"Have you any message for your old playfellow, Miss Garth?" said the
Vicar, as he took a fragrant apple from the basket which she held
towards him, and put it in his pocket. "Something to soften down that
harsh judgment? I am going straight to see him."
"No," said Mary, shaking her head, and smiling. "If I were to say that
he would not be ridiculous as a clergyman, I must say that he would be
something worse than ridiculous. But I am very glad to hear that he is
going away to work."
"On the other hand, I am very glad to hear that _you_ are not going
away to work. My mother, I am sure, will be all the happier if you
will come to see her at the vicarage: you know she is fond of having
young people to talk to, and she has a great deal to tell about old
times. You will really be doing a kindness."
"I should like it very much, if I may," said Mary. "Everything seems
too happy for me all at once. I thought it would always be part of my
life to long for home, and losing that grievance makes me feel rather
empty: I suppose it served instead of sense to fill up my mind?"
"May I go with you, Mary?" whispered Letty--a most inconvenient child,
who listened to everything. But she was made exultant by having her
chin pinched and her cheek kissed by Mr. Farebrother--an incident
which she narrated to her mother and father.
As the Vicar walked to Lowick, any one watching him closely might have
seen him twice shrug his shoulders. I think that the rare Englishmen
who have this gesture are never of the heavy type--for fear of any
lumbering instance to the contrary, I will say, hardly ever; they have
usually a fine temperament and much tolerance towards the smaller
errors of men (themselves inclusive). The Vicar was holding an inward
dialogue in which he told himself that there was probably something
more between Fred and Mary Garth than the regard of old playfellows,
and replied with a question whether that bit of womanhood were not a
great deal too choice for that crude young gentleman. The rejoinder to
this was the first shrug. Then he laughed at himself for being likely
to have felt jealous, as if he had been a man able to marry, which,
added he, it is as clear as any balance-sheet that I am not. Whereupon
followed the second shrug.
What could two men, so different from each other, see in this "brown
patch," as Mary called herself? It was certainly not her plainness
that attracted them (and let all plain young ladies be warned against
the dangerous encouragement given them by Society to confide in their
want of beauty). A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very
wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences:
and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one
loved.