MISS SUSAN’S absence from home had been a very short one—she left and returned within the week; and during this time matters went on very quietly at Whiteladies. The servants had their own way in most things—they gave Miss Augustine her spare meals when they pleased, though Martha, left in charge, stood over her to see that she ate something. But Stevens stood upon no ceremony—he took off his coat and went into the garden, which was his weakness, and there enjoyed a carnival of digging and dibbling, until the gardener grumbled, who was not disposed to have his plants meddled with.

“He has been a touching of my geraniums,” said this functionary; “what do he know about a garden? Do you ever see me a poking of myself into the pantry a cleaning of his spoons?”

“No, bless you,” said the cook; “nobody don’t see you a putting of your hand to work as you ain’t forced to. You know better, Mr. Smithers.”

“That ain’t it, that ain’t it,” said Smithers, somewhat discomfited; and he went out forthwith, and made an end of the amateur. “Either it’s my garden, or it ain’t,” said the man of the spade; “if it is, you’ll get out o’ that in ten minutes’ time. I can’t be bothered with fellers here as don’t know the difference between a petuniar and a nasty choking rubbish of a bindweed.”

“You might speak a little more civil to them as helps you,” said Stevens, humbled by an unfortunate mistake he had made; but still not without some attempt at self-assertion.

“Help! you wait till I asks you for your help,” said the gardener. And thus Stevens was driven back to his coat, his pantry, and the proprieties of life, before Miss Susan’s return.

As for Augustine, she gathered her poor people round her in the almshouse chapel every morning, and said her prayers among the pensioners, whom she took so much pains to guide in their devotion, for the benefit of her family and the expiation of their sins. The poor people in the almshouses were not perhaps more pious than any other equal number of people in the village; but they all hobbled to their seats in the chapel, and said their Amens, led by Josiah Tolladay—who had been parish clerk in his day, and pleased himself in this shadow of his ancient office—with a certain fervor. Some of them grumbled, as who does not grumble at a set duty, whatever it may be? but I think the routine of the daily service was rather a blessing to most of them, giving them a motive for exerting themselves, for putting on clean caps, and brushing their old coats. The almshouses lay near the entrance of the village of St. Austin’s, a square of old red-brick houses, built two hundred years ago, with high dormer windows, and red walls, mellowed into softness by age. They had been suffered to fall into decay by several generations of Austins, but had been restored to thorough repair and to their original use by Miss Augustine, who had added a great many conveniences and advantages, unthought of in former days, to the little cottages, and had done everything that could be done to make the lives of her beadsmen and beadswomen agreeable. She was great herself on the duty of self-denial, fasted much, and liked to punish her delicate and fragile outer woman, which, poor soul, had little strength to spare; but she petted her pensioners, and made a great deal of their little ailments, and kept the cook at Whiteladies constantly occupied for them, making dainty dishes to tempt the appetites of old humbugs of both sexes, who could eat their own plain food very heartily when this kind and foolish lady was out of the way. She was so ready to indulge them, that old Mrs. Tolladay was quite right in calling the gentle foundress, the abstract, self-absorbed, devotional creature, whose life was dedicated to prayer for her family, a great temptation to her neighbors. Miss Augustine was so anxious to make up for all her grandfathers and grandmothers had done, and to earn a pardon for their misdeeds, that she could deny nothing to her poor.

The almshouses formed a square of tiny cottages, with a large garden in the midst, which absorbed more plants, the gardener said, than all the gardens at Whiteladies. The entrance from the road was through a gateway, over which was a clock-tower; and in this part of the building were situated the pretty, quaint little rooms occupied by the chaplain. Right opposite, at the other end of the garden, was the chapel; and all the houses opened upon the garden which was pretty and bright with flowers, with a large grassplot in the midst, and a fine old mulberry tree, under which the old people would sit and bask in the sunshine. There were about thirty of them, seven or eight houses on each side of the square—a large number to be maintained by one family; but I suppose that the first Austins had entertained a due sense of their own wickedness, and felt that no small price was required to buy them off. Half of these people at least, however, were now at Miss Augustine’s charges. The endowment, being in land, and in a situation where land rises comparatively little in value, had ceased to be sufficient for so large a number of pensioners—and at least half of the houses had been left vacant, and falling into decay in the time of the late Squire and his father. It had been the enterprise of Miss Augustine’s life to set this family charity fully forth again, according to the ordinance of the first founder—and almost all her fortune was dedicated to that and to the new freak of the chantry. She had chosen her poor people herself from the village and neighborhood, and perhaps on the whole they were not badly chosen. She had selected the chaplain herself, a quaint, prim little old man, with a wife not unlike himself, who fitted into the rooms in the tower, and whose object in life for their first two years had been to smooth down Miss Augustine, and keep her within the limits of good sense. Happily they had given that over before the time at which this story commences, and now contented themselves with their particular mission to the old almspeople themselves. These were enough to give them full occupation. They were partly old couples, husband and wife, and partly widows and single people; and they were as various in their characteristics as every group of human persons are, “a sad handful,” as old Mrs. Tolladay said. Dr. Richard and his wife had enough to do, to keep them in order, what with Miss Augustine’s vagaries, and what with the peculiarities of the Austin pensioners themselves.

The two principal sides of the square, facing each other—the gate side and the chapel side—had each a faction of its own. The chapel side was led by old Mrs. Matthews, who was the most prayerful woman in the community, or at least had the credit among her own set of being so—the gate side, by Sarah Storton, once the laundress at Whiteladies, who was, I fear, a very mundane personage, and did not hesitate to speak her mind to Miss Augustine herself. Old Mrs. Tolladay lived on the south side, and was the critic and historian, or bard, of both the factions. She was the wife of the old clerk, who rang the chapel bell, and led with infinite self-importance the irregular fire of Amens, which was so trying to Dr. Richard; but many of the old folks were deaf, and not a few stupid, and how could they be expected to keep time in the responses? Old Mrs. Matthews, who had been a Methodist once upon a time, and still was suspected of proclivities toward chapel, would groan now and then, without any warning, in the middle of the service, making Dr. Richard, whose nerves were sensitive, jump; and on Summer days, when the weather was hot, and the chapel close and drowsy, one of the old men would indulge in an occasional snore, quickly strangled by his helpmate—which had a still stronger effect on the Doctor’s nerves. John Simmons, who had no wife to wake him, was the worst offender on such occasions. He lived on the north side, in the darkest and coldest of all the cottages, and would drop his head upon his old breast, and doze contentedly, filling the little chapel with audible indications of his beatific repose. Once Miss Augustine herself had risen from her place, and walking solemnly down the chapel, in the midst of the awe-stricken people, had awakened John, taking her slim white hand out of her long sleeves, and making him start with a cold touch upon his shoulder. “It will be best to stay away out of God’s house if you cannot join in our prayers,” Miss Augustine had said, words which in his fright and compunction the old man did not understand. He thought he was to be turned out of his poor little cold cottage, which was a palace to him, and awaited the next Monday, on which he received his weekly pittance from the chaplain, with terrified expectation. “Be I to go, sir?” said old John, trembling in all his old limbs; for he had but “the House” before him as an alternative, and the reader knows what a horror that alternative is to most poor folks.

“Miss Augustine has said nothing about it,” said Dr. Richard; “but John, you must not snore in church; if you will sleep, which is very reprehensible, why should you snore, John?”

“It’s my misfortune, sir,” said the old man. “I was always a snoring sleeper, God forgive me; there’s many a one, as you say, sir, as can take his nap quiet, and no one know nothing about it; but, Doctor, I don’t mean no harm, and it ain’t my fault.”

“You must take care not to sleep, John,” said Dr. Richard, shaking his head, “that is the great thing. You’ll not snore if you don’t sleep.”

“I donnow that,” said John doubtfully, taking up his shillings. The old soul was hazy, and did not quite know what he was blamed for. Of all the few enjoyments he had, that Summer doze in the warm atmosphere was perhaps the sweetest. Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care—John felt it to be one of the best things in this world, though he did not know what any idle book had said.

At nine o’clock every morning James Tolladay sallied out of his cottage, with the key of the chapel, opened the door, and began to tug at the rope, which dangled so temptingly just out of the reach of the children, when they came to see their grandfathers and grandmothers at the almshouses. The chapel was not a very good specimen of architecture, having been built in the seventeenth century; and the bell which James Tolladay rung was not much of a bell; but still it marked nine o’clock to the village, the clergyman of the parish being a quiet and somewhat indolent person, who had, up to this time, resisted the movement in favor of daily services. Tolladay kept on ringing while the old people stumbled past him into their benches, and the Doctor, in his surplice, and little Mrs. Richard in her little trim bonnet—till Miss Augustine came along the path from the gate like a figure in a procession, with her veil on her head in Summer, and her hood in Winter, and with her hands folded into her long, hanging sleeves. Miss Augustine always came alone, a solitary figure in the sunshine, and walked abstracted and solemn across the garden, and up the length of the chapel to the seat which was left for her on one side of the altar rails. Mrs. Richard had a place on the other side, but Miss Augustine occupied a sort of stall, slightly raised, and very visible to all the congregation. The Austin arms were on this stall, a sign of proprietorship not perhaps quite in keeping with the humble meaning of the chapel; and Miss Augustine had blazoned it with a legend in very ecclesiastical red and blue—“Pray for us,” translated with laudable intentions, out of the Latin, in order to be understood by the congregation, but sent back into obscurity by the church decorator, whose letters were far too good art to be comprehensible. The old women, blinking under their old dingy bonnets, which some of them still insisted upon wearing “in the fashion,” with here and there a tumbled red and yellow rose, notwithstanding all that Mrs. Richard could say; and the old men with their heads sunk into the shabby collars of their old coats, sitting tremulous upon the benches, over which Miss Augustine could look from her high seat, immediately finding out any defaulter—were a pitiful assemblage enough, in that unloveliness of age and weakness which the very poor have so little means of making beautiful; but they were not without interest, nor their own quaint humor had any one there been of the mind to discover it. Of this view of the assemblage I need not say Miss Augustine was quite unconscious; her ear caught Mrs. Matthews’s groan of unction with a sense of happiness, and she was pleased by the fervor of the dropping Amen, which made poor Dr. Richard so nervous. She did not mind the painful fact that at least a minute elapsed between John Tolladay’s clerkly solemnity of response and the fitful gust with which John Simmons in the background added his assisting voice.

Miss Augustine was too much absorbed in her own special interests to be a Ritualist or not a Ritualist, or to think at all of Church politics. She was confused in her theology, and determined to have her family prayed for, and their sins expiated, without asking herself whether it was release from purgatory which she anticipated as the answer to her prayers, or simply a turning aside of the curse for the future. I think the idea in her mind was quite confused, and she neither knew nor was at any trouble to ascertain exactly what she meant. Accordingly, though many people, and the rector himself among them, thought Miss Augustine to be of the highest sect of the High Church, verging upon Popery itself, Miss Augustine in reality found more comfort in the Dissenting fervor of the old woman who was a “Methody,” than in the most correct Church worship. What she wanted, poor soul, was that semi-commercial, semi-visionary traffic, in which not herself but her family were to be the gainers. She was a merchant organizing this bargain with heaven, the nature of which she left vague even to herself; and those who aided her with most apparent warmth of supplications, were the people whom she most appreciated, with but little regard to the fashion of their exertions. John Simmons, when he snored, was like a workman shirking work to Miss Augustine. But even Dr. Richard and his wife had not fathomed this downright straightforward business temper which existed without her own knowledge, or any one else’s, in the strange visionary being with whom they had to do. She, indeed, put her meaning simply into so many words, but it was impossible for those good people to take her at her own word, and to believe that she expressed all she meant, and nothing less or more.

There was a little prayer used in the almshouse chapel for the family of the founder, which Dr. Richard had consented, with some difficulty, to add after the collects at Morning and Evening Service, and which he had a strong impression was uncanonical, and against the rubrics, employing it, so to speak, under protest, and explaining to every chance stranger that it was “a tradition of the place from time immemorial.”

“I suppose we are not at liberty to change lightly any ancient use,” said the chaplain, “at least such was the advice of my excellent friend the Bishop of the Leeward Islands, in whose judgment I have great confidence. I have not yet had an opportunity of laying the matter before the Bishop of my own diocese, but I have little doubt his lordship will be of the same opinion.”

With this protestation of faith, which I think was much stronger than Dr. Richard felt, the chaplain used the prayer; but he maintained a constant struggle against Miss Augustine, who would have had him add sentences to it from time to time, as various family exigencies arose. On one of the days of Miss Susan’s absence a thought of this kind came into her sister’s head. Augustine felt that Miss Susan being absent, and travelling, and occupied with her business, whatever it was, might, perhaps, omit to read the Lessons for the day, as was usual, or would be less particular in her personal devotions. She thought this over all evening, and dreamed of it at night; and in the morning she sent a letter to the chaplain as soon as she woke, begging him to add to his prayer for the founder’s family the words, “and for such among them as may be specially exposed to temptation this day.” Dr. Richard took a very strong step on this occasion—he refused to do it. It was a great thing for a man to do, the comfort of whose remnant of life hung upon the pleasure of his patroness; but he knew it was an illegal liberty to take with his service, and he would not do it.

Miss Augustine was very self-absorbed, and very much accustomed (though she thought otherwise) to have everything her own way, and when she perceived that this new petition of hers was not added to the prayer for her family, she disregarded James Tolladay’s clerkly leading of the responses even more than John Simmons did. She made a little pause, and repeated it herself, in an audible voice, and then said her Amen, keeping everybody waiting for her, and Dr. Richard standing mute and red on the chancel steps, with the words, as it might be, taken out of his very lips. When they all came out of chapel, Mrs. Matthews had a private interview with Miss Augustine, which detained her, and it was not till after the old people had dispersed to their cottages that she made her way over to the clock-tower in which the chaplain’s rooms were situated. “You did not pray for my people, as I asked you,” said Augustine, looking at him with her pale blue eyes. She was not angry or irritable, but asked the question softly. Dr. Richard had been waiting for her in his dining-room, which was a quaint room over the archway, with one window looking to the road, another to the garden. He was seated by the table, his wife beside him, who had not yet taken off her bonnet, and who held her smelling-salts in her hand.

“Miss Augustine,” said the chaplain, with a little flush on his innocent aged face. He was a plump, neat little old man, with the red and white of a girl in his gentle countenance. He had risen up when she entered, but being somewhat nervous sat down again, though she never sat down. “Miss Augustine,” he said, solemnly, “I have told you before, I cannot do anything, even to oblige you, which is against Church law and every sound principle. Whatever happens to me, I must be guided by law.”

“Does law forbid you to pray for your fellow-creatures who are in temptation?” said Miss Augustine, without any change of her serious abstracted countenance.

“Miss Augustine, this is a question in which I cannot be dictated to,” said the old gentleman, growing redder. “I will ask the prayers of the congregation for any special person who may be in trouble, sorrow, or distress, before the Litany, or the collect for all conditions of men, making a pause at the appropriate petition, as is my duty; but I cannot go beyond the rubrics, whatever it may cost me,” said Dr. Richard, with a look of determined resolution, as though he looked for nothing better than to be led immediately to the stake. And his wife fixed her eyes upon him admiringly, backing him up; and put, with a little pressure of his fingers, her smelling-salts into his hand.

“In that case,” said Miss Augustine, in her abstract way, “in that case—I will not ask you; but it is a pity the rubrics should say it is your duty not to pray for any one in temptation; it was Susan,” she added, softly, with a sigh.

“Miss Susan!” said the chaplain, growing hotter than ever at the thought that he had nearly been betrayed into the impertinence of praying for a person whom he so much respected. He was horrified at the risk he had run. “Miss Augustine,” he said, severely, “if my conscience had permitted me to do this, which I am glad it did not, what would your sister have said? I could never have looked her in the face again, after taking such a liberty with her.”

“We could never have looked her in the face again,” echoed Mrs. Richard; “but, thank God, my dear, you stood fast!”

“Yes. I hope true Church principles and a strong resolution will always save me,” said the Doctor, with gentle humility, “and that I may always have the resolution to stand fast.”

Miss Augustine made no reply to this for the moment. Then she said, without any change of tone, “Say, to-morrow, please, that prayers are requested for Susan Austin, on a voyage, and in temptation abroad.”

“My dear Miss Augustine!” said the unhappy clergyman, taking a sniff at the salts, which now were truly needed.

“Yes, that will come to the same thing,” said Miss Augustine quietly to herself.

She stood opposite to the agitated pair, with her hands folded into her great sleeves, her hood hanging back on her shoulders, her black veil falling softly about her pale head. There was no emotion in her countenance. Her mind was not alarmed about her sister. The prayer was a precautionary measure, to keep Susan out of temptation—not anything strenuously called for by necessity. She sighed softly as she made the reflection, that to name her sister before the Litany was said would answer her purpose equally well; and thus with a faint smile, and slight wave of her hand toward the chaplain and his wife, she turned and went away. The ordinary politenesses were lost upon Miss Augustine, and the door stood open behind her, so that there was no need for Dr. Richard to get up and open it; and, indeed, they were so used to her ways, her comings and her goings, that he did not think of it. So the old gentleman sat with his wife by his side, backing him up, gazing with consternation, and without a word, at the gray retreating figure. Mrs. Richard, who saw her husband’s perturbed condition, comforted him as best she could, patting his arm with her soft little hand, and whispering words of consolation. When Miss Augustine was fairly out of the house, the distressed clergyman at last permitted his feelings to burst forth.

“Pray for Susan Austin publicly by name!” he said, rising and walking about the room. “My dear, it will ruin us! This comes of women having power in the Church! I don’t mean to say anything, my dear, injurious to your sex, which you know I respect deeply—in its own place; but a woman’s interference in the Church is enough to send the wisest man out of his wits.”

“Dear Henery,” said Mrs. Richard, for it was thus she pronounced her husband’s name, “why should you be so much disturbed about it, when you know she is mad?”

“It is only her enemies who say she is mad,” said Dr. Richard; “and even if she is mad, what does that matter? There is nothing against the rubrics in what she asks of me now. I shall be forced to do it; and what will Miss Susan say? And consider that all our comfort, everything depends upon it. Ellen, you are very sensible; but you don’t grasp the full bearing of the subject as I do.”

“No, my dear, I do not pretend to have your mind,” said the good wife; “but things never turn out so bad as we fear,” she said a moment after, with homely philosophy—“nor so good, either,” she added, with a sigh.