'I have been to the station on purpose to meet you!' cried Mr.
Torkingham, 'and was returning with the idea that you had not come. I am
your grandmother's emissary. She could not come herself, and as she was
anxious, and nobody else could be spared, I came for her.' Then they walked on together. The parson told Swithin all about his grandmother, the parish, and his endeavours to enlighten it; and in due course said, 'You are no doubt aware that Lady Constantine is living
again at Welland?' Swithin said he had heard as much, and added, what was far within the
truth, that the news of the Bishop's death had been a great surprise to
him.
'Yes,' said Mr. Torkingham, with nine thoughts to one word. 'One might
have prophesied, to look at him, that Melchester would not lack a bishop
for the next forty years. Yes; pale death knocks at the cottages of the
poor and the palaces of kings with an impartial foot!' 'Was he a particularly good man?' asked Swithin.
'He was not a Ken or a Heber. To speak candidly, he had his faults, of which arrogance was not the least. But who is perfect?' Swithin, somehow, felt relieved to hear that the Bishop was not a perfect
man.
'His poor wife, I fear, had not a great deal more happiness with him than
with her first husband. But one might almost have foreseen it; the
marriage was hasty--the result of a red-hot caprice, hardly becoming in a
man of his position; and it betokened a want of temperate discretion
which soon showed itself in other ways. That's all there was to be said
against him, and now it's all over, and things have settled again into
their old course. But the Bishop's widow is not the Lady Constantine of
former days. No; put it as you will, she is not the same. There seems
to be a nameless something on her mind--a trouble--a rooted melancholy,
which no man's ministry can reach. Formerly she was a woman whose
confidence it was easy to gain; but neither religion nor philosophy
avails with her now. Beyond that, her life is strangely like what it was
when you were with us.' Conversing thus they pursued the turnpike road till their conversation
was interrupted by a crying voice on their left. They looked, and
perceived that a child, in getting over an adjoining stile, had fallen on
his face.
Mr. Torkingham and Swithin both hastened up to help the sufferer, who was
a lovely little fellow with flaxen hair, which spread out in a frill of
curls from beneath a quaint, close-fitting velvet cap that he wore.
Swithin picked him up, while Mr. Torkingham wiped the sand from his lips
and nose, and administered a few words of consolation, together with a
few sweet-meats, which, somewhat to Swithin's surprise, the parson
produced as if by magic from his pocket. One half the comfort rendered
would have sufficed to soothe such a disposition as the child's. He
ceased crying and ran away in delight to his unconscious nurse, who was
reaching up for blackberries at a hedge some way off.