I often preach them patience and endurance, but I do not believe, put to the proof, I myself should practise the half of it. To think of their being driven away, outcasts from the only friends who love them; watched, and harassed, and threatened darkly by a foe, who will not meet them face to face. And to bear all this and be innocent — for, upon my soul, the lad is innocent! — is it not enough to drive them to despair? And yet, all the gold in that boy’s nature is being ten times refined in the fiery furnace of affliction, and as for his sister—”
Here a radiant smile appears on the lips of the Minor Canon, and brightens his eyes; but it is lost on his mother, whose own eyes are cast down and clouded by thickly-falling tears. She quickly wipes them away, and not to expose herself to the bare supposition of having changed her mind, says —
“Then what is the reason of your being so sad and troubled and so unlike yourself, since it is not that?”
“A horrible suspicion has sprung up in my mind; a suspicion so horrible that, without proof to confirm it, it would be a sin to utter it, even to you. It seems a sin to have conceived it, and yet it suddenly came to me, almost like an inspiration, and having come, seemed to be the result of reasoning, which my mind had been carrying on unconsciously for months. God grant I may be wrong,” adds the Minor Canon, rising and shaking himself, as if to be rid of these melancholy thoughts. Then, catching a glimpse of his mother’s anxious face —
“I must take a run in the fresh air. You see I have my fits, as well as other people; but I know a cure — a fresh air cure. I shall come back in half an hour as fresh as a bee, ‘ gathering honey from every opening flower.’”
Humming cheerfully, to complete the metaphor, the Rev. Septimus is in full trot, leaving her looking wistfully after him from the doorstep.
* * * *
The Very Revd the Dean was both surprised and perplexed, though, as he declared to Mrs. Dean— “Not quite so surprised, as perplexed, perplexed. For, my dear, how are we in so short a time, to find a substitute? And even with time before us, such a choir-master is not so easily to be found again; such voice! such expression! so attentive too, and punctual in attendance — in short, in every respect so unexceptional. A sad calamity for a man, though, a very sad calamity!”
Now that the Dean comes to think of it, he is not surprised at all that Mr. Jasper should wish to give up his situation as choir-master, and go to London.
He had declared that he could not remain any longer in Cloisterham; the very air he breathed there, every note he sung there, every corner in the town, and every nook in the Cathedral, reminded him — here he had choked and become deadly pale; but the Dean had understood him; yes, the Dean had understood him perfectly, and had felt for him deeply; poor man! poor man! His salary was not the object to him it had been; the lawyer from London had communicated with him, and informed him that certain moneys, which would have been handed over to his lost nephew on his coming of age — the words brought out in a spasmodic way, and with the same deadly paleness — were at his disposal, as the only near relative. He had begged the Dean as a personal favour to supply his place as soon as possible, and of course the Dean could not refuse him; though, as he said before, “he was grieved to part with him, grieved and perplexed.” Thus the Dean, sitting cosily with Mrs. Dean, in the cool of the evening, in the verandah at the back of the Deanery, and speaking in that tone of lazy, cheerful discontent, becoming and natural to an afterdinner Dean; with such a glorious vista before him of sunny peaches and apricots, and mellowing plums, and blushing apples, in such quantity and quality as only were to be found in that Deanery garden, hidden from profane eyes by high walls, and only accessible to the favoured few, who were honoured in Cloisterham by the general and significant title of “those who visited at the Deanery.” Thus the Dean, and the opinions expressed by him on this occasion, were echoed that same evening through all Cloisterham. Every one related it to somebody else, and though occasional variations were observable, the echo remained pretty faithful to its original.