Here she stopped her work suddenly, and looked up at him, her dark sharp eyes lighting up her thin sallow face with an expression which it was beyond his power to fathom. The black eyelashes widened, the dark eyebrows rose, with a full gaze of the profoundest tragic sadness, on the surface of which a certain gleam of amusement seemed to hover. The worn woman looked over the dark world of her own experience, of which she was conscious in every nerve, but of which he knew nothing, and smiled at his youth out of the abysses of her own life, where volcanoes had been, and earthquakes. He perceived it dimly, without understanding how, and faltered and blushed, yet grew angry with all the self-assertion of youth.
“I don’t doubt you know that as well as I do—perhaps better; but notwithstanding, I find my life leaves little room for laughter,” said the young pastor, not without a slight touch of heroics.
“Mr. Vincent,” said Mrs. Hilyard, with a gleam of mirth in her eye, “in inferring that I perhaps know better, you infer also that I am older than you, which is uncivil to a lady. But for my part, I don’t object to laughter. Generally it’s better than crying, which in a great many cases I find the only alternative. I doubt, however, much whether life, from the butterman’s point of view, wears the same aspect. I should be inclined to say not; and I daresay your views will brighten with your company,” added the aggravating woman, again resuming, with eyes fixed upon it, her laborious work.
“I perceive you see already what is likely to be my great trial in Carlingford,” said young Vincent. “I confess that the society of my office-bearers, which I suppose I must always consider myself bound to——”
“That was a very sad sigh,” said the rapid observer beside him; “but don’t confide in me, lest I should be tempted to tell somebody. I can speak my mind without prejudice to anybody; and if you agree with me, it may be a partial relief to your feelings. I shall be glad to see you when you can spare me half an hour. I can’t look at you while I talk, for that would lose me so much time, but at my age it doesn’t matter. Come and see me. It’s your business to do me good—and it’s possible I might even do some good to you.”
“Thank you. I shall certainly come,” said the minister, rising with the feeling that he had received his dismissal for to-day. She rose, too, quickly, and but for a moment, and held out her hand to him.
“Be sure you don’t betray to the dairywoman what I had on my mind, and wanted to tell you, though she is dying to know,” said his singular new acquaintance, without a smile, but with again a momentary movement in her thin cheeks. When she had shaken hands with him, she seated herself again immediately, and without a moment’s pause proceeded with her work, apparently concentrating all her faculties upon it, and neither hearing nor seeing more of her visitor, though he still stood within two steps of her, overshadowing the table. The young man turned and left the room with involuntary quietness, as if he had been dismissed from the presence of a princess. He went straight down-stairs without ever pausing, and hastened through the narrow back-street with still the impulse communicated by that dismissal upon him. When he drew breath, it was with a curious mixture of feelings. Who she was or what she was—how she came there, working at those “slops” till the colour came off upon her hands, and her poor thin fingers bled—she so strangely superior to her surroundings, yet not despising or quarrelling with them, or even complaining of them, so far as he could make out—infinitely perplexed the inexperienced minister. He came away excited and bewildered from the interview, which had turned out so different from his expectations. Whether she had done him good, was extremely doubtful; but she had changed the current of his thoughts, which was in its way an immediate benefit. Marvelling over such a mysterious apparition, and not so sure as in the morning that nothing out of the most vulgar routine ever could occur in Carlingford, Mr. Vincent turned with meditative steps towards the little house at the extreme end of Grove Street, where his predecessor still lingered. A visit to old Mr. Tufton was a periodical once a-week duty, to be performed with the utmost regularity. Tozer and Pigeon had agreed that it would be the making of the young minister to draw thus from the experience of the old one. Whether Mr. Vincent agreed with them, may be apprehended from the scene which follows.
CHAPTER III.
Mr. Tufton’s house was at the extremity of Grove Street—at the extremity, consequently, in that direction, of Carlingford, lying parallel with the end of Grange Lane, and within distant view of St. Roque’s. It was a little old-fashioned house, with a small garden in front and a large garden behind, in which the family cabbages, much less prosperous since the old minister became unable to tend them, flourished. The room into which Mr. Vincent, as an intimate of the house, was shown, was a low parlour with two small windows, overshadowed outside by ivy, and inside by two large geraniums, expanded upon a Jacob’s ladder of props, which were the pride of Mrs. Tufton’s heart, and made it almost impossible to see anything clearly within, even at the height of day. Some prints, of which one represented Mr. Tufton himself, and the rest other ministers of “the connection,” in mahogany frames, hung upon the green walls. The furniture, though it was not unduly abundant, filled up the tiny apartment, so that quite a dislocation and rearrangement of everything was necessary before a chair could be got for the visitor, and he got into it. Though it was rather warm for October out of doors, a fire, large for the size of the room, was burning in the fireplace, on either side of which was an easy-chair and an invalid. The one fronting the light, and consequently fronting the visitor, was Adelaide Tufton, the old minister’s daughter, who had been confined to that chair longer than Phœbe Tozer could remember; and who, during that long seclusion, had knitted, as all Salem Chapel believed, without intermission, nobody having ever yet succeeded in discovering where the mysterious results of her labour went to. She was knitting now, reclining back in the cushioned chair which had been made for her, and was her shell and habitation. A very pale, emaciated, eager-looking woman, not much above thirty, but looking, after half a lifetime spent in that chair, any age that imagination might suggest; a creature altogether separated from the world—separated from life, it would be more proper to say—for nobody more interested in the world and other people’s share of it than Adelaide Tufton existed in Carlingford. She had light-blue eyes, rather prominent, which lightened without giving much expression to her perfectly colourless face. Her very hair was pale, and lay in braids of a clayey yellow, too listless and dull to be called brown, upon the thin temples, over which the thin white skin seemed to be strained like an over-tight bandage. Somehow, however, people who were used to seeing her, were not so sorry as they might have been for Adelaide Tufton. No one could exactly say why; but she somehow appeared, in the opinion of Salem Chapel, to indemnify herself for her privations, and was treated, if without much sympathy, at least without that ostentatious pity which is so galling to the helpless. Few people could afford to be sorry for so quick-sighted and all-remembering an observer; and the consequence was, that Adelaide, almost without knowing it, had managed to neutralise her own disabilities, and to be acknowledged as an equal in the general conflict, which she could enter only with her sharp tongue and her quick eye.
It was Mr. Tufton himself who sat opposite—his large expanse of face, with the white hair which had been apostrophised as venerable at so many Salem tea-parties, and which Vincent himself had offered homage to, looming dimly through the green shade of the geraniums, as he sat with his back to the window. He had a green shade over his eyes besides, and his head moved with a slight palsied tremor, which was now the only remnant of that “visitation” which had saved his feelings, and dismissed more benignly than Tozer and his brother deacons the old pastor from his old pulpit. He sat very contentedly doing nothing, with his large feet in large loose slippers, and his elbows supported on the arms of his chair. By the evidence of Mrs. Tufton’s spectacles, and the newspaper lying on the table, it was apparent that she had been reading the ‘Carlingford Gazette’ to her helpless companions; and that humble journal, which young Vincent had kicked to the other end of his room before coming out, had made the morning pass very pleasantly to the three secluded inmates of Siloam Cottage, which was the name of the old minister’s humble home.