There are some people who imperceptibly float away from their youth into middle age,and thence pass into declining life with the soft and gentle motion of happy years.There are others who are whirled,in spite of themselves,down dizzy rapids of agony away from their youth at one great bound,into old age with another sudden shock;and thence into the vast calm ocean where there are no shore-marks to tell of time.
This last,it seemed,was to be Ellinor's lot.Her youth had gone in a single night,fifteen years ago,and now she appeared to have become an elderly woman;very still and hopeless in look and movement,but as sweet and gentle in speech and smile as ever she had been in her happiest days.All young people,when they came to know her,loved her dearly,though at first they might call her dull,and heavy to get on with;and as for children and old people,her ready watchful sympathy in their joys as well as their sorrows was an unfailing passage to their hearts.After the first great shock of Mr.Corbet's marriage was over,she seemed to pass into a greater peace than she had known for years;the last faint hope of happiness was gone;it would,perhaps,be more accurate to say,of the bright happiness she had planned for herself in her early youth.
Unconsciously,she was being weaned from self-seeking in any shape,and her daily life became,if possible,more innocent and pure and holy.One of the canons used to laugh at her for her constant attendance at all the services,and for her devotion to good works,and call her always the reverend sister.Miss Monro was a little annoyed at this faint clerical joke;Ellinor smiled quietly.Miss Monro disapproved of Ellinor's grave ways and sober severe style of dress.
"You may be as good as you like,my dear,and yet go dressed in some pretty colour,instead of those perpetual blacks and greys,and then there would be no need for me to be perpetually telling people you are only four-and-thirty (and they don't believe me,though I tell them so till I am black in the face).Or,if you would but wear a decent-shaped bonnet,instead of always wearing those of the poky shape in fashion when you were seventeen."The old canon died,and some one was to he appointed in his stead.
These clerical preferments and appointments were the all-important interests to the inhabitants of the Close,and the discussion of probabilities came up invariably if any two met together,in street or house,or even in the very cathedral itself.At length it was settled,and announced by the higher powers.An energetic,hard-working clergyman from a distant part of the diocese,Livingstone by name,was to have the vacant canonry.
Miss Monro said that the name was somehow familiar to her,and by degrees she recollected the young curate who had come to inquire after Ellinor in that dreadful illness she had had at Hamley in the year 1829.Ellinor knew nothing of that visit;no more than Miss Monro did of what had passed between the two before that anxious night.Ellinor just thought it possible it might be the same Mr.
Livingstone,and would rather it were not,because she did not feel as if she could bear the frequent though not intimate intercourse she must needs have,if such were the case,with one so closely associated with that great time of terror which she was striving to bury out of sight by every effort in her power.Miss Monro,on the contrary,was busy weaving a romance for her pupil;she thought of the passionate interest displayed by the fair young clergyman fifteen years ago,and believed that occasionally men could be constant,and hoped that if Mr.Livingstone were the new canon,he might prove the rara avis which exists but once in a century.He came,and it was the same.He looked a little stouter,a little older,but had still the gait and aspect of a young man.His smooth fair face was scarcely lined at all with any marks of care;the blue eyes looked so kindly and peaceful,that Miss Monro could scarcely fancy they were the same which she had seen fast filling with tears;the bland calm look of the whole man needed the ennoblement of his evident devoutness to be raised into the type of holy innocence which some of the Romanists call the "sacerdotal face."His entire soul was in his work,and he looked as little likely to step forth in the character of either a hero of romance or a faithful lover as could be imagined.
Still Miss Monro was not discouraged;she remembered the warm,passionate feeling she had once seen break through the calm exterior,and she believed that what had happened once might occur again.
Of course,while all eyes were directed on the new canon,he had to learn who the possessors of those eyes were one by one;and it was probably some time before the idea came into his mind that Miss Wilkins,the lady in black,with the sad pale face,so constant an attendant at service,so regular a visitor at the school,was the same Miss Wilkins as the bright vision of his youth.It was her sweet smile at a painstaking child that betrayed her--if,indeed,betrayal it might be called where there was no wish or effort to conceal anything.Canon Livingstone left the schoolroom almost directly,and,after being for an hour or so in his house,went out to call on Mrs.Randall,the person who knew more of her neighbours'affairs than any one in East Chester.