Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/39

 and hoped; she was waiting and hoping, calmly and quietly fulfilling the ordinary duties of her very ordinary life, but never losing sight of her fixed intent. Then across the path of her life there came a man who seemed to give promise of eventually fulfilling the requirements she had planned out for herself. It was but a promise; there was nothing tangible; but the promise was so good, the girl's heart yearned for an occupant, and, with all its hard teaching and its worldly aspirations, it was but human after all. So her human heart and her worldly wisdom came to a compromise in the matter of her acceptance of a lover, and the result of that compromise was her engagement to Walter Joyce.

When the Helmingham Grammar School was under the misrule of old Dr. Munch, then at its lowest ebb, and nominations to the foundation were to be had for the asking, and, indeed, in many cases were sent a-begging, it occurred to the old head master to offer one of the vacancies to Mr. Joyce, the principal grocer and maltster of the village, whose son was then just of an age to render him accessible to the benefits of the education which Sir Ranulph Clinton had demised to the youth of Helmingham, and which was then being so imperfectly supplied to them under the auspices of Dr. Munch. You must not for an instant imagine that the offer was made by the old Doctor out of pure loving-kindness and magnanimity; he looked at it, as he did at most things, from a purely practical point of view; he owed Joyce, the grocer, so much money, and if Joyce, the grocer, would write him a receipt in full for all his indebtedness in return for a nomination for Joyce junior, at least he, the Doctor, would not have done a bad stroke of business. He would have wiped out an existing score, the value of which proceeding meant, in Dr. Munch's eyes, that he would be enabled at once to commence a fresh one, while the acquisition of young Joyce as a scholar would not cause one atom of difference in the manner in which the school was conducted, or rather left to conduct itself. The offer was worth making, for the debt was heavy, though the Doctor was by no means sure of its being accepted. Andrew Joyce was not Helmingham born; he had come from Spindleton, one of the large inland capitals, and had purchased the business which he owned. He was not popular among the Helmingham folk, who were all strict church people, so far as morning service attending, tithe paying, and parson-respecting were concerned, from the fact that his religious tendencies were suspected to be what the villagers termed "methodee." He had his seat in the village church, it is true, and put in an appearance there on the Sunday morning, but instead of spending the Sabbath evening in the orthodox way—which at Helmingham consisted in sitting in the best parlour, with a very dim light, and enjoying the blessings of sound sleep, while Nelson's Fasts and Festivals, or some equally proper work, rested on the sleeper's knee, until it fell off with a crash, and was only recovered to be held upside down until the grateful announcement of the arrival of supper—Mr. Joyce was in the habit of dropping into Salem Chapel, where Mr. Stoker, a shining light from the pottery district, dealt forth the most uncomfortable doctrine in the most forcible manner. The Helmingham people declared, too, that Andrew Joyce was "uncanny" in other ways; he was close-fisted and niggardly, his name was to be found on no subscription list; he was litigious; he declared that Mr. Prickett, the old-fashioned solicitor of the village, was too slow for him, and he put his law matters into the hands of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, attorneys at Brocksopp, who levied a distress before other people had served a writ, and who were considered the sharpest practitioners in the county. Old Dr. Munch had heard of the process of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, and the dread of any of it being exercised on him originally prompted his offer to Andrew Joyce. He knew that he might count on an ally in Andrew Joyce's wife, a superior woman in very delicate health, who had great influence with her husband, and who was devoted to her only son. Mrs. Joyce, when Hester Baines, had been a Bible-class teacher in Spindleton, and had had herself a fair amount of education, would have had more, for she was a very earnest woman in her vocation, ever striving to gain more knowledge herself for the mere purpose of imparting it to others, but from her early youth she had been fighting with a spinal disease, to which she was gradually succumbing, so that although sour granite-faced Andrew Joyce was not the exact helpmate that the girl so full of love and trust would have chosen for herself, when he offered her his hand and his home, she was glad to avail herself of the protection thus afforded, and of the temporary peace which she could thus enjoy, until called, as she thought she should be, very speedily to her eternal rest.