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When he was permitted to say good-night, he went away with a sensation of fatigue more overpowering than if he had visited all the houses in Wharfside. When he passed the green door, over which the apple-tree rustled in the dark, it was a pang to his heart.
Then he began to have a strange painful feeling that Lucy watched too, and was observing all his looks and ways, and what he did and said in these changed times. It was a strange difference from the sweet half-conscious bond between them which existed of old, when they walked home together from Wharfside, talking of the district and the people, in the tender union of unspoken love and fellowship.
He had been in Wharfside that afternoon, and felt convinced that even the dying woman at No. 10 Prickett's Lane had heard of Rosa Elsworthy; and he saw, or imagined he saw, many a distrustful inquiring glance thrown at him by people to whom he had been a kind of secondary Providence. Naturally the mere thought of the failing allegiance of the "district" went to Mr Wentworth's heart.
I was surprised to hear what you were doing at the place they call Wharfside." "First let me correct you in two little inaccuracies," said Mr Wentworth, blandly, as he peeled his orange. "The Rector of Carlingford is not my rector, and I don't preach the Tracts for the Times. Let us always be particular, my dear aunt, as to points of fact."
And he did not try to overtake her on the road, as he might have done had his heart been less deeply touched, but went off with abstracted looks to Wharfside, where all the poor people were very glad to see him, and where his absence was spoken of as if he had been three months instead of three days away.
"In that case, it will perhaps be better not to say anything," he said; "but I think you will find difficulties in the way. Wharfside has some curious privileges, and pays no rates; but I have never taken up that ground. The two previous rectors made it over to me, and the work is too important to be ignored.
Easter had been early that year, and Ascension Day was in the beginning of May, one of those sweet days of early summer which still occur now and then to prove that the poets were right in all they say of the tenderest month of the year. Mr Wentworth had done duty at St Roque's, and afterwards at Wharfside. The sweet day and the sweet season had moved his heart.
He told her next morning, in his curt way, that he thought it would be best to wait a little before taking any steps in the Wharfside business.
He could not go to Wharfside, to the "district" through which they had so often gone together, about which they had talked, when all the little details discussed were sweet with the love which they did not name, without going deeper and deeper into that sweet shadow of Lucy which was upon his way wherever he went.
He went his way to Wharfside all the same, where the service was conducted as of old, and where all the humble uncertain voices were buoyed up and carried on by the steady pure volume of liquid sound which issued from Lucy Wodehouse's lips into the utterance of such a 'Magnificat' as filled Mr Wentworth's mind with exultation.
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