The maid was a poor windling thing, and, though a playward piece o' flesh
when he married her, 'a socked and sighed, and went out like a snoff!
Yes, my lady. Well, when Pa'son St. Cleeve married this homespun woman
the toppermost folk wouldn't speak to his wife. Then he dropped a cuss
or two, and said he'd no longer get his living by curing their twopenny
souls o' such d--- nonsense as that (excusing my common way), and he took
to farming straightway, and then 'a dropped down dead in a nor'-west
thunderstorm; it being said--hee-hee!--that Master God was in tantrums
wi'en for leaving his service,--hee-hee! I give the story as I heard it,
my lady, but be dazed if I believe in such trumpery about folks in the
sky, nor anything else that's said on 'em, good or bad. Well, Swithin,
the boy, was sent to the grammar school, as I say for; but what with
having two stations of life in his blood he's good for nothing, my lady.
He mopes about--sometimes here, and sometimes there; nobody troubles
about en.' Lady Constantine thanked her informant, and proceeded onward. To her, as
a woman, the most curious feature in the afternoon's incident was that
this lad, of striking beauty, scientific attainments, and cultivated
bearing, should be linked, on the maternal side, with a local
agricultural family through his father's matrimonial eccentricity. A
more attractive feature in the case was that the same youth, so capable
of being ruined by flattery, blandishment, pleasure, even gross
prosperity, should be at present living on in a primitive Eden of
unconsciousness, with aims towards whose accomplishment a Caliban shape
would have been as effective as his own.