"What, you can read Hebrew, Alick?"
"So can you."
"Enough to appreciate the disputed passages. When did you study it?"
"I learnt enough, when I was laid up, to look out my uncle's texts for
him."
She felt a little abashed by the tone, but a message called him away,
and before his return Mr. Clare came back to ask for a reference to St.
Augustine. On her offer of her services, she was thanked, and directed
with great precision to the right volume of the Library of the Fathers,
but spying a real St. Augustine, she could not be satisfied without a
flight at the original. It was not, however, easy to find the place; she
was forced to account for her delay by confessing her attempt, and
then to profit by Mr. Clare's directions, and, after all, her false
quantities, though most tenderly and apologetically corrected, must have
been dreadful to the scholarly ear, for she was obliged to get Alick to
read the passage over to him before he arrived at the sense, and Rachel
felt her flight of clever womanhood had fallen short. It was quite new
to her to be living with people who knew more of, and went deeper into,
everything than she did, and her husband's powers especially amazed her.
The afternoon was chiefly spent in the hay-field under a willow-tree;
Mr. Clare tried to leave the young people to themselves, but they would
not consent; and, after a good deal of desultory talk and description of
the minnows and water-spiders, in whom Mr. Clare seemed to take a deep
interest, they went on with their book till the horses came, and Alick
took Rachel for a ride in Earlsworthy Park, a private gate of which,
just opposite to the Rectory, was free to its inhabitants. The Duke was
an old college friend of Mr. Clare, and though much out of health, and
hardly ever able to reside at the Park, all its advantages were at the
Rector's service, and they were much appreciated when, on this sultry
summer's day, Rachel found shade and coolness in the deep arcades of the
beech woods, and freshness on the upland lawns, as she rode happily on
the dear old mare, by whom she really thought herself fondly recognised.
There was something in the stillness of the whole, even in the absence
of the roll and plash of the sea waves beside which she had grown up,
that seemed to give her repose from the hurry and throb of sensations
and thoughts that had so long preyed upon her; and when the ride was
over she was refreshed, not tired, and the evening bell drew her to the
conclusion most befitting a day spent in that atmosphere of quietude.
She felt grateful to her husband for making no remark, though the only
time she had been within a church since her illness had been at their
wedding, he only gave her his arm, and said she should sit in the nook
that used to be his in the time of his lameness; and a most sheltered
nook it was, between a pillar and the open chancel screen, where no eyes
could haunt her, even if the congregation had been more than a Saturday
summer evening one.