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When Ruth had no call upon her time, it was indeed a holiday at Chapel-house. She threw off as much as she could of the care and the sadness in which she had been sharing; and returned fresh and helpful, ready to go about in her soft, quiet way, and fill up every measure of service, and heap it with the fragrance of her own sweet nature.
Mr Farquhar offered to accompany Ruth home; but the streets that intervened between Mr Bradshaw's and the Chapel-house were so quiet that he desisted, when he learnt from Ruth's manner how much she disliked his proposal. Mr Bradshaw, too, instantly observed: "Oh! Mrs Denbigh need not trouble you, Farquhar. I have servants at liberty at any moment to attend on her, if she wishes it."
Mr Farquhar was not in the habit of paying calls on any one; and though he had always entertained and evinced the most kind and friendly feeling towards Mr Benson, he had rarely been in the Chapel-house.
Just as the golden chalice of the first crocus opened on the graves of the Rehoboth burial-yard, the old woman at the chapel-house died. The funeral was to take place at three o'clock, but long before the hour old Joseph's kitchen was filled with a motley group of mourners. They came from far and near, from moor and field, and from the cottages over the way.
Almost as soon as they had let themselves into the Chapel-house, a messenger brought a note from Mrs Bradshaw, with a pot of quince marmalade, which, she said to Miss Benson, she thought that Leonard might fancy, and if he did, they were to be sure and let her know, as she had plenty more; or, was there anything else that he would like? She would gladly make him whatever he fancied.
They brought what they could a fresh egg, when eggs were scarce a few ripe pears that grew on the sunniest side of the humblest cottage, where the fruit was regarded as a source of income a call of inquiry, and a prayer that God would spare the child, from an old crippled woman, who could scarcely drag herself so far as the Chapel-house, yet felt her worn and weary heart stirred with a sharp pang of sympathy, and a very present remembrance of the time when she too was young, and saw the life-breath quiver out of her child, now an angel in that heaven which felt more like home to the desolate old creature than this empty earth.
As Ruth came up to the door of the Chapel-house, it was opened, and Leonard came out, bright and hopeful as the morning, his face radiant at the prospect of the happy day before him. He was dressed in the clothes it had been such a pleasant pride to her to make for him.
But as he ended his speech he sighed; and Mr Farquhar was none the less convinced that common report was true, which represented the clever, prosperous surgeon of Eccleston as bitterly disappointed at his failure of offspring. While these various interests and feelings had their course outside the Chapel-house, within there was but one thought which possessed all the inmates.
The Carroll family, like Miss Elizabeth McGauley, gave refuge in their house to a minister of their own religion, and it was in such a chapel-house that John Carroll was born, on the 8th of January, 1735 the first Bishop and Archbishop of Baltimore.
From what I have gleaned from the natives, both buildings must have surpassed in meanness our wildest conceptions of them. But more upon that subject later. Any account of the chapel-house at Ardmuirland would be incomplete without some reference to a personage who holds an important position in the household, second only to that of the master of the house.
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