be quite unnatural if one did not take an interest,” said Mrs. Richard, backing him up.

“But nobody objects to your taking an interest,” said Miss Susan. “I think it, as you say, the most natural thing in the world.”

“Thanks, thanks, for saying so!” said Dr. Richard with enthusiasm; and then he looked at his wife, and his wife at him, and there was an awful pause.

“My dear, good, excellent people,” said Miss Susan, hurriedly, “for Heaven’s sake, if there is any bad news coming, out with it at once!”

“No, no; no bad news!” said Dr. Richard; and then he cleared his throat. “The fact is, I came to speak to you – about Miss Augustine. I am afraid her eccentricity is increasing. It is painful, very painful to me to say so, for but for her kindness my wife and I should not have been half so comfortable these dozen years past; but I think it a friend’s duty, not to say a clergyman’s. Miss Susan, you are aware that people say that she is – not quite right in her mind!”

“I am aware that people talk a great deal of nonsense,” said Miss Susan, half-relieved, half-aggravated. “I should not wonder if they said I was mad myself.”

“If they knew!” she added mentally, with a curious thrill of self-arraignment, judging her own cause, and in the twinkling of an eye running over the past and the future, and wondering, if she should ever be found out, whether people would say she was mad too.

“No, no,” said the Doctor; “you are well known for one of the most sensible women in the county.”

“Quite one of the most influential and well-known people in the county,” said Mrs. Richard, with an echo in which there was always an individual tone.

“Well, well; let that be as it may,” said Miss Susan, not dissatisfied with this appreciation; “and what has my sister done – while I have been absent, I suppose?”

“It is a matter of great gravity, and closely concerning myself,” said Dr. Richard, with some dignity. “You are aware, Miss Susan, that my office as Warden of the Almshouses is in some respects an anomalous one, making me, in some degree, subordinate, or apparently so, in my ecclesiastical position to – in fact, to a lady. It is quite a strange, almost unprecedented, combination of circumstances.”

“Very strange indeed,” said Mrs. Richard. “My husband, in his ecclesiastical position, as it were subordinate – to a lady.”

“Pardon me,” said Miss Susan; “I never interfere with Augustine. You knew how it would be when you came.”

“But there are some things one was not prepared for,” said the Doctor, with irrestrainable pathos. “It might set me wrong with the persons I respect most, Miss Susan. Your sister not only attempted to add a petition to the prayers of the Church, which nobody is at liberty to do except the Archbishops themselves, acting under the authority of Government; but finding me inexorable in that – for I hope nothing will ever lead me astray from the laws of the Church – she directed me to request the prayers of the congregation for you, the most respectable person in the neighborhood – for you, as exposed to temptation!”