Lifes Little Ironies | Page 2

who watched her away, the answer
came that she was the second wife of the incumbent of a neighbouring
parish, and that she was lame. She was generally believed to be a
woman with a story--an innocent one, but a story of some sort or other.
In conversing with her on their way home the boy who walked at her
elbow said that he hoped his father had not missed them.
'He have been so comfortable these last few hours that I am sure he
cannot have missed us,' she replied.
'Has, dear mother--not have!' exclaimed the public-school boy, with an
impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. 'Surely you know that
by this time!'
His mother hastily adopted the correction, and did not resent his
making it, or retaliate, as she might well have done, by bidding him to
wipe that crumby mouth of his, whose condition had been caused by
surreptitious attempts to eat a piece of cake without taking it out of the
pocket wherein it lay concealed. After this the pretty woman and the
boy went onward in silence.
That question of grammar bore upon her history, and she fell into
reverie, of a somewhat sad kind to all appearance. It might have been
assumed that she was wondering if she had done wisely in shaping her
life as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this.

In a remote nook in North Wessex, forty miles from London, near the
thriving county-town of Aldbrickham, there stood a pretty village with
its church and parsonage, which she knew well enough, but her son had
never seen. It was her native village, Gaymead, and the first event
bearing upon her present situation had occurred at that place when she
was only a girl of nineteen.
How well she remembered it, that first act in her little tragi-comedy, the
death of her reverend husband's first wife. It happened on a spring
evening, and she who now and for many years had filled that first
wife's place was then parlour-maid in the parson's house.
When everything had been done that could be done, and the death was
announced, she had gone out in the dusk to visit her parents, who were
living in the same village, to tell them the sad news. As she opened the
white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose westward,
shutting out the pale light of the evening sky, she discerned, without
much surprise, the figure of a man standing in the hedge, though she
roguishly exclaimed as a matter of form, 'Oh, Sam, how you frightened
me!'
He was a young gardener of her acquaintance. She told him the
particulars of the late event, and they stood silent, these two young
people, in that elevated, calmly philosophic mind which is engendered
when a tragedy has happened close at hand, and has not happened to
the philosophers themselves. But it had its bearing upon their relations.
'And will you stay on now at the Vicarage, just the same?' asked he.
She had hardly thought of that. 'Oh, yes--I suppose!' she said.
'Everything will be just as usual, I imagine?'
He walked beside her towards her mother's. Presently his arm stole
round her waist. She gently removed it; but he placed it there again,
and she yielded the point. 'You see, dear Sophy, you don't know that
you'll stay on; you may want a home; and I shall be ready to offer one
some day, though I may not be ready just yet.

'Why, Sam, how can you be so fast! I've never even said I liked 'ee; and
it is all your own doing, coming after me!'
'Still, it is nonsense to say I am not to have a try at you like the rest.' He
stooped to kiss her a farewell, for they had reached her mother's door.
'No, Sam; you sha'n't!' she cried, putting her hand over his mouth. 'You
ought to be more serious on such a night as this.' And she bade him
adieu without allowing him to kiss her or to come indoors.
The vicar just left a widower was at this time a man about forty years of
age, of good family, and childless. He had led a secluded existence in
this college living, partly because there were no resident landowners;
and his loss now intensified his habit of withdrawal from outward
observation. He was still less seen than heretofore, kept himself still
less in time with the rhythm and racket of the movements called
progress in the world without. For many months after his wife's decease
the economy of his household remained as before; the cook, the
housemaid, the parlour-maid, and the man out-of-doors performed their
duties or left them undone, just as Nature prompted them--the