← catalogue

Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #5773 · 845,151 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5773]
                Most recently updated: August 5, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5773

Credits: Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBOURHOOD ***




Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

by George Macdonald, LL. D.

New York


Contents

 CHAPTER I. DESPONDENCY AND CONSOLATION.
 CHAPTER II. MY FIRST SUNDAY AT MARSHMALLOWS.
 CHAPTER III. MY FIRST MONDAY AT MARSHMALLOWS.
 CHAPTER IV. THE COFFIN.
 CHAPTER V. VISITORS FROM THE HALL.
 CHAPTER VI. OLDCASTLE HALL.
 CHAPTER VII. THE BISHOP’S BASIN.
 CHAPTER VIII. WHAT I PREACHED.
 CHAPTER IX. THE ORGANIST.
 CHAPTER X. MY CHRISTMAS PARTY.
 CHAPTER XI. SERMON ON GOD AND MAMMON.
 CHAPTER XII. THE AVENUE.
 CHAPTER XIII. YOUNG WEIR.
 CHAPTER XIV. MY PUPIL.
 CHAPTER XV. DR DUNCAN’S STORY.
 CHAPTER XVI. THE ORGAN.
 CHAPTER XVII. THE CHURCH-RATE.
 CHAPTER XVIII. JUDY’S NEWS.
 CHAPTER XIX. THE INVALID.
 CHAPTER XX. MOOD AND WILL.
 CHAPTER XXI. THE DEVIL IN THOMAS WEIR.
 CHAPTER XXII. THE DEVIL IN CATHERINE WEIR.
 CHAPTER XXIII. THE DEVIL IN THE VICAR.
 CHAPTER XXIV. AN ANGEL UNAWARES.
 CHAPTER XXV. TWO PARISHIONERS.
 CHAPTER XXVI. SATAN CAST OUT.
 CHAPTER XXVII. THE MAN AND THE CHILD.
 CHAPTER XXVIII. OLD MRS TOMKINS.
 CHAPTER XXIX. CALM AND STORM.
 CHAPTER XXX. A SERMON TO MYSELF.
 CHAPTER XXXI. A COUNCIL OF FRIENDS.
 CHAPTER XXXII. THE NEXT THING.
 CHAPTER XXXIII. OLD ROGERS’S THANKSGIVING.
 CHAPTER XXXIV. TOM’S STORY.




CHAPTER I.
DESPONDENCY AND CONSOLATION.


Before I begin to tell you some of the things I have seen and heard, in
both of which I have had to take a share, now from the compulsion of my
office, now from the leading of my own heart, and now from that destiny
which, including both, so often throws the man who supposed himself a
mere on-looker, into the very vortex of events—that destiny which took
form to the old pagans as a gray mist high beyond the heads of their
gods, but to us is known as an infinite love, revealed in the mystery
of man—I say before I begin, it is fitting that, in the absence of a
common friend to do that office for me, I should introduce myself to
your acquaintance, and I hope coming friendship. Nor can there be any
impropriety in my telling you about myself, seeing I remain concealed
behind my own words. You can never look me in the eyes, though you may
look me in the soul. You may find me out, find my faults, my vanities,
my sins, but you will not SEE me, at least in this world. To you I am
but a voice of revealing, not a form of vision; therefore I am bold
behind the mask, to speak to you heart to heart; bold, I say, just so
much the more that I do not speak to you face to face. And when we meet
in heaven—well, there I know there is no hiding; there, there is no
reason for hiding anything; there, the whole desire will be alternate
revelation and vision.

I am now getting old—faster and faster. I cannot help my gray hairs,
nor the wrinkles that gather so slowly yet ruthlessly; no, nor the
quaver that will come in my voice, not the sense of being feeble in the
knees, even when I walk only across the floor of my study. But I have
not got used to age yet. I do not FEEL one atom older than I did at
three-and-twenty. Nay, to tell all the truth, I feel a good deal
younger.—For then I only felt that a man had to take up his cross;
whereas now I feel that a man has to follow Him; and that makes an
unspeakable difference.—When my voice quavers, I feel that it is mine
and not mine; that it just belongs to me like my watch, which does not
go well-now, though it went well thirty years ago—not more than a
minute out in a month. And when I feel my knees shake, I think of them
with a kind of pity, as I used to think of an old mare of my father’s
of which I was very fond when I was a lad, and which bore me across
many a field and over many a fence, but which at last came to have the
same weakness in her knees that I have in mine; and she knew it too,
and took care of them, and so of herself, in a wise equine fashion.
These things are not me—or _I_, if the grammarians like it better, (I
always feel a strife between doing as the scholar does and doing as
other people do;) they are not me, I say; I HAVE them—and, please God,
shall soon have better. For it is not a pleasant thing for a young man,
or a young woman either, I venture to say, to have an old voice, and a
wrinkled face, and weak knees, and gray hair, or no hair at all. And if
any moral Philistine, as our queer German brothers over the Northern
fish-pond would call him, say that this is all rubbish, for that we ARE
old, I would answer: “Of all children how can the children of God be
old?”

So little do I give in to calling this outside of me, ME, that I should
not mind presenting a minute description of my own person such as would
at once clear me from any suspicion of vanity in so introducing myself.
Not that my honesty would result in the least from indifference to the
external—but from comparative indifference to the transitional; not to
the transitional in itself, which is of eternal significance and
result, but to the particular form of imperfection which it may have
reached at any individual moment of its infinite progression towards
the complete. For no sooner have I spoken the word NOW, than that NOW
is dead and another is dying; nay, in such a regard, there is no
NOW—only a past of which we know a little, and a future of which we
know far less and far more. But I will not speak at all of this body of
my earthly tabernacle, for it is on the whole more pleasant to forget
all about it. And besides, I do not want to set any of my readers to
whom I would have the pleasure of speaking far more openly and
cordially than if they were seated on the other side of my
writing-table—I do not want to set them wondering whether the vicar be
this vicar or that vicar; or indeed to run the risk of giving the
offence I might give, if I were anything else than “a wandering voice.”

I did not feel as I feel now when first I came to this parish. For, as
I have said, I am now getting old very fast. True, I was thirty when I
was made a vicar, an age at which a man might be expected to be
beginning to grow wise; but even then I had much yet to learn.

I well remember the first evening on which I wandered out from the
vicarage to take a look about me—to find out, in short, where I was,
and what aspect the sky and earth here presented. Strangely enough, I
had never been here before; for the presentation had been made me while
I was abroad.—I was depressed. It was depressing weather. Grave doubts
as to whether I was in my place in the church, would keep rising and
floating about, like rain-clouds within me. Not that I doubted about
the church; I only doubted about myself. “Were my motives pure?” “What
were my motives?” And, to tell the truth, I did not know what my
motives were, and therefore I could not answer about the purity of
them. Perhaps seeing we are in this world in order to become pure, it
would be expecting too much of any young man that he should be
absolutely certain that he was pure in anything. But the question
followed very naturally: “Had I then any right to be in the Church—to
be eating her bread and drinking her wine without knowing whether I was
fit to do her work?” To which the only answer I could find was, “The
Church is part of God’s world. He makes men to work; and work of some
sort must be done by every honest man. Somehow or other, I hardly know
how, I find myself in the Church. I do not know that I am fitter for
any other work. I see no other work to do. There is work here which I
can do after some fashion. With God’s help I will try to do it well.”

This resolution brought me some relief, but still I was depressed. It
was depressing weather.—I may as well say that I was not married then,
and that I firmly believed I never should be married—not from any
ambition taking the form of self-denial; nor yet from any notion that
God takes pleasure in being a hard master; but there was a lady—Well, I
WILL be honest, as I would be.—I had been refused a few months before,
which I think was the best thing ever happened to me except one. That
one, of course, was when I was accepted. But this is not much to the
purpose now. Only it was depressing weather.

For is it not depressing when the rain is falling, and the steam of it
is rising? when the river is crawling along muddily, and the horses
stand stock-still in the meadows with their spines in a straight line
from the ears to where they fail utterly in the tails? I should only
put on goloshes now, and think of the days when I despised damp. Ah! it
was mental waterproof that I needed then; for let me despise damp as
much as I would, I could neither keep it out of my mind, nor help
suffering the spiritual rheumatism which it occasioned. Now, the damp
never gets farther than my goloshes and my Macintosh. And for that
worst kind of rheumatism—I never feel it now.

But I had begun to tell you about that first evening.—I had arrived at
the vicarage the night before, and it had rained all day, and was still
raining, though not so much. I took my umbrella and went out.

For as I wanted to do my work well (everything taking far more the
shape of work to me, then, and duty, than it does now—though, even now,
I must confess things have occasionally to be done by the clergyman
because there is no one else to do them, and hardly from other motive
than a sense of duty,—a man not being able to shirk work because it may
happen to be dirty)—I say, as I wanted to do my work well, or rather,
perhaps, because I dreaded drudgery as much as any poor fellow who
comes to the treadmill in consequence—I wanted to interest myself in
it; and therefore I would go and fall in love, first of all, if I
could, with the country round about. And my first step beyond my own
gate was up to the ankles, in mud.

Therewith, curiously enough, arose the distracting thought how I could
possibly preach TWO good sermons a Sunday to the same people, when one
of the sermons was in the afternoon instead of the evening, to which
latter I had been accustomed in the large town in which I had formerly
officiated as curate in a proprietary chapel. I, who had declaimed
indignantly against excitement from without, who had been inclined to
exalt the intellect at the expense even of the heart, began to fear
that there must be something in the darkness, and the gas-lights, and
the crowd of faces, to account for a man’s being able to preach a
better sermon, and for servant girls preferring to go out in the
evening. Alas! I had now to preach, as I might judge with all
probability beforehand, to a company of rustics, of thought yet slower
than of speech, unaccustomed in fact to THINK at all, and that in the
sleepiest, deadest part of the day, when I could hardly think myself,
and when, if the weather should be at all warm, I could not expect many
of them to be awake. And what good might I look for as the result of my
labour? How could I hope in these men and women to kindle that fire
which, in the old days of the outpouring of the Spirit, made men live
with the sense of the kingdom of heaven about them, and the expectation
of something glorious at hand just outside that invisible door which
lay between the worlds?

I have learned since, that perhaps I overrated the spirituality of
those times, and underrated, not being myself spiritual enough to see
all about me, the spirituality of these times. I think I have learned
since, that the parson of a parish must be content to keep the upper
windows of his mind open to the holy winds and the pure lights of
heaven; and the side windows of tone, of speech, of behaviour open to
the earth, to let forth upon his fellow-men the tenderness and truth
which those upper influences bring forth in any region exposed to their
operation. Believing in his Master, such a servant shall not make
haste; shall feel no feverous desire to behold the work of his hands;
shall be content to be as his Master, who waiteth long for the fruits
of His earth.

But surely I am getting older than I thought; for I keep wandering away
from my subject, which is this, my first walk in my new cure. My excuse
is, that I want my reader to understand something of the state of my
mind, and the depression under which I was labouring. He will perceive
that I desired to do some work worth calling by the name of work, and
that I did not see how to get hold of a beginning.

I had not gone far from my own gate before the rain ceased, though it
was still gloomy enough for any amount to follow. I drew down my
umbrella, and began to look about me. The stream on my left was so
swollen that I could see its brown in patches through the green of the
meadows along its banks. A little in front of me, the road, rising
quickly, took a sharp turn to pass along an old stone bridge that
spanned the water with a single fine arch, somewhat pointed; and
through the arch I could see the river stretching away up through the
meadows, its banks bordered with pollards. Now, pollards always made me
miserable. In the first place, they look ill-used; in the next place,
they look tame; in the third place, they look very ugly. I had not
learned then to honour them on the ground that they yield not a jot to
the adversity of their circumstances; that, if they must be pollards,
they still will be trees; and what they may not do with grace, they
will yet do with bounty; that, in short, their life bursts forth,
despite of all that is done to repress and destroy their individuality.
When you have once learned to honour anything, love is not very far
off; at least that has always been my experience. But, as I have said,
I had not yet learned to honour pollards, and therefore they made me
more miserable than I was already.

When, having followed the road, I stood at last on the bridge, and,
looking up and down the river through the misty air, saw two long rows
of these pollards diminishing till they vanished in both directions,
the sight of them took from me all power of enjoying the water beneath
me, the green fields around me, or even the old-world beauty of the
little bridge upon which I stood, although all sorts of bridges have
been from very infancy a delight to me. For I am one of those who never
get rid of their infantile predilections, and to have once enjoyed
making a mud bridge, was to enjoy all bridges for ever.

I saw a man in a white smock-frock coming along the road beyond, but I
turned my back to the road, leaned my arms on the parapet of the
bridge, and stood gazing where I saw no visions, namely, at those very
poplars. I heard the man’s footsteps coming up the crown of the arch,
but I would not turn to greet him. I was in a selfish humour if ever I
was; for surely if ever one man ought to greet another, it was upon
such a comfortless afternoon. The footsteps stopped behind me, and I
heard a voice:—

“I beg yer pardon, sir; but be you the new vicar?”

I turned instantly and answered, “I am. Do you want me?”

“I wanted to see yer face, sir, that was all, if ye’ll not take it
amiss.”

Before me stood a tall old man with his hat in his hand, clothed as I
have said, in a white smock-frock. He smoothed his short gray hair with
his curved palm down over his forehead as he stood. His face was of a
red brown, from much exposure to the weather. There was a certain look
of roughness, without hardness, in it, which spoke of endurance rather
than resistance, although he could evidently set his face as a flint.
His features were large and a little coarse, but the smile that parted
his lips when he spoke, shone in his gray eyes as well, and lighted up
a countenance in which a man might trust.

“I wanted to see yer face, sir, if you’ll not take it amiss.”

“Certainly not,” I answered, pleased with the man’s address, as he
stood square before me, looking as modest as fearless. “The sight of a
man’s face is what everybody has a right to; but, for all that, I
should like to know why you want to see my face.”

“Why, sir, you be the new vicar. You kindly told me so when I axed
you.”

“Well, then, you’ll see my face on Sunday in church—that is, if you
happen to be there.”

For, although some might think it the more dignified way, I could not
take it as a matter of course that he would be at church. A man might
have better reasons for staying away from church than I had for going,
even though I was the parson, and it was my business. Some clergymen
separate between themselves and their office to a degree which I cannot
understand. To assert the dignities of my office seems to me very like
exalting myself; and when I have had a twinge of conscience about it,
as has happened more than once, I have then found comfort in these two
texts: “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister;”
and “It is enough that the servant should be as his master.” Neither
have I ever been able to see the very great difference between right
and wrong in a clergyman, and right and wrong in another man. All that
I can pretend to have yet discovered comes to this: that what is right
in another man is right in a clergyman; and what is wrong in another
man is much worse in a clergyman. Here, however, is one more proof of
approaching age. I do not mean the opinion, but the digression.

“Well, then,” I said, “you’ll see my face in church on Sunday, if you
happen to be there.”

“Yes, sir; but you see, sir, on the bridge here, the parson is the
parson like, and I’m Old Rogers; and I looks in his face, and he looks
in mine, and I says to myself, ‘This is my parson.’ But o’ Sundays he’s
nobody’s parson; he’s got his work to do, and it mun be done, and
there’s an end on’t.”

That there was a real idea in the old man’s mind was considerably
clearer than the logic by which he tried to bring it out.

“Did you know parson that’s gone, sir?” he went on.

“No,” I answered.

“Oh, sir! he wur a good parson. Many’s the time he come and sit at my
son’s bedside—him that’s dead and gone, sir—for a long hour, on a
Saturday night, too. And then when I see him up in the desk the next
mornin’, I’d say to myself, ‘Old Rogers, that’s the same man as sat by
your son’s bedside last night. Think o’ that, Old Rogers!’ But,
somehow, I never did feel right sure o’ that same. He didn’t seem to
have the same cut, somehow; and he didn’t talk a bit the same. And when
he spoke to me after sermon, in the church-yard, I was always of a mind
to go into the church again and look up to the pulpit to see if he war
really out ov it; for this warn’t the same man, you see. But you’ll
know all about it better than I can tell you, sir. Only I always liked
parson better out o’ the pulpit, and that’s how I come to want to make
you look at me, sir, instead o’ the water down there, afore I see you
in the church to-morrow mornin’.”

The old man laughed a kindly laugh; but he had set me thinking, and I
did not know what to say to him all at once. So after a short pause, he
resumed—

“You’ll be thinking me a queer kind of a man, sir, to speak to my
betters before my betters speaks to me. But mayhap you don’t know what
a parson is to us poor folk that has ne’er a friend more larned than
theirselves but the parson. And besides, sir, I’m an old salt,—an old
man-o’-war’s man,—and I’ve been all round the world, sir; and I ha’
been in all sorts o’ company, pirates and all, sir; and I aint a bit
frightened of a parson. No; I love a parson, sir. And I’ll tell you for
why, sir. He’s got a good telescope, and he gits to the masthead, and
he looks out. And he sings out, ‘Land ahead!’ or ‘Breakers ahead!’ and
gives directions accordin’. Only I can’t always make out what he says.
But when he shuts up his spyglass, and comes down the riggin’, and
talks to us like one man to another, then I don’t know what I should do
without the parson. Good evenin’ to you, sir, and welcome to
Marshmallows.”

The pollards did not look half so dreary. The river began to glimmer a
little; and the old bridge had become an interesting old bridge. The
country altogether was rather nice than otherwise. I had found a friend
already!—that is, a man to whom I might possibly be of some use; and
that was the most precious friend I could think of in my present
situation and mood. I had learned something from him too; and I
resolved to try all I could to be the same man in the pulpit that I was
out of it. Some may be inclined to say that I had better have formed
the resolution to be the same man out of the pulpit that I was in it.
But the one will go quite right with the other. Out of the pulpit I
would be the same man I was in it—seeing and feeling the realities of
the unseen; and in the pulpit I would be the same man I was out of
it—taking facts as they are, and dealing with things as they show
themselves in the world.

One other occurrence before I went home that evening, and I shall close
the chapter. I hope I shall not write another so dull as this. I dare
not promise, though; for this is a new kind of work to me.

Before I left the bridge,—while, in fact, I was contemplating the
pollards with an eye, if not of favour, yet of diminished dismay,—the
sun, which, for anything I knew of his whereabouts, either from
knowledge of the country, aspect of the evening, or state of my own
feelings, might have been down for an hour or two, burst his cloudy
bands, and blazed out as if he had just risen from the dead, instead of
being just about to sink into the grave. Do not tell me that my figure
is untrue, for that the sun never sinks into the grave, else I will
retort that it is just as true of the sun as of a man; for that no man
sinks into the grave. He only disappears. Life IS a constant sunrise,
which death cannot interrupt, any more than the night can swallow up
the sun. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all
live unto him.”

Well, the sun shone out gloriously. The whole sweep of the gloomy river
answered him in gladness; the wet leaves of the pollards quivered and
glanced; the meadows offered up their perfect green, fresh and clear
out of the trouble of the rain; and away in the distance, upon a rising
ground covered with trees, glittered a weathercock. What if I found
afterwards that it was only on the roof of a stable? It shone, and that
was enough. And when the sun had gone below the horizon, and the fields
and the river were dusky once more, there it glittered still over the
darkening earth, a symbol of that faith which is “the evidence of
things not seen,” and it made my heart swell as at a chant from the
prophet Isaiah. What matter then whether it hung over a stable-roof or
a church-tower?

I stood up and wandered a little farther—off the bridge, and along the
road. I had not gone far before I passed a house, out of which came a
young woman leading a little boy. They came after me, the boy gazing at
the red and gold and green of the sunset sky. As they passed me, the
child said—

“Auntie, I think I should like to be a painter.”

“Why?” returned his companion.

“Because, then,” answered the child, “I could help God to paint the
sky.”

What his aunt replied I do not know; for they were presently beyond my
hearing. But I went on answering him myself all the way home. Did God
care to paint the sky of an evening, that a few of His children might
see it, and get just a hope, just an aspiration, out of its passing
green, and gold, and purple, and red? and should I think my day’s
labour lost, if it wrought no visible salvation in the earth?

But was the child’s aspiration in vain? Could I tell him God did not
want his help to paint the sky? True, he could mount no scaffold
against the infinite of the glowing west. But might he not with his
little palette and brush, when the time came, show his brothers and
sisters what he had seen there, and make them see it too? Might he not
thus come, after long trying, to help God to paint this glory of vapour
and light inside the minds of His children? Ah! if any man’s work is
not WITH God, its results shall be burned, ruthlessly burned, because
poor and bad.

“So, for my part,” I said to myself, as I walked home, “if I can put
one touch of a rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman of my
cure, I shall feel that I have worked with God. He is in no haste; and
if I do what I may in earnest, I need not mourn if I work no great work
on the earth. Let God make His sunsets: I will mottle my little fading
cloud. To help the growth of a thought that struggles towards the
light; to brush with gentle hand the earth-stain from the white of one
snowdrop—such be my ambition! So shall I scale the rocks in front, not
leave my name carved upon those behind me.”

People talk about special providences. I believe in the providences,
but not in the specialty. I do not believe that God lets the thread of
my affairs go for six days, and on the seventh evening takes it up for
a moment. The so-called special providences are no exception to the
rule—they are common to all men at all moments. But it is a fact that
God’s care is more evident in some instances of it than in others to
the dim and often bewildered vision of humanity. Upon such instances
men seize and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it
would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter
is one grand providence.

I was one of such men at the time, and could not fail to see what I
called a special providence in this, that on my first attempt to find
where I stood in the scheme of Providence, and while I was discouraged
with regard to the work before me, I should fall in with these two—an
old man whom I could help, and a child who could help me; the one
opening an outlet for my labour and my love, and the other reminding me
of the highest source of the most humbling comfort,—that in all my work
I might be a fellow-worker with God.




CHAPTER II.
MY FIRST SUNDAY AT MARSHMALLOWS.


These events fell on the Saturday night. On the Sunday morning, I read
prayers and preached. Never before had I enjoyed so much the petitions
of the Church, which Hooker calls “the sending of angels upward,” or
the reading of the lessons, which he calls “the receiving of angels
descended from above.” And whether from the newness of the parson, or
the love of the service, certainly a congregation more intent, or more
responsive, a clergyman will hardly find. But, as I had feared, it was
different in the afternoon. The people had dined, and the usual
somnolence had followed; nor could I find in my heart to blame men and
women who worked hard all the week, for being drowsy on the day of
rest. So I curtailed my sermon as much as I could, omitting page after
page of my manuscript; and when I came to a close, was rewarded by
perceiving an agreeable surprise upon many of the faces round me. I
resolved that, in the afternoons at least, my sermons should be as
short as heart could wish.

But that afternoon there was at least one man of the congregation who
was neither drowsy nor inattentive. Repeatedly my eyes left the page
off which I was reading and glanced towards him. Not once did I find
his eyes turned away from me.

There was a small loft in the west end of the church, in which stood a
little organ, whose voice, weakened by years of praising, and possibly
of neglect, had yet, among a good many tones that were rough, wooden,
and reedy, a few remaining that were as mellow as ever praiseful heart
could wish to praise withal. And these came in amongst the rest like
trusting thoughts amidst “eating cares;” like the faces of children
borne in the arms of a crowd of anxious mothers; like hopes that are
young prophecies amidst the downward sweep of events. For, though I do
not understand music, I have a keen ear for the perfection of the
single tone, or the completeness of the harmony. But of this organ more
by and by.

Now this little gallery was something larger than was just necessary
for the organ and its ministrants, and a few of the parishioners had
chosen to sit in its fore-front. Upon this occasion there was no one
there but the man to whom I have referred.

The space below this gallery was not included in the part of the church
used for the service. It was claimed by the gardener of the place, that
is the sexton, to hold his gardening tools. There were a few ancient
carvings in wood lying in it, very brown in the dusky light that came
through a small lancet window, opening, not to the outside, but into
the tower, itself dusky with an enduring twilight. And there were some
broken old headstones, and the kindly spade and pickaxe—but I have
really nothing to do with these now, for I am, as it were, in the
pulpit, whence one ought to look beyond such things as these.

Rising against the screen which separated this mouldy portion of the
church from the rest, stood an old monument of carved wood, once
brilliantly painted in the portions that bore the arms of the family
over whose vault it stood, but now all bare and worn, itself gently
flowing away into the dust it commemorated. It lifted its gablet,
carved to look like a canopy, till its apex was on a level with the
book-board on the front of the organ-loft; and over—in fact upon this
apex appeared the face of the man whom I have mentioned. It was a very
remarkable countenance—pale, and very thin, without any hair, except
that of thick eyebrows that far over-hung keen, questioning eyes. Short
bushy hair, gray, not white, covered a well formed head with a high
narrow forehead. As I have said, those keen eyes kept looking at me
from under their gray eyebrows all the time of the sermon—intelligently
without doubt, but whether sympathetically or otherwise I could not
determine. And indeed I hardly know yet. My vestry door opened upon a
little group of graves, simple and green, without headstone or slab;
poor graves, the memory of whose occupants no one had cared to
preserve. Good men must have preceded me here, else the poor would not
have lain so near the chancel and the vestry-door. All about and beyond
were stones, with here and there a monument; for mine was a large
parish, and there were old and rich families in it, more of which
buried their dead here than assembled their living. But close by the
vestry-door, there was this little billowy lake of grass. And at the
end of the narrow path leading from the door, was the churchyard wall,
with a few steps on each side of it, that the parson might pass at once
from the churchyard into his own shrubbery, here tangled, almost
matted, from luxuriance of growth. But I would not creep out the back
way from among my people. That way might do very well to come in by;
but to go out, I would use the door of the people. So I went along the
church, a fine old place, such as I had never hoped to be presented to,
and went out by the door in the north side into the middle of the
churchyard. The door on the other side was chiefly used by the few
gentry of the neighbourhood; and the Lych-gate, with its covered way,
(for the main road had once passed on that side,) was shared between
the coffins and the carriages, the dead who had no rank but one, that
of the dead, and the living who had more money than their neighbours.
For, let the old gentry disclaim it as they may, mere wealth, derived
from whatever source, will sooner reach their level than poor
antiquity, or the rarest refinement of personal worth; although, to be
sure, the oldest of them will sooner give to the rich their sons or
their daughters to wed, to love if they can, to have children by, than
they will yield a jot of their ancestral preeminence, or acknowledge
any equality in their sons or daughters-in-law. The carpenter’s son is
to them an old myth, not an everlasting fact. To Mammon alone will they
yield a little of their rank—none of it to Christ. Let me glorify God
that Jesus took not on. Him the nature of nobles, but the seed of Adam;
for what could I do without my poor brothers and sisters?

I passed along the church to the northern door, and went out. The
churchyard lay in bright sunshine. All the rain and gloom were gone.
“If one could only bring this glory of sun and grass into one’s hope
for the future!” thought I; and looking down I saw the little boy who
aspired to paint the sky, looking up in my face with mingled confidence
and awe.

“Do you trust me, my little man?” thought I. “You shall trust me then.
But I won’t be a priest to you, I’ll be a big brother.”

For the priesthood passes away, the brotherhood endures. The priesthood
passes away, swallowed up in the brotherhood. It is because men cannot
learn simple things, cannot believe in the brotherhood, that they need
a priesthood. But as Dr Arnold said of the Sunday, “They DO need it.”
And I, for one, am sure that the priesthood needs the people much more
than the people needs the priesthood.

So I stooped and lifted the child and held him in my arms. And the
little fellow looked at me one moment longer, and then put his arms
gently round my neck. And so we were friends. When I had set him down,
which I did presently, for I shuddered at the idea of the people
thinking that I was showing off the CLERGYMAN, I looked at the boy. In
his face was great sweetness mingled with great rusticity, and I could
not tell whether he was the child of gentlefolk or of peasants. He did
not say a word, but walked away to join his aunt, who was waiting for
him at the gate of the churchyard. He kept his head turned towards me,
however, as he went, so that, not seeing where he was going, he
stumbled over the grave of a child, and fell in the hollow on the other
side. I ran to pick him up. His aunt reached him at the same moment.

“Oh, thank you, sir!” she said, as I gave him to her, with an
earnestness which seemed to me disproportionate to the deed, and
carried him away with a deep blush over all her countenance.

At the churchyard-gate, the old man-of-war’s man was waiting to have
another look at me. His hat was in his hand, and he gave a pull to the
short hair over his forehead, as if he would gladly take that off too,
to show his respect for the new parson. I held out my hand gratefully.
It could not close around the hard, unyielding mass of fingers which
met it. He did not know how to shake hands, and left it all to me. But
pleasure sparkled in his eyes.

“My old woman would like to shake hands with you, sir,” he said.

Beside him stood his old woman, in a portentous bonnet, beneath whose
gay yellow ribbons appeared a dusky old face, wrinkled like a ship’s
timbers, out of which looked a pair of keen black eyes, where the best
beauty, that of loving-kindness, had not merely lingered, but
triumphed.

“I shall be in to see you soon,” I said, as I shook hands with her. “I
shall find out where you live.”

“Down by the mill,” she said; “close by it, sir. There’s one bed in our
garden that always thrives, in the hottest summer, by the plash from
the mill, sir.”

“Ask for Old Rogers, sir,” said the man. “Everybody knows Old Rogers.
But if your reverence minds what my wife says, you won’t go wrong. When
you find the river, it takes you to the mill; and when you find the
mill, you find the wheel; and when you find the wheel, you haven’t far
to look for the cottage, sir. It’s a poor place, but you’ll be welcome,
sir.”




CHAPTER III.
MY FIRST MONDAY AT MARSHMALLOWS.


The next day I might expect some visitors. It is a fortunate thing that
English society now regards the parson as a gentleman, else he would
have little chance of being useful to the UPPER CLASSES. But I wanted
to get a good start of them, and see some of my poor before my rich
came to see me. So after breakfast, on as lovely a Monday in the
beginning of autumn as ever came to comfort a clergyman in the reaction
of his efforts to feed his flock on the Sunday, I walked out, and took
my way to the village. I strove to dismiss from my mind every feeling
of DOING DUTY, of PERFORMING MY PART, and all that. I had a horror of
becoming a moral policeman as much as of “doing church.” I would simply
enjoy the privilege, more open to me in virtue of my office, of
ministering. But as no servant has a right to force his service, so I
would be the NEIGHBOUR only, until such time as the opportunity of
being the servant should show itself.

The village was as irregular as a village should be, partly consisting
of those white houses with intersecting parallelograms of black which
still abound in some regions of our island. Just in the centre,
however, grouping about an old house of red brick, which had once been
a manorial residence, but was now subdivided in all modes that analytic
ingenuity could devise, rose a portion of it which, from one point of
view, might seem part of an old town. But you had only to pass round
any one of three visible corners to see stacks of wheat and a
farm-yard; while in another direction the houses went straggling away
into a wood that looked very like the beginning of a forest, of which
some of the village orchards appeared to form part. From the street the
slow-winding, poplar-bordered stream was here and there just visible.

I did not quite like to have it between me and my village. I could not
help preferring that homely relation in which the houses are built up
like swallow-nests on to the very walls of the cathedrals themselves,
to the arrangement here, where the river flowed, with what flow there
was in it, between the church and the people.

A little way beyond the farther end of the village appeared an iron
gate, of considerable size, dividing a lofty stone wall. And upon the
top of that one of the stone pillars supporting the gate which I could
see, stood a creature of stone, whether natant, volant, passant,
couchant, or rampant, I could not tell, only it looked like something
terrible enough for a quite antediluvian heraldry.

As I passed along the street, wondering with myself what relations
between me and these houses were hidden in the future, my eye was
caught by the window of a little shop, in which strings of beads and
elephants of gingerbread formed the chief samples of the goods within.
It was a window much broader than it was high, divided into
lozenge-shaped panes. Wondering what kind of old woman presided over
the treasures in this cave of Aladdin, I thought to make a first of my
visits by going in and buying something. But I hesitated, because I
could not think of anything I was in want of—at least that the old
woman was likely to have. To be sure I wanted a copy of Bengel’s
“Gnomon;” but she was not likely to have that. I wanted the fourth
plate in the third volume of Law’s “Behmen;” she was not likely to have
that either. I did not care for gingerbread; and I had no little girl
to take home beads to.

But why should I not go in without an ostensible errand? For this
reason: there are dissenters everywhere, and I could not tell but I
might be going into the shop of a dissenter. Now, though, I confess,
nothing would have pleased me better than that all the dissenters
should return to their old home in the Church, I could not endure the
suspicion of laying myself out to entice them back by canvassing or
using any personal influence. Whether they returned or not, however,
(and I did not expect many would,) I hoped still, some day, to stand
towards every one of them in the relation of the parson of the parish,
that is, one of whom each might feel certain that he was ready to serve
him or her at any hour when he might be wanted to render a service. In
the meantime, I could not help hesitating.

I had almost made up my mind to ask if she had a small pocket compass,
for I had seen such things in little country shops—I am afraid only in
France, though—when the door opened, and out came the little boy whom I
had already seen twice, and who was therefore one of my oldest friends
in the place. He came across the road to me, took me by the hand, and
said—

“Come and see mother.”

“Where, my dear?” I asked.

“In the shop there,” he answered.

“Is it your mother’s shop?”

“Yes.”

I said no more, but accompanied him. Of course my expectation of seeing
an old woman behind the counter had vanished, but I was not in the
least prepared for the kind of woman I did see.

The place was half a shop and half a kitchen. A yard or so of counter
stretched inwards from the door, just as a hint to those who might be
intrusively inclined. Beyond this, by the chimney-corner, sat the
mother, who rose as we entered. She was certainly one—I do not say of
the most beautiful, but, until I have time to explain further—of the
most remarkable women I had ever seen. Her face was absolutely
white—no, pale cream-colour—except her lips and a spot upon each cheek,
which glowed with a deep carmine. You would have said she had been
painting, and painting very inartistically, so little was the red
shaded into the surrounding white. Now this was certainly not
beautiful. Indeed, it occasioned a strange feeling, almost of terror,
at first, for she reminded one of the spectre woman in the “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner.” But when I got used to her complexion, I saw that the
form of her features was quite beautiful. She might indeed have been
LOVELY but for a certain hardness which showed through the beauty. This
might have been the result of ill health, ill-endured; but I doubted
it. For there was a certain modelling of the cheeks and lips which
showed that the teeth within were firmly closed; and, taken with the
look of the eyes and forehead, seemed the expression of a constant and
bitter self-command. But there were indubitable marks of ill health
upon her, notwithstanding; for not to mention her complexion, her large
dark eye was burning as if the lamp of life had broken and the oil was
blazing; and there was a slight expansion of the nostrils, which
indicated physical unrest. But her manner was perfectly, almost
dreadfully, quiet; her voice soft, low, and chiefly expressive of
indifference. She spoke without looking me in the face, but did not
seem either shy or ashamed. Her figure was remarkably graceful, though
too worn to be beautiful.—Here was a strange parishioner for me!—in a
country toy-shop, too!

As soon as the little fellow had brought me in, he shrunk away through
a half-open door that revealed a stair behind.

“What can I do for you, sir?” said the mother, coldly, and with a kind
of book-propriety of speech, as she stood on the other side of the
little counter, prepared to open box or drawer at command.

“To tell the truth, I hardly know,” I said. “I am the new vicar; but I
do not think that I should have come in to see you just to-day, if it
had not been that your little boy there—where is he gone to? He asked
me to come in and see his mother.”

“He is too ready to make advances to strangers, sir.”

She said this in an incisive tone.

“Oh, but,” I answered, “I am not a stranger to him. I have met him
twice before. He is a little darling. I assure you he has quite gained
my heart.”

No reply for a moment. Then just “Indeed!” and nothing more.

I could not understand it.

But a jar on a shelf, marked TOBACCO, rescued me from the most pressing
portion of the perplexity, namely, what to say next.

“Will you give me a quarter of a pound of tobacco?” I said.

The woman turned, took down the jar, arranged the scales, weighed out
the quantity, wrapped it up, took the money,—and all without one other
word than, “Thank you, sir;” which was all I could return, with the
addition of, “Good morning.”

For nothing was left me but to walk away with my parcel in my pocket.

The little boy did not show himself again. I had hoped to find him
outside.

Pondering, speculating, I now set out for the mill, which, I had
already learned, was on the village side of the river. Coming to a lane
leading down to the river, I followed it, and then walked up a path
outside the row of pollards, through a lovely meadow, where brown and
white cows were eating and shining all over the thick deep grass.
Beyond the meadow, a wood on the side of a rising ground went parallel
with the river a long way. The river flowed on my right. That is, I
knew that it was flowing, but I could not have told how I knew, it was
so slow. Still swollen, it was of a clear brown, in which you could see
the browner trouts darting to and fro with such a slippery gliding,
that the motion seemed the result of will, without any such
intermediate and complicate arrangement as brain and nerves and
muscles. The water-beetles went spinning about over the surface; and
one glorious dragon-fly made a mist about him with his long wings. And
over all, the sun hung in the sky, pouring down life; shining on the
roots of the willows at the bottom of the stream; lighting up the black
head of the water-rat as he hurried across to the opposite bank;
glorifying the rich green lake of the grass; and giving to the whole an
utterance of love and hope and joy, which was, to him who could read
it, a more certain and full revelation of God than any display of power
in thunder, in avalanche, in stormy sea. Those with whom the feeling of
religion is only occasional, have it most when the awful or grand
breaks out of the common; the meek who inherit the earth, find the God
of the whole earth more evidently present—I do not say more present,
for there is no measuring of His presence—more evidently present in the
commonest things. That which is best He gives most plentifully, as is
reason with Him. Hence the quiet fulness of ordinary nature; hence the
Spirit to them that ask it.

I soon came within sound of the mill; and presently, crossing the
stream that flowed back to the river after having done its work on the
corn, I came in front of the building, and looked over the half-door
into the mill. The floor was clean and dusty. A few full sacks, tied
tight at the mouth—they always look to me as if Joseph’s silver cup
were just inside—stood about. In the farther corner, the flour was
trickling down out of two wooden spouts into a wooden receptacle below.
The whole place was full of its own faint but pleasant odour. No man
was visible. The spouts went on pouring the slow torrent of flour, as
if everything could go on with perfect propriety of itself. I could not
even see how a man could get at the stones that I heard grinding away
above, except he went up the rope that hung from the ceiling. So I
walked round the corner of the place, and found myself in the company
of the water-wheel, mossy and green with ancient waterdrops, looking so
furred and overgrown and lumpy, that one might have thought the wood of
it had taken to growing again in its old days, and so the wheel was
losing by slow degrees the shape of a wheel, to become some new awful
monster of a pollard. As yet, however, it was going round; slowly,
indeed, and with the gravity of age, but doing its work, and casting
its loose drops in the alms-giving of a gentle rain upon a little plot
of Master Rogers’s garden, which was therefore full of moisture-loving
flowers. This plot was divided from the mill-wheel by a small stream
which carried away the surplus water, and was now full and running
rapidly.

Beyond the stream, beside the flower bed, stood a dusty young man,
talking to a young woman with a rosy face and clear honest eyes. The
moment they saw me they parted. The young man came across the stream at
a step, and the young woman went up the garden towards the cottage.

“That must be Old Rogers’s cottage?” I said to the miller.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, looking a little sheepish.

“Was that his daughter—that nice-looking young woman you were talking
to?”

“Yes, sir, it was.”

And he stole a shy pleased look at me out of the corners of his eyes.

“It’s a good thing,” I said, “to have an honest experienced old mill
like yours, that can manage to go on of itself for a little while now
and then.”

This gave a great help to his budding confidence. He laughed.

“Well, sir, it’s not very often it’s left to itself. Jane isn’t at her
father’s above once or twice a week at most.”

“She doesn’t live with them, then?”

“No, sir. You see they’re both hearty, and they ain’t over well to do,
and Jane lives up at the Hall, sir. She’s upper housemaid, and waits on
one of the young ladies.—Old Rogers has seen a great deal of the world,
sir.”

“So I imagine. I am just going to see him. Good morning.”

I jumped across the stream, and went up a little gravel-walk, which led
me in a few yards to the cottage-door. It was a sweet place to live in,
with honeysuckle growing over the house, and the sounds of the
softly-labouring mill-wheel ever in its little porch and about its
windows.

The door was open, and Dame Rogers came from within to meet me. She
welcomed me, and led the way into her little kitchen. As I entered,
Jane went out at the back-door. But it was only to call her father, who
presently came in.

“I’m glad to see ye, sir. This pleasure comes of having no work to-day.
After harvest there comes slack times for the likes of me. People don’t
care about a bag of old bones when they can get hold of young men.
Well, well, never mind, old woman. The Lord’ll take us through somehow.
When the wind blows, the ship goes; when the wind drops, the ship
stops; but the sea is His all the same, for He made it; and the wind is
His all the same too.”

He spoke in the most matter-of-fact tone, unaware of anything poetic in
what he said. To him it was just common sense, and common sense only.

“I am sorry you are out of work,” I said. “But my garden is sadly out
of order, and I must have something done to it. You don’t dislike
gardening, do you?”

“Well, I beant a right good hand at garden-work,” answered the old man,
with some embarrassment, scratching his gray head with a troubled
scratch.

There was more in this than met the ear; but what, I could not
conjecture. I would press the point a little. So I took him at his own
word.

“I won’t ask you to do any of the more ornamental part,” I said,—“only
plain digging and hoeing.”

“I would rather be excused, sir.”

“I am afraid I made you think”—

“I thought nothing, sir. I thank you kindly, sir.”

“I assure you I want the work done, and I must employ some one else if
you don’t undertake it.”

“Well, sir, my back’s bad now—no, sir, I won’t tell a story about it. I
would just rather not, sir.”

“Now,” his wife broke in, “now, Old Rogers, why won’t ’ee tell the
parson the truth, like a man, downright? If ye won’t, I’ll do it for
’ee. The fact is, sir,” she went on, turning to me, with a plate in her
hand, which she was wiping, “the fact is, that the old parson’s man for
that kind o’ work was Simmons, t’other end of the village; and my man
is so afeard o’ hurtin’ e’er another, that he’ll turn the bread away
from his own mouth and let it fall in the dirt.”

“Now, now, old ’oman, don’t ’ee belie me. I’m not so bad as that. You
see, sir, I never was good at knowin’ right from wrong like. I never
was good, that is, at tellin’ exactly what I ought to do. So when
anything comes up, I just says to myself, ‘Now, Old Rogers, what do you
think the Lord would best like you to do?’ And as soon as I ax myself
that, I know directly what I’ve got to do; and then my old woman can’t
turn me no more than a bull. And she don’t like my obstinate fits. But,
you see, I daren’t sir, once I axed myself that.”

“Stick to that, Rogers,” I said.

“Besides, sir,” he went on, “Simmons wants it more than I do. He’s got
a sick wife; and my old woman, thank God, is hale and hearty. And there
is another thing besides, sir: he might take it hard of you, sir, and
think it was turning away an old servant like; and then, sir, he
wouldn’t be ready to hear what you had to tell him, and might, mayhap,
lose a deal o’ comfort. And that I would take worst of all, sir.”

“Well, well, Rogers, Simmons shall have the job.”

“Thank ye, sir,” said the old man.

His wife, who could not see the thing quite from her husband’s point of
view, was too honest to say anything; but she was none the less cordial
to me. The daughter stood looking from one to the other with attentive
face, which took everything, but revealed nothing.

I rose to go. As I reached the door, I remembered the tobacco in my
pocket. I had not bought it for myself. I never could smoke. Nor do I
conceive that smoking is essential to a clergyman in the country;
though I have occasionally envied one of my brethren in London, who
will sit down by the fire, and, lighting his pipe, at the same time
please his host and subdue the bad smells of the place. And I never
could hit his way of talking to his parishioners either. He could put
them at their ease in a moment. I think he must have got the trick out
of his pipe. But in reality, I seldom think about how I ought to talk
to anybody I am with.

That I didn’t smoke myself was no reason why I should not help Old
Rogers to smoke. So I pulled out the tobacco.

“You smoke, don’t you, Rogers?” I said.

“Well, sir, I can’t deny it. It’s not much I spend on baccay, anyhow.
Is it, dame?

“No, that it bean’t,” answered his wife.

“You don’t think there’s any harm in smoking a pipe, sir?”

“Not the least,” I answered, with emphasis.

“You see, sir,” he went on, not giving me time to prove how far I was
from thinking there was any harm in it; “You see, sir, sailors learns
many ways they might be better without. I used to take my pan o’ grog
with the rest of them; but I give that up quite, ’cause as how I don’t
want it now.”

“’Cause as how,” interrupted his wife, “you spend the money on tea for
me, instead. You wicked old man to tell stories!”

“Well, I takes my share of the tea, old woman, and I’m sure it’s a deal
better for me. But, to tell the truth, sir, I was a little troubled in
my mind about the baccay, not knowing whether I ought to have it or
not. For you see, the parson that’s gone didn’t more than half like it,
as I could tell by the turn of his hawse-holes when he came in at the
door and me a-smokin’. Not as he said anything; for, ye see, I was an
old man, and I daresay that kep him quiet. But I did hear him blow up a
young chap i’ the village he come upon promiscus with a pipe in his
mouth. He did give him a thunderin’ broadside, to be sure! So I was in
two minds whether I ought to go on with my pipe or not.”

“And how did you settle the question, Rogers?”

“Why, I followed my own old chart, sir.”

“Quite right. One mustn’t mind too much what other people think.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean, sir.”

“What do you mean then? I should like to know.”

“Well, sir, I mean that I said to myself, ‘Now, Old Rogers, what do you
think the Lord would say about this here baccay business?’”

“And what did you think He would say?”

“Why, sir, I thought He would say, ‘Old Rogers, have yer baccay; only
mind ye don’t grumble when you ‘aint got none.’”

Something in this—I could not at the time have told what—touched me
more than I can express. No doubt it was the simple reality of the
relation in which the old man stood to his Father in heaven that made
me feel as if the tears would come in spite of me.

“And this is the man,” I said to myself, “whom I thought I should be
able to teach! Well, the wisest learn most, and I may be useful to him
after all.”

As I said nothing, the old man resumed—

“For you see, sir, it is not always a body feels he has a right to
spend his ha’pence on baccay; and sometimes, too, he aint got none to
spend.”

“In the meantime,” I said, “here is some that I bought for you as I
came along. I hope you will find it good. I am no judge.”

The old sailor’s eyes glistened with gratitude. “Well, who’d ha’
thought it. You didn’t think I was beggin’ for it, sir, surely?”

“You see I had it for you in my pocket.”

“Well, that IS good o’ you, sir!”

“Why, Rogers, that’ll last you a month!” exclaimed his wife, looking
nearly as pleased as himself.

“Six weeks at least, wife,” he answered. “And ye don’t smoke yourself,
sir, and yet ye bring baccay to me! Well, it’s just like yer Master,
sir.”

I went away, resolved that Old Rogers should have no chance of
“grumbling” for want of tobacco, if I could help it.




CHAPTER IV.
THE COFFIN.


On the way back, my thoughts were still occupied with the woman I had
seen in the little shop. The old man-of-war’s man was probably the
nobler being of the two; and if I had had to choose between them, I
should no doubt have chosen him. But I had not to choose between them;
I had only to think about them; and I thought a great deal more about
the one I could not understand than the one I could understand. For Old
Rogers wanted little help from me; whereas the other was evidently a
soul in pain, and therefore belonged to me in peculiar right of my
office; while the readiest way in which I could justify to myself the
possession of that office was to make it a shepherding of the sheep. So
I resolved to find out what I could about her, as one having a right to
know, that I might see whether I could not help her. From herself it
was evident that her secret, if she had one, was not to be easily
gained; but even the common reports of the village would be some
enlightenment to the darkness I was in about her.

As I went again through the village, I observed a narrow lane striking
off to the left, and resolved to explore in that direction. It led up
to one side of the large house of which I have already spoken. As I
came near, I smelt what has been to me always a delightful smell—that
of fresh deals under the hands of the carpenter. In the scent of those
boards of pine is enclosed all the idea the tree could gather of the
world of forest where it was reared. It speaks of many wild and bright
but chiefly clean and rather cold things. If I were idling, it would
draw me to it across many fields.—Turning a corner, I heard the sound
of a saw. And this sound drew me yet more. For a carpenter’s shop was
the delight of my boyhood; and after I began to read the history of our
Lord with something of that sense of reality with which we read other
histories, and which, I am sorry to think, so much of the well-meant
instruction we receive in our youth tends to destroy, my feeling about
such a workshop grew stronger and stronger, till at last I never could
go near enough to see the shavings lying on the floor of one, without a
spiritual sensation such as I have in entering an old church; which
sensation, ever since having been admitted on the usual conditions to a
Mohammedan mosque, urges me to pull off, not only my hat, but my shoes
likewise. And the feeling has grown upon me, till now it seems at times
as if the only cure in the world for social pride would be to go for
five silent minutes into a carpenter’s shop. How one can think of
himself as above his neighbours, within sight, sound, or smell of one,
I fear I am getting almost unable to imagine, and one ought not to get
out of sympathy with the wrong. Only as I am growing old now, it does
not matter so much, for I daresay my time will not be very long.

So I drew near to the shop, feeling as if the Lord might be at work
there at one of the benches. And when I reached the door, there was my
pale-faced hearer of the Sunday afternoon, sawing a board for a
coffin-lid.

As my shadow fell across and darkened his work, he lifted his head and
saw me.

I could not altogether understand the expression of his countenance as
he stood upright from his labour and touched his old hat with rather a
proud than a courteous gesture. And I could not believe that he was
glad to see me, although he laid down his saw and advanced to the door.
It was the gentleman in him, not the man, that sought to make me
welcome, hardly caring whether I saw through the ceremony or not. True,
there was a smile on his lips, but the smile of a man who cherishes a
secret grudge; of one who does not altogether dislike you, but who has
a claim upon you—say, for an apology, of which claim he doubts whether
you know the existence. So the smile seemed tightened, and stopped just
when it got half-way to its width, and was about to become hearty and
begin to shine.

“May I come in?” I said.

“Come in, sir,” he answered.

“I am glad I have happened to come upon you by accident,” I said.

He smiled as if he did not quite believe in the accident, and
considered it a part of the play between us that I should pretend it. I
hastened to add—

“I was wandering about the place, making some acquaintance with it, and
with my friends in it, when I came upon you quite unexpectedly. You
know I saw you in church on Sunday afternoon.”

“I know you saw me, sir,” he answered, with a motion as if to return to
his work; “but, to tell the truth, I don’t go to church very often.”

I did not quite know whether to take this as proceeding from an honest
fear of being misunderstood, or from a sense of being in general
superior to all that sort of thing. But I felt that it would be of no
good to pursue the inquiry directly. I looked therefore for something
to say.

“Ah! your work is not always a pleasant one,” I said, associating the
feelings of which I have already spoken with the facts before me, and
looking at the coffin, the lower part of which stood nearly finished
upon trestles on the floor.

“Well, there are unpleasant things in all trades,” he answered. “But it
does not matter,” he added, with an increase of bitterness in his
smile.

“I didn’t mean,” I said, “that the work was unpleasant—only sad. It
must always be painful to make a coffin.”

“A joiner gets used to it, sir, as you do to the funeral service. But,
for my part, I don’t see why it should be considered so unhappy for a
man to be buried. This isn’t such a good job, after all, this world,
sir, you must allow.”

“Neither is that coffin,” said I, as if by a sudden inspiration.

The man seemed taken aback, as Old Rogers might have said. He looked at
the coffin and then looked at me.

“Well, sir,” he said, after a short pause, which no doubt seemed longer
both to him and to me than it would have seemed to any third person, “I
don’t see anything amiss with the coffin. I don’t say it’ll last till
doomsday, as the gravedigger says to Hamlet, because I don’t know so
much about doomsday as some people pretend to; but you see, sir, it’s
not finished yet.”

“Thank you,” I said; “that’s just what I meant. You thought I was hasty
in my judgment of your coffin; whereas I only said of it knowingly what
you said of the world thoughtlessly. How do you know that the world is
finished anymore than your coffin? And how dare you then say that it is
a bad job?”

The same respectfully scornful smile passed over his face, as much as
to say, “Ah! it’s your trade to talk that way, so I must not be too
hard upon you.”

“At any rate, sir,” he said, “whoever made it has taken long enough
about it, a person would think, to finish anything he ever meant to
finish.”

“One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as
one day,” I said.

“That’s supposing,” he answered, “that the Lord did make the world. For
my part, I am half of a mind that the Lord didn’t make it at all.”

“I am very glad to hear you say so,” I answered.

Hereupon I found that we had changed places a little. He looked up at
me. The smile of superiority was no longer there, and a puzzled
questioning, which might indicate either “Who would have expected that
from you?” or, “What can he mean?” or both at once, had taken its
place. I, for my part, knew that on the scale of the man’s judgment I
had risen nearer to his own level. As he said nothing, however, and I
was in danger of being misunderstood, I proceeded at once.

“Of course it seems to me better that you should not believe God had
done a thing, than that you should believe He had not done it well!”

“Ah! I see, sir. Then you will allow there is some room for doubting
whether He made the world at all?”

“Yes; for I do not think an honest man, as you seem to me to be, would
be able to doubt without any room whatever. That would be only for a
fool. But it is just possible, as we are not perfectly good
ourselves—you’ll allow that, won’t you?”

“That I will, sir; God knows.”

“Well, I say—as we’re not quite good ourselves, it’s just possible that
things may be too good for us to do them the justice of believing in
them.”

“But there are things, you must allow, so plainly wrong!”

“So much so, both in the world and in myself, that it would be to me
torturing despair to believe that God did not make the world; for then,
how would it ever be put right? Therefore I prefer the theory that He
has not done making it yet.”

“But wouldn’t you say, sir, that God might have managed it without so
many slips in the making as your way would suppose? I should think
myself a bad workman if I worked after that fashion.”

“I do not believe that there are any slips. You know you are making a
coffin; but are you sure you know what God is making of the world?”

“That I can’t tell, of course, nor anybody else.”

“Then you can’t say that what looks like a slip is really a slip,
either in the design or in the workmanship. You do not know what end He
has in view; and you may find some day that those slips were just the
straight road to that very end.”

“Ah! maybe. But you can’t be sure of it, you see.”

“Perhaps not, in the way you mean; but sure enough, for all that, to
try it upon life—to order my way by it, and so find that it works well.
And I find that it explains everything that comes near it. You know
that no engineer would be satisfied with his engine on paper, nor with
any proof whatever except seeing how it will go.”

He made no reply.

It is a principle of mine never to push anything over the edge. When I
am successful, in any argument, my one dread is of humiliating my
opponent. Indeed I cannot bear it. It humiliates me. And if you want
him to think about anything, you must leave him room, and not give him
such associations with the question that the very idea of it will be
painful and irritating to him. Let him have a hand in the convincing of
himself. I have been surprised sometimes to see my own arguments come
up fresh and green, when I thought the fowls of the air had devoured
them up. When a man reasons for victory and not for the truth in the
other soul, he is sure of just one ally, the same that Faust had in
fighting Gretchen’s brother—that is, the Devil. But God and good men
are against him. So I never follow up a victory of that kind, for, as I
said, the defeat of the intellect is not the object in fighting with
the sword of the Spirit, but the acceptance of the heart. In this case,
therefore, I drew back.

“May I ask for whom you are making that coffin?”

“For a sister of my own, sir.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“There’s no occasion. I can’t say I’m sorry, though she was one of the
best women I ever knew.”

“Why are you not sorry, then? Life’s a good thing in the main, you will
allow.”

“Yes, when it’s endurable at all. But to have a brute of a husband
coming home at any hour of the night or morning, drunk upon the money
she had earned by hard work, was enough to take more of the shine out
of things than church-going on Sundays could put in again, regular as
she was, poor woman! I’m as glad as her brute of a husband, that she’s
out of his way at last.”

“How do you know he’s glad of it?”

“He’s been drunk every night since she died.”

“Then he’s the worse for losing her?”

“He may well be. Crying like a hypocrite, too, over his own work!”

“A fool he must be. A hypocrite, perhaps not. A hypocrite is a terrible
name to give. Perhaps her death will do him good.”

“He doesn’t deserve to be done any good to. I would have made this
coffin for him with a world of pleasure.”

“I never found that I deserved anything, not even a coffin. The only
claim that I could ever lay to anything was that I was very much in
want of it.”

The old smile returned—as much as to say, “That’s your little game in
the church.” But I resolved to try nothing more with him at present;
and indeed was sorry that I had started the new question at all, partly
because thus I had again given him occasion to feel that he knew better
than I did, which was not good either for him or for me in our relation
to each other.

“This has been a fine old room once,” I said, looking round the
workshop.

“You can see it wasn’t a workshop always, sir. Many a grand
dinner-party has sat down in this room when it was in its glory. Look
at the chimney-piece there.”

“I have been looking at it,” I said, going nearer.

“It represents the four quarters of the world, you see.”

I saw strange figures of men and women, one on a kneeling camel, one on
a crawling crocodile, and others differently mounted; with various
besides of Nature’s bizarre productions creeping and flying in
stone-carving over the huge fire-place, in which, in place of a fire,
stood several new and therefore brilliantly red cart-wheels. The sun
shone through the upper part of a high window, of which many of the
panes were broken, right in upon the cart-wheels, which, glowing thus
in the chimney under the sombre chimney-piece, added to the grotesque
look of the whole assemblage of contrasts. The coffin and the carpenter
stood in the twilight occasioned by the sharp division of light made by
a lofty wing of the house that rose flanking the other window. The room
was still wainscotted in panels, which, I presume, for the sake of the
more light required for handicraft, had been washed all over with
white. At the level of labour they were broken in many places. Somehow
or other, the whole reminded me of Albert Durer’s “Melencholia.”

Seeing I was interested in looking about his shop, my new friend—for I
could not help feeling that we should be friends before all was over,
and so began to count him one already—resumed the conversation. He had
never taken up the dropped thread of it before.

“Yes, sir,” he said; “the owners of the place little thought it would
come to this—the deals growing into a coffin there on the spot where
the grand dinner was laid for them and their guests! But there is
another thing about it that is odder still; my son is the last male”—

Here he stopped suddenly, and his face grew very red. As suddenly he
resumed—

“I’m not a gentleman, sir; but I will tell the truth. Curse it!—I beg
your pardon, sir,”—and here the old smile—“I don’t think I got that
from THEIR side of the house.—My son’s NOT the last male descendant.”

Here followed another pause.

As to the imprecation, I knew better than to take any notice of a mere
expression of excitement under a sense of some injury with which I was
not yet acquainted. If I could get his feelings right in regard to
other and more important things, a reform in that matter would soon
follow; whereas to make a mountain of a molehill would be to put that
very mountain between him and me. Nor would I ask him any questions,
lest I should just happen to ask him the wrong one; for this
parishioner of mine evidently wanted careful handling, if I would do
him any good. And it will not do any man good to fling even the Bible
in his face. Nay, a roll of bank-notes, which would be more evidently a
good to most men, would carry insult with it if presented in that
manner. You cannot expect people to accept before they have had a
chance of seeing what the offered gift really is.

After a pause, therefore, the carpenter had once more to recommence, or
let the conversation lie. I stood in a waiting attitude. And while I
looked at him, I was reminded of some one else whom I knew—with whom,
too, I had pleasant associations—though I could not in the least
determine who that one might be.

“It’s very foolish of me to talk so to a stranger,” he resumed.

“It is very kind and friendly of you,” I said, still careful to make no
advances. “And you yourself belong to the old family that once lived in
this old house?”

“It would be no boast to tell the truth, sir, even if it were a credit
to me, which it is not. That family has been nothing but a curse to
ours.”

I noted that he spoke of that family as different from his, and yet
implied that he belonged to it. The explanation would come in time. But
the man was again silent, planing away at half the lid of his sister’s
coffin. And I could not help thinking that the closed mouth meant to
utter nothing more on this occasion.

“I am sure there must be many a story to tell about this old place, if
only there were any one to tell them,” I said at last, looking round
the room once more.—“I think I see the remains of paintings on the
ceiling.”

“You are sharp-eyed, sir. My father says they were plain enough in his
young days.”

“Is your father alive, then?”

“That he is, sir, and hearty too, though he seldom goes out of doors
now. Will you go up stairs and see him? He’s past ninety, sir. He has
plenty of stories to tell about the old place—before it began to fall
to pieces like.”

“I won’t go to-day,” I said, partly because I wanted to be at home to
receive any one who might call, and partly to secure an excuse for
calling again upon the carpenter sooner than I should otherwise have
liked to do. “I expect visitors myself, and it is time I were at home.
Good morning.”

“Good morning, sir.”

And away home I went with a new wonder in my brain. The man did not
seem unknown to me. I mean, the state of his mind woke no feeling of
perplexity in me. I was certain of understanding it thoroughly when I
had learned something of his history; for that such a man must have a
history of his own was rendered only the more probable from the fact
that he knew something of the history of his forefathers, though,
indeed, there are some men who seem to have no other. It was strange,
however, to think of that man working away at a trade in the very house
in which such ancestors had eaten and drunk, and married and given in
marriage. The house and family had declined together—in outward
appearance at least; for it was quite possible both might have risen in
the moral and spiritual scale in proportion as they sank in the social
one. And if any of my readers are at first inclined to think that this
could hardly be, seeing that the man was little, if anything, better
than an infidel, I would just like to hold one minute’s conversation
with them on that subject. A man may be on the way to the truth, just
in virtue of his doubting. I will tell you what Lord Bacon says, and of
all writers of English I delight in him: “So it is in contemplation: if
a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he
will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” Now
I could not tell the kind or character of this man’s doubt; but it was
evidently real and not affected doubt; and that was much in his favour.
And I couid see that he was a thinking man; just one of the sort I
thought I should get on with in time, because he was
honest—notwithstanding that unpleasant smile of his, which did irritate
me a little, and partly piqued me into the determination to get the
better of the man, if I possibly could, by making friends with him. At
all events, here was another strange parishioner. And who could it be
that he was like?




CHAPTER V.
VISITORS FROM THE HALL.


When I came near my own gate, I saw that it was open; and when I came
in sight of my own door, I found a carriage standing before it, and a
footman ringing the bell. It was an old-fashioned carriage, with two
white horses in it, yet whiter by age than by nature. They looked as if
no coachman could get more than three miles an hour out of them, they
were so fat and knuckle-kneed. But my attention could not rest long on
the horses, and I reached the door just as my housekeeper was
pronouncing me absent. There were two ladies in the carriage, one old
and one young.

“Ah, here is Mr. Walton!” said the old lady, in a serene voice, with a
clear hardness in its tone; and I held out my hand to aid her descent.
She had pulled off her glove to get a card out of her card-case, and so
put the tips of two old fingers, worn very smooth, as if polished with
feeling what things were like, upon the palm of my hand. I then offered
my hand to her companion, a girl apparently about fourteen, who took a
hearty hold of it, and jumped down beside her with a smile. As I
followed them into the house, I took their card from the housekeeper’s
hand, and read, Mrs Oldcastle and Miss Gladwyn.

I confess here to my reader, that these are not really the names I read
on the card. I made these up this minute. But the names of the persons
of humble position in my story are their real names. And my reason for
making the difference will be plain enough. You can never find out my
friend Old Rogers; you might find out the people who called on me in
their carriage with the ancient white horses.

When they were seated in the drawing-room, I said to the old lady—

“I remember seeing you in church on Sunday morning. It is very kind of
you to call so soon.”

“You will always see me in church,” she returned, with a stiff bow, and
an expansion of deadness on her face, which I interpreted into an
assertion of dignity, resulting from the implied possibility that I
might have passed her over in my congregation, or might have forgotten
her after not passing her over.

“Except when you have a headache, grannie,” said Miss Gladwyn, with an
arch look first at her grandmother, and then at me. “Grannie has bad
headaches sometimes.”

The deadness melted a little from Mrs Oldcastle’s face, as she turned
with half a smile to her grandchild, and said—

“Yes, Pet. But you know that cannot be an interesting fact to Mr.
Walton.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Oldcastle,” I said. “A clergyman ought to know
something, and the more the better, of the troubles of his flock.
Sympathy is one of the first demands he ought to be able to meet—I know
what a headache is.”

The former expression, or rather non-expression, returned; this time
unaccompanied by a bow.

“I trust, Mr. Walton, I TRUST I am above any morbid necessity for
sympathy. But, as you say, amongst the poor of your flock,—it IS very
desirable that a clergyman should be able to sympathise.”

“It’s quite true what grannie says, Mr. Walton, though you mightn’t
think it. When she has a headache, she shuts herself up in her own
room, and doesn’t even let me come near her—nobody but Sarah; and how
she can prefer her to me, I’m sure I don’t know.”

And here the girl pretended to pout, but with a sparkle in her bright
gray eye.

“The subject is not interesting to me, Pet. Pray, Mr. Walton, is it a
point of conscience with you to wear the surplice when you preach?”

“Not in the least,” I answered. “I think I like it rather better on the
whole. But that’s not why I wear it.”

“Never mind grannie, Mr. Walton. _I_ think the surplice is lovely. I’m
sure it’s much liker the way we shall be dressed in heaven, though I
don’t think I shall ever get there, if I must read the good books
grannie reads.”

“I don’t know that it is necessary to read any good books but the good
book,” I said.

“There, grannie!” exclaimed Miss Gladwyn, triumphantly. “I’m so glad
I’ve got Mr Walton on my side!”

“Mr Walton is not so old as I am, my dear, and has much to learn yet.”

I could not help feeling a little annoyed, (which was very foolish, I
know,) and saying to myself, “If it’s to make me like you, I had rather
not learn any more;” but I said nothing aloud, of course.

“Have you got a headache to-day, grannie?”

“No, Pet. Be quiet. I wish to ask Mr Walton WHY he wears the surplice.”

“Simply,” I replied, “because I was told the people had been accustomed
to it under my predecessor.”

“But that can be no good reason for doing what is not right—that people
have been accustomed to it.”

“But I don’t allow that it’s not right. I think it is a matter of no
consequence whatever. If I find that the people don’t like it, I will
give it up with pleasure.”

“You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton.”

“I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills;
for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in
obeying his conscience and keeping his soul’s garments clean, to mind
whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves
them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.”

“They may believe that too soon.”

“I don’t think any one can believe the truth too soon.”

A pause followed, during which it became evident to me that Miss
Gladwyn saw fun in the whole affair, and was enjoying it thoroughly.
Mrs Oldcastle’s face, on the contrary, was illegible. She resumed in a
measured still voice, which she meant to be meek, I daresay, but which
was really authoritative—

“I am sorry, Mr Walton, that your principles are so loose and
unsettled. You will see my honesty in saying so when you find that,
objecting to the surplice, as I do, on Protestant grounds, I yet warn
you against making any change because you may discover that your
parishioners are against it. You have no idea, Mr Walton, what inroads
Radicalism, as they call it, has been making in this neighbourhood. It
is quite dreadful. Everybody, down to the poorest, claiming a right to
think for himself, and set his betters right! There’s one worse than
any of the rest—but he’s no better than an atheist—a carpenter of the
name of Weir, always talking to his neighbours against the proprietors
and the magistrates, and the clergy too, Mr Walton, and the game-laws;
and what not? And if you once show them that you are afraid of them by
going a step out of your way for THEIR opinion about anything, there
will be no end to it; for, the beginning of strife is like the letting
out of water, as you know. _I_ should know nothing about it, but that,
my daughter’s maid—I came to hear of it through her—a decent girl of
the name of Rogers, and born of decent parents, but unfortunately
attached to the son of one of your churchwardens, who has put him into
that mill on the river you can almost see from here.”

“Who put him in the mill?”

“His own father, to whom it belongs.”

“Well, it seems to me a very good match for her.”

“Yes, indeed, and for him too. But his foolish father thinks the match
below him, as if there was any difference between the positions of
people in that rank of life! Every one seems striving to tread on the
heels of every one else, instead of being content with the station to
which God has called them. I am content with mine. I had nothing to do
with putting myself there. Why should they not be content with theirs?
They need to be taught Christian humility and respect for their
superiors. That’s the virtue most wanted at present. The poor have to
look up to the rich”—

“That’s right, grannie! And the rich have to look down on the poor.”

“No, my dear. I did not say that. The rich have to be KIND to the
poor.”

“But, grannie, why did you marry Mr Oldcastle?”

“What does the child mean?”

“Uncle Stoddart says you refused ever so many offers when you were a
girl.”

“Uncle Stoddart has no business to be talking about such things to a
chit like you,” returned the grandmother smiling, however, at the
charge, which so far certainly contained no reproach.

“And grandpapa was the ugliest and the richest of them all—wasn’t he,
grannie? and Colonel Markham the handsomest and the poorest?”

A flush of anger crimsoned the old lady’s pale face. It looked dead no
longer.

“Hold your tongue,” she said. “You are rude.”

And Miss Gladwyn did hold her tongue, but nothing else, for she was
laughing all over.

The relation between these two was evidently a very odd one. It was
clear that Miss Gladwyn was a spoiled child, though I could not help
thinking her very nicely spoiled, as far as I saw; and that the old
lady persisted in regarding her as a cub, although her claws had grown
quite long enough to be dangerous. Certainly, if things went on thus,
it was pretty clear which of them would soon have the upper hand, for
grannie was vulnerable, and Pet was not.

It really began to look as if there were none but characters in my
parish. I began to think it must be the strangest parish in England,
and to wonder that I had never heard of it before. “Surely it must be
in some story-book at least!” I said to myself.

But her grand-daughter’s tiger-cat-play drove the old lady nearer to
me. She rose and held out her hand, saying, with some kindness—

“Take my advice, my dear Mr Walton, and don’t make too much of your
poor, or they’ll soon be too much for you to manage.—Come, Pet: it’s
time to go home to lunch.—And for the surplice, take your own way and
wear it. _I_ shan’t say anything more about it.”

“I will do what I can see to be right in the matter,” I answered as
gently as I could; for I did not want to quarrel with her, although I
thought her both presumptuous and rude.

“I’m on your side, Mr Walton,” said the girl, with a sweet comical
smile, as she squeezed my hand once more.

I led them to the carriage, and it was with a feeling of relief that I
saw it drive off.

The old lady certainly was not pleasant. She had a white smooth face
over which the skin was drawn tight, gray hair, and rather lurid hazel
eyes. I felt a repugnance to her that was hardly to be accounted for by
her arrogance to me, or by her superciliousness to the poor; although
either would have accounted for much of it. For I confess that I have
not yet learned to bear presumption and rudeness with all the patience
and forgiveness with which I ought by this time to be able to meet
them. And as to the poor, I am afraid I was always in some danger of
being a partizan of theirs against the rich; and that a clergyman ought
never to be. And indeed the poor rich have more need of the care of the
clergyman than the others, seeing it is hardly that the rich shall
enter into the kingdom of heaven, and the poor have all the advantage
over them in that respect.

“Still,” I said to myself, “there must be some good in the woman—she
cannot be altogether so hard as she looks, else how should that child
dare to take the liberties of a kitten with her? She doesn’t look to ME
like one to make game of! However, I shall know a little more about her
when I return her call, and I will do my best to keep on good terms
with her.”

I took down a volume of Plato to comfort me after the irritation which
my nerves had undergone, and sat down in an easy-chair beside the open
window of my study. And with Plato in my hand, and all that outside my
window, I began to feel as if, after all, a man might be happy, even if
a lady had refused him. And there I sat, without opening my favourite
vellum-bound volume, gazing out on the happy world, whence a gentle
wind came in, as if to bid me welcome with a kiss to all it had to give
me. And then I thought of the wind that bloweth where it listeth, which
is everywhere, and I quite forgot to open my Plato, and thanked God for
the Life of life, whose story and whose words are in that best of
books, and who explains everything to us, and makes us love Socrates
and David and all good men ten times more; and who follows no law but
the law of love, and no fashion but the will of God; for where did ever
one read words less like moralising and more like simple earnestness of
truth than all those of Jesus? And I prayed my God that He would make
me able to speak good common heavenly sense to my people, and forgive
me for feeling so cross and proud towards the unhappy old lady—for I
was sure she was not happy—and make me into a rock which swallowed up
the waves of wrong in its great caverns, and never threw them back to
swell the commotion of the angry sea whence they came. Ah, what it
would be actually to annihilate wrong in this way!—to be able to say,
it shall not be wrong against me, so utterly do I forgive it! How much
sooner, then, would the wrong-doer repent, and get rid of the wrong
from his side also! But the painful fact will show itself, not less
curious than painful, that it is more difficult to forgive small wrongs
than great ones. Perhaps, however, the forgiveness of the great wrongs
is not so true as it seems. For do we not think it is a fine thing to
forgive such wrongs, and so do it rather for our own sakes than for the
sake of the wrongdoer? It is dreadful not to be good, and to have bad
ways inside one.

Such thoughts passed through my mind. And once more the great light
went up on me with regard to my office, namely, that just because I was
parson to the parish, I must not be THE PERSON to myself. And I prayed
God to keep me from feeling STUNG and proud, however any one might
behave to me; for all my value lay in being a sacrifice to Him and the
people.

So when Mrs Pearson knocked at the door, and told me that a lady and
gentleman had called, I shut my book which I had just opened, and kept
down as well as I could the rising grumble of the inhospitable
Englishman, who is apt to be forgetful to entertain strangers, at least
in the parlour of his heart. And I cannot count it perfect hospitality
to be friendly and plentiful towards those whom you have invited to
your house—what thank has a man in that?—while you are cold and
forbidding to those who have not that claim on your attention. That is
not to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. By all means tell
people, when you are busy about something that must be done, that you
cannot spare the time for them except they want you upon something of
yet more pressing necessity; but TELL them, and do not get rid of them
by the use of the instrument commonly called THE COLD SHOULDER. It is a
wicked instrument that, and ought to have fallen out of use by this
time.

I went and received Mr and Miss Boulderstone, and was at least thus far
rewarded—that the EERIE feeling, as the Scotch would call it, which I
had about my parish, as containing none but CHARACTERS, and therefore
not being CANNIE, was entirely removed. At least there was a wholesome
leaven in it of honest stupidity. Please, kind reader, do not fancy I
am sneering. I declare to you I think a sneer the worst thing God has
not made. A curse is nothing in wickedness to it, it seems to me. I do
mean that honest stupidity I respect heartily, and do assert my
conviction that I do not know how England at least would get on without
it. But I do not mean the stupidity that sets up for teaching itself to
its neighbour, thinking itself wisdom all the time. That I do not
respect.

Mr and Miss Boulderstone left me a little fatigued, but in no way sore
or grumbling. They only sent me back with additional zest to my Plato,
of which I enjoyed a hearty page or two before any one else arrived.
The only other visitors I had that day were an old surgeon in the navy,
who since his retirement had practised for many years in the
neighbourhood, and was still at the call of any one who did not think
him too old-fashioned—for even here the fashions, though decidedly
elderly young ladies by the time they arrived, held their sway none the
less imperiously—and Mr Brownrigg, the churchwarden. More of Dr Duncan
by and by.

Except Mr and Miss Boulderstone, I had not yet seen any common people.
They were all decidedly uncommon, and, as regarded most of them, I
could not think I should have any difficulty in preaching to them. For,
whatever place a man may give to preaching in the ritual of the
church—indeed it does not properly belong to the ritual at all—it is
yet the part of the so-called service with which his personality has
most to do. To the influences of the other parts he has to submit
himself, ever turning the openings of his soul towards them, that he
may not be a mere praying-machine; but with the sermon it is otherwise.
That he produces. For that he is responsible. And therefore, I say, it
was a great comfort to me to find myself amongst a people from which my
spirit neither shrunk in the act of preaching, nor with regard to which
it was likely to feel that it was beating itself against a stone wall.
There was some good in preaching to a man like Weir or Old Rogers.
Whether there was any good in preaching to a woman like Mrs Oldcastle I
did not know.

The evening I thought I might give to my books, and thus end my first
Monday in my parish; but, as I said, Mr Brownrigg, the churchwarden,
called and stayed a whole weary hour, talking about matters quite
uninteresting to any who may hereafter peruse what I am now writing.
Really he was not an interesting man: short, broad, stout, red-faced,
with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in
constant lingual activity about little nothings. Indeed, when there was
no new nothing to be had, the old nothing would do over again to make a
fresh fuss about. But if you attempted to convey a thought into his
mind which involved the moving round half a degree from where he stood,
and looking at the matter from a point even so far new, you found him
utterly, totally impenetrable, as pachydermatous as any rhinoceros or
behemoth. One other corporeal fact I could not help observing, was,
that his cheeks rose at once from the collar of his green coat, his
neck being invisible, from the hollow between it and the jaw being
filled up to a level. The conformation was just what he himself
delighted to contemplate in his pigs, to which his resemblance was
greatly increased by unwearied endeavours to keep himself close
shaved.—I could not help feeling anxious about his son and Jane
Rogers.—He gave a quantity of gossip about various people, evidently
anxious that I should regard them as he regarded them; but in all he
said concerning them I could scarcely detect one point of significance
as to character or history. I was very glad indeed when the waddling of
hands—for it was the perfect imbecility of hand-shaking—was over, and
he was safely out of the gate. He had kept me standing on the steps for
full five minutes, and I did not feel safe from him till I was once
more in my study with the door shut.

I am not going to try my reader’s patience with anything of a more
detailed account of my introduction to my various parishioners. I shall
mention them only as they come up in the course of my story. Before
many days had passed I had found out my poor, who, I thought, must be
somewhere, seeing the Lord had said we should have them with us always.
There was a workhouse in the village, but there were not a great many
in it; for the poor were kindly enough handled who belonged to the
place, and were not too severely compelled to go into the house;
though, I believe, in this house they would have been more comfortable
than they were in their own houses.

I cannot imagine a much greater misfortune for a man, not to say a
clergyman, than not to know, or knowing, not to minister to any of the
poor. And I did not feel that I knew in the least where I was until I
had found out and conversed with almost the whole of mine.

After I had done so, I began to think it better to return Mrs
Oldcastle’s visit, though I felt greatly disinclined to encounter that
tight-skinned nose again, and that mouth whose smile had no light in
it, except when it responded to some nonsense of her grand-daughter’s.




CHAPTER VI.
OLDCASTLE HALL.


About noon, on a lovely autumn day, I set out for Oldcastle Hall. The
keenness of the air had melted away with the heat of the sun, yet still
the air was fresh and invigorating. Can any one tell me why it is that,
when the earth is renewing her youth in the spring, man should feel
feeble and low-spirited, and gaze with bowed head, though pleased
heart, on the crocuses; whereas, on the contrary, in the autumn, when
nature is dying for the winter, he feels strong and hopeful, holds his
head erect, and walks with a vigorous step, though the flaunting
dahlias discourage him greatly? I do not ask for the physical causes:
those I might be able to find out for myself; but I ask, Where is the
rightness and fitness in the thing? Should not man and nature go
together in this world which was made for man—not for science, but for
man? Perhaps I have some glimmerings of where the answer lies. Perhaps
“I see a cherub that sees it.” And in many of our questions we have to
be content with such an approximation to an answer as this. And for my
part I am content with this. With less, I am not content.

Whatever that answer may be, I walked over the old Gothic bridge with a
heart strong enough to meet Mrs Oldcastle without flinching. I might
have to quarrel with her—I could not tell: she certainly was neither
safe nor wholesome. But this I was sure of, that I would not quarrel
with her without being quite certain that I ought. I wish it were NEVER
one’s duty to quarrel with anybody: I do so hate it. But not to do it
sometimes is to smile in the devil’s face, and that no one ought to do.
However, I had not to quarrel this time.

The woods on the other side of the river from my house, towards which I
was now walking, were of the most sombre rich colour—sombre and rich,
like a life that has laid up treasure in heaven, locked in a casket of
sorrow. I came nearer and nearer to them through the village, and
approached the great iron gate with the antediluvian monsters on the
top of its stone pillars. And awful monsters they were—are still! I see
the tail of one of them at this very moment. But they let me through
very quietly, notwithstanding their evil looks. I thought they were
saying to each other across the top of the gate, “Never mind; he’ll
catch it soon enough.” But, as I said, I did not catch it that day; and
I could not have caught it that day; it was too lovely a day to catch
any hurt even from that most hurtful of all beings under the sun, an
unwomanly woman.

I wandered up the long winding road, through the woods which I had
remarked flanking the meadow on my first walk up the river. These woods
smelt so sweetly—their dead and dying leaves departing in sweet
odours—that they quite made up for the absence of the flowers. And the
wind—no, there was no wind—there was only a memory of wind that woke
now and then in the bosom of the wood, shook down a few leaves, like
the thoughts that flutter away in sighs, and then was still again.

I am getting old, as I told you, my friends. (See there, you seem my
friends already. Do not despise an old man because he cannot help
loving people he never saw or even heard of.) I say I am getting
old—(is it BUT or THEREFORE? I do not know which)—but, therefore, I
shall never forget that one autumn day in those grandly fading woods.

Up the slope of the hillside they rose like one great rainbow-billow of
foliage—bright yellow, red-rusty and bright fading green, all kinds and
shades of brown and purple. Multitudes of leaves lay on the sides of
the path, so many that I betook myself to my old childish amusement of
walking in them without lifting my feet, driving whole armies of them
with ocean-like rustling before me. I did not do so as I came back. I
walked in the middle of the way then, and I remember stepping over many
single leaves, in a kind of mechanico-merciful way, as if they had been
living creatures—as indeed who can tell but they are, only they must be
pretty nearly dead when they are on the ground.

At length the road brought me up to the house. It did not look such a
large house as I have since found it to be. And it certainly was not an
interesting house from the outside, though its surroundings of green
grass and trees would make any whole beautiful. Indeed the house itself
tried hard to look ugly, not quite succeeding, only because of the kind
foiling of its efforts by the Virginia creepers and ivy, which, as if
ashamed of its staring countenance, did all they could to spread their
hands over it and hide it. But there was one charming group of old
chimneys, belonging to some portion behind, which indicated a very
different, namely, a very much older, face upon the house once—a face
that had passed away to give place to this. Once inside, I found there
were more remains of the olden time than I had expected. I was led up
one of those grand square oak staircases, which look like a portion of
the house to be dwelt in, and not like a ladder for getting from one
part of the habitable regions to another. On the top was a fine expanse
of landing, another hall, in fact, from which I was led towards the
back of the house by a narrow passage, and shown into a small dark
drawing-room with a deep stone-mullioned window, wainscoted in oak
simply carved and panelled. Several doors around indicated
communication with other parts of the house. Here I found Mrs
Oldcastle, reading what I judged to be one of the cheap and gaudy
religious books of the present day. She rose and RECEIVED me, and
having motioned me to a seat, began to talk about the parish. You would
have perceived at once from her tone that she recognised no other bond
of connexion between us but the parish.

“I hear you have been most kind in visiting the poor, Mr Walton. You
must take care that they don’t take advantage of your kindness, though.
I assure you, you will find some of them very grasping indeed. And you
need not expect that they will give you the least credit for good
intentions.”

“I have seen nothing yet to make me uneasy on that score. But certainly
my testimony is of no weight yet.”

“Mine is. I have proved them. The poor of this neighbourhood are very
deficient in gratitude.”

“Yes, grannie,——”

I started. But there was no interruption, such as I have made to
indicate my surprise; although, when I looked half round in the
direction whence the voice came, the words that followed were all
rippled with a sweet laugh of amusement.

“Yes, grannie, you are right. You remember how old dame Hope wouldn’t
take the money you offered her, and dropped such a disdainful courtesy.
It was SO greedy of her, wasn’t it?”

“I am sorry to hear of any disdainful reception of kindness,” I said.

“Yes, and she had the coolness, within a fortnight, to send up to me
and ask if I would be kind enough to lend her half-a-crown for a few
weeks.”

“And then it was your turn, grannie! You sent her five shillings,
didn’t you?—Oh no; I’m wrong. That was the other woman.”

“Indeed, I did not send her anything but a rebuke. I told her that it
would be a very wrong thing in me to contribute to the support of such
an evil spirit of unthankfulness as she indulged in. When she came to
see her conduct in its true light, and confessed that she had behaved
very abominably, I would see what I could do for her.”

“And meantime she was served out, wasn’t she? With her sick boy at
home, and nothing to give him?” said Miss Gladwyn.

“She made her own bed, and had to lie on it.”

“Don’t you think a little kindness might have had more effect in
bringing her to see that she was wrong.”

“Grannie doesn’t believe in kindness, except to me—dear old grannie!
She spoils me. I’m sure I shall be ungrateful some day; and then she’ll
begin to read me long lectures, and prick me with all manner of
headless pins. But I won’t stand it, I can tell you, grannie! I’m too
much spoiled for that.”

Mrs Oldcastle was silent—why, I could not tell, except it was that she
knew she had no chance of quieting the girl in any other way.

I may mention here, lest I should have no opportunity afterwards, that
I inquired of dame Hope as to her version of the story, and found that
there had been a great misunderstanding, as I had suspected. She was
really in no want at the time, and did not feel that it would be quite
honourable to take the money when she did not need it—(some poor people
ARE capable of such reasoning)—and so had refused it, not without a
feeling at the same time that it was more pleasant to refuse than to
accept from such a giver; some stray sparkle of which feeling,
discovered by the keen eye of Miss Gladwyn, may have given that
appearance of disdain to her courtesy to which the girl alluded. When,
however, her boy in service was brought home ill, she had sent to ask
for what she now required, on the very ground that it had been offered
to her before. The misunderstanding had arisen from the total
incapacity of Mrs Oldcastle to enter sympathetically into the feelings
of one as superior to herself in character as she was inferior in
worldly condition.

But to return to Oldcastle Hall.

I wished to change the subject, knowing that blind defence is of no
use. One must have definite points for defence, if one has not a
thorough understanding of the character in question; and I had neither.

“This is a beautiful old house,” I said. “There must be strange places
about it.”

Mrs Oldcastle had not time to reply, or at least did not reply, before
Miss Gladwyn said—

“Oh, Mr Walton, have you looked out of the window yet? You don’t know
what a lovely place this is, if you haven’t.”

And as she spoke she emerged from a recess in the room, a kind of dark
alcove, where she had been amusing herself with what I took to be some
sort of puzzle, but which I found afterwards to be the bit and
curb-chain of her pony’s bridle which she was polishing up to her own
bright mind, because the stable-boy had not pleased her in the matter,
and she wanted both to get them brilliant and to shame the lad for the
future. I followed her to the window, where I was indeed as much
surprised and pleased as she could have wished.

“There!” she said, holding back one of the dingy heavy curtains with
her small childish hand.

And there, indeed, I saw an astonishment. It did not lie in the lovely
sweeps of hill and hollow stretching away to the horizon, richly
wooded, and—though I saw none of them—sprinkled, certainly with sweet
villages full of human thoughts, loves, and hopes; the astonishment did
not lie in this—though all this was really much more beautiful to the
higher imagination—but in the fact that, at the first glance, I had a
vision properly belonging to a rugged or mountainous country. For I had
approached the house by a gentle slope, which certainly was long and
winding, but had occasioned no feeling in my mind that I had reached
any considerable height. And I had come up that one beautiful
staircase; no more; and yet now, when I looked from this window, I
found myself on the edge of a precipice—not a very deep one, certainly,
yet with all the effect of many a deeper. For below the house on this
side lay a great hollow, with steep sides, up which, as far as they
could reach, the trees were climbing. The sides were not all so steep
as the one on which the house stood, but they were all rocky and steep,
with here and there slopes of green grass. And down in the bottom, in
the centre of the hollow, lay a pool of water. I knew it only by its
slaty shimmer through the fading green of the tree-tops between me and
it.

“There!” again exclaimed Miss Gladwyn; “isn’t that beautiful? But you
haven’t seen the most beautiful thing yet. Grannie, where’s—ah! there
she is! There’s auntie! Don’t you see her down there, by the side of
the pond? That pond is a hundred feet deep. If auntie were to fall in
she would be drowned before you could jump down to get her out. Can you
swim?”

Before I had time to answer, she was off again.

“Don’t you see auntie down there?”

“No, I don’t see her. I have been trying very hard, but I can’t.”

“Well, I daresay you can’t. Nobody, I think, has got eyes but myself.
Do you see a big stone by the edge of the pond, with another stone on
the top of it, like a big potato with a little one grown out of it?”

“No.”

“Well, auntie is under the trees on the opposite side from that stone.
Do you see her yet?”

“No.”

“Then you must come down with me, and I will introduce you to her.
She’s much the prettiest thing here. Much prettier than grannie.”

Here she looked over her shoulder at grannie, who, instead of being
angry, as, from what I had seen on our former interview, I feared she
would be, only said, without even looking up from the little
blue-boarded book she was again reading—

“You are a saucy child.”

Whereupon Miss Gladwyn laughed merrily.

“Come along,” she said, and, seizing me by the hand, led me out of the
room, down a back-staircase, across a piece of grass, and then down a
stair in the face of the rock, towards the pond below. The stair went
in zigzags, and, although rough, was protected by an iron balustrade,
without which, indeed, it would have been very dangerous.

“Isn’t your grandmamma afraid to let you run up and down here, Miss
Gladwyn?” I said.

“Me!” she exclaimed, apparently in the utmost surprise. “That WOULD be
fun! For, you know, if she tried to hinder me—but she knows it’s no
use; I taught her that long ago—let me see, how long: oh! I don’t
know—I should think it must be ten years at least. I ran away, and they
thought I had drowned myself in the pond. And I saw them, all the time,
poking with a long stick in the pond, which, if I had been drowned
there, never could have brought me up, for it is a hundred feet deep, I
am sure. How I hurt my sides trying to keep from screaming with
laughter! I fancied I heard one say to the other, ‘We must wait till
she swells and floats?’”

“Dear me! what a peculiar child!” I said to myself.

And yet somehow, whatever she said—even when she was most rude to her
grandmother—she was never offensive. No one could have helped feeling
all the time that she was a little lady.—I thought I would venture a
question with her. I stood still at a turn of the zigzag, and looked
down into the hollow, still a good way below us, where I could now
distinguish the form, on the opposite side of the pond, of a woman
seated at the foot of a tree, and stooping forward over a book.

“May I ask you a question, Miss Gladwyn?”

“Yes, twenty, if you like; but I won’t answer one of them till you give
up calling me Miss Gladwyn. We can’t be friends, you know, so long as
you do that.”

“What am I to call you, then? I never heard you called by any other
name than Pet, and that would hardly do, would it?”

“Oh, just fancy if you called me Pet before grannie! That’s grannie’s
name for me, and nobody dares to use it but grannie—not even auntie;
for, between you and me, auntie is afraid of grannie; I can’t think
why. I never was afraid of anybody—except, yes, a little afraid of old
Sarah. She used to be my nurse, you know; and grandmamma and everybody
is afraid of her, and that’s just why I never do one thing she wants me
to do. It would never do to give in to being afraid of her, you
know.—There’s auntie, you see, down there, just where I told you
before.”

“Oh yes! I see her now.—What does your aunt call you, then?”

“Why, what you must call me—my own name, of course.”

“What is that?”

“Judy.”

She said it in a tone which seemed to indicate surprise that I should
not know her name—perhaps read it off her face, as one ought to know a
flower’s name by looking at it. But she added instantly, glancing up in
my face most comically—

“I wish yours was Punch.”

“Why, Judy?”

“It would be such fun, you know.”

“Well, it would be odd, I must confess. What is your aunt’s name?”

“Oh, such a funny name!—much funnier than Judy: Ethelwyn. It sounds as
if it ought to mean something, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. It is an Anglo-Saxon word, without doubt.”

“What does it mean?”

“I’m not sure about that. I will try to find out when I go home—if you
would like to know.”

“Yes, that I should. I should like to know everything about auntie
Ethelwyn. Isn’t it pretty?”

“So pretty that I should like to know something more about Aunt
Ethelwyn. What is her other name?”

“Why, Ethelwyn Oldcastle, to be sure. What else could it be?”

“Why, you know, for anything I knew, Judy, it might have been Gladwyn.
She might have been your father’s sister.”

“Might she? I never thought of that. Oh, I suppose that is because I
never think about my father. And now I do think of it, I wonder why
nobody ever mentions him to me, or my mother either. But I often think
auntie must be thinking about my mother. Something in her eyes, when
they are sadder than usual, seems to remind me of my mother.”

“You remember your mother, then?”

“No, I don’t think I ever saw her. But I’ve answered plenty of
questions, haven’t I? I assure you, if you want to get me on to the
Catechism, I don’t know a word of it. Come along.”

I laughed.

“What!” she said, pulling me by the hand, “you a clergyman, and laugh
at the Catechism! I didn’t know that.”

“I’m not laughing at the Catechism, Judy. I’m only laughing at the idea
of putting Catechism questions to you.”

“You KNOW I didn’t mean it,” she said, with some indignation.

“I know now,” I answered. “But you haven’t let me put the only question
I wanted to put.”

“What is it?”

“How old are you?”

“Twelve. Come along.”

And away we went down the rest of the stair.

When we reached the bottom, a winding path led us through the trees to
the side of the pond, along which we passed to get to the other side.

And then all at once the thought struck me—why was it that I had never
seen this auntie, with the lovely name, at church? Was she going to
turn out another strange parishioner?

There she sat, intent on her book. As we drew near she looked up and
rose, but did not come forward.

“Aunt Winnie, here’s Mr. Walton,” said Judy.

I lifted my hat and held out my hand. Before our hands met, however, a
tremendous splash reached my ears from the pond. I started round. Judy
had vanished. I had my coat half off, and was rushing to the pool, when
Miss Oldcastle stopped me, her face unmoved, except by a smile, saying,
“It’s only one of that frolicsome child’s tricks, Mr Walton. It is well
for you that I was here, though. Nothing would have delighted her more
than to have you in the water too.”

“But,” I said, bewildered, and not half comprehending, “where is she?”

“There,” returned Miss Oldcastle, pointing to the pool, in the middle
of which arose a heaving and bubbling, presently yielding passage to
the laughing face of Judy.

“Why don’t you help me out, Mr Walton? You said you could swim.”

“No, I did not,” I answered coolly. “You talked so fast, you did not
give me time to say so.”

“It’s very cold,” she returned.

“Come out, Judy dear,” said her aunt. “Run home and change your
clothes. There’s a dear.”

Judy swam to the opposite side, scrambled out, and was off like a
spaniel through the trees and up the stairs, dripping and raining as
she went.

“You must be very much astonished at the little creature, Mr Walton.”

“I find her very interesting. Quite a study.”

“There never was a child so spoiled, and never a child on whom it took
less effect to hurt her. I suppose such things do happen sometimes. She
is really a good girl; though mamma, who has done all the spoiling,
will not allow me to say she is good.”

Here followed a pause, for, Judy disposed of, what should I say next?
And the moment her mind turned from Judy, I saw a certain stillness—not
a cloud, but the shadow of a cloud—come over Miss Oldcastle’s face, as
if she, too, found herself uncomfortable, and did not know what to say
next. I tried to get a glance at the book in her hand, for I should
know something about her at once if I could only see what she was
reading. She never came to church, and I wanted to arrive at some
notion of the source of her spiritual life; for that she had such, a
single glance at her face was enough to convince me. This, I mean, made
me even anxious to see what the book was. But I could only discover
that it was an old book in very shabby binding, not in the least like
the books that young ladies generally have in their hands.

And now my readers will possibly be thinking it odd that I have never
yet said a word about what either Judy or Miss Oldcastle was like. If
there is one thing I feel more inadequate to than another, in taking
upon me to relate—it is to describe a lady. But I will try the girl
first.

Judy was rosy, gray-eyed, auburn-haired, sweet-mouthed. She had
confidence in her chin, assertion in her nose, defiance in her
eyebrows, honesty and friendliness over all her face. No one,
evidently, could have a warmer friend; and to an enemy she would be
dangerous no longer than a fit of passion might last. There was nothing
acrid in her; and the reason, I presume, was, that she had never yet
hurt her conscience. That is a very different thing from saying she had
never done wrong, you know. She was not tall, even for her age, and
just a little too plump for the immediate suggestion of grace. Yet
every motion of the child would have been graceful, except for the fact
that impulse was always predominant, giving a certain jerkiness, like
the hopping of a bird, instead of the gliding of one motion into
another, such as you might see in the same bird on the wing.

There is one of the ladies.

But the other—how shall I attempt to describe her?

The first thing I felt was, that she was a lady-woman. And to feel that
is almost to fall in love at first sight. And out of this whole, the
first thing you distinguished would be the grace over all. She was
rather slender, rather tall, rather dark-haired, and quite blue-eyed.
But I assure you it was not upon that occasion that I found out the
colour of her eyes. I was so taken with her whole that I knew nothing
about her parts. Yet she was blue-eyed, indicating northern
extraction—some centuries back perhaps. That blue was the blue of the
sea that had sunk through the eyes of some sea-rover’s wife and settled
in those of her child, to be born when the voyage was over. It had been
dyed so deep INGRAYNE, as Spenser would say, that it had never been
worn from the souls of the race since, and so was every now and then
shining like heaven out at some of its eyes. Her features were what is
called regular. They were delicate and brave.—After the grace, the
dignity was the next thing you came to discover. And the only thing you
would not have liked, you would have discovered last. For when the
shine of the courtesy with which she received me had faded away a
certain look of negative haughtiness, of withdrawal, if not of
repulsion, took its place, a look of consciousness of her own high
breeding—a pride, not of life, but of circumstance of life, which
disappointed me in the midst of so much that was very lovely. Her voice
was sweet, and I could have fancied a tinge of sadness in it, to which
impression her slowness of speech, without any drawl in it,
contributed. But I am not doing well as an artist in describing her so
fully before my reader has become in the least degree interested in
her. I was seeing her, and no words can make him see her.

Fearing lest some such fancy as had possessed Judy should be moving in
her mind, namely, that I was, if not exactly going to put her through
her Catechism, yet going in some way or other to act the clergyman, I
hastened to speak.

“This is a most romantic spot, Miss Oldcastle,” I said; “and as
surprising as it is romantic. I could hardly believe my eyes when I
looked out of the window and saw it first.”

“Your surprise was the more natural that the place itself is not
properly natural, as you must have discovered.”

This was rather a remarkable speech for a young lady to make. I
answered—

“I only know that such a chasm is the last thing I should have expected
to find in this gently undulating country. That it is artificial I was
no more prepared to hear than I was to see the place itself.”

“It looks pretty, but it has not a very poetic origin,” she returned.
“It is nothing but the quarry out of which the old house at the top of
it was built.”

“I must venture to differ from you entirely in the aspect such an
origin assumes to me,” I said. “It seems to me a more poetic origin
than any convulsion of nature whatever would have been; for, look you,”
I said—being as a young man too much inclined to the didactic, “for,
look you,” I said—and she did look at me—“from that buried mass of rock
has arisen this living house with its histories of ages and
generations; and”—

Here I saw a change pass upon her face: it grew almost pallid. But her
large blue eyes were still fixed on mine.

“And it seems to me,” I went on, “that such a chasm made by the
uplifting of a house therefrom, is therefore in itself more poetic than
if it were even the mouth of an extinct volcano. For, grand as the
motions and deeds of Nature are, terrible as is the idea of the fiery
heart of the earth breaking out in convulsions, yet here is something
greater; for human will, human thought, human hands in human labour and
effort, have all been employed to build this house, making not only the
house beautiful, but the place whence it came beautiful too. It stands
on the edge of what Shelley would call its ‘antenatal tomb’—now
beautiful enough to be its mother—filled from generation to generation
“—

Her face had grown still paler, and her lips moved as if she would
speak; but no sound came from them. I had gone on, thinking it best to
take no notice of her paleness; but now I could not help expressing
concern.

“I am afraid you feel ill, Miss Oldcastle.”

“Not at all,” she answered, more quickly than she had yet spoken.

“This place must be damp,” I said. “I fear you have taken cold.”

She drew herself up a little haughtily, thinking, no doubt, that after
her denial I was improperly pressing the point. So I drew back to the
subject of our conversation.

“But I can hardly think,” I said, “that all this mass of stone could be
required to build the house, large as it is. A house is not solid, you
know.”

“No,” she answered. “The original building was more of a castle, with
walls and battlements. I can show you the foundations of them still;
and the picture, too, of what the place used to be. We are not what we
were then. Many a cottage, too, has been built out of this old quarry.
Not a stone has been taken from it for the last fifty years, though.
Just let me show you one thing, Mr. Walton, and then I must leave you.”

“Do not let me detain you a moment. I will go at once,” I said;
“though, if you would allow me, I should be more at ease if I might see
you safe at the top of the stair first.”

She smiled.

“Indeed, I am not ill,” she answered; “but I have duties to attend to.
Just let me show you this, and then you shall go with me back to
mamma.”

She led the way to the edge of the pond and looked into it. I followed,
and gazed down into its depths, till my sight was lost in them. I could
see no bottom to the rocky shaft.

“There is a strong spring down there,” she said. “Is it not a dreadful
place? Such a depth!”

“Yes,” I answered; “but it has not the horror of dirty water; it is as
clear as crystal. How does the surplus escape?”

“On the opposite side of the hill you came up there is a well, with a
strong stream from it into the river.”

“I almost wonder at your choosing such a place to read in. I should
hardly like to be so near this pond,” said I, laughing.

“Judy has taken all that away. Nothing in nature, and everything out of
it, is strange to Judy, poor child! But just look down a little way
into the water on this side. Do you see anything?”

“Nothing,” I answered.

“Look again, against the wall of the pond,” she said.

“I see a kind of arch or opening in the side,” I answered.

“That is what I wanted you to see. Now, do you see a little barred
window, there, in the face of the rock, through the trees?”

“I cannot say I do,” I replied.

“No. Except you know where it is—and even then—it is not so easy to
find it. I find it by certain trees.”

“What is it?”

“It is the window of a little room in the rock, from which a stair
leads down through the rock to a sloping passage. That is the end of it
you see under the water.”

“Provided, no doubt,” I said, “in case of siege, to procure water.”

“Most likely; but not, therefore, confined to that purpose. There are
more dreadful stories than I can bear to think of”—-

Here she paused abruptly, and began anew “—-As if that house had
brought death and doom out of the earth with it. There was an old
burial-ground here before the Hall was built.”

“Have you ever been down the stair you speak of?” I asked.

“Only part of the way,” she answered. “But Judy knows every step of it.
If it were not that the door at the top is locked, she would have dived
through that archway now, and been in her own room in half the time.
The child does not know what fear means.”

We now moved away from the pond, towards the side of the quarry and the
open-air stair-case, which I thought must be considerably more pleasant
than the other. I confess I longed to see the gleam of that water at
the bottom of the dark sloping passage, though.

Miss Oldcastle accompanied me to the room where I had left her mother,
and took her leave with merely a bow of farewell. I saw the old lady
glance sharply from her to me as if she were jealous of what we might
have been talking about.

“Grannie, are you afraid Mr. Walton has been saying pretty things to
Aunt Winnie? I assure you he is not of that sort. He doesn’t understand
that kind of thing. But he would have jumped into the pond after me and
got his death of cold if auntie would have let him. It WAS cold. I
think I see you dripping now, Mr Walton.”

There she was in her dark corner, coiled up on a couch, and laughing
heartily; but all as if she had done nothing extraordinary. And,
indeed, estimated either by her own notions or practices, what she had
done was not in the least extraordinary.

Disinclined to stay any longer, I shook hands with the grandmother,
with a certain invincible sense of slime, and with the grandchild with
a feeling of mischievous health, as if the girl might soon corrupt the
clergyman into a partnership in pranks as well as in friendship. She
followed me out of the room, and danced before me down the oak
staircase, clearing the portion from the first landing at a bound. Then
she turned and waited for me, who came very deliberately, feeling the
unsure contact of sole and wax. As soon as I reached her, she said, in
a half-whisper, reaching up towards me on tiptoe—

“Isn’t she a beauty?”

“Who? your grandmamma?” I returned.

She gave me a little push, her face glowing with fun. But I did not
expect she would take her revenge as she did. “Yes, of course,” she
answered, quite gravely. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

And then, seeing that she had put me hors de combat, she burst into
loud laughter, and, opening the hall-door for me, let me go without
another word.

I went home very quietly, and, as I said, stepping with curious care—of
which, of course, I did not think at the time—over the yellow and brown
leaves that lay in the middle of the road.




CHAPTER VII.
THE BISHOP’S BASIN.


I went home very quietly, as I say, thinking about the strange elements
that not only combine to make life, but must be combined in our idea of
life, before we can form a true theory about it. Now-a-days, the vulgar
notion of what is life-like in any annals is to be realised by sternly
excluding everything but the commonplace; and the means, at least, are
often attained, with this much of the end as well—that the appearance
life bears to vulgar minds is represented with a wonderful degree of
success. But I believe that this is, at least, quite as unreal a mode
of representing life as the other extreme, wherein the unlikely, the
romantic, and the uncommon predominate. I doubt whether there is a
single history—if one could only get at the whole of it—in which there
is not a considerable admixture of the unlikely become fact, including
a few strange coincidences; of the uncommon, which, although striking
at first, has grown common from familiarity with its presence as our
own; with even, at least, some one more or less rosy touch of what we
call the romantic. My own conviction is, that the poetry is far the
deepest in us, and that the prose is only broken-down poetry; and
likewise that to this our lives correspond. The poetic region is the
true one, and just, THEREFORE, the incredible one to the lower order of
mind; for although every mind is capable of the truth, or rather
capable of becoming capable of the truth, there may lie ages between
its capacity and the truth. As you will hear some people read poetry so
that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some people read their
own lives and those of others.

I fell into these reflections from comparing in my own mind my former
experiences in visiting my parishioners with those of that day. True, I
had never sat down to talk with one of them without finding that that
man or that woman had actually a HISTORY, the most marvellous and
important fact to a human being; nay, I had found something more or
less remarkable in every one of their histories, so that I was more
than barely interested in each of them. And as I made more acquaintance
with them, (for I had not been in the position, or the disposition
either, before I came to Marshmallows, necessary to the gathering of
such experiences,) I came to the conclusion—not that I had got into an
extraordinary parish of characters—but that every parish must be more
or less extraordinary from the same cause. Why did I not use to see
such people about me before? Surely I had undergone a change of some
sort. Could it be, that the trouble I had been going through of late,
had opened the eyes of my mind to the understanding, or rather the
simple SEEING, of my fellow-men?

But the people among whom I had been to-day belonged rather to such as
might be put into a romantic story. Certainly I could not see much that
was romantic in the old lady; and yet, those eyes and that
tight-skinned face—what might they not be capable of in the working out
of a story? And then the place they lived in! Why, it would hardly come
into my ideas of a nineteenth-century country parish at all. I was
tempted to try to persuade myself that all that had happened, since I
rose to look out of the window in the old house, had been but a dream.
For how could that wooded dell have come there after all? It was much
too large for a quarry. And that madcap girl—she never flung herself
into the pond!—it could not be. And what could the book have been that
the lady with the sea-blue eyes was reading? Was that a real book at
all? No. Yes. Of course it was. But what was it? What had that to do
with the matter? It might turn out to be a very commonplace book after
all. No; for commonplace books are generally new, or at least in fine
bindings. And here was a shabby little old book, such as, if it had
been commonplace, would not have been likely to be the companion of a
young lady at the bottom of a quarry—

“A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”


I know all this will sound ridiculous, especially that quotation from
Kubla Khan coming after the close of the preceding sentence; but it is
only so much the more like the jumble of thoughts that made a chaos of
my mind as I went home. And then for that terrible pool, and
subterranean passage, and all that—what had it all to do with this
broad daylight, and these dying autumn leaves? No doubt there had been
such places. No doubt there were such places somewhere yet. No doubt
this was one of them. But, somehow or other, it would not come in well.
I had no intention of GOING IN FOR—that is the phrase now—going in for
the romantic. I would take the impression off by going to see Weir the
carpenter’s old father. Whether my plan was successful or not, I shall
leave my reader to judge.

I found Weir busy as usual, but not with a coffin this time. He was
working at a window-sash. “Just like life,” I thought—tritely perhaps.
“The other day he was closing up in the outer darkness, and now he is
letting in the light.”

“It’s a long time since you was here last, sir,” he said, but without a
smile.

Did he mean a reproach? If so, I was more glad of that reproach than I
would have been of the warmest welcome, even from Old Rogers. The fact
was that, having a good deal to attend to besides, and willing at the
same time to let the man feel that he was in no danger of being bored
by my visits, I had not made use even of my reserve in the shape of a
visit to his father.

“Well,” I answered, “I wanted to know something about all my people,
before I paid a second visit to any of them.”

“All right, sir. Don’t suppose I meant to complain. Only to let you
know you was welcome, sir.”

“I’ve just come from my first visit to Oldcastle Hall. And, to tell the
truth, for I don’t like pretences, my visit to-day was not so much to
you as to your father, whom, perhaps, I ought to have called upon
before, only I was afraid of seeming to intrude upon you, seeing we
don’t exactly think the same way about some things,” I added—with a
smile, I know, which was none the less genuine that I remember it yet.

And what makes me remember it yet? It is the smile that lighted up his
face in response to mine. For it was more than I looked for. And his
answer helped to fix the smile in my memory.

“You made me think, sir, that perhaps, after all, we were much of the
same way of thinking, only perhaps you was a long way ahead of me.”

Now the man was not right in saying that we were much of the same way
of THINKING; for our opinions could hardly do more than come within
sight of each other; but what he meant was right enough. For I was
certain, from the first, that the man had a regard for the downright,
honest way of things, and I hoped that I too had such a regard. How
much of selfishness and of pride in one’s own judgment might be mixed
up with it, both in his case and mine, I had been too often taken in—by
myself, I mean—to be at all careful to discriminate, provided there was
a proportion of real honesty along with it, which, I felt sure, would
ultimately eliminate the other. For in the moral nest, it is not as
with the sparrow and the cuckoo. The right, the original inhabitant is
the stronger; and, however unlikely at any given point in the history
it may be, the sparrow will grow strong enough to heave the intruding
cuckoo overboard. So I was pleased that the man should do me the honour
of thinking I was right as far as he could see, which is the greatest
honour one man can do another; for it is setting him on his own steed,
as the eastern tyrants used to do. And I was delighted to think that
the road lay open for further and more real communion between us in
time to come.

“Well,” I answered, “I think we shall understand each other perfectly
before long. But now I must see your father, if it is convenient and
agreeable.”

“My father will be delighted to see you, I know, sir. He can’t get so
far as the church on Sundays; but you’ll find him much more to your
mind than me. He’s been putting ever so many questions to me about the
new parson, wanting me to try whether I couldn’t get more out of you
than the old parson. That’s the way we talk about you, you see, sir.
You’ll understand. And I’ve never told him that I’d been to church
since you came—I suppose from a bit of pride, because I had so long
refused to go; but I don’t doubt some of the neighbours have told him,
for he never speaks about it now. And I know he’s been looking out for
you; and I fancy he’s begun to wonder that the parson was going to see
everybody but him. It WILL be a pleasure to the old man, sir, for he
don’t see a great many to talk to; and he’s fond of a bit of gossip, is
the old man, sir.”

So saying, Weir led the way through the shop into a lobby behind, and
thence up what must have been a back-stair of the old house, into a
large room over the workshop. There were bits of old carving about the
walls of the room yet, but, as in the shop below, all had been
whitewashed. At one end stood a bed with chintz curtains and a
warm-looking counterpane of rich faded embroidery. There was a bit of
carpet by the bedside, and another bit in front of the fire; and there
the old man sat, on one side, in a high-backed not very easy-looking
chair. With a great effort he managed to rise as I approached him,
notwithstanding my entreaties that he would not move. He looked much
older when on his feet, for he was bent nearly double, in which posture
the marvel was how he could walk at all. For he did totter a few steps
to meet me, without even the aid of a stick, and, holding out a thin,
shaking hand, welcomed me with an air of breeding rarely to be met with
in his station in society. But the chief part of this polish sprung
from the inbred kindliness of his nature, which was manifest in the
expression of his noble old countenance. Age is such a different thing
in different natures! One man seems to grow more and more selfish as he
grows older; and in another the slow fire of time seems only to
consume, with fine, imperceptible gradations, the yet lingering
selfishness in him, letting the light of the kingdom, which the Lord
says is within, shine out more and more, as the husk grows thin and is
ready to fall off, that the man, like the seed sown, may pierce the
earth of this world, and rise into the pure air and wind and dew of the
second life. The face of a loving old man is always to me like a
morning moon, reflecting the yet unrisen sun of the other world, yet
fading before its approaching light, until, when it does rise, it pales
and withers away from our gaze, absorbed in the source of its own
beauty. This old man, you may see, took my fancy wonderfully, for even
at this distance of time, when I am old myself, the recollection of his
beautiful old face makes me feel as if I could write poetry about him.

“I’m blithe to see ye, sir,” said he. “Sit ye down, sir.”

And, turning, he pointed to his own easy-chair; and I then saw his
profile. It was delicate as that of Dante, which in form it
marvellously resembled. But all the sternness which Dante’s evil times
had generated in his prophetic face was in this old man’s replaced by a
sweetness of hope that was lovely to behold.

“No, Mr Weir,” I said, “I cannot take your chair. The Bible tells us to
rise up before the aged, not to turn them out of their seats.”

“It would do me good to see you sitting in my cheer, sir. The pains
that my son Tom there takes to keep it up as long as the old man may
want it! It’s a good thing I bred him to the joiner’s trade, sir. Sit
ye down, sir. The cheer’ll hold ye, though I warrant it won’t last that
long after I be gone home. Sit ye down, sir.”

Thus entreated, I hesitated no longer, but took the old man’s seat. His
son brought another chair for him, and he sat down opposite the fire
and close to me. Thomas then went back to his work, leaving us alone.

“Ye’ve had some speech wi’ my son Tom,” said the old man, the moment he
was gone, leaning a little towards me. “It’s main kind o’ you, sir, to
take up kindly wi’ poor folks like us.”

“You don’t say it’s kind of a person to do what he likes best,” I
answered. “Besides, it’s my duty to know all my people.”

“Oh yes, sir, I know that. But there’s a thousand ways ov doin’ the
same thing. I ha’ seen folks, parsons and others, ’at made a great show
ov bein’ friendly to the poor, ye know, sir; and all the time you could
see, or if you couldn’t see you could tell without seein’, that they
didn’t much regard them in their hearts; but it was a sort of
accomplishment to be able to talk to the poor, like, after their own
fashion. But the minute an ould man sees you, sir, he believes that you
MEAN it, sir, whatever it is. For an ould man somehow comes to know
things like a child. They call it a second childhood, don’t they, sir?
And there are some things worth growin’ a child again to get a hould ov
again.”

“I only hope what you say may be true—about me, I mean.”

“Take my word for it, sir. You have no idea how that boy of mine, Tom
there, did hate all the clergy till you come. Not that he’s anyway
favourable to them yet, only he’ll say nothin’ again’ you, sir. He’s
got an unfortunate gift o’ seein’ all the faults first, sir; and when a
man is that way given, the faults always hides the other side, so that
there’s nothing but faults to be seen.”

“But I find Thomas quite open to reason.”

“That’s because you understand him, sir, and know how to give him head.
He tould me of the talk you had with him. You don’t bait him. You don’t
say, ‘You must come along wi’ me,’ but you turns and goes along wi’
him. He’s not a bad fellow at all, is Tom; but he will have the reason
for everythink. Now I never did want the reason for everything. I was
content to be tould a many things. But Tom, you see, he was born with a
sore bit in him somewheres, I don’t rightly know wheres; and I don’t
think he rightly knows what’s the matter with him himself.”

“I dare say you have a guess though, by this time, Mr. Weir,” I said;
“and I think I have a guess too.”

“Well, sir, if he’d only give in, I think he would be far happier. But
he can’t see his way clear.”

“You must give him time, you know. The fact is, he doesn’t feel at home
yet.’ And how can he, so long as he doesn’t know his own Father?”

“I’m not sure that I rightly understand you,” said the old man, looking
bewildered and curious.

“I mean,” I answered, “that till a man knows that he is one of God’s
family, living in God’s house, with God up-stairs, as it were, while he
is at his work or his play in a nursery below-stairs, he can’t feel
comfortable. For a man could not be made that should stand alone, like
some of the beasts. A man must feel a head over him, because he’s not
enough to satisfy himself, you know. Thomas just wants faith; that is,
he wants to feel that there is a loving Father over him, who is doing
things all well and right, if we could only understand them, though it
really does not look like it sometimes.”

“Ah, sir, I might have understood you well enough, if my poor old head
hadn’t been started on a wrong track. For I fancied for the moment that
you were just putting your finger upon the sore place in Tom’s mind.
There’s no use in keeping family misfortunes from a friend like you,
sir. That boy has known his father all his life; but I was nearly half
his age before I knew mine.”

“Strange!” I said, involuntarily almost.

“Yes, sir; strange you may well say. A strange story it is. The Lord
help my mother! I beg yer pardon, sir. I’m no Catholic. But that prayer
will come of itself sometimes. As if it could be of any use now! God
forgive me!”

“Don’t you be afraid, Mr Weir, as if God was ready to take offence at
what comes naturally, as you say. An ejaculation of love is not likely
to offend Him who is so grand that He is always meek and lowly of
heart, and whose love is such that ours is a mere faint light—‘a little
glooming light much like a shade’—as one of our own poets says, beside
it.”

“Thank you, Mr Walton. That’s a real comfortable word, sir. And I am
heart-sure it’s true, sir. God be praised for evermore! He IS good,
sir; as I have known in my poor time, sir. I don’t believe there ever
was one that just lifted his eyes and looked up’ards, instead of
looking down to the ground, that didn’t get some comfort, to go on
with, as it were—the ready—money of comfort, as it were—though it might
be none to put in the bank, sir.”

“That’s true enough,” I said. “Then your father and mother—?”

And here I hesitated.

“Were never married, sir,” said the old man promptly, as if he would
relieve me from an embarrassing position. “_I_ couldn’t help it. And
I’m no less the child of my Father in heaven for it. For if He hadn’t
made me, I couldn’t ha’ been their son, you know, sir. So that He had
more to do wi’ the makin’ o’ me than they had; though mayhap, if He had
His way all out, I might ha’ been the son o’ somebody else. But, now
that things be so, I wouldn’t have liked that at all, sir; and bein’
once born so, I would not have e’er another couple of parents in all
England, sir, though I ne’er knew one o’ them. And I do love my mother.
And I’m so sorry for my father that I love him too, sir. And if I could
only get my boy Tom to think as I do, I would die like a psalm-tune on
an organ, sir.”

“But it seems to me strange,” I said, “that your son should think so
much of what is so far gone by. Surely he would not want another father
than you, now. He is used to his position in life. And there can be
nothing cast up to him about his birth or descent.”

“That’s all very true, sir, and no doubt it would be as you say. But
there has been other things to keep his mind upon the old affair.
Indeed, sir, we have had the same misfortune all over again among the
young people. And I mustn’t say anything more about it; only my boy Tom
has a sore heart.”

I knew at once to what he alluded; for I could not have been about in
my parish all this time without learning that the strange handsome
woman in the little shop was the daughter of Thomas Weir, and that she
was neither wife nor widow. And it now occurred to me for the first
time that it was a likeness to her little boy that had affected me so
pleasantly when I first saw Thomas, his grandfather. The likeness to
his great-grandfather, which I saw plainly enough, was what made the
other fact clear to me. And at the same moment I began to be haunted
with a flickering sense of a third likeness which I could not in the
least fix or identify.

“Perhaps,” I said, “he may find some good come out of that too.”

“Well, who knows, sir?”

“I think,” I said, “that if we do evil that good may come, the good we
looked for will never come thereby. But once evil is done, we may
humbly look to Him who bringeth good out of evil, and wait. Is your
granddaughter Catherine in bad health? She looks so delicate!”

“She always had an uncommon look. But what she looks like now, I don’t
know. I hear no complaints; but she has never crossed this door since
we got her set up in that shop. She never comes near her father or her
sister, though she lets them, leastways her sister, go and see her. I’m
afraid Tom has been rayther unmerciful, with her. And if ever he put a
bad name upon her in her hearing, I know, from what that lass used to
be as a young one, that she wouldn’t be likely to forget it, and as
little likely to get over it herself, or pass it over to another, even
her own father. I don’t believe they do more nor nod to one another
when they meet in the village. It’s well even if they do that much.
It’s my belief there’s some people made so hard that they never can
forgive anythink.”

“How did she get into the trouble? Who is the father of her child?”

“Nay, that no one knows for certain; though there be suspicions, and
one of them, no doubt, correct. But, I believe, fire wouldn’t drive his
name out at her mouth. I know my lass. When she says a thing, she’ll
stick to it.”

I asked no more questions. But, after a short pause, the old man went
on.

“I shan’t soon forget the night I first heard about my father and
mother. That was a night! The wind was roaring like a mad beast about
the house;—not this house, sir, but the great house over the way.”

“You don’t mean Oldcastle Hall?” I said.

“’Deed I do, sir,” returned the old man, “This house here belonged to
the same family at one time; though when I was born it was another
branch of the family, second cousins or something, that lived in it.
But even then it was something on to the downhill road, I believe.”

“But,” I said, fearing my question might have turned the old man aside
from a story worth hearing, “never mind all that now, if you please. I
am anxious to hear all about that night. Do go on. You were saying the
wind was blowing about the old house.”

“Eh, sir, it was roaring!-roaring as if it was mad with rage! And every
now and then it would come down the chimley like out of a gun, and blow
the smoke and a’most the fire into the middle of the housekeeper’s
room. For the housekeeper had been giving me my supper. I called her
auntie, then; and didn’t know a bit that she wasn’t my aunt really. I
was at that time a kind of a under-gamekeeper upon the place, and slept
over the stable. But I fared of the best, for I was a favourite with
the old woman—I suppose because I had given her plenty of trouble in my
time. That’s always the way, sir.—Well, as I was a-saying, when the
wind stopped for a moment, down came the rain with a noise that sounded
like a regiment of cavalry on the turnpike road t’other side of the
hill. And then up the wind got again, and swept the rain away, and took
it all in its own hand again, and went on roaring worse than ever.
‘You’ll be wet afore you get across the yard, Samuel,’ said auntie,
looking very prim in her long white apron, as she sat on the other side
of the little round table before the fire, sipping a drop of hot rum
and water, which she always had before she went to bed. ‘You’ll be wet
to the skin, Samuel,’ she said. ‘Never mind,’ says I. ‘I’m not salt,
nor yet sugar; and I’ll be going, auntie, for you’ll be wanting your
bed.’—‘Sit ye still,’ said she. ‘I don’t want my bed yet.’ And there
she sat, sipping at her rum and water; and there I sat, o’ the other
side, drinking the last of a pint of October, she had gotten me from
the cellar—for I had been out in the wind all day. ‘It was just such a
night as this,’ said she, and then stopped again.—But I’m wearying you,
sir, with my long story.”

“Not in the least,” I answered. “Quite the contrary. Pray tell it out
your own way. You won’t tire me, I assure you.”

So the old man went on.

“‘It was just such a night as this,’ she began again—‘leastways it was
snow and not rain that was coming down, as if the Almighty was a-going
to spend all His winter-stock at oncet.’—‘What happened such a night,
auntie?’ I said. ‘Ah, my lad!’ said she, ‘ye may well ask what
happened. None has a better right. You happened. That’s all.’—‘Oh,
that’s all, is it, auntie?’ I said, and laughed. ‘Nay, nay, Samuel,’
said she, quite solemn, ‘what is there to laugh at, then? I assure you,
you was anything but welcome.’—‘And why wasn’t I welcome?’ I said. ‘I
couldn’t help it, you know. I’m very sorry to hear I intruded,’ I said,
still making game of it, you see; for I always did like a joke. ‘Well,’
she said, ‘you certainly wasn’t wanted. But I don’t blame you, Samuel,
and I hope you won’t blame me.’—‘What do you mean, auntie ?’ I mean
this, that it’s my fault, if so be that fault it is, that you’re
sitting there now, and not lying, in less bulk by a good deal, at the
bottom of the Bishop’s Basin.’ That’s what they call a deep pond at the
foot of the old house, sir; though why or wherefore, I’m sure I don’t
know. ‘Most extraordinary, auntie!’ I said, feeling very queer, and as
if I really had no business to be there. ‘Never you mind, my dear,’
says she; ‘there you are, and you can take care of yourself now as well
as anybody.’—‘But who wanted to drown me?’ ‘Are you sure you can
forgive him, if I tell you?’—‘Sure enough, suppose he was sitting where
you be now,’ I answered. ‘It was, I make no doubt, though I can’t prove
it,—I am morally certain it was your own father.’ I felt the skin go
creepin’ together upon my head, and I couldn’t speak. ‘Yes, it was,
child; and it’s time you knew all about it. Why, you don’t know who
your own father was!’—‘No more I do,’ I said; ‘and I never cared to
ask, somehow. I thought it was all right, I suppose. But I wonder now
that I never did.’—‘Indeed you did many a time, when you was a mere
boy, like; but I suppose, as you never was answered, you give it up for
a bad job, and forgot all about it, like a wise man. You always was a
wise child, Samuel.’ So the old lady always said, sir. And I was
willing to believe she was right, if I could. ‘But now,’ said she,
‘it’s time you knew all about it.—Poor Miss Wallis!—I’m no aunt of
yours, my boy, though I love you nearly as well, I think, as if I was;
for dearly did I love your mother. She was a beauty, and better than
she was beautiful, whatever folks may say. The only wrong thing, I’m
certain, that she ever did, was to trust your father too much. But I
must see and give you the story right through from beginning to
end.—Miss Wallis, as I came to know from her own lips, was the daughter
of a country attorney, who had a good practice, and was likely to leave
her well off. Her mother died when she was a little girl. It’s not easy
getting on without a mother, my boy. So she wasn’t taught much of the
best sort, I reckon. When her father died early, and she was left
atone, the only thing she could do was to take a governess’s place, and
she came to us. She never got on well with the children, for they were
young and self willed and rude, and would not learn to do as they were
bid. I never knew one o’ them shut the door when they went out of this
room. And, from having had all her own way at home, with plenty of
servants, and money to spend, it was a sore change to her. But she was
a sweet creature, that she was. She did look sorely tried when Master
Freddy would get on the back of her chair, and Miss Gusta would lie
down on the rug, and never stir for all she could say to them, but only
laugh at her.—To be sure!’ And then auntie would take a sip at her rum
and water, and sit considering old times like a statue. And I sat as if
all my head was one great ear, and I never spoke a word. And auntie
began again. ‘The way I came to know so much about her was this.
Nobody, you see, took any notice or care of her. For the children were
kept away with her in the old house, and my lady wasn’t one to take
trouble about anybody till once she stood in her way, and then she
would just shove her aside or crush her like a spider, and ha’ done
with her.’—They have always been a proud and a fierce race, the
Oldcastles, sir,” said Weir, taking up the speech in his own person,
“and there’s been a deal o’ breedin in-and-in amongst them, and that
has kept up the worst of them. The men took to the women of their own
sort somehow, you see. The lady up at the old Hall now is a Crowfoot.
I’ll just tell you one thing the gardener told me about her years ago,
sir. She had a fancy for hyacinths in her rooms in the spring, and she
had some particular fine ones; and a lady of her acquaintance begged
for some of them. And what do you think she did? She couldn’t refuse
them, and she couldn’t bear any one to have them as good as she. And so
she sent the hyacinth-roots—but she boiled ’em first. The gardener told
me himself, sir.—‘And so, when the poor thing,’ said auntie, ‘was taken
with a dreadful cold, which was no wonder if you saw the state of the
window in the room she had to sleep in, and which I got old Jones to
set to rights and paid him for it out of my own pocket, else he
wouldn’t ha’ done it at all, for the family wasn’t too much in the way
or the means either of paying their debts—well, there she was, and
nobody minding her, and of course it fell to me to look after her. It
would have made your heart bleed to see the poor thing flung all of a
heap on her bed, blue with cold and coughing. “My dear!” I said; and
she burst out crying, and from that moment there was confidence between
us. I made her as warm and as comfortable as I could, but I had to
nurse her for a fortnight before she was able to do anything again. She
didn’t shirk her work though, poor thing. It was a heartsore to me to
see the poor young thing, with her sweet eyes and her pale face,
talking away to those children, that were more like wild cats than
human beings. She might as well have talked to wild cats, I’m sure. But
I don’t think she was ever so miserable again as she must have been
before her illness; for she used often to come and see me of an
evening, and she would sit there where you are sitting now for an hour
at a time, without speaking, her thin white hands lying folded in her
lap, and her eyes fixed on the fire. I used to wonder what she could be
thinking about, and I had made up my mind she was not long for this
world; when all at once it was announced that Miss Oldcastle, who had
been to school for some time, was coming home; and then we began to see
a great deal of company, and for month after month the house was more
or less filled with visitors, so that my time was constantly taken up,
and I saw much less of poor Miss Wallis than I had seen before. But
when we did meet on some of the back stairs, or when she came to my
room for a few minutes before going to bed, we were just as good
friends as ever. And I used to say, “I wish this scurry was over, my
dear, that we might have our old times again.” And she would smile and
say something sweet. But I was surprised to see that her health began
to come back—at least so it seemed to me, for her eyes grew brighter
and a flush came upon her pale face, and though the children were as
tiresome as ever, she didn’t seem to mind it so much. But indeed she
had not very much to do with them out of school hours now; for when the
spring came on, they would be out and about the place with their sister
or one of their brothers; and indeed, out of doors it would have been
impossible for Miss Wallis to do anything with them. Some of the
visitors would take to them too, for they behaved so badly to nobody as
to Miss Wallis, and indeed they were clever children, and could be
engaging enough when they pleased.—But then I had a blow, Samuel. It
was a lovely spring night, just after the sun was down, and I wanted a
drop of milk fresh from the cow for something that I was making for
dinner the next day; so I went through the kitchen-garden and through
the belt of young larches to go to the shippen. But when I got among
the trees, who should I see at the other end of the path that went
along, but Miss Wallis walking arm-in-arm with Captain Crowfoot, who
was just home from India, where he had been with Lord Clive. The
captain was a man about two or three and thirty, a relation of the
family, and the son of Sir Giles Crowfoot’—who lived then in this old
house, sir, and had but that one son, my father, you see, sir.—‘And it
did give me a turn,’ said my aunt, ‘to see her walking with him, for I
felt as sure as judgment that no good could come of it. For the captain
had not the best of characters—that is, when people talked about him in
chimney corners, and such like, though he was a great favourite with
everybody that knew nothing about him. He was a fine, manly, handsome
fellow, with a smile that, as people said, no woman could resist,
though I’m sure it would have given me no trouble to resist it,
whatever they may mean by that, for I saw that that same smile was the
falsest thing of all the false things about him. All the time he was
smiling, you would have thought he was looking at himself in a glass.
He was said to have gathered a power of money in India, somehow or
other. But I don’t know, only I don’t think he would have been the
favourite he was with my lady if he hadn’t. And reports were about,
too, of the ways and means by which he had made the money; some said by
robbing the poor heathen creatures; and some said it was only that his
brother officers didn’t approve of his speculating as he did in horses
and other things. I don’t know whether officers are so particular. At
all events, this was a fact, for it was one of his own servants that
told me, not thinking any harm or any shame of it. He had quarrelled
with a young ensign in the regiment. On which side the wrong was, I
don’t know. But he first thrashed him most unmercifully, and then
called him out, as they say. And when the poor fellow appeared, he
could scarcely see out of his eyes, and certainly couldn’t take
anything like an aim. And he shot him dead,—did Captain
Crowfoot.’—Think of hearing that about one’s own father, sir! But I
never said a word, for I hadn’t a word to say.—‘Think of that, Samuel,’
said my aunt, ‘else you won’t believe what I am going to tell you. And
you won’t even then, I dare say. But I must tell you, nevertheless and
notwithstanding.—Well, I felt as if the earth was sinking away from
under the feet of me, and I stood and stared at them. And they came on,
never seeing me, and actually went close past me and never saw me; at
least, if he saw me he took no notice, for I don’t suppose that the
angel with the flaming sword would have put him out. But for her, I
know she didn’t see me, for her face was down, burning and smiling at
once.’—I’m an old man now, sir, and I never saw my mother; but I can’t
tell you the story without feeling as if my heart would break for the
poor young lady.—‘I went back to my room,’ said my aunt, ‘with my empty
jug in my hand, and I sat down as if I had had a stroke, and I never
moved till it was pitch dark and my fire out. It was a marvel to me
afterwards that nobody came near me, for everybody was calling after me
at that time. And it was days before I caught a glimpse of Miss Wallis
again, at least to speak to her. At last, one night she came to my
room; and without a moment of parley, I said to her, “Oh, my dear! what
was that wretch saying to you?”—“What wretch?” says she, quite sharp
like. “Why, Captain Crowfoot,” says I, “to be sure.”—“What have you to
say against Captain Crowfoot?” says she, quite scornful like. So I
tumbled out all I had against him in one breath. She turned awful pale,
and she shook from head to foot, but she was able for all that to say,
“Indian servants are known liars, Mrs Prendergast,” says she, “and I
don’t believe one word of it all. But I’ll ask him, the next time I see
him.”—“Do so, my dear,” I said, not fearing for myself, for I knew he
would not make any fuss that might bring the thing out into the air,
and hoping that it might lead to a quarrel between them. And the next
time I met her, Samuel—it was in the gallery that takes to the west
turret—she passed me with a nod just, and a blush instead of a smile on
her sweet face. And I didn’t blame her, Samuel; but I knew that that
villain had gotten a hold of her. And so I could only cry, and that I
did. Things went on like this for some months. The captain came and
went, stopping a week at a time. Then he stopped for a whole month, and
this was in the first of the summer; and then he said he was ordered
abroad again, and went away. But he didn’t go abroad. He came again in
the autumn for the shooting, and began to make up to Miss Oldcastle,
who had grown a fine young woman by that time. And then Miss Wallis
began to pine. The captain went away again. Before long I was certain
that if ever young creature was in a consumption, she was; but she
never said a word to me. How ever the poor thing got on with her work,
I can’t think, but she grew weaker and weaker. I took the best care of
her she would let me, and contrived that she should have her meals in
her own room; but something was between her and me that she never spoke
a word about herself, and never alluded to the captain. By and by came
the news that the captain and Miss Oldcastle were to be married in the
spring. And Miss Wallis took to her bed after that; and my lady said
she had never been of much use, and wanted to send her away. But Miss
Oldcastle, who was far superior to any of the rest in her disposition,
spoke up for her. She had been to ask me about her, and I told her the
poor thing must go to a hospital if she was sent away, for she had
ne’er a home to go to. And then she went to see the governess, poor
thing! and spoke very kindly to her; but never a word would Miss Wallis
answer; she only stared at her with great, big, wild-like eyes. And
Miss Oldcastle thought she was out of her mind, and spoke of an asylum.
But I said she hadn’t long to live, and if she would get my lady her
mother to consent to take no notice, I would take all the care and
trouble of her. And she promised, and the poor thing was left alone. I
began to think myself her mind must be going, for not a word would she
speak, even to me, though every moment I could spare I was up with her
in her room. Only I was forced to be careful not to be out of the way
when my lady wanted me, for that would have tied me more. At length one
day, as I was settling her pillow for her, she all at once threw her
arms about my neck, and burst into a terrible fit of crying. She sobbed
and panted for breath so dreadfully, that I put my arms round her and
lifted her up to give her relief; and when I laid her down again, I
whispered in her ear, “I know now, my dear. I’ll do all I can for you.”
She caught hold of my hand and held it to her lips, and then to her
bosom, and cried again, but more quietly, and all was right between us
once more. It was well for her, poor thing, that she could go to her
bed. And I said to myself, “Nobody need ever know about it; and nobody
ever shall if I can help it.” To tell the truth, my hope was that she
would die before there was any need for further concealment. “But
people in that condition seldom die, they say, till all is over; and so
she lived on and on, though plainly getting weaker and weaker.—At the
captain’s next visit, the wedding-day was fixed. And after that a
circumstance came about that made me uneasy. A Hindoo servant—the
captain called him his NIGGER always—had been constantly in attendance
upon him. I never could abide the snake-look of the fellow, nor the
noiseless way he went about the house. But this time the captain had a
Hindoo woman with him as well. He said that his man had fallen in with
her in London; that he had known her before; that she had come home as
nurse with an English family, and it would be very nice for his wife to
take her back with her to India, if she could only give her house room,
and make her useful till after the wedding. This was easily arranged,
and he went away to return in three weeks, when the wedding was to take
place. Meantime poor Emily grew fast worse, and how she held out with
that terrible cough of hers I never could understand—and spitting
blood, too, every other hour or so, though not very much. And now, to
my great trouble, with the preparations for the wedding, I could see
yet less of her than before; and when Miss Oldcastle sent the Hindoo to
ask me if she might not sit in the room with the poor girl, I did not
know how to object, though I did not at all like her being there. I
felt a great mistrust of the woman somehow or other. I never did like
blacks, and I never shall. So she went, and sat by her, and waited on
her very kindly—at least poor Emily said so. I called her Emily because
she had begged me, that she might feel as if her mother were with her,
and she was a child again. I had tried before to find out from her when
greater care would be necessary, but she couldn’t tell me anything. I
doubted even if she understood me. I longed to have the wedding over
that I might get rid of the black woman, and have time to take her
place, and get everything prepared. The captain arrived, and his man
with him. And twice I came upon the two blacks in close
conversation.—Well, the wedding-day came. The people went to church;
and while they were there a terrible storm of wind and snow came on,
such that the horses would hardly face it. The captain was going to
take his bride home to his father, Sir Giles’s; but, short as the
distance was, before the time came the storm got so dreadful that no
one could think of leaving the house that night. The wind blew for all
the world just as it blows this night, only it was snow in its mouth,
and not rain. Carriage and horses and all would have been blown off the
road for certain. It did blow, to be sure! After dinner was over and
the ladies were gone to the drawing-room, and the gentlemen had been
sitting over their wine for some time, the butler, William Weir—an
honest man, whose wife lived at the lodge—came to my room looking
scared. “Lawks, William!” says I,’ said my aunt, sir, ‘“whatever is the
matter with you?”—“Well, Mrs Prendergast!” says he, and said no more.
“Lawks, William,” says I, “speak out.”—“Well,” says he, “Mrs
Prendergast, it’s a strange wedding, it is! There’s the ladies all
alone in the withdrawing-room, and there’s the gentlemen calling for
more wine, and cursing and swearing that it’s awful to hear. It’s my
belief that swords will be drawn afore long.”—“Tut!” says I, “William,
it will come the sooner if you don’t give them what they want. Go and
get it as fast as you can.”—“I don’t a’most like goin’ down them stairs
alone, in sich a night, ma’am,” says he. “Would you mind coming with
me?”—“Dear me, William,” says I, “a pretty story to tell your wife”—she
was my own half-sister, and younger than me—“a pretty story to tell
your wife, that you wanted an old body like me to go and take care of
you in your own cellar,” says I. “But I’ll go with you, if you like;
for, to tell the truth, it’s a terrible night.” And so down we went,
and brought up six bottles more of the best port. And I really didn’t
wonder, when I was down there, and heard the dull roar of the wind
against the rock below, that William didn’t much like to go alone.—When
he went back with the wine, the captain said, “William, what kept you
so long? Mr Centlivre says that you were afraid to go down into the
cellar.” Now, wasn’t that odd, for it was a real fact? Before William
could reply, Sir Giles said, “A man might well be afraid to go anywhere
alone in a night like this.” Whereupon the captain cried, with an oath,
that he would go down the underground stair, and into every vault on
the way, for the wager of a guinea. And there the matter, according to
William, dropped, for the fresh wine was put on the table. But after
they had drunk the most of it—the captain, according to William,
drinking less than usual—it was brought up again, he couldn’t tell by
which of them. And in five minutes after, they were all at my door,
demanding the key of the room at the top of the stair. I was just going
up to see poor Emily when I heard the noise of their unsteady feet
coming along the passage to my door; and I gave the captain the key at
once, wishing with all my heart he might get a good fright for his
pains. He took a jug with him, too, to bring some water up from the
well, as a proof he had been down. The rest of the gentlemen went with
him into the little cellar-room; but they wouldn’t stop there till he
came up again, they said it was so cold. They all came into my room,
where they talked as gentlemen wouldn’t do if the wine hadn’t got
uppermost. It was some time before the captain returned. It’s a good
way down and back. When he came in at last, he looked as if he had got
the fright I wished him, he had such a scared look. The candle in his
lantern was out, and there was no water in the jug. “There’s your
guinea, Centlivre,” says he, throwing it on the table. “You needn’t ask
me any questions, for I won’t answer one of them.”—“Captain,” says I,
as he turned to leave the room, and the other gentlemen rose to follow
him, “I’ll just hang up the key again.”—” By all means,” says he.
“Where is it, then?” says I. He started and made as if he searched his
pockets all over for it. “I must have dropped it,” says he; “but it’s
of no consequence; you can send William to look for it in the morning.
It can’t be lost, you know.”—“Very well, captain,” said I. But I didn’t
like being without the key, because of course he hadn’t locked the
door, and that part of the house has a bad name, and no wonder. It
wasn’t exactly pleasant to have the door left open. All this time I
couldn’t get to see how Emily was. As often as I looked from my window,
I saw her light in the old west turret out there, Samuel. You know the
room where the bed is still. The rain and the wind will be blowing
right through it to-night. That’s the bed you was born upon,
Samuel.’—It’s all gone now, sir, turret and all, like a good deal more
about the old place; but there’s a story about that turret afterwards,
only I mustn’t try to tell you two things at once.—‘Now I had told the
Indian woman that if anything happened, if she was worse, or wanted to
see me, she must put the candle on the right side of the window, and I
should always be looking out, and would come directly, whoever might
wait. For I was expecting you some time soon, and nobody knew anything
about when you might come. But there the blind continued drawn down as
before. So I thought all was going on right. And what with the storm
keeping Sir Giles and so many more that would have gone home that
night, there was no end of work, and some contrivance necessary, I can
tell you, to get them all bedded for the night, for we were nothing too
well provided with blankets and linen in the house. There was always
more room than money in it. So it was past twelve o’clock before I had
a minute to myself, and that was only after they had all gone to
bed—the bride and bridegroom in the crimson chamber, of course. Well,
at last I crept quietly into Emily’s room. I ought to have told you
that I had not let her know anything about the wedding being that day,
and had enjoined the heathen woman not to say a word; for I thought she
might as well die without hearing about it. But I believe the vile
wretch did tell her. When I opened the room-door, there was no light
there. I spoke, but no one answered. I had my own candle in my hand,
but it had been blown out as I came up the stair. I turned and ran
along the corridor to reach the main stair, which was the nearest way
to my room, when all at once I heard such a shriek from the crimson
chamber as I never heard in my life. It made me all creep like worms.
And in a moment doors and doors were opened, and lights came out,
everybody looking terrified; and what with drink, and horror, and
sleep, some of the gentlemen were awful to look upon. And the door of
the crimson chamber opened too, and the captain appeared in his
dressing-gown, bawling out to know what was the matter; though I’m
certain, to this day, the cry did come from that room, and that he knew
more about it than any one else did. As soon as I got a light, however,
which I did from Sir Giles’s candle, I left them to settle it amongst
them, and ran back to the west turret. When I entered the room, there
was my dear girl lying white and motionless. There could be no doubt a
baby had been born, but no baby was to be seen. I rushed to the bed;
but though she was still warm, your poor mother was quite dead. There
was no use in thinking about helping her; but what could have become of
the child? As if by a light in my mind, I saw it all. I rushed down to
my room, got my lantern, and, without waiting to be afraid, ran to the
underground stairs, where I actually found the door standing open. I
had not gone down more than three turnings, when I thought I heard a
cry, and I sped faster still. And just about half-way down, there lay a
bundle in a blanket. And how ever you got over the state I found you
in, Samuel, I can’t think. But I caught you up as you was, and ran to
my own room with you; and I locked the door, and there being a kettle
on the fire, and some conveniences in the place, I did the best for you
I could. For the breath wasn’t out of you, though it well might have
been. And then I laid you before the fire, and by that time you had
begun to cry a little, to my great pleasure, and then I got a blanket
off my bed, and wrapt you up in it; and, the storm being abated by this
time, made the best of my way with you through the snow to the lodge,
where William’s wife lived. It was not so far off then as it is now.
But in the midst of my trouble the silly body did make me laugh when he
opened the door to me, and saw the bundle in my arms. “Mrs
Prendergast,” says he, “I didn’t expect it of you.”—“Hold your tongue,”
I said. “You would never have talked such nonsense if you had had the
grace to have any of your own,” says I. And with that I into the
bedroom and shut the door, and left him out there in his shirt. My
sister and I soon got everything arranged, for there was no time to
lose. And before morning I had all made tidy, and your poor mother
lying as sweet a corpse as ever angel saw. And no one could say a word
against her. And it’s my belief that that villain made her believe
somehow or other that she was as good as married to him. She was buried
down there in the churchyard, close by the vestry-door,’ said my aunt,
sir; and all of our family have been buried there ever since, my son
Tom’s wife among them, sir.”

“But what was that cry in the house?” I asked “And what became of the
black woman?”

“The woman was never seen again in our quarter; and what the cry was my
aunt never would say. She seemed to know though; notwithstanding, as
she said, that Captain and Mrs Crowfoot denied all knowledge of it. But
the lady looked dreadful, she said, and never was well again, and died
at the birth of her first child. That was the present Mrs Oldcastle’s
father, sir.”

“But why should the woman have left you on the stair, instead of
drowning you in the well at the bottom?”

“My aunt evidently thought there was some mystery about that as well as
the other, for she had no doubt about the woman’s intention. But all
she would ever say concerning it was, ‘The key was never found, Samuel.
You see I had to get a new one made.’ And she pointed to where it hung
on the wall. ‘But that doesn’t look new now,’ she would say. ‘The lock
was very hard to fit again.’ And so you see, sir, I was brought up as
her nephew, though people were surprised, no doubt, that William Weir’s
wife should have a child, and nobody know she was expecting.—Well, with
all the reports of the captain’s money, none of it showed in this old
place, which from that day began, as it were, to crumble away. There’s
been little repair done upon it since then. If it hadn’t been a
well-built place to begin with, it wouldn’t be standing now, sir. But
it’s a very different place, I can tell you. Why, all behind was a
garden with terraces, and fruit trees, and gay flowers, to no end. I
remember it as well as yesterday; nay, a great deal better, for the
matter of that. For I don’t remember yesterday at all, sir.”

I have tried a little to tell the story as he told it. But I am aware
that I have succeeded very badly; for I am not like my friend in
London, who, I verily believe, could give you an exact representation
of any dialect he ever heard. I wish I had been able to give a little
more of the form of the old man’s speech; all I have been able to do is
to show a difference from my own way of telling a story. But in the
main, I think, I have reported it correctly. I believe if the old man
was correct in representing his aunt’s account, the story is very
little altered between us.

But why should I tell such a story at all?

I am willing to allow, at once, that I have very likely given it more
room than it deserves in these poor Annals of mine; but the reason why
I tell it at all is simply this, that, as it came from the old man’s
lips, it interested me greatly. It certainly did not produce the effect
I had hoped to gain from an interview with him, namely, A REDUCTION TO
THE COMMON AND PRESENT. For all this ancient tale tended to keep up the
sense of distance between my day’s experience at the Hall and the work
I had to do amongst my cottagers and trades-people. Indeed, it came
very strangely upon that experience.

“But surely you did not believe such an extravagant tale? The old man
was in his dotage, to begin with.”

Had the old man been in his dotage, which he was not, my answer would
have been a more triumphant one. For when was dotage consistently and
imaginatively inventive? But why should I not believe the story? There
are people who can never believe anything that is not (I do not say
merely in accordance with their own character, but) in accordance with
the particular mood they may happen to be in at the time it is
presented to them. They know nothing of human nature beyond their own
immediate preference at the moment for port or sherry, for vice or
virtue. To tell me there could not be a man so lost to shame, if to
rectitude, as Captain Crowfoot, is simply to talk nonsense. Nay, gentle
reader, if you—and let me suppose I address a lady—if you will give
yourself up for thirty years to doing just whatever your lowest self
and not your best self may like, I will warrant you capable, by the end
of that time, of child murder at least. I do not think the descent to
Avernus is always easy; but it is always possible. Many and many such a
story was fact in old times; and human nature being the same still,
though under different restraints, equally horrible things are
constantly in progress towards the windows of the newspapers.

“But the whole tale has such a melodramatic air!”

That argument simply amounts to this: that, because such subjects are
capable of being employed with great dramatic effect, and of being at
the same time very badly represented, therefore they cannot take place
in real life. But ask any physician of your acquaintance, whether a
story is unlikely simply because it involves terrible things such as do
not occur every day. The fact is, that such things, occurring monthly
or yearly only, are more easily hidden away out of sight. Indeed we can
have no sense of security for ourselves except in the knowledge that we
are striving up and away, and therefore cannot be sinking nearer to the
region of such awful possibilities.

Yet, as I said before, I am afraid I have given it too large a space in
my narrative. Only it so forcibly reminded me at the time of the
expression I could not understand upon Miss Oldcastle’s face, and since
then has been so often recalled by circumstances and events, that I
felt impelled to record it in full. And now I have done with it.

I left the old man with thanks for the kind reception he had given me,
and walked home, revolving many things with which I shall not detain
the attention of my reader. Indeed my thoughts were confused and
troubled, and would ill bear analysis or record. I shut myself up in my
study, and tried to read a sermon of Jeremy Taylor. But it would not
do. I fell fast asleep over it at last, and woke refreshed.




CHAPTER VIII.
WHAT I PREACHED.


During the suffering which accompanied the disappointment at which I
have already hinted, I did not think it inconsistent with the manly
spirit in which I was resolved to endure it, to seek consolation from
such a source as the New Testament—if mayhap consolation for such a
trouble was to be found there. Whereupon, a little to my surprise, I
discovered that I could not read the Epistles at all. For I did not
then care an atom for the theological discussions in which I had been
interested before, and for the sake of which I had read those epistles.
Now that I was in trouble, what to me was that philosophical theology
staring me in the face from out the sacred page? Ah! reader, do not
misunderstand me. All reading of the Book is not reading of the Word.
And many that are first shall be last and the last first. I know NOW
that it was Jesus Christ and not theology that filled the hearts of the
men that wrote those epistles—Jesus Christ, the living, loving God-Man,
whom I found—not in the Epistles, but in the Gospels. The Gospels
contain what the apostles preached—the Epistles what they wrote after
the preaching. And until we understand the Gospel, the good news of
Jesus Christ our brother-king—until we understand Him, until we have
His Spirit, promised so freely to them that ask it—all the Epistles,
the words of men who were full of Him, and wrote out of that fulness,
who loved Him so utterly that by that very love they were lifted into
the air of pure reason and right, and would die for Him, and did die
for Him, without two thoughts about it, in the very simplicity of NO
CHOICE—the Letters, I say, of such men are to us a sealed book. Until
we love the Lord so as to do what He tells us, we have no right to have
an opinion about what one of those men meant; for all they wrote is
about things beyond us. The simplest woman who tries not to judge her
neighbour, or not to be anxious for the morrow, will better know what
is best to know, than the best-read bishop without that one simple
outgoing of his highest nature in the effort to do the will of Him who
thus spoke.

But I have, as is too common with me, been led away by my feelings from
the path to the object before me. What I wanted to say was this: that,
although I could make nothing of the epistles, could see no possibility
of consolation for my distress springing from them, I found it
altogether different when I tried the Gospel once more. Indeed, it then
took such a hold of me as it had never taken before. Only that is
simply saying nothing. I found out that I had known nothing at all
about it; that I had only a certain surface-knowledge, which tended
rather to ignorance, because it fostered the delusion that I did know.
Know that man, Christ Jesus! Ah! Lord, I would go through fire and
water to sit the last at Thy table in Thy kingdom; but dare I say now I
KNOW Thee!—But Thou art the Gospel, for Thou art the Way, the Truth,
and the Life; and I have found Thee the Gospel. For I found, as I read,
that Thy very presence in my thoughts, not as the theologians show
Thee, but as Thou showedst Thyself to them who report Thee to us,
smoothed the troubled waters of my spirit, so that, even while the
storm lasted, I was able to walk upon them to go to Thee. And when
those waters became clear, I most rejoiced in their clearness because
they mirrored Thy form—because Thou wert there to my vision—the one
Ideal, the perfect man, the God perfected as king of men by working out
His Godhood in the work of man; revealing that God and man are one;
that to serve God, a man must be partaker of the Divine nature; that
for a man’s work to be done thoroughly, God must come and do it first
Himself; that to help men, He must be what He is—man in God, God in
man—visibly before their eyes, or to the hearing of their ears. So much
I saw.

And therefore, when I was once more in a position to help my fellows,
what could I want to give them but that which was the very bread and
water of life to me—the Saviour himself? And how was I to do this?—By
trying to represent the man in all the simplicity of His life, of His
sayings and doings, of His refusals to say or do.—I took the story from
the beginning, and told them about the Baby; trying to make the fathers
and mothers, and all whose love for children supplied the lack of
fatherhood and motherhood, feel that it was a real baby-boy. And I
followed the life on and on, trying to show them how He felt, as far as
one might dare to touch such sacred things, when He did so and so, or
said so and so; and what His relation to His father and mother and
brothers and sisters was, and to the different kinds of people who came
about Him. And I tried to show them what His sayings meant, as far as I
understood them myself, and where I could not understand them I just
told them so, and said I hoped for more light by and by to enable me to
understand them; telling them that that hope was a sharp goad to my
resolution, driving me on to do my duty, because I knew that only as I
did my duty would light go up in my heart, making me wise to understand
the precious words of my Lord. And I told them that if they would try
to do their duty, they would find more understanding from that than
from any explanation I could give them.

And so I went on from Sunday to Sunday. And the number of people that
slept grew less and less, until, at last, it was reduced to the
churchwarden, Mr Brownrigg, and an old washerwoman, who, poor thing,
stood so much all the week, that sitting down with her was like going
to bed, and she never could do it, as she told me, without going to
sleep. I, therefore, called upon her every Monday morning, and had five
minutes’ chat with her as she stood at her wash-tub, wishing to make up
to her for her drowsiness; and thinking that if I could once get her
interested in anything, she might be able to keep awake a little while
at the beginning of the sermon; for she gave me no chance of
interesting her on Sundays—going fast asleep the moment I stood up to
preach. I never got so far as that, however; and the only fact that
showed me I had made any impression upon her, beyond the pleasure she
always manifested when I appeared on the Monday, was, that, whereas all
my linen had been very badly washed at first, a decided improvement
took place after a while, beginning with my surplice and bands, and
gradually extending itself to my shirts and handkerchiefs; till at last
even Mrs Pearson was unable to find any fault with the poor old sleepy
woman’s work. For Mr Brownrigg, I am not sure that the sense of any one
sentence I ever uttered, down to the day of his death, entered into his
brain—I dare not say his mind or heart. With regard to him, and
millions besides, I am more than happy to obey my Lord’s command, and
not judge.

But it was not long either before my congregations began to improve,
whatever might be the cause. I could not help hoping that it was really
because they liked to hear the Gospel, that is, the good news about
Christ himself. And I always made use of the knowledge I had of my
individual hearers, to say what I thought would do them good. Not that
I ever preached AT anybody; I only sought to explain the principles of
things in which I knew action of some sort was demanded from them. For
I remembered how our Lord’s sermon against covetousness, with the
parable of the rich man with the little barn, had for its occasion the
request of a man that our Lord would interfere to make his brother
share with him; which He declining to do, yet gave both brothers a
lesson such as, if they wished to do what was right, would help them to
see clearly what was the right thing to do in this and every such
matter. Clear the mind’s eye, by washing away the covetousness, and the
whole nature would be full of light, and the right walk would speedily
follow.

Before long, likewise, I was as sure of seeing the pale face of Thomas
Weir perched, like that of a man beheaded for treason, upon the apex of
the gablet of the old tomb, as I was of hearing the wonderful playing
of that husky old organ, of which I have spoken once before. I
continued to pay him a visit every now and then; and I assure you,
never was the attempt to be thoroughly honest towards a man better
understood or more appreciated than my attempt was by the ATHEISTICAL
carpenter. The man was no more an atheist than David was when he saw
the wicked spreading like a green bay-tree, and was troubled at the
sight. He only wanted to see a God in whom he could trust. And if I
succeeded at all in making him hope that there might be such a God, it
is to me one of the most precious seals of my ministry.

But it was now getting very near Christmas, and there was one person
whom I had never yet seen at church: that was Catherine Weir. I
thought, at first, it could hardly be that she shrunk from being seen;
for how then could she have taken to keeping a shop, where she must be
at the beck of every one? I had several times gone and bought tobacco
of her since that first occasion; and I had told my housekeeper to buy
whatever she could from her, instead of going to the larger shop in the
place; at which Mrs Pearson had grumbled a good deal, saying how could
the things be so good out of a poky shop like that? But I told her I
did not care if the things were not quite as good; for it would be of
more consequence to Catherine to have the custom, than it would be to
me to have the one lump of sugar I put in my tea of a morning one shade
or even two shades whiter. So I had contrived to keep up a kind of
connexion with her, although I saw that any attempt at conversation was
so distasteful to her, that it must do harm until something should have
brought about a change in her feelings; though what feeling wanted
changing, I could not at first tell. I came to the conclusion that she
had been wronged grievously, and that this wrong operating on a nature
similar to her father’s, had drawn all her mind to brood over it. The
world itself, the whole order of her life, everything about her, would
seem then to have wronged her; and to speak to her of religion would
only rouse her scorn, and make her feel as if God himself, if there
were a God, had wronged her too. Evidently, likewise, she had that
peculiarity of strong, undeveloped natures, of being unable, once
possessed by one set of thoughts, to get rid of it again, or to see
anything except in the shadow of those thoughts. I had no doubt,
however, at last, that she was ashamed of her position in the eyes of
society, although a hitherto indomitable pride had upheld her to face
it so far as was necessary to secure her independence; both of
which—pride and shame—prevented her from appearing where it was
unnecessary, and especially in church. I could do nothing more than
wait for a favourable opportunity. I could invent no way of reaching
her yet; for I had soon found that kindness to her boy was regarded
rather in the light of an insult to her. I should have been greatly
puzzled to account for his being such a sweet little fellow, had I not
known that he was a great deal with his aunt and grandfather. A more
attentive and devout worshipper was not in the congregation than that
little boy.

Before going on to speak of another of the most remarkable of my
parishioners, whom I have just once mentioned I believe already, I
should like to say that on three several occasions before Christmas I
had seen Judy look grave. She was always quite well-behaved in church,
though restless, as one might expect. But on these occasions she was
not only attentive, but grave, as if she felt something or other. I
will not mention what subjects I was upon at those times, because the
mention of them would not, in the minds of my readers, at all harmonise
with the only notion of Judy they can yet by possibility have.

For Mrs Oldcastle, I never saw her change countenance or even
expression at anything—I mean in church.




CHAPTER IX.
THE ORGANIST.


On the afternoon of my second Sunday at Marshmallows, I was standing in
the churchyard, casting a long shadow in the light of the declining
sun. I was reading the inscription upon an old headstone, for I thought
everybody was gone; when I heard a door open, and shut again before I
could turn. I saw at once that it must have been a little door in the
tower, almost concealed from where I stood by a deep buttress. I had
never seen the door open, and I had never inquired anything about it,
supposing it led merely into the tower.

After a moment it opened again, and, to my surprise, out came, stooping
his tall form to get his gray head clear of the low archway, a man whom
no one could pass without looking after him. Tall, and strongly built,
he had the carriage of a military man, without an atom of that
sternness which one generally finds in the faces of those accustomed to
command. He had a large face, with large regular features, and large
clear gray eyes, all of which united to express an exceeding placidity
or repose. It shone with intelligence—a mild intelligence—no way
suggestive of profundity, although of geniality. Indeed, there was a
little too much expression. The face seemed to express ALL that lay
beneath it.

I was not satisfied with the countenance; and yet it looked quite good.
It was somehow a too well-ordered face. It was quite Greek in its
outline; and marvellously well kept and smooth, considering that the
beard, to which razors were utterly strange, and which descended
half-way down his breast, would have been as white as snow except for a
slight yellowish tinge. His eyebrows were still very dark, only just
touched with the frost of winter. His hair, too, as I saw when he
lifted his hat, was still wonderfully dark for the condition of his
beard.—It flashed into my mind, that this must be the organist who
played so remarkably. Somehow I had not happened yet to inquire about
him. But there was a stateliness in this man amounting almost to
consciousness of dignity; and I was a little bewildered. His clothes
were all of black, very neat and clean, but old-fashioned and
threadbare. They bore signs of use, but more signs of time and careful
keeping. I would have spoken to him, but something in the manner in
which he bowed to me as he passed, prevented me, and I let him go
unaccosted.

The sexton coming out directly after, and proceeding to lock the door,
I was struck by the action. “What IS he locking the door for?” I said
to myself. But I said nothing to him, because I had not answered the
question myself yet.

“Who is that gentleman,” I asked, “who came out just now?”

“That is Mr Stoddart, sir,” he answered.

I thought I had heard the name in the neighbourhood before.

“Is it he who plays the organ?” I asked.

“That he do, sir. He’s played our organ for the last ten year, ever
since he come to live at the Hall.”

“What Hall?”

“Why the Hall, to be sure,—Oldcastle Hall, you know.”

And then it dawned on my recollection that I had heard Judy mention her
uncle Stoddart. But how could he be her uncle?

“Is he a relation of the family?” I asked.

“He’s a brother-in-law, I believe, of the old lady, sir, but how ever
he come to live there I don’t know. It’s no such binding connexion, you
know, sir. He’s been in the milintairy line, I believe, sir, in the
Ingies, or somewheres.”

I do not think I shall have any more strange parishioners to present to
my readers; at least I do not remember any more just at this moment.
And this one, as the reader will see, I positively could not keep out.

A military man from India! a brother-in-law of Mrs Oldcastle, choosing
to live with her! an entrancing performer upon an old, asthmatic,
dry-throated church organ! taking no trouble to make the clergyman’s
acquaintance, and passing him in the churchyard with a courteous bow,
although his face was full of kindliness, if not of kindness! I could
not help thinking all this strange. And yet—will the reader cease to
accord me credit when I assert it?—although I had quite intended to
inquire after him when I left the vicarage to go to the Hall, and had
even thought of him when sitting with Mrs Oldcastle, I never thought of
him again after going with Judy, and left the house without having made
a single inquiry after him. Nor did I think of him again till just as I
was passing under the outstretched neck of one of those serpivolants on
the gate; and what made me think of him then, I cannot in the least
imagine; but I resolved at once that I would call upon him the
following week, lest he should think that the fact of his having
omitted to call upon me had been the occasion of such an apparently
pointed omission on my part. For I had long ago determined to be no
further guided by the rules of society than as they might aid in
bringing about true neighbourliness, and if possible friendliness and
friendship. Wherever they might interfere with these, I would disregard
them—as far on the other hand as the disregard of them might tend to
bring about the results I desired.

When, carrying out this resolution, I rang the doorbell at the Hall,
and inquired whether Mr Stoddart was at home, the butler stared; and,
as I simply continued gazing in return, and waiting, he answered at
length, with some hesitation, as if he were picking and choosing his
words:

“Mr Stoddart never calls upon any one, sir.”

“I am not complaining of Mr Stoddart,” I answered, wishing to put th

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/5773