Chapter 10 BRINGS THE READER BACK TO THE RESPECTABILITIES OF THE PARSONAGE.

After the high-born Captain Cecil Wiseman had accomplished his purpose, Sarah Wanless lost her attraction for him. With a fiendish guile he had tracked her down, and now that the chase was over, the victory won, why should he bother himself further? Sarah's beauty was not less; nay, was rather enhanced by the new sadness that shaded her face; but the Captain hardly looked at her again.

These confounded wenches were so given to whimpering, and this serene aristocrat hated "scenes." Had Sally been bold and of brazen iniquity, like many of the stained ones he knew in the greenrooms of London theatres, she might possibly have held this lust-consumed reptile a little longer in her power, but being only a simple village maiden slowly awakening to the horror of the fate that had befallen her, the sight of her tearful face made him avoid her. What had he to do with the consequences of sin and folly? Was not the world bound to make his vices pleasant to him?

This thoroughbred captain in Her Majesty's Dragoon Guards left Sally then, and sought other attractions, his appetite whetted by his success. Even as he snared Sarah Wanless his roving eye had sighted other game.

The vicar's wife, Mrs. Codling, had several daughters whom, like a judicious mother, she was anxious to marry well. These the Captain had deigned to notice somewhat in the course of his long visits at the Grange while Sally's destruction was in progress. At church more than once his greedy eye had rested on the vicar's pew with a hard gaze of admiration, and on week days his footsteps had begun to stray towards the vicarage often enough to set Mrs. Codling's brain a-scheming. It would be indeed a triumph, she felt, if the heir of Squire Wiseman could be got to marry one of her daughters. But that was a job which needed the most delicate handling, for if Lady Harriet got wind of her designs, the consequences would be more than Mrs. Codling felt able to face. At the best the parson's daughter would have been considered no fit match for so great a personage as this ill-doing guardsman, but, as things were, the very idea of such a marriage would have been received at the Grange with unutterable scorn.

Times were in many ways changed with the vicar since that day now long past, when his soft, fat hands were uplifted in holy repulsion of the horrible rabbit-slaying criminal who stood before him doomed. For one thing he had gathered a family around him, and for another he had been overtaken by poverty-a poverty that came of greed. The living of Ashbrook was worth in money about ￡250 a year, and there was a good vicarage with a large garden and paddock, so that altogether Mr. Codling was as well off in the country as he would have been with ￡500 a year in town. To this income, itself above starvation point many degrees, Mrs. Codling had added an income of nearly ￡2,000, which made the home more than comfortable. A contented man would have been very happy with such a provision, judged even by the standard of the Spectator, which admires Christianity with a well filled purse, but Mr. Codling wanted more, like most parsons. One would think from the eagerness shown by such to possess themselves either of rich wives or of large incomes made out of nothing, that somehow Christianity and poverty are things that cannot exist together. Luxury is certainly essential to the true faith of the majority of modern parsons. Without it they shrivel up, grow morose, full of evil thoughts, such as envy and malice, and instead of an example are a warning.

Parson Codling, then, took the common clerical fever. During the railway mania he saw men spring suddenly from poverty to great wealth, and very soon came to the conclusion that nothing would be easier than for him to do as they did. Entirely ignorant of the game of speculation, Codling took to speculating with the fearlessness of a master in the art, and following a common rut of fortune, he for a time succeeded. One land speculation in which he joined, and where the shareholders of a new line of railway were fleeced of fabulous thousands, cleared him, it was said, about ￡1800, and he did well with sundry purchases of shares. Naturally, success made him bolder. He bought anything and everything, became an expert user of stock exchange slang, and deeply versed in the "rigs" and dodges of the share market. Some of the squires around began to envy him, others cursed him for a nuisance, but still he made money, and no doubt would have gone on making it indefinitely had somebody always been found ready to buy when he wanted to sell. Unluckily for him, the day came when he could not sell at any price, and as he had been lifted clean off his feet by the elation of his early speculative successes, he only came back to the hard earth to find himself ruined. The crisis of 1847 did not break out without much foreshadowing to prudent men, but to the Rev. Josiah Codling it came like the trumpet of doom. Till the very last he clung to the hope that a rise in the share markets would set him free. That fatal October therefore passed like a whirlwind, leaving Codling stripped of all he had previously made and some ￡40,000 in debt. To save him from public exposure and disgrace, his wife had to part with nearly all her property in Worcester, and they were glad, ultimately, to escape with as much as yielded about ￡200 a-year beyond the value of the living. Had all the creditors been fairly paid they would not have retained a penny, but Codling struggled and wheedled, and, it is said, shed copious floods of tears over his hard fate, until pitying people let him go.

Such an untoward end of the glorious visions in which the vicar had indulged naturally embittered his home circle. Mrs. Codling could not forgive her lord for ruining her, and took to reviling the poor wretch early and late. The miserable fellow would have borne his misfortunes ill enough even if sympathised with. Being reviled, he bore them not at all. He drowned them in drink. At first he stupified himself with brandy; but that proving too dear for his means, he relapsed to gin, and led a sodden existence.

All too late his wife saw the blunder she had made, and tried to wean him back to sobriety. Failing in that, her pride and cunning came to the rescue. She smothered her tears and veiled her sorrows before the world, hiding at the same time her husband's infirmity as much as possible from the public eye. The lot was hard, her punishment severe, but she braced herself to it with a woman's patient courage, and straightway opened her heart to new hopes and dreams of better days to come. Henceforth the aim of her life must be to get her four daughters settled in life. Alas! the settlements would need to be humbler now than those she had once dreamed of. The tables of the great ones of the parish were not now open to them as they had been before her money had gone, and before Codling took to drink. There was not even a barrack in the neighbourhood, with its successive bevies of foolish young officers to prey upon-only Leamington with its dawdling crowds of nobodies. Ah, well, the most had to be made of the opportunities that offered.

These being the circumstances of the family at the vicarage, this the mental attitude of Mrs. Codling, who could wonder that her soured spirit rose once more within her with a feeling akin to gratitude towards a merciful providence, when Captain Wiseman came in her way? Despair had sometimes nearly marked her down for his prey, and lo! here was the Prince of the fairy tale. Dresses were forthwith obtained for the girls such as they had not worn for years, for happily their mother had still a few jewels left which she could pawn or sell. And being handsome girls-two of them particularly so-they soon attracted a good deal of the roving guardsman's attention. At first a little flirtation with them gave a pleasant variety to his existence, rendered just a little monotonous by the labour of stalking down Sally Wanless. The shrewd mother contrived that his opportunities should be frequent. The old pony chaise was furbished up anew and the girls took to driving the fat, wheezy, old pony about the country in a manner new and far from agreeable to it. In this way they managed to cross the Captain's trail much after his own style with Sally. During that winter he hunted a good deal, and the Codling girls developed an enthusiasm for the sport which made them haunt meets far and near. Months before the Captain flung Sarah from him he had thus become familiar with the sight of these girls, and no sooner was she well destroyed than he began to develop a preference for the youngest but one-Adelaide or Adela Codling. Miss Adela was a buxom, roystering, kind of girl, of handsome features, light brains, and abundant animal spirits. Already, though but nineteen, she had a reputation amongst her acquaintances of being what the pump-room gossip of Leamington styled "fastish." She affected outré fashion in dress, and was always ready to lead a revolt against established proprieties. To play the boisterous hoyden at a harvest home or farmer's Christmas dance, where she could scandalise all the sober domestic virtue of the parish and make every buxom farmer's lass wild with jealousy by her extravagant flirtations with the young men, delighted Miss Adelaide beyond measure.

This free young lady was most to the Captain's taste of all the four, but her mother felt disappointed at the preference. It not only left the eldest girl out in the cold, but made Mrs. Codling's task more dangerous. Adela had no prudence, and unripe plans might become known to Lady Harriet through her folly. Besides, her ladyship would probably be harder to persuade into accepting Adela as a daughter-in-law than any of the other three.

So thought the prudent, anxious mother; but she was too wise to interfere. A risk must be taken in any case, and she resolved to let the captain have his way, bracing herself to greater vigilance and higher flights of matrimonial diplomacy than ever. And she found a much more efficient ally in the Captain than she had expected. Men, in her opinion, were never prudent in love matters, but this man was as cautious as a diplomat on a secret mission. It did not suit him any more than Mrs. Codling that his mother should scent danger in his visits to the vicarage. In such a place as Ashbrook and in ordinary circumstances all their care would have gone for nothing; but, happily for their plans, her ladyship did not go out much now, and called seldom on any of her neighbours. Her husband, the estate, her miserable son, any one of them would have given her grief or work enough to keep her well at home. When she went abroad, therefore, it was generally for an hour's drive out and home, or to Leamington or Warwick on business.

Just now she was struggling hard not to lose the dream of hope that had for a short time gladdened her heart about her boy, and was failing in the effort. Notwithstanding his long visits to the Grange, his demands for money continued to be insatiable. He always put his necessities down to the bad conduct of the Jews. They had got him fast, he said, and would give him no peace. But as bill after bill got paid, only to be succeeded by a new crop, Lady Harriet began to doubt the truth of this tale, and in her unhappiness shut herself up more than ever. The Captain had only to spend a little of the money wrung from his mother in bribing her maid, and he was free to destroy all the women of the parish if he chose.

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