LIII
It was evening at Emminster Vicarage. The two customary candles were
burning under their green shades in the Vicar's study, but he had not
been sitting there. Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire
which sufficed for the increasing mildness of the spring, and went
out again; sometimes pausing at the front door, going on to the
drawing-room, then returning again to the front door.
It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside, there was still
light enough without to see with distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had
been sitting in the drawing-room, followed him hither.
"Plenty of time yet," said the Vicar. "He doesn't reach Chalk-Newton
till six, even if the train should be punctual, and ten miles of
country-road, five of them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over
in a hurry by our old horse."
"But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear."
"Years ago."
Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this was only
waste of breath, the one essential being simply to wait.
At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the old
pony-chaise appeared indeed outside the railings. They saw alight
therefrom a form which they affected to recognize, but would actually
have passed by in the street without identifying had he not got out
of their carriage at the particular moment when a particular person
was due. Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door, and her
husband came more slowly after her.
The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their anxious faces
in the doorway and the gleam of the west in their spectacles because
they confronted the last rays of day; but they could only see his
shape against the light.
"O, my boy, my boy--home again at last!" cried Mrs Clare, who cared
no more at that moment for the stains of heterodoxy which had caused
all this separation than for the dust upon his clothes. What woman,
indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the
promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes
in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if
weighed against their happiness? As soon as they reached the room
where the candles were lighted she looked at his face.
"O, it is not Angel--not my son--the Angel who went away!" she cried
in all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself aside.
His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure
from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had
experienced, in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his
first aversion to the mockery of events at home. You could see the
skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton.
He matched Crivelli's dead Christus. His sunken eye-pits were of
morbid hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows
and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his
face twenty years before their time.