CHAPTER IV: THE INTERVIEW WITH THE VICAR
At six o’clock the next day, the whole body of men in the choir
emerged from the tranter’s door, and advanced with a firm step
down the lane. This dignity of march gradually became obliterated
as they went on, and by the time they reached the hill behind the vicarage
a faint resemblance to a flock of sheep might have been discerned in
the venerable party. A word from the tranter, however, set them
right again; and as they descended the hill, the regular tramp, tramp, tramp of the united feet was clearly audible from the vicarage garden. At the opening of the gate there was another short interval of irregular shuffling, caused by a rather peculiar habit the gate had, when swung open quickly, of striking against the bank and slamming back into the opener’s face.
“Now keep step again, will ye?” said the tranter. “It looks better, and more becomes the high class of arrant which has brought us here.” Thus they advanced to the door.
At Reuben’s ring the more modest of the group turned aside, adjusted their hats, and looked critically at any shrub that happened to lie in the line of vision; endeavouring thus to give a person who chanced to look out of the windows the impression that their request, whatever it was going to be, was rather a casual thought occurring whilst they were inspecting the vicar’s shrubbery and grass-plot than a predetermined thing. The tranter, who, coming frequently to the vicarage with luggage, coals, firewood, etc., had none of the awe for its precincts that filled the breasts of most of the others, fixed his eyes firmly on the knocker during this interval of waiting. The knocker having no characteristic worthy of notice, he relinquished it for a knot in one of the door-panels, and studied the winding lines of the grain.
“O, sir, please, here’s Tranter Dewy, and old William
Dewy, and young Richard Dewy, O, and all the quire too, sir, except
the boys, a-come to see you!” said Mr. Maybold’s maid-servant
to Mr. Maybold, the pupils of her eyes dilating like circles in a pond.
“All the choir?” said the astonished vicar (who may be
shortly described as a good-looking young man with courageous eyes, timid mouth, and neutral nose), abandoning his writing and looking at his parlour-maid after speaking, like a man who fancied he had seen her face before but couldn’t recollect where.
“And they looks very firm, and Tranter Dewy do turn neither
to the right hand nor to the left, but stares quite straight and solemn
with his mind made up!”
“O, all the choir,” repeated the vicar to himself, trying
by that simple device to trot out his thoughts on what the choir could
come for.
“Yes; every man-jack of ’em, as I be alive!” (The parlour-maid was rather local in manner, having in fact been raised in the same village.) “Really, sir, ’tis thoughted by many in town and country that—”
“Town and country!—Heavens, I had no idea that I was
public property in this way!” said the vicar, his face acquiring
a hue somewhere between that of the rose and the peony. “Well, ‘It is thought in town and country that—’”
“It is thought that you be going to get it hot and strong!—excusen
my incivility, sir.”
The vicar suddenly recalled to his recollection that he had long
ago settled it to be decidedly a mistake to encourage his servant Jane
in giving personal opinions. The servant Jane saw by the vicar’s
face that he recalled this fact to his mind; and removing her forehead
from the edge of the door, and rubbing away the indent that edge had
made, vanished into the passage as Mr. Maybold remarked, “Show
them in, Jane.”
A few minutes later a shuffling and jostling (reduced to as refined
a form as was compatible with the nature of shuffles and jostles) was
heard in the passage; then an earnest and prolonged wiping of shoes, conveying the notion that volumes of mud had to be removed; but the roads being so clean that not a particle of dirt appeared on the choir’s boots (those of all the elder members being newly oiled, and Dick’s brightly polished), this wiping might have been set down simply as a desire to show that respectable men had no wish to take a mean advantage of clean roads for curtailing proper ceremonies. Next there came a powerful whisper from the same quarter:-