Grant Allen - Babylon. Volume 3

At last, however, after one of these regular six-monthly notices the rector happened to come down to breakfast one morning, and found a letter in a strange foreign-looking hand lying beside his porridge on the dining-room table. He turned it over and looked anxiously at the back: – yes, it was just as he hoped and feared; it bore a London post-mark, and had a Byzantine-look-ing coronet embossed upon it in profuse gilding and brilliantly blazoned heraldic colours. The old man’s heart sank within him. ‘Confound it,’ he said to himself, half-angrily, ‘I do believe I’ve gone and done my duty this time with a regular vengeance. This is an answer to the advertisement at last, and it’s an application from somebody or other to carry off dear little Miss Wroe to Rome as somebody’s governess. Hang it all, how shall I ever manage, at my age too, to accommodate myself to another young woman! I won’t open it now. I can’t open it now. If I open it before prayers and breakfast, and it really turns out to be quite satisfactory, I shall break down over it, I know I shall; and then little Miss Wroe will see I’ve been crying about it, and refuse to leave us – she’s a good girl, and if she knew how much I valued her, she’d refuse to leave us; and so after all she’d never get to join this sculptor son of young Sam Churchill’s that she’s for ever thinking of. I’ll put it away till after breakfast. Perhaps indeed it mayn’t be at all the thing for her – which would be very lucky – no, I mean unlucky; – well, there, there, what a set of miserable selfish wretched creatures we are really, whenever it comes to making even a small sacrifice for one another. Con O’Donovan, my boy, you know perfectly well in your heart of hearts you were half-wishing that that poor girl wasn’t going at last to join her lover that she’s so distracted about; and yet after that, you have the impudence to get up in the pulpit every Sunday morning, and preach a sermon about our duty to others to your poor parishioners – perhaps, even out of the fifth chapter of Matthew, you confounded hypocrite! It seems to me there’s a good deal of truth in that line of Tennyson’s, though it sounds so cynical:

However we brave it out, we men are a little breed!

Upon my soul, when I come to think of it, I’m really and truly quite ashamed of myself.’

Do you ever happen to have noticed that the very men who have the smallest possible leaven of littleness, or meanness, or selfishness, in their own natures are usually the exact ones who most often bitterly reproach themselves for their moral shortcomings in this matter?

When the rector came to open the envelope by-and-by in his own study, he found it contained a letter in French from a Russian countess, then in London, who proposed spending the winter in Italy. ‘Madame had seen M. O’Donovan’s Advertisement in a journal of his country, and would be glad to learn from Monsieur some particulars about the young lady whom he desired to recommend to families. Madame required a governess for one little girl, and proposed a salary of 2,500 francs.’ The old man’s eyes brightened at the idea of so large an offer – one hundred pounds sterling – and then he laid down the letter again, and cried gently to himself, as old people sometimes do, for a few minutes. After that, he reflected that Georgey Wroe’s daughter was a very good girl, and deserved any advancement that he could get for her; and Georgey was a fine young fellow himself, and as clever a hand at managing a small smack in a squall off the Chesil as any fisherman, bar none, in all England. God bless his soul, what a run that was they had together, the night the ‘Sunderbund’ East Indiaman went to pieces off Deadman’s Bay, from Seaton Bar right round the Bill to Lulworth! He could mind even now the way the water broke over the gunwale into Georgey’s face, and how Georgey laughed at the wind, and swore it was a mere breeze, and positively whistled to it. Well, well, he would do what he could for Georgey’s daughter, and he must look out (with a stifled sigh) for some other good girl to take care of Lucy’s precious little ones.

So he sat down and wrote off such a glowing account of Minna’s many virtues to the Russian countess in London – an account mainly derived from his own calm inner belief as to what a perfect woman’s character ought to be made up of – that the Russian countess wrote back to say she would engage Mdlle. Wroe immediately, without even waiting to see her. Till he got that answer, Mr. O’Donovan never said a word about the matter to Minna, for fear she might be disappointed; but as soon as it arrived, and he had furtively dried his eyes behind his handkerchief, lest she should see how sorry he was to lose her, he laid the two letters triumphantly down before her, and said, in a voice which seemed as though he were quite as much interested in the event as she was: ‘There you see, my dear, I’ve found somebody at last for you to go to Rome with.’ Minna’s head reeled and her eyes swam as she read the two letters to herself with some difficulty (for her French was of the strictly school-taught variety); but as soon as she had spelt out the meaning to her own intense satisfaction, she flung her arms round old Mr. O’Donovan’s neck, and kissed him twice fervently. Mr. O’Donovan’s eyes glistened, and he kissed her in return gently on her forehead. She had grown to be to him almost like a daughter, and he loved her so dearly that it was a hard wrench to part from her. ‘And you know, my dear,’ he said to her with fatherly tenderness, ‘you won’t mind my mentioning it to you, I’m sure, because I need hardly tell you how much interest I take in my old friend Georgey’s daughter; but I think it’s just as well the lady’s a foreigner, and especially a Russian, because they’re not so particular, I believe, about the conventionalities of society as our English mothers are apt to be; and you’ll probably get more opportunities of seeing young Churchill when occasion offers than you would have done if you’d happened to have gone abroad with an English family.’

When Minna went away from the country rectory, at very short notice, some three weeks later, Mary the housemaid observed, with a little ill-natured smile to the other village gossips, that it wasn’t before it was time, neither; for the way that that there Miss Wroe, as she called herself, had been carrying on last month or two along of poor old master, and him a clergyman, too, and old enough to know better, but there, what can you expect, for everybody knows what an old gentleman is when a governess or anybody can twist him round her little finger, was that dreadful that really she often wondered whether a respectable girl as was always brought up quite decent and her only a fisherman’s daughter, too, as master hisself admitted, but them governesses, when they got theirselves a little eddication and took a sitooation, was that stuck-up and ridiculous, not but what she made her always keep her place, for that matter, for she wasn’t going to be put down by none of your governesses, setting themselves up to be ladies when they wasn’t no better nor she was, but at any rate it was a precious good thing she was gone now before things hadn’t gone no further, for if she’d stayed, why, of course, there wouldn’t have been nothing left for her to do, as had always lived in proper families, but to go and give notice herself afore she’d stop in such a sitooation.

And Mrs. Upjohn, the doctor’s wife, smiled blandly when Mary spoke to her about it, and said in a grave tone of severe moral censure: ‘Well, there, Mary, you oughtn’t to want to meddle with your master’s business, whatever you may happen to fancy. Not but what Miss Wroe herself certainly did behave in a most imprudent and unladylike manner; and I can’t deny, of course, that she’s laid herself open to every word of what you say about her. But then, you know, Mary, she isn’t a lady; and, after all, what can you expect from such a person?’ To which Mary, having that profound instinctive contempt for her own class which is sometimes begotten among the essentially vulgar by close unconscious introspection, immediately answered: ‘Ah, what indeed!’ and went on unrebuked with her ill-natured gossip. So high and watchful is social morality amid the charming Arcadian simplicity of our outlying English country villages.