Swithin said he had heard as much, and added, what was far within the truth, that the news of the Bishop's death had been a great surprise to him.
'Yes,' said Mr. Torkingham, with nine thoughts to one word. 'One might have prophesied, to look at him, that Melchester would not lack a bishop for the next forty years. Yes; pale death knocks at the cottages of the poor and the palaces of kings with an impartial foot!'
'Was he a particularly good man?' asked Swithin.
'He was not a Ken or a Heber. To speak candidly, he had his faults, of which arrogance was not the least. But who is perfect?'
Swithin, somehow, felt relieved to hear that the Bishop was not a perfect man.
'His poor wife, I fear, had not a great deal more happiness with him than with her first husband. But one might almost have foreseen it; the marriage was hasty--the result of a red-hot caprice, hardly becoming in a man of his position; and it betokened a want of temperate discretion which soon showed itself in other ways. That's all there was to be said against him, and now it's all over, and things have settled again into their old course. But the Bishop's widow is not the Lady Constantine of former days. No; put it as you will, she is not the same. There seems to be a nameless something on her mind--a trouble--a rooted melancholy, which no man's ministry can reach. Formerly she was a woman whose confidence it was easy to gain; but neither religion nor philosophy avails with her now. Beyond that, her life is strangely like what it was when you were with us.'
Conversing thus they pursued the turnpike road till their conversation was interrupted by a crying voice on their left. They looked, and perceived that a child, in getting over an adjoining stile, had fallen on his face.
Mr. Torkingham and Swithin both hastened up to help the sufferer, who was a lovely little fellow with flaxen hair, which spread out in a frill of curls from beneath a quaint, close-fitting velvet cap that he wore. Swithin picked him up, while Mr. Torkingham wiped the sand from his lips and nose, and administered a few words of consolation, together with a few sweet-meats, which, somewhat to Swithin's surprise, the parson produced as if by magic from his pocket. One half the comfort rendered would have sufficed to soothe such a disposition as the child's. He ceased crying and ran away in delight to his unconscious nurse, who was reaching up for blackberries at a hedge some way off.