All Upton was thrown into a ferment by the unexpected news that their rector had resigned his living, and was about to emigrate to New Zealand. At first it was declared too strange to be true. Then in a few of the lower class taverns it was said to be too good to be true; but in the Upton Arms, where the landlady considered it her duty to be regular at church, and even the landlord thought it the thing to go there pretty often, a civil amount of regret was expressed. It was the fault of his wife, said most of the respectable parishioners, who unfortunately did not know when she had had enough of a good thing. Even those who were in the same plight with herself threw a stone at poor Sophy when they heard that their pleasant-spoken, affable, popular rector, as he used to be, was about to flee his country. Very few sympathized with him. He was taking an unheard-of, preposterous, fanatical course. How could a man in his senses give up a living of £400 a year, with a pretty rectory and glebe-land, for a colonial curacy?
But there was one person who heard the news, and brooded over it silently, with very different feelings. The last few months had been very tranquil ones for Ann Holland. The one anxiety of her quiet life had been removed, and after the first sorrow was passed she had found her home a very peaceful place without her brother. Her old neighbors could come in now to take tea with her without any dread of being rudely disturbed. The business did not suffer; it was rather increasing, and she had had some thoughts of employing a second journeyman. But to hear that Mr. Chantrey was going to leave Upton, and that very soon she should see neither him nor Charlie, who made her house so merry whenever he ran in, was as great a blow to her as to Mrs. Bolton.
Ann Holland had been born in the house she lived in, and had never dwelt anywhere else. All her world lay within the compass of a few miles from it, among the farm-houses where her business or her early friendships had made her acquainted with the inhabitants. The people of Upton only were her fellow-countrymen; all others were foreigners, and to her, lawful objects of mistrust. Every other land save her own seemed a strange and perilous place. Of New Zealand she had not even any vague ideas, for it was nothing but a name to her. She had far clearer views of heaven, of that other world into which she had seen so many of her childhood's friends pass away. To lie down upon her bed and die would have been a familiar journey to her compared with that strange voyage across boundless seas to a country of which she knew nothing but the name.
Yet they were going—Mr. Chantrey, with his failing health; Mrs. Chantrey, a victim to a miserable vice; and Charlie, the young, inexperienced boy. What a helpless set! She tried to picture them passing through the discomforts and dangers of a savage life, as she supposed it to be; Mr. Chantrey ill, poor, friendless, and homeless. Upon her screen were the announcements of his coming to the living, of his marriage, the birth of both children, and the death of one. She read them over word for word, with eyes fast filling and growing dim with tears. Very soon there would be another column in the newspaper telling of his resignation and departure—perhaps shortly afterward of his death. He would die in that far-off country, with no one to care for him or nurse him except his unhappy wife. She could not bear to think of it. She must go with them.
But how could she ever bear to quit Upton? All her own people were buried in the churchyard there, and she kept their graves green with turf, and their headstones free from moss. She had no memories or associations anywhere else, and she clung to all such memories and cherished them fondly. There was no one in Upton who knew the pedigrees of every family as she did. Even her household goods, old and quaint as they were, had a halo from the light of other days about them. How many persons, dead and gone now, had she seen sit opposite to her in that old arm-chair! How often had childish faces looked laughingly at themselves in her pewter plates? Her mother's chairs and sofa, worked in tent-stitch, which only saw the daylight twice a year—what would become of them, and what common uses would they be put to in any other house? Her heart failed her when she thought of leaving these things. It was not, moreover, simply leaving them, as she would have to do when she died, but she must see them sold and scattered before her eyes, and behold the vacant places empty and forlorn, without their old belongings. Could she bear to be so uprooted?
"Sir," she said one evening, when Mr. Chantrey, worn out with the conflict of his own parting with his people, was sitting depressed and silent by her fireside, "Mr. Chantrey, are you thinking of taking out a servant with you?"
"No," he answered; "the cost would be too much. You forget we are going to be poor folks out yonder, Ann. Don't you remember telling me it might have been better for my wife if she had had to work hard for Charlie and me?"
"That was long ago," she replied; "it's different now. Who's to mind you if you are ill? and who's to see Master Charlie kept nice, like a gentleman's son? I've been thinking it would break my heart to sit at home thinking of you all. There is nothing to keep me here, now my poor brother's gone. Take me with you, sir."
"No, no!" he exclaimed, vehemently—so vehemently that she knew how his heart leaped at the thought of it; "you must not sacrifice yourself for us. What! give up this pleasant home of yours, and all your old friends?! No; it cannot be."
"There'd be trouble in it," she said; "but it would be a harder trouble to think of you in foreign parts, with none but savages about you, and no roof over your head, and wild beasts marauding about."
"Not so bad as that," he interrupted, smiling so cheerfully that her own face brightened. "There are no wild beasts, and not many natives, and I shall have a home of my own somewhere."
"I could never sleep at nights," she went on, "or eat my bread in comfort, for wondering about you. I don't want to be a cost to you; and when I've sold all, I shall have a little sum of money in hand that will keep me a year or two after my passage is paid. I'm not too old for work yet. If it's too bad a place for me to go to, what must it be for you? And you're not as strong as you ought to be, sir. If anything should happen to you out there, you'd like to know I was with them you love, taking care of them."
"It would be a greater comfort than I can tell," said Mr. Chantrey, in a tremulous voice. "Now and then the thought crosses my mind that I might die yonder; and what would become of Sophy and Charlie, left so desolate? There's Warden; but he is too austere and harsh, good as he is. But, Ann, I ought not to let you come."
"There's no duty to keep me at home," she answered. "If my poor brother was alive, I could never forsake him, you know; but that is all over now. And I could have patience with her, poor lady! Aye, I'd have patience for her own sake as well as yours. She could never try me as I've been tried. And I've great hopes of her. Maybe if James, poor fellow, could have broken off all his old ways, and begun again fresh, turning over a new leaf where folks hadn't seen the old one, he might have been saved. I've great hopes of Mrs. Chantrey; and nobody could help her as I could. It seems almost as if our blessed Lord laid this thing before me, and asked me to do it for his sake. Sure if he asked me to go all round the world for him, I couldn't say no. To go to New Zealand with folks I love will be nothing to him leaving heaven, with his Father and the holy angels there, to live and work like a poor man in this world, and to die on the cross at the end of all."
Her voice fell into its lowest and tenderest key as she spoke these last words, and the tears stood in her eyes, as if the thought of Christ's life, so long familiar, had started into a new meaning for her. The opportunity for copying Him more literally than she had ever done before was granted to her, and her spirit sprang forward eagerly to seize it. Mr. Chantrey sat silent, yet with a lighter heart than he had had for months. He felt that if Ann Holland went out with them half his load would be gone. There was a brighter hope for Sophy, and there would be a sure friend for his boy, whatever his own fate might be. Yet he shrank from accepting such a sacrifice, and could only see the selfishness of doing so at the first moment.
"You must take another week to think of it," he said.
But when the week was ended Ann Holland was more confirmed in her wish than before. The news that she was going out with Mr. Chantrey's family caused as great a stir in the town as that of the rector's resignation. The Hollands had always been saddlers in Upton, and all the true old Upton people had faithfully adhered to them, never being tempted away by interlopers from London or other places, who professed to do better work at lower prices. To be sure the last male Holland was gone, but every one knew that his only share in the business for many years had been the spending of the money it brought in. That Ann Holland should give up her good trade and go out as servant to the Chantreys—for so it was represented by the news-bearers—was an unheard-of, incredible thing. Many were the remonstrances she had to listen to, and to answer as best she could.
It was a bitter day for Ann Holland when she saw her treasured household furniture sold by auction and scattered to the four winds. Many of her old neighbors bought for themselves some mementoes of the place they knew so well, but the bulk of the larger articles were sold without sentiment or feeling. It was a pang to part with each one of them, as they were carried off to some strange or hostile house to be put to common uses. The bare walls and empty rooms that were left, which she had never seen bare and empty before, seemed terribly new, yet familiar to her. She wandered through them for a few minutes, loitering in each one as she thought of all that had happened to her during her monotonous life; and then, with a sorrowful yet brave heart, she walked along the street to the rectory, which was already dismantled and bare like the home she had just left.
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