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 has 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.
