THE NEW RECTOR.
The news which so much disturbed the inhabitants of the rectory at
Brentburn was already old news in Oxford, where indeed it was known and
decided who Mr. Chester's successor was to be. The august body in whose
hands the appointment lay was absolutely unconscious of the existence of
Mr. St. John. Several members of it, it is true, were his own
contemporaries, and had been his acquaintances in the old days when
these very dons themselves traversed their quadrangles with such hopes
and fears in respect to the issue of an examination, as the destruction
of the world or its salvation would scarcely rouse in them now; but what
was it likely they could know about a man who at sixty-five was only a
curate, who had never asked for anything, never tried for anything; but
had kept himself out of sight and knowledge for a lifetime? Those of
them who had a dim recollection that "old St. John" was Chester's curate
in charge, naturally thought that he held that precarious and
unprofitable place for so long, because of some personal connection with
the locality, or preference for it, which he was well off enough to be
able to indulge. He had been poor in his youth, but probably his wife
had had money, or something had fallen to him. What so likely as that
something good should fall by inheritance to a man with such a patrician
name? Therefore let nobody blame the dons. They might have been capable
(though I don't know whether they would have had any right to exercise
their patronage so) of a great act of poetic justice, and might have
given to the undistinguished but old member of their college the reward
of his long exertions, had they known. But as they did not know, what
could these good men do but allot it to the excellent young
Fellow--already the winner of all kinds of honours--who condescended to
be willing to accept the humble rectory? Everybody said it was not
worth Mildmay's while to shelve himself in an obscure place like
Brentburn; that it was a strange thing for him to do; that he would hate
it as poor Chester--also an extremely accomplished man and fellow of his
college--had done. Gossips--and such beings exist in the most classical
places--feared that he must want the money; though some thought he was
merely disinclined to let a tolerable small living, not far from town,
and in a good county, where there were many "nice families," pass him;
but very few people so far as I am aware, thought of any higher motive
which a popular young don could have for such a fancy.
Mr. Mildmay was quite one of the advanced rank of young Oxford men. I
have never been able to understand how it was that he continued more or
less orthodox, but he had done so by special constitution of mind, I
suppose, which in some tends to belief as much as in some others it
tends to unbelief. He was not one of those uncomfortable people who are
always following out "truth" to some bitter end or other, and refusing
all compromise. Perhaps he was not so profound as are those troublesome
spirits, but he was a great deal happier, and a great deal more
agreeable. It is quite possible that some young reader may object to
this as a shameful begging of the question whether it is not best to
follow "truth" with bosom bare into whatsoever wintry lands that
oft-bewildered power may lead. I don't know; some minds have little
inclination towards the sombre guesses of science, new or old; and
perhaps some may prefer Roger Mildmay for the mere fact that he did not
feel himself to have outgrown Christianity; which, I confess, is my own
feeling on the subject. However, if it is any satisfaction to the said
young reader, I may as well avow that though nature kept him from being
sceptical, that kindly nurse did not hinder him from throwing himself
into much semi-intellectual foolishness in other ways. To hear him talk
of art was enough to make all the Academy dance with fury, and drive the
ordinary learner, however little attached to the Academy, into absolute
imbecility; and his rooms were as good as a show, with all the last
fantastical delights of the day--more like a museum of china and
knick-knacks than rooms to live in. His floors were littered with rugs,
over which, in the æsthetic dimness, unwary visitors tumbled; his walls
were toned into olive greens or peacock blues, dark enough to have
defied all the sunshine of the Indies to light them up. He had few
pictures; but his rooms were hung with photographs "taken direct," and a
collection of old china plates, which perhaps, in their primitive
colours and broad effect, "came" better than pictures in the subdued and
melancholy light. But why insist upon these details? A great many
highly-cultured persons have the same kind of rooms, and Mildmay was
something more than a highly-cultured person. All this amused and
occupied him very much--for indeed collecting is a very amusing
occupation; and when he had found something "really good" in an old
curiosity shop, it exhilarated him greatly to bring it home, and find a
place for it among his precious stores, and to make it "compose" with
the other curiosities around it. As sheer play, I don't know any play
more pleasant; and when he looked round upon the dim world of _objets
d'art_ that covered all his walls, shelves, and tables, and marked the
fine pictorial effect of the one brilliant spot of light which the green
shade of his reading-lamp prevented from too great diffusion--when, I
say, looking up from his studies, Mr. Mildmay looked round upon all
this, and felt that only very fine taste, and much patient labour,
supported by a tolerably well-filled purse, could have brought it all
together, and arranged everything into one harmonious whole, there came
a glow of gentle satisfaction to the heart of the young don.
But then he sighed. All perfection is melancholy. When you have finally
arranged your last acquisition, and look round upon a completeness
which, even for the introduction of additional beauty, it seems wicked
to disturb, what can you do but sigh? And there was more than this in
the breath of melancholy--the long-drawn utterance of an unsatisfied
soul in Mildmay's sigh. After all, a man cannot live for china, for
æsthetic arrangement, for furniture, however exquisite; or even for art,
when he is merely a critic, commentator, and amateur--not a worker in
the same. You may suppose that he was weary of his loneliness; that he
wanted a companion, or those domestic joys which are supposed to be so
infinitely prized in England. I am sorry to say this was not the case.
The class to which Mildmay belongs are rather in the way of scouting
domestic joys. A man who makes a goddess of his room, who adores china,
and decks his mantleshelf with lace, seldom (in theory) wants a wife, or
sighs for a companion of his joys and sorrows. For why? He does not deal
much in sorrows or in joys. The deepest delight which can thrill the
soul in the discovery of old Worcester or royal Dresden, scarcely
reaches to the height of passion; and even if a matchless cup of _Henri
Deux_ were to be shivered to pieces in your hand, your despair would not
appeal to human sympathy as would the loss of a very much commoner piece
of flesh and blood. And then young ladies as a class are not, I fear,
great in the marks of china, and even in the feminine speciality of lace
require years to mellow them into admiration of those archæological
morsels which cannot be worn. Besides, the very aspect of such rooms as
those I have indicated (not being bold enough to attempt to describe
them) is inimical to all conjoint and common existence. Solitude is
taken for granted in all those dainty arrangements; in the dim air, the
dusky walls, the subdued tone. A child in the place, ye heavens!
imagination shivers, and dares not contemplate what might follow.
And then Mr. Mildmay had exhausted this delight. I believe his rooms
were papered with three different kinds of the choicest paper that ever
came out of Mr. Morris's hands. His curtains had been embroidered in the
art school of needlework on cloth woven and dyed expressly for him. An
ancient piece of lovely Italian tapestry hung over one door, and another
was veiled by a glorious bit of eastern work from Damascus or
Constantinople. His Italian cabinets were enough to make you faint with
envy; his Venice glass--but why should I go on? The rugs which tripped
you up as you threaded your way through the delicate artificial twilight
were as valuable as had they been woven in gold; and no sooner was it
known that Mildmay had accepted a living than all the superior classes
in the southern half of England pricked up their ears. Would there be a
sale? About a thousand connoisseurs from all parts of the country
balanced themselves metaphorically on one foot like Raphael's St.
Michael, ready to swoop down at the first note of warning. I am not sure
that among railway authorities there were not preparations for a
special train.
Mr. Mildmay had got tired of it all. Suddenly in that dainty dimness of
high culture it had occurred to him that studies of old art and
accumulations of the loveliest furniture were not life. What was life?
There are so many that ask that question, and the replies are so feeble.
The commonest rendering is that which Faust in sheer disgust of
intellectualism plunged into--pleasure; with what results the reader
knows. Pleasure in its coarser meaning, in the Faust sense, and in the
vulgar sensual sense, was only a disgust to such a man as Roger Mildmay.
What could he have done with his fine tastes and pure habits in the
_coulisses_ or the casinos? He would only have recoiled with the
sickening sensations of physical loathing as well as mental. What then?
Should he marry and have a family, which is the virtuous and respectable
answer to his question? He had no inclination that way. The woman whom
he was to marry had not yet risen on his firmament, and he was not the
kind of man to determine on marriage in the abstract, dissociated from
any individual. How then was he to know life, and have it? Should he go
off into the distant world and travel, and discover new treasures of art
in unsuspected places, and bring home his trophies from all quarters of
the world? But he had done this so often already that even the idea
almost fatigued him. Besides, all these expedients, pleasure,
domesticity, travel, would all have been ways of pleasing himself only,
and he had already done a great deal to please himself. Life must have
something in it surely of sharper, more pungent flavour. It could not be
a mere course of ordinary days one succeeding another, marked out by
dinners, books, conversations, the same thing over again, never more
than an hour of it at a time in a man's possession, nothing in it that
could not be foreseen and mapped out. This could not be life. How was he
to get at life? He sat and wondered over this problem among his
beautiful collections. He had nothing to do, you will say; and yet you
can't imagine how busy he was. In short, he was never without something
to do. He had edited a Greek play, he had written magazine articles, he
had read papers before literary societies, he had delivered lectures.
Few, very few, were his unoccupied moments. He knew a great many people
in the highest classes of society, and kept up a lively intercourse with
the most intelligent, the most cultivated minds of his time. He was,
indeed, himself one of the most highly cultured persons of his standing;
yet here he sat in the most delightful rooms in his college, sighing for
life, life!
What is life? Digging, ploughing, one can understand that; but
unfortunately one cannot dig, and "to beg I am ashamed." These familiar
words suggested themselves by the merest trick of the ear to his mind
unawares. To beg, the Franciscans he had seen in old Italy had not been
at all ashamed; neither were the people who now and then penetrated into
college rooms with--if not the Franciscan's wallet, or the penitent's
rattling money-box--lists of subscriptions with which to beguile the
unwary. For what? For hospitals, schools, missions, churches; the grand
deduction to be drawn from all this being that there were a great many
people in the world, by their own fault or that of others, miserable,
sick, ignorant, wicked; and that a great many more people, from good or
indifferent motives, on true or on false pretences, were making a great
fuss about helping them. This fuss was in a general way annoying, and
even revolting to the _dilettanti_, whose object is to see and hear only
things that are beautiful, to encourage in themselves and others
delightful sensations; but yet when you came to think of it, it could
not be denied that the whole system of public charity had a meaning. In
some cases a false, foolish, wrong meaning, no doubt; but yet----
If I were to tell you all the fancies that passed through Roger
Mildmay's head on the subject, it would require volumes; and many of his
thoughts were fantastic enough. The fact that he had taken orders and
was the man he was, made it his proper business to teach others; but he
would much rather, he thought, have reclaimed waste land, or something
of that practical sort. Yes, to reclaim a bit of useless moorland and
make it grow oats or even potatoes--that would be something; but then
unfortunately the ludicrous side of the matter would come over him. What
could he do on his bit of moorland with those white hands of his? Would
it not be much more sensible to pay honest wages to some poor honest man
out of work, and let him do the digging? and then where was Roger
Mildmay? still left, stranded, high and dry, upon the useless ground of
his present existence. Such a man in such a self-discussion is as many
women are. If he works, what is the good of it? It is to occupy, to
please himself, not because the work is necessary to others; indeed, it
is taking bread out of the mouths of others to do badly himself that
which another man, probably lounging sadly, out of work, and seeing his
children starve, would do well. Let him, then, go back to his own
profession; and what was he to do? A clergyman must preach, and he did
not feel at all at his ease in the pulpit. A clergyman must teach, and
his prevailing mood was a desire to learn. A clergyman must care for the
poor, and he knew nothing about the poor. The result of all these
confused and unsatisfactory reasonings with himself was that when the
living of Brentburn was offered to him half in joke, he made a plunge at
it, and accepted. "Let us try!" he said to himself. Anything was better
than this perplexity. At the worst he could but fail.
Now, Mr. St. John, as I have said, was a member of the same college, and
had served the parish of Brentburn for twenty years, and what was to
Roger Mildmay an adventure, a very doubtful experiment, would have been
to him life and living; and next on the list of eligible persons after
Mr. Mildmay was the Rev. John Ruffhead, who was very anxious to marry
and settle, and was a clergyman's son well trained to his work. Such
injustices are everywhere around us; they are nobody's fault, we
say--they are the fault of the system; but what system would mend them
it is hard to tell. And, on the other hand, perhaps neither Mr. St. John
nor Mr. Ruffhead had the same high object before them as Roger had. The
old man would have gone on in his gentle routine just as he had done all
those years, always kind, soothing the poor folk more than he taught
them; the young man would, though sure to do his duty, have thought
perhaps more of the future Mrs. Ruffhead, and the settling down, than of
any kind of heroic effort to realize life and serve the world. So that
on the whole, ideally, my _dilettante_ had the highest ideal; though the
practical effect of him no one could venture to foretell.
He had decided to accept the living of Brentburn at once, feeling the
offer to be a kind of answer of the oracle--for there was a certain
heathenism mingling with his Christianity--to his long-smouldering and
unexpressed desires; but before concluding formally he went, by the
advice of one of his friends, to look at the place, "to see how he would
like it." "Like it! do I want to like it?" he said to himself. Must this
always be the first question? Was it not rather the first possibility
held out to him in the world--of duty, and a real, necessary, and
certain work which should not be to please himself? He did not want to
like it. Now, men of Mildmay's turn of mind are seldom deeply devoted to
nature. They admire a fine landscape or fine sunset, no doubt, but it is
chiefly for the composition, the effects of light and shade, the
combination of colours. In the loveliest country they sigh for picture
galleries and fine architecture, and cannot please themselves with the
mists and the clouds, the woods and the waters, the warm, sweet,
boundless atmosphere itself, in which others find beauty and mystery
unceasing. Yet on this occasion a different result took place; although
it was contrary to his own principles, when he first came out of the
prosaic little railway at Brentburn and saw at his right hand, one rich
cloud of foliage rounding upon another, and all the wealth of princely
trees standing up in their battalions under the full warm August sky;
and on the other the sweet wild common bursting forth in a purple blaze
of heather, all belted and broken with the monastic gloom of the
pine-woods and ineffable blue distances of the wilder country--there
suddenly fell upon him a love at first sight for this insignificant
rural place, which I cannot account for any more than he could. I should
be disposed to say that the scent of the fir-trees went to his head, as
it does to mine; but then the very soul within him melted to the great,
broad, delicious greenness of shadows in the forest; and the two between
them held him in an ecstasy, in that sweet lapse of all sense and
thought into which nature sometimes surprises us, when all at once,
without any suspicion on our part of what she is about, she throws
herself open to us, and holds out her tender arms. Mildmay stood in this
partial trance, not knowing what he was doing, for--two full minutes,
then he picked himself up, slightly ashamed of his ecstasy, and asked
his way to the church, and said to himself (as I think Mr. Ruskin says
somewhere) that mere nature without art to back her up is little, but
that he might indeed permit himself to feel those indescribable
sensations if he could look at all this as a background to a beautiful
piece of ancient architecture in the shape of a church. Alas, poor Mr.
Mildmay! I don't know why it had never been broken to him. Ignorant
persons had said "a very nice church," perhaps out of sheer ignorance,
perhaps from the commercial point of view that a new church in perfect
repair is much more delightful, to a young rector's pocket at least,
than the most picturesque old one in perpetual need of restorations. But
anyhow, when the church of Brentburn did burst upon him in all its
newness, poor Roger put out his hand to the first support he could find,
and felt disposed to swoon. The support which he found to lean on was
the wooden rail, round a rather nasty duck-pond which lay between two
cottages, skirting the garden hedge of one of them. Perhaps it was the
odour of this very undelightful feature in the scene that made him feel
like fainting, rather than the sight of the church; but he did not think
so in the horror of the moment. He who had hoped to see the distant
landscape all enhanced and glorified, by looking at it from among the
ancestral elms or solemn yew-trees about a venerable village spire, and
old grey, mossy Saxon walls--or beside the lovely tracery of some
decorated window with perhaps broken pieces of old glass glimmering out
like emeralds and rubies! The church, I have already said, was painfully
new; it was in the most perfect good order; the stones might have been
scrubbed with scrubbing-brushes that very morning; and, worse than all,
it was good Gothic, quite correct and unobjectionable. The poor young
don's head drooped upon his breast, his foot slipped on the edge of the
duck-pond. Never was a more delicate distress; and yet but for the
despairing grasp he gave to the paling, the result might have been
grotesque enough.
"Be you poorly, sir?" said old Mrs. Joel, who was standing, as she
generally was, at her cottage door.
"No, no, I thank you," said the new rector faintly; "I suppose it is the
sun."
"Come in a bit and rest, bless you," said Mrs. Joel; "you do look
overcome. It is a bit strong is that water of hot days. Many a one comes
to look at our cheuch. There's a power of old cheuches about, and ours
is the only one I know of as is new, sir, and sweet and clean--though I
says it as shouldn't," said the old woman, smoothing her apron and
curtsying with a conscious smile.
"You are the sexton's wife? you have the charge of it?" said Mr.
Mildmay.
"Thank my stars! I ain't no man's wife," said Mrs. Joel. "I be old John
Joel's widow--and a queer one he was; and the curate he say as I was to
keep the place, though there's a deal of jealousy about. I never see in
all my born days a jealouser place than Brentburn."
"Who is the curate?" asked Mr. Mildmay.
"Bless your soul, sir, he'll be as pleased as Punch to see you. You go
up bold to the big door and ask for Mr. St. John; he would always have
the hartis-gentlemen and that sort in, to take a cup of tea with him.
The Missis didn't hold with it in her time. She had a deal of pride,
though you wouldn't have thought it at first. But since she's dead and
gone, Mr. St. John he do have his way; and two pretty young ladies just
come from school," said Mrs. Joel with a smirk. She was herself very
curious about the stranger, who was evidently not a "hartis-gentleman."
"Maybe you was looking for lodgings, like?" she said, after a pause.
"No, no," said Mildmay, with unnecessary explanatoriness; "I was only
struck by the church, in passing, and wished to know who was the
clergyman----"
"Between ourselves, sir," said Mrs. Joel, approaching closer than was
pleasant, for her dinner had been highly seasoned, "I don't know as Mr.
St. John is what you call the clergyman. He ain't but the curate, and I
do hear as there is a real right clergyman a-coming. But you won't name
it, not as coming from me? for I can't say but he's always been a good
friend."
"Oh no, I shall not name it. Good morning," cried Mildmay hurriedly. A
new church, a horrible duck-pond, an old woman who smelt of onions. He
hurried along, scarcely aware in his haste until he arrived in front of
it that the house beyond the church was the rectory, his future home.