"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.

"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.

"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism--of a mechanical, a scientific age--which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at St Peter's, I think?"

"You wouldn't see _very_ much of me, if I did come," I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"

Mr Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. "I wish," he said, with a gallant little bow, "there were more like you."

"More like _me_, Mr Crimble?"

"I mean," he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom, whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, "I mean that--that you--that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear."

We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs Bowater's black currant jam.

"But then, I have plenty of time," I said agreeably. "And the real difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had some of Miss Bowater's brains."

A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly begun eating again.

"Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a--a brilliant young lady. The very life of a party, I a.s.sure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely, Miss M., religion _should_ be the great solvent. At least, that is my view."

He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out through my window-blinds.

"Mixing people must be very wearisome," I suggested, examining his face.

"'Wearisome,'" he repeated blandly. "I am sometimes at my wits' end. No.

A curate's life is not a happy one." Yet he confessed it almost with joy.

"And the visiting!" I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr Crimble, little dreaming how soon that want was to be satiated.

"I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough."

"But I a.s.sure you," he replied, politely but firmly, "a true religion is exceedingly difficult. 'The eye of a needle'--we mustn't forget that."

"Ah, yes," said I warmly; "that 'eye' will be narrow enough even for a person with my little advantages. I remember my mother's cook telling me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went to h.e.l.l. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother."

Mr Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.

"I remember, too," I went on, "one summer's day as a very little girl I was taken to the evening service. And the singing--bursting out like that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window."

"Jumped out of the window!" cried my visitor in consternation.

"Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn't hurt myself.

The gra.s.s was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it--the air and the tombstones. And though I had my gasps, the 'eye' seemed big enough when I was a child.

But afterwards--when I was confirmed--I thought of h.e.l.l a good deal. I can't _see_ it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons.

_That_ can't be right."

"My dear young lady!" cried Mr Crimble, as if shocked, "is it wise to attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love."

"Yes," I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, "I believe that." And I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. "Have you ever read Mr Clodd's _Childhood of the World_, Mr Crimble?"

By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. "Mr Clodd?... Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man."

"This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of religion were not invented by devils. They were 'Man's struggles from darkness to twilight.' What he meant was that no man _loves_ darkness.

At least," I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, "not without the stars."

"That is exceedingly true," replied Mr Crimble. "And, talking of stars, what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick parishioner, Mr Hubbins." Then it was _his_ foot that f.a.n.n.y and I had heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of bread and b.u.t.ter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: "Sick, I regret to say, no longer."

"Dead?" I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.

Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr Hubbins. "I should not like to go to h.e.l.l in the snow," I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:--

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte --_Every nighte and alle_, Fire and sleet and candle-lighte, _And Christe receive thy saule_!"

"Beautiful, beautiful," murmured Mr Crimble, yet not without a trace of alarm in his dark eyes. "But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr Hubbins---- His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end."

"Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr Crimble. Surely one must be more alive in that last hour than ever--just when one's going away.

At any rate," and I couldn't refrain a sigh, almost of envy, "I hope _I_ shall be. Was Mr Hubbins a good man?"

"He was a most regular church-goer," replied my visitor a little unsteadily; "a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be greatly missed. You may remember what Mr Ruskin wrote of his father: 'Here lies an entirely honest merchant.' Mr Ruskin, senior, was, as a matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr Hubbins, I believe, was in linen, though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven't we," and he cleared his throat, "haven't we--er--strayed into a rather lugubrious subject?"

"We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world," said I.

"Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn't always _think_ too closely. 'Days and moments quickly flying,' true enough, though hardly appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the Christian year. But, on the other hand, 'we may make our lives sublime.'

Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr Hub----"

"Yes," I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to the bait, "but what do you think Longfellow absolutely _meant_ by his 'sailor on the main' of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody else having been shipwrecked and just leaving _footprints_ in the sand?

I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr Crimble, that merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don't think that can be so, because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn't he?--at least for a poet. For my part," I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor, and on familiar ground, "I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the savages as 'without Pa.s.sions, Sullenness, or Designs,' even though he did, poor thing, 'have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh'? Not that I mean to suggest," I added hastily, "that Mr Hubbins was in any sense a cannibal."

"By no means," said Mr Crimble helplessly. "But there," and he brushed his knees with his handkerchief, "I fear you are too much of a reader for me, and--and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St Peter's. Mother Church has room for all, you know, in her--about her footstool." He smiled at me very kindly. "And our organist, Mr Temple, has been treating us to some charmingly quaint old carols--at least the words seem a little quaint to a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a _student_ of poetry.

Parochial work leaves little time even for the cla.s.sics:--

"Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.

Favete linguis...."

He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate the whole ode for me, when I heard f.a.n.n.y's step at the door. I desisted.

At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs Bowater's firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with relief--like Longfellow's shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a ship.

f.a.n.n.y's pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright with the cold--for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she had come out of a dream. Whatever cla.s.s of the community Mr Crimble may have meant to include in his _Odi_, the celerity with which he rose to greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater's. She smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr Crimble instinctively folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.

"But, Miss Bowater," he pleaded, "the printer has been waiting nearly two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now."

"Yes," said f.a.n.n.y, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly removing her gloves. "It is annoying. I hadn't a vestige of a cold last night."