Scally Part 4

The curate supplied the relative sentence. Eileen nodded her head in acknowledgment.

"Yes; who are--like you and me--are miserable together, they are happy!

See?"

"I see," said the curate gravely. "Yes, you are right there; but we can't go on living on a diet of joint misery. We shall have to face the future. What are we going to do about it?"

Then Eileen spoke up boldly for the first time.

"Gerald," she said, "we shall simply have to manage on a hundred a year."

But the curate shook his head.

"Dearest, I should be an utter cad if I allowed you to do such a thing,"

he said. "A hundred a year is less than two pounds a week!"

"A lot of people live on less than two pounds a week," Eileen pointed out longingly.

"Yes; I know. If we could rent a three-s.h.i.+lling cottage and I could go about with a spotted handkerchief round my neck, and you could scrub the doorsteps _coram populo_, we might be very comfortable; but the clergy belong to the black-coated cla.s.s, and people in the lower ranks of the black-coated cla.s.s are the poorest people in the whole wide world. They have to spend money on luxuries--collars and charwomen, and so on--which a workingman can spend entirely on necessities. It wouldn't merely mean no pretty dresses and a lot of hard work for you, Eileen. It would mean starvation! Believe me--I know! Some of my friends have tried it--and I know!"

"What happened to them?" asked Eileen fearfully.

"They all had to come down in the end--some soon, some late, but all in time--to taking parish relief."

"Parish relief?"

"Yes; not official, regulation, rate-aided charity, but the infinitely more humiliating charity of their well-to-do neighbors--quiet checks, second-hand dresses, and things like that. No, little girl; you and I are too proud--too proud of the cloth--for that. We will never give a handle to the people who are always waiting to have a fling at the improvident clergy--not if it breaks our hearts, we won't!"

"You are quite right, dear," said Eileen quietly. "We must wait."

Then the curate said the most difficult thing he had said yet:--

"I shall have to go away from here."

Eileen's hand turned cold in his.

"Why?" she whispered; but she knew.

"Because if we wait here we shall wait forever. The last curate in Much Moreham--what happened to him?"

"He died."

"Yes--at fifty-five; and he had been here for thirty years. Preferment does not come in sleepy villages. I must go back to London."

"The East End?"

"East or south or north--it doesn't signify. Anywhere but west. In the east and south and north there is always work to be done--hard work. And if a parson has no money and no brains and no influence, and can only work--run clothing clubs and soup kitchens, and reclaim drunkards--London is the place for him. So off I go to London, my beloved, to lay the foundations of Paradise for you and me--for you and me!"

There was a long silence. Then the pair rose to their feet and smiled on each other extremely cheerfully, because each suspected the other--rightly--of low spirits.

"Shall we tell people?" asked the curate.

Eileen thought, and shook her head.

"No," she said; "nicer not. It will make a splendid secret."

"Just between us two, eh?" said the curate, kindling at the thought.

"Just between us two," agreed Eileen. And the curate kissed her very solemnly. A secret is a comfortable thing to lovers, especially when they are young and about to be lonely.

At this moment a leonine head, supported on a lumbering and ill-balanced body, was thrust in between them. It was Excalibur, taking sanctuary with the Church from the vengeance of the Law.

"We might tell Scally, I think," said Eileen.

"Rather!" a.s.sented the curate. "He introduced us."

So Eileen communicated the great news to Excalibur.

"You do approve, dear--don't you?" she said.

Excalibur, instinctively realizing that this was an occasion when liberties might be taken, stood up on his hind legs and placed his forepaws on his mistress's shoulders. The curate supported them both.

"And you will use your influence to get us a living wage from somewhere--won't you, old man?" added the curate.

Excalibur tried to lick both their faces at once--and succeeded.

VI

SO the curate went away, but not to London. He was sent instead to a great manufacturing town in the north, where the work was equally hard, and where Anglican and Roman and Salvationist fought grimly side by side against the powers of drink and disease and crime. During these days, which ultimately rolled into years, the curate lost his boyish freshness and his unfortunate tendency to put on flesh. He grew thin and lathy; and, though his smile was as ready and as magnetic as ever, he seldom laughed.

He never failed, however, to write a cheerful letter to Eileen every Monday morning. He was getting a hundred and twenty pounds a year now; so his chances of becoming a millionaire had increased by twenty per cent.

Meantime his two confederates, Excalibur and Eileen, continued to reside at Much Moreham. Eileen was still the recognized beauty of the district, but she spread her net less promiscuously than of yore. Girl friends she always had in plenty, but it was noticed that she avoided intimacy with all eligible males of over twenty and under forty-five years of age. No one knew the reason for this except Excalibur. Eileen used to read Gerald's letters aloud to him every Tuesday morning; sometimes the letter contained a friendly message to Excalibur himself.

In acknowledgment of this courtesy Excalibur always sent his love to the curate--Eileen wrote every Friday--and he and Eileen walked together, rain or s.h.i.+ne, on Friday afternoons to post the letter in the next village. Much Moreham's post office was too small to remain oblivious to such a regular correspondence.

The curate was seen no more in his old parish. Railroad journeys are costly things and curates' holidays rare. Besides, he had no overt excuse for coming. And so life went on for five years. The curate and Eileen may have met during that period, for Eileen sometimes went away visiting. As Excalibur was not privileged to accompany her on these occasions he had no means of checking her movements; but the chances are that she never saw the curate, or I think she would have told Excalibur about it. We simply have to tell some one.

Then, quite suddenly, came a tremendous change in Excalibur's life.

Eileen's brother-in-law--he was Excalibur's master no longer, for Excalibur had been transferred to Eileen by deed of gift, at her own request, on her first birthday after the curate's departure--fell ill.

There was an operation and a crisis, and a deal of unhappiness at Much Moreham; then came convalescence, followed by directions for a sea voyage of six months. It was arranged that the house should be shut up and the children sent to their grandmother at Bath.

"That settles everything and everybody," said the gaunt man on the sofa, "except you, Eileen? What about you?"

"What about Scally?" inquired Eileen.