Frank Nash Westcott - Hepsey Burke

Hepsey retired hastily, lest her face should relax its well-assumed severity.

Maxwell, in the meantime, felt it a part of his duty to console and soothe the ruffled feelings of his zealous and fluent parishioner, and to Virginia’s pride his offer of escort to Willow Bluff was ample reparation for the untoward interruption of her oratory. She 82 delivered into his hands, with sensitive upward glance, the receptacle containing her manuscript, and set a brisk pace, at which she insured the passing of the other guests along the road, making visible her triumph over circumstance and at the same time obviating untimely intrusion of a tete-a-tete conversation.

“You must have given a great deal of time and study to your subject,” remarked Maxwell politely.

“It is very near to my heart,” responded Virginia, in welling tones. “Home-life is, to me, almost a religion. Do you not feel, with me, that it is the most valuable of human qualities, Mr. Maxwell?”

“I do indeed, and one of the most difficult to reduce to a science,”—she glanced up at him apprehensively, whereupon, lest he seemed to have erred in fact, he added,—“as you made us realize in your paper.”

“It is so nice to have your appreciation,” she gurgled. “Often I feel it almost futile to try to influence our cold parish audiences; their attitude is so stolid, so unimaginative. As you must have realized, in the pulpit, they are so hard to lead into untrodden paths. Let us take the way home by the lane,” she added coyly, leading off the road down a sheltered by-way.

The lane was rough, and the lady, tightly and lightly 83 shod, stumbled neatly and grasped her escort’s arm for support—and retained it for comfort.

“What horizons your sermons have spread before us—and, yet,”—she hesitated,—“I often wonder, as my eyes wander over the congregation, how many besides myself, really hear your message, really see what you see.”

Her hand trembled on his arm, and Maxwell was a little at a loss, though anxious not to seem unresponsive to Virginia’s enthusiasm for spiritual vision.

“I feel that my first attention has to be given to the simpler problems, here in Durford,” he replied. “But I am glad if I haven’t been dull, in the process.”

“Dull? No indeed—how can you say that! To my life—you will understand?” (she glanced up with tremulous flutter of eyelids) “—you have brought so much helpfulness and—and warmth.” She sighed eloquently.

Maxwell was no egotist, and was always prone to see only an impersonal significance in parish compliments. A more self-conscious subject for confidences would have replied less openly.

“I am glad—very glad. But you must not think that the help has been one-sided. You have seconded my efforts so energetically—indeed I don’t know what I could have accomplished without such whole-hearted 84 help as you and Mrs. Burke and others have given.”

To the optimistic Virginia the division of the loaves and fishes of his personal gratitude was scarcely heeded. She cherished her own portion, and soon magnified it to a basketful—and soon, again, to a monopoly of the entire supply. As he gave her his hand at the door of Willow Bluff, she was in fit state to invest that common act of friendliness with symbolic significance of a rosy future.

Mrs. Burke seemed incapable of sitting still, with folded hands, for any length of time; and when the stress of her attention to household work, and her devotion to neighborly good deeds relaxed, she turned to knitting wash-rags as a sportsman turns to his gun, or a toper to his cups. She seemed to find more stimulus for thought and more helpful diversion in the production of one wash-rag than most persons find in a trip abroad.

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