Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/375

Charles Dickens] she's very much attached to her mother, and will feel the loss very much. Wonderful girl that, sir!"

"Miss Ashurst? She is, indeed!" said Mr. Creswell, abstractedly.

"Such a clever head, such individuality, such dominant will! Let her make up her mind to a thing and you may consider it done! Charming girl, too; simple, unaffected, affectionate—dear me! I think I can see her now, in frilled trousers, bowling a hoop round the schoolhouse garden, and poor Ashurst pointing her out to me through the window! Poor Ashurst! dear me!"

Dr. Osborne pulled out a green silk pocket-handkerchief ornamented with orange spots, buried his face in it, and blew a loud and long note of defiance to the feelings which were very nearly making themselves manifest. When he reappeared to public gaze, Maud and Gertrude had entered the room, and the conversation took a different turn. The young ladies thought it a lovely morning, so fresh and nice, and they hoped they would have no more of that horrid winter, which they detested. Yes, they had seen dear Mrs. Ashurst, and she seemed much the same, if anything a little brighter than last night, but then she always was brighter in the mornings. Miss Ashurst had gone for a turn round the garden, her mother had said. And did uncle remember that they must go to Helmingham church that morning? Oh, Dr. Osborne didn't know that Hooton church was going to be repaired, and that there would not be service there for three or four Sundays. The snow had come through on to the organ, and when they went to repair the place they found that the roof was all rotten, and so they would have to have a new roof. And it was a pity, one of the young ladies thought, that while they were about it they didn't have a new clergyman instead of that deaf old Mr. Coulson, who mumbled so you couldn't hear him. And then Dr. Osborne told them they would be pleased at Helmingham church, for they had a new organist, Mr. Hall, and he had organised a new choir, in which Miss Gill's soprano and Mr. Drake's bass were heard to the greatest effect. Time to start was it not? Uncle must not forget the distance they had to walk. Yes, Maud would drive with Dr. Osborne with pleasure. She liked that dear old pony so much. She would be ready in an instant.

Marian went with the rest of the party to church, and sat with them immediately opposite the head-master's seat, where she had sat for so many years, and which was directly in front of the big school pew. What memories came over her as she looked across the aisle! Her eyes rested on the manly figure and the M.B. waistcoat of Mr. Benthall, who sat in the place of honour, but after an instant he seemed to disappear as in a dissolving view, and there came in his place a bowed and shrunken elderly man, with small white hands nestling under his ample cuffs, all his clothes seemingly too large for him, big lustrous eyes, pale complexion, and iron-grey hair. No other change in the whole church, save in that pew. The lame man who acted as a kind of verger still stumped up the pulpit-stairs and arranged the cushion, greatly to the horror of the preacher of the day, Mr. Trollope, who, being a little man, could hardly be seen in the deep pulpit, and whose soft, little voice could scarcely be heard out of the mass of wood and cotton velvet in which he was steeped to the ears. The butcher, who was also churchwarden and a leading member of the congregation, still applied to himself all the self-accusatory passages in the responses in the Psalms, and gave them out looking round at his fellow-parishioners in a tone of voice which seemed to say, "See what an infernal scoundrel I am, and how I delight in letting you know it!" The boys in the school were in the same places, many of them were the same boys, and the bigger ones, who had been in love with Marian when she lived among them, nudged each other as she came in, and then became scarlet from their clean collars to the roots of their freshly-pomatumed hair. Fresh faces nowhere but there. Change in no life but hers. Yes, as her eye rested on Mr. Creswell's solemn suit of black she remembered that life had changed also for him. And somehow, she could scarcely tell how, she felt comforted by the thought.

They left the church when the service was ended, but it was some time before they were able to start on their way home. Mr. Creswell came so seldom into Helmingham, that many of his old acquaintances saw him there for the first time since his wife's death, and came to offer their long-deferred condolence, and to chat over matters of local gossip. Marian, too, was always a welcome sight to the Helmingham people, and the women gathered round her and asked her about her mother's health,