The vicarage was a little low house, very
humble in its externals, roofed with fluted tiles, and the walls covered
to the height of the chamber windows with green latticework and
creepers. It stood in a spacious garden and orchard, and had
outbuildings at a little distance on the same homely plan. The living
was in the gift of Abbotsmead, and the Fairfaxes had not been moved to
house their pastor, with his three hundred a year, in a residence fit
for a bishop. It was a simple, pleasant, rustic spot. The lower windows
were open, so was the door under the porch. Bessie saw that it could not
have undergone any material change since the summer days of twenty years
ago, when her father, a bright young fellow fresh from college, went to
read there of a morning with the learned vicar, and fell in love with
his pretty Elizabeth, and wooed and won her.
Bessie, imperfectly informed, exaggerated the resentment with which Mr.
Fairfax had visited his offending son. It was never an active
resentment, but merely a contemptuous acceptance of his irrevocable act.
He said, "Geoffry has married to his taste. His wife is used to a plain
way of living; they will be more useful in a country parish living on
so, free from the temptations of superfluous means." And he gave the
young couple a bare pittance. Time might have brought him relenting, but
time does not always reserve us opportunities. And here was Bessie
Fairfax considering the sorrows and early deaths of her parents,
charging them to her grandfather's account, and confirming herself in
her original judgment that he was a hard and cruel man.
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