While Mr. Gloag was away upon his holiday a strange minister and his wife came to look after the congregation at Burnhead. The inhabitants regarded them with more or less suspicion, for they came from a big town, and their ways were unaccustomed.
Mr. Dewar, the visiting minister, was mild and inoffensive, with no strongly marked characteristic of any sort; but Mrs. Dewar, a large, bustling lady of resolute character and little tact, succeeded during her first week in offending the majority of the leading members of the congregation.
Lady Alicia frankly avowed that "she couldn't endure the woman"; Miss Esperance said nothing; the Misses Moffat were encouraged by Lady Alicia's plain-speaking to go so far as to remark that Mrs. Dewar was very different from "our late dear Mrs. Gloag," while the village women in confabulation at their respective doors pronounced the newcomer to be "a leddy-buddy," which to the initiated subtly conveyed their opinion that she was not quite a lady.
Still, she was eager to do her duty in this small, benighted backwater, and she "visited" with zeal and frequency.
Her second visit to Remote was paid at a time when Mr. Wycherly happened to have gone downstairs to ask Miss Esperance a question; and Mrs. Dewar was shown into the parlour before he could escape. And even had such flight been possible, Miss Esperance held up a small, imploring hand as Robina announced the lady's name, which would have kept Mr. Wycherly at her side to face the wives of twenty ministers.
Mrs. Dewar was charmed. She had wanted all along to meet Mr. Wycherly, and she opened the conversation at once by shaking a large kid-gloved forefinger at him, remarking with ponderous jocosity:
"I didn't see you in the church last Sabbath—and how was that?"
Mr. Wycherly glanced despairingly at Miss Esperance, and she came to the rescue by remarking: "Mr. Wycherly is not a member of our church, Mrs. Dewar; he is an Episcopalian."
"Ah, but nevertheless," Mrs. Dewar persisted, "I think he should come and hear Mr. Dewar preach while he has the opportunity. It isn't often at a little place like this you get a man from such an important charge."
"I am sure Burnhead is very fortunate," murmured the ever-courteous Mr. Wycherly.
"You may well say that," the lady replied, highly satisfied, "and I must say that the place seems to me to be in great need of a little moral and intellectual quickening. Of course, poor Mr. Gloag has been much handicapped in his work by that poor invalid wife of his."
Miss Esperance always sat up very straight in her chair, but during Mrs. Dewar's speech her little figure attained to a positively awe-inspiring frigidity of displeasure, and Mr. Wycherly looked anxiously at their visitor as though he feared she might be turned into a pillar of salt there and then.
"On the contrary," Miss Esperance remarked, and her very voice seemed to have withdrawn itself to some inaccessible altitude, "by the death of his wife, dear Mr. Gloag has been deprived of such a perfect helpmeet as is seldom given to man. You must certainly have been strangely misinformed, Mrs. Dewar, to have acquired such a very mistaken conception of the true circumstances."
For a moment Mr. Wycherly felt almost sorry for Mrs. Dewar, but although she could not fail to be conscious that she had, in vulgar phrase, "put her foot in it," she was too thick-skinned and complacent to be crushed.
"I'm sure," she said, making an effort to speak pleasantly, "I'm very glad to hear what you say; but really there does seem to be a sad lack of what my husband calls Spiritual Freemasonry among the congregation here, and naturally one judges more or less of the Shepherd by his sheep."
"I fear," said Miss Esperance, "that it is exceedingly unsafe to do so in the majority of cases; including, surely, the fundamental Example from which your analogy is drawn."
There was a dreadful pause. Poor Mr. Wycherly was hot all over. "If they are going to talk theology," he thought to himself desperately, "I shall be compelled to escape by the window."
"You must, Mrs. Dewar," he exclaimed recklessly, and then coloured furiously for his voice sounded so loud, "you must find it very agreeable to pass a week or two in the country at this time of year."
"We always go to the country every year," Mrs. Dewar rejoined rather huffily, "but generally to the sea, it is so much better for the children. We came here this year solely to oblige Mr. Gloag," and the many bugles on Mrs. Dewar's stiff mantle chimed in concert, as though in approbation of this amiability.
"That was very good of you," said Mr. Wycherly. "I am sure he badly needed a holiday. I don't think he has been out of the village for more than a night or two for over ten years."
"That's where he makes a great mistake. My husband always says that a man grows stagnant unless he gets frequent change of scene and society. What you tell me explains much of the spiritual torpor we deplore in this village."
"I don't know what you would say to me, Mrs. Dewar; I should be afraid to confess to you how many years it is since I have been out of this village—a great many, I assure you."
"Doubtless you are engaged in various intellectual pursuits which help to pass the time," Mrs. Dewar remarked graciously, and she smiled upon Mr. Wycherly—all women did when they got the chance—and during the rest of her somewhat prolonged visit she addressed her remarks almost exclusively to him: ignoring Miss Esperance, who sat still and straight in her high-backed chair with a look of considerable amusement in her kind old eyes.
Mr. Wycherly accompanied Mrs. Dewar to the gate and held it open for her to pass out.
"You must come and see us at the Manse," she remarked condescendingly—then confidentially: "I fear you must find it sadly lonely and uncongenial living here with only that old lady for company."
"Pardon me," said Mr. Wycherly, "most people are only too inclined to envy me the great, the very great privileges that I enjoy."
And Mrs. Dewar had to learn that it was not only Miss Esperance who could surround herself with an atmosphere of almost unapproachable aloofness. She concluded her farewell with some haste, and Mr. Wycherly walked slowly back to the house.
Montagu met him in the doorway. "Who was that lady, Guardie?" he inquired eagerly. "She stayed an awful time. Who is she?"
"God made her, and therefore let her pass for a woman," said Mr. Wycherly dreamily.
Montagu stared at him in astonishment, then pursued him indoors to find out exactly what he meant by this cryptic speech; but for once Mr. Wycherly's explanations were both elusive and unsatisfactory.
Next day Miss Esperance invaded Mr. Wycherly's room right in the middle of lessons. She held an open note in her hand; a note written on pink paper, with scalloped edges.
"I am sorry to interrupt you," she said, "but here is an invitation from Miss Maggie Moffat, asking us both to take tea with them on Friday at five. May I accept for you?"
Mr. Wycherly, who had risen at her entrance, was standing behind his loaded desk.
"Oh, dear Miss Esperance, pray don't!" he exclaimed piteously. "You know I never go out anywhere—and to a tea-party—I shouldn't know how to behave. Pray, thank the Misses Moffat and say that I never go anywhere—it is most kind of them—but——!
"I'd go if I were you," Montagu suggested, sprawling over his table and sucking the handle of his pen; "they have awfully good sorts of cakes, full of squashy stuff that runs out over your fingers. My! but it is good."
"If it required anything to confirm me in my refusal," Mr. Wycherly said, smiling at Miss Esperance, "such perilous cakes as those Montagu describes would do it."
"It would please them very much if you would go," Miss Esperance said persuasively; "we shouldn't stay more than an hour."
Mr. Wycherly wrinkled up his forehead in the greatest perplexity: "But I never go anywhere," he said again.
"And why not?" Miss Esperance asked boldly. "If it were almost anybody else, I would not press you, but they are so sensitive. If you don't go they will think it is because you are proud, and don't think them good enough."
"Me! Proud!" ejaculated poor Mr. Wycherly. "But this is dreadful."
"They stopped us one day," remarked the pen-sucking Montagu, "and asked if you were not very stand-off, and Edmund said it was bosh, and you were nothing of the sort, and that if they just came and played handy-pandy with you, they'd soon see."
"Well," said Miss Esperance, tapping the letter, "what am I to say?"
"O, say Guardie's much obliged and he'll be very pleased to come, and that we'll be very pleased to come, too," suggested Montagu, who appreciated tea at the Misses Moffat's.
"I did not ask you, Montagu," Miss Esperance remarked with dignity. "Well, dear friend, may I say you will go with me?"
"Do you wish me to go, Miss Esperance?" groaned Mr. Wycherly.
"I don't wish you to do anything intensely disagreeable to yourself, but, if you did go, it would assuredly give great pleasure to them—and to me——"
"Then I will go," said Mr. Wycherly; and he said it with all the resolution of a man determined to do or die.
The Misses Moffat were greatly flustered, for Mr. and Mrs. Dewar were also to be of the party, and to entertain two gentlemen at once was an unheard-of plunge into the wildest dissipation.
They paid innumerable visits of inspection to their little dining-room, where the tea-table, laid early in the afternoon, positively groaned under its load of dainties. No less than four different kinds of jam gleamed jewel-like, each in a cut-glass dish, at the four corners of the table: while cookies, soda scones, dropped scones, short bread, and the cream cakes, so appreciated by Montagu, were piled up in abundance on the various plates. In the centre of the table was a large épergne arranged with flowers by Miss Jeanie's artistic hands. These preparations all completed, there yet remained the arrangement of the guests at table.
"You see, me dear," said Miss Maggie, anxiously, "we must ask Mr. Dewar to take the foot of the table because he's the minister, and will ask the blessing. But the question is, where'll we put Mr. Wycherly? Because, you see, whoever sits by Mr. Wycherly will get a gentleman on either side, which doesn't seem quite fair somehow. If we put him on my right hand and give him Mrs. Dewar for a partner, then she'll be seated next her husband, and that doesn't seem quite correct; and yet, if we put Miss Esperance Bethune there, that's not right, either, and her seeing him every day."
"Don't you think," Miss Jeanie suggested, "that he'd better sit on your right hand and Mrs. Dewar on your left, with Miss Bethune between Mr. and Mrs. Dewar, and I'll separate the gentlemen?"
"We mustn't think of ourselves on occasions like these," Miss Maggie said, with just a tinge of reproof in her voice; "it's not a matter to be settled hastily."
"Well, there's not many ways we can sit unless you give up having Mr. Dewar at the bottom of the table," Miss Jeanie responded sharply.
"That," Miss Maggie replied solemnly, "is a necessity—because of the blessing."
So, after all, Miss Jeanie had it her way.
Mr. Wycherly had assuredly never been at a similar tea-party.
At the very beginning of the meal his polite commonplaces to Miss Maggie were drowned by the minister's voice, as with uplifted hand he asked a lengthy blessing. Mr. Wycherly was rather startled, but he bent his head decorously, and when it was over continued his sentence where he had broken off.
Mrs. Dewar was so odiously patronising to the Misses Moffat that Mr. Wycherly unconsciously ranged himself on their side, devoting himself to the entertainment of Miss Maggie, so that she became hopelessly flustered and forgot to ask Mrs. Dewar if she would take some more tea—an omission pointed out by the neglected lady with some asperity.
Mr. Wycherly filled the soul of Miss Jeanie with rapture by telling her how Montagu and Edmund were consumed with envy because they were not invited. When tea was over and they repaired to the front parlour he looked anxiously at Miss Esperance. Surely the stipulated hour must be up. The Misses Moffat were quite endurable: kind and simple and almost pathetic in their tremulous eagerness to please. But Mrs. Dewar was getting on his nerves, and she insisted on addressing her conversation to him as though she were on much more familiar terms with him than the rest of the party, a dreadful supposition not to be borne for an instant.
"Perhaps," said Miss Maggie, beaming upon her guests, "the gentlemen would like a game of draughts."
Mr. Wycherly's heart went down into his boots. Some years ago he would truthfully have said he didn't play draughts; since then, however, Mr. Gloag had taught him that he, in his turn, might teach the little boys; and Mr. Wycherly was scrupulously accurate in all his statements.
Miss Esperance came to the rescue. "I fear," said she, "that we must be going. We promised the children that we would be home by about six."
Miss Esperance never made any plan that she did not intend to carry out, and five minutes later she and Mr. Wycherly were on their way home. The little boys were waiting for them at the gate and volunteered to take Mr. Wycherly for a walk.
Miss Esperance stood looking after them and her eyes were fond and proud. Old Elsa came out to ask her mistress something about the supper and joined her at the gate, and she, too, looked after the trio marching down the road, Mr. Wycherly, as usual, in the middle, with a small boy hanging on to either hand.
"He's awfu' kind to they bairns," said Elsa. "They've wauken'd him up extraordinar'. He's no' the same gentleman he was afore they came."
"He is exactly the same, Elsa," Miss Esperance said gently. "Circumstances have changed, and God in His great mercy has seen fit to call out the many beautiful qualities with which He has endowed His servant. But Mr. Wycherly is not changed."
Elsa's face softened, as it always did when she looked at her mistress.
"I'm thinkin', mem," she said, "that though the Lord has seen fit to do much, He made you His instrument."
Gradually by slow degrees, but daily more and more, was Mr. Wycherly shaken out of his groove. It was he who took the little boys twice a week to be drilled at Pier's Hill; when Mr. Gloag came back, he even went occasionally to the Manse to play chess with him because Miss Esperance declared the minister to be so lonely. And, more wonderful still, that winter he made two or three journeys to Shrewsbury to confer with Mr. Woodhouse and see after his affairs in person, leaving Montagu in charge of Miss Esperance and the household.