Fulk and the dissenting minister were the only friends
the poor man had, and the latter Hester would not
let into her house. As to Perrault, he loathed
and shrank from him as the real destroyer of all his
peace, and still the most dangerous influence about
his wife. He never said so, but we felt it.
I think the poor man’s happiest hours were spent
here; and, now and then in a press of work, or to
show how a thing ought to be done, he put his own
hand to axe, lever, or hay-fork, and toiled with that
cruelly-wasted alert strength.
Fulk always says there never was anyone who taught
him so much as Joel Lea, and he means deeper things
than farming.
Sometimes Mr. Lea brought his little boy. I
was vexed at first; but Alured, who had hardly spoken
to a child before, was in ecstasies, as if a new existence
had come upon him; and Trevor Lea was really a very
nice little boy. He was only half a year the
elder; and they were so much alike that strangers
did not know them apart, dressed alike, as they were;
or they were taken for twins, and it made people laugh
to find they were uncle and nephew.
And I must allow the nephew was the best behaved,
though it made me savage to hear Fulk say so.
But our Ally’s was not real naughtiness--only
the consequence of our not being able to keep up discipline,
while we lived in dread of that seventh year that
might rob us of our darling—always sweet
and loving.
A change or two began to creep into our life.
One afternoon, as Jaquetta, in her pretty pink gingham
and white apron, with her black hair in the Grecian
coil we used to wear when our heads were allowed to
be of their own proper size, was gathering crimson
apples from the quarrendon tree close to the river,
a voice came over the water—
“Oh, my good girl, if you would but stand so
a minute, and allow me to sketch you!”
Jaquetta started round and laughed. No doubt
she was looking like an Arcadian; but I—as
from under the trees I saw two gentlemen on the other
side of the little stream, and jumped up to come to
her defence—I must have looked more like
a displeased if not draggle-tailed duchess, for there
was an immediate disconcerted begging of our pardons,
and a hasty departure.
Jaquetta made a very funny account of my spring forward
in awful dignity, so horribly affronted at her being
called a good girl! and she made Fulk laugh heartily.
The gloom did seem to be lightening on him now.
Walking tourists, we supposed, though one we thought
was a clergyman; and on Sunday we saw him in the desk
and the draughtsman in the parsonage pew; and we discovered
that these were the proposed new curate, Mr. Cradock,
and his younger brother. Our rector was a canon
who had bad health and never came near us, and the
poor old curate was past work, and, indeed, died a
week or two after he had given up.
