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THE
CURATE IN CHARGE.
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT.
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1883.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE PARISH 1
II. THE PREVIOUS HISTORY OF MR. ST. JOHN 12
III. AUNT JANE 30
IV. MISS BROWN 51
V. THE GIRLS AT SCHOOL 68
VI. THE GIRLS AT HOME 89
VII. NEWS 109
VIII. THE NEW RECTOR 134
IX. THE ENEMY 154
X. IN THE PARISH 178
XI. CICELY'S APPEAL 202
XII. THE PARSON'S ROUND 224
XIII. WHAT THE GIRLS COULD DO 247
XIV. HOW TO EXERCISE CHURCH PATRONAGE 272
XV. THE ARTIST AND THE HOUSEKEEPER 290
XVI. REALITY 313
XVII. THE BREAKING UP 330
XVIII. THE CURATE LEAVES BRENTBURN 344
XIX. THE RECTOR'S BEGINNING 364
XX. THE PARISH SCHOOLMISTRESS 387
THE CURATE IN CHARGE
CHAPTER I.
THE PARISH.
The parish of Brentburn lies in the very heart of the leafy county of
Berks. It is curiously situated on the borders of the forest, which is
rich as Arden on one side, and on the edge of a moorland country
abounding in pines and heather on the other; so that in the course of a
moderate walk the wayfarer can pass from leafy glades and luxuriant
breadth of shadow, great wealthy oaks and beeches, and stately chestnuts
such as clothe Italian hill-sides, to the columned fir-trees of a Scotch
wood, all aromatic with wild fragrant odours of the moor and peat-moss.
On one hand, the eye and the imagination lose themselves in soft woods
where Orlando might hang his verses, and heavenly Rosalind flout her
lover. On the other, knee-deep in rustling heather and prickly billows
of the gorse, the spectator looks over dark undulations of pines,
standing up in countless regiments, each line and rank marked against
the sky, and an Ossianic breeze making wild music through them. At the
corner, where these two landscapes, so strangely different, approach
each other most closely, stand the church and rectory of Brentburn. The
church, I am sorry to say, is new spick-and-span nineteenth century
Gothic, much more painfully correct than if it had been built in the
fourteenth century, as it would fain, but for its newness, make believe
to be. The rectory is still less engaging than the church. It is of red
brick, and the last rector, so long as he lived in it, tried hard to
make his friends believe that it was of Queen Anne's time--that last
distinctive age of domestic architecture; but he knew very well all the
while that it was only an ugly Georgian house, built at the end of the
last century. It had a carriage entrance with the ordinary round "sweep"
and clump of laurels, and it was a good-sized house, and comfortable
enough in a steady, ugly, respectable way. The other side, however,
which looked upon a large garden older far than itself, where mossed
apple-trees stood among the vegetable beds in the distant corners, and a
delicious green velvet lawn, soft with immemorial turf, spread before
the windows, was pleasanter than the front view. There was a large
mulberry-tree in the middle of the grass, which is as a patent of
nobility to any lawn; and a few other trees were scattered about--a
gnarled old thorn for one, which made the whole world sweet in its
season, and an apple-tree and a cherry at the further corners, which
had, of course, no business to be there. The high walls were clothed
with fruit trees, a green wavy lining, to their very top--or in spring
rather a mystic, wonderful drapery of white and pink which dazzled all
beholders. This, I am sorry to say, at the time my story begins, was
more lovely than profitable; for, indeed, so large a garden would have
required two gardeners to keep it in perfect order, while all it had was
the chance attentions of a boy of all work. A door cut in this living
wall of blossoms led straight out to the common, which was scarcely
less sweet in spring; and a little way above, on a higher elevation,
was the church surrounded by its graves. Beyond this, towards the south,
towards the forest, the wealthy, warm English side, there were perhaps a
dozen houses, an untidy shop, and the post-office called Little
Brentburn, to distinguish it from the larger village, which was at some
distance. The cottages were almost all old, but this hamlet was not
pretty. Its central feature was a duck-pond, its ways were muddy, its
appearance squalid. There was no squire in the parish to keep it in
order, no benevolent rich proprietor, no wealthy clergyman; and this
brings us at once to the inhabitants of the rectory, with whom we have
most concern.
The rector had not resided in the parish for a long time--between
fifteen and twenty years. It was a college living, of the value of four
hundred and fifty pounds a year, and it had been conferred upon the Rev.
Reginald Chester, who was a fellow of the college, as long ago as the
time I mention. Mr. Chester was a very good scholar, and a man of very
refined tastes. He had lived in his rooms at Oxford, and in various
choice regions of the world, specially in France and Italy, up to the
age of forty, indulging all his favourite (and quite virtuous) tastes,
and living a very pleasant if not a very useful life. He had a little
fortune of his own, and he had his fellowship, and was able to keep up
congenial society, and to indulge himself in almost all the indulgences
he liked. Why he should have accepted the living of Brentburn it would
be hard to say; I suppose there is always an attraction, even to the
most philosophical, in a few additional hundreds a year. He took it,
keeping out poor Arlington, who had the next claim, and who wanted to
marry, and longed for a country parish. Mr. Chester did not want to
marry, and hated everything parochial; but he took the living all the
same. He came to live at Brentburn in the beginning of summer,
furnishing the house substantially, with Turkey carpets, and huge
mountains of mahogany--for the science of furniture had scarcely been
developed in those days; and for the first few months, having brought an
excellent cook with him, and finding his friends in town quite willing
to spend a day or two by times in the country, and being within an
hour's journey of London, he got on tolerably well. But the winter was
a very different matter. His friends no longer cared to come. There was
good hunting to be sure, but Mr. Chester's friends in general were not
hunting men, and the country was damp and rheumatic, and the society
more agricultural than intellectual. Then his cook, still more
important, mutinied. She had never been used to it, and her kitchen was
damp, and she had no means of improving herself "in this hole," as she
irreverently called the rectory of Brentburn. Heroically, in spite of
this, in spite of the filthy roads, the complaints of the poor, an
indifferent cook, and next to no society, Mr. Chester held out for two
long years. The damp crept on him, into his very bones. He got incipient
rheumatism, and he had a sharp attack of bronchitis. This was in spring,
the most dangerous season when your lungs are weak; and in Mr. Chester's
family there had at one time been a girl who died of consumption. He was
just at the age when men are most careful of their lives, when, awaking
out of the confidence of youth, they begin to realize that they are
mortal, and one day or other must die. He took fright; he consulted a
kind physician, who was quite ready to certify that his health required
Mentone or Spitzbergen, whichever the patient wished; and then Mr.
Chester advertised for a curate. The parish was so small that up to this
moment he had not had any occasion for such an article. He got a most
superior person, the Rev. Cecil St. John, who was very ready and happy
to undertake all the duties for less than half of the stipend. Mr.
Chester was a liberal man in his way. He let Mr. St. John have the
rectory to live in, and the use of all his furniture, except his best
Turkey carpets, which it must be allowed were too good for a curate; and
then, with heart relieved, he took his way into the south and the
sunshine. What a relief it was! He soon got better at Mentone, and went
on to more amusing and attractive places; but as it was on account of
his health that he had got rid of his parish, consistency required that
he should continue to be "delicate." Nothing is more easy than to manage
this when one has money enough and nothing to do. He bought a small
villa near Naples, with the best possible aspect, sheltered from the
east wind. He became a great authority on the antiquities of the
neighbourhood, and in this way had a constant change and variety of the
very best society. He took great care of himself; was never out at
sunset, avoided the sirocco, and took great precautions against fever.
He even began to plan a book about Pompeii. And thus the years glided by
quite peacefully in the most refined of occupations, and he had almost
forgotten that he ever was rector of Brentburn. Young fellows of his
college recollected it from time to time, and asked querulously if he
never meant to die. "You may be sure he will never die if he can help
it," the Provost of that learned community replied, chuckling, for he
knew his man. And meantime Mr. St. John, who was the curate in charge,
settled down and made himself comfortable, and forgot that he was not
there in his own right. It is natural a man should feel so who has been
priest of a parish for nearly twenty years.
This Mr. St. John was a man of great tranquillity of mind, and with
little energy of disposition. Where he was set down there he remained,
taking all that Providence sent him very dutifully, without any effort
to change what might be objectionable or amend what was faulty; nobody
could be more accomplished than he was in the art of "putting up with"
whatsoever befell him. When once he had been established anywhere, only
something from without could move him--never any impulse from within. He
took what happened to him, as the birds took the crumbs he threw out to
them, without question or preference. The only thing in which he ever
took an initiative was in kindness. He could not bear to hurt any one's
feelings, to make any one unhappy, and by dint of his submissiveness of
mind he was scarcely ever unhappy himself. The poor people all loved
him; he never could refuse them anything, and his reproofs were balms
which broke no man's head. He was indeed, but for his sympathy, more
like an object in nature--a serene, soft hillside touched by the lights
and shadows of changeable skies, yet never really affected by them
except for the moment--than a suffering and rejoicing human creature.
"On a fair landscape some have looked
And felt, as I have heard them say,
As if the fleeting time had been
A thing as steadfast as the scene
On which they gazed themselves away."
This was the effect Mr. St. John produced upon his friends and the
parish; change seemed impossible to him--and that he could die, or
disappear, or be anything different from what he was, was as hard to
conceive as it was to realize that distinct geological moment when the
hills were all in fusion, and there was not a tree in the forest. That
this should be the case in respect to the curate in charge, whose
position was on sufferance, and whom any accident happening to another
old man in Italy, or any caprice of that old man's fancy, could sweep
away out of the place as if he had never been, gave additional
quaintness yet power to the universal impression. Nobody could imagine
what Brentburn would be like without Mr. St. John, and he himself was of
the same mind.
At the period when this story commences the curate was a widower with
"two families." He had been so imprudent as to marry twice; he had two
daughters grown up, who were coming to him, but had not arrived, and he
had two little baby boys, whose mother had recently died. But how this
mother and these boys came about, to Mr. St. John's great surprise--and
who the daughters were who were coming to take charge of him--I must
tell before I go on any further. The whole episode of his second
marriage was quite accidental in the curate's life.