A LONDON CURACY.
The district on which his vicar directed Felix to concentrate his
efforts was by no means a neglected one. It was rather suffering from
the multitude of laborers, who had chosen it as their part of the great
vineyard. Lying close to a wealthy and fashionable neighborhood, it had
long been a kind of pleasure-ground, or park for hunting sinners in, to
the charitable and religious inhabitants of the comfortable dwellings
standing within a stone's throw of the wretched streets. There was
interest and excitement to be found there for their own unoccupied time,
and a pleasant glow of approbation for their consciences. Every
denomination had a mission there; and the mission-halls stood thickly on
the ground. There were Bible-women, nurses, city missionaries, tract
distributors at work; mothers' meetings were held; classes of all sorts
were open; infirmaries and medical mission-rooms were established; and
coffee-rooms were to be found in nearly every street. Each body of
Christians acted as if there were no other workers in the field; each
was striving to hunt souls into its own special fold; and each
distributed its funds as if no money but theirs was being laid out for
the welfare of the poor district. Hence there were greater pauperism and
more complete poverty than in many a neglected quarter of the East End,
with all its untold misery. Spirit-vaults flourished; the low
lodging-houses were crowded to excess; rents rose rapidly; and the
narrow ill lighted streets swarmed with riff-raff after nightfall, when
the greater part of the wealthy district-visitors were spending their
evening hours in their comfortable homes, satisfied with their day's
work for the Lord.
But Felix began his work in the evenings, when the few decent working
men, who still continued to live in the Brickfields, had come home from
their day's toil, and the throng of professional beggars and thieves,
who found themselves in good quarters there, poured in from their day's
prowling. It was well for him that he had an athletic and muscular
frame, well-knitted together, and strengthened by exercise, for many a
time he had to force his way out of houses, where he found himself
surrounded by a crew of half-drunken and dangerous men. Presently they
got to know and respect him both for his strength and forbearance, which
he exercised with good temper and generosity. He could give a blow, as
well as take one, when it was necessary. At one time his absence from
church was compulsory, because he had received a black eye when
defending a querulous old crone from her drunken son; he was seen about
the wretched streets of the Brickfields with this too familiar
decoration, but he took care not to go home until it was lost.
With the more decent inhabitants of the district he was soon a great
favorite; but he was feared and abhorred by the others. Felix belonged
to the new school of philanthropic economy, which discerns, and protests
against thoughtless almsgiving; and above all, against doles to street
beggars. He would have made giving equally illegal with begging. But he
soon began to despair of effecting a reformation in this direction; for
even Phebe could not always refrain from finding a penny for some poor
little shivering urchin, dogging her steps on a winter's day.
"You do not stop to think how cruel you are," Felix would say
indignantly; "if it was not for women giving to them, these poor little
wretches would never be sent out, with their naked feet on the frozen
pavement, and scarcely rags enough to hide their bodies, blue with cold.
If you could only step inside the gin-shops as I do, you would see a
drunken sinner of a father or a mother drinking down the pence you drop
into the children's hands. Your thoughtless kindness is as cruel as
their vice."
But still, with all that fresh ardor and energy which is sneered at in
the familiar proverb, "A new broom sweeps clean," Felix swept away at
the misery, and the ignorance, and the vice of his degraded district. He
was not going to spare himself; it should be no sham fight with him. The
place was his first battlefield; and it had a strong attraction for him.
So through the pleasant months of spring, which for the last four years
had been spent at Oxford, and into the hot weeks of summer, Felix was
indefatigably at work, giving himself no rest and no recreation, besides
writing long and frequent letters to Mrs. Pascal, or rather to Alice.
For would not Alice always read those letters, every word of them? would
she not even often be the first to open them? it being the pleasant
custom of the Pascal household for most letters to be in common,
excepting such as were actually marked "private." And Mrs. Pascal's
answer might have been dictated by Alice herself, so exactly did they
express her mind. They did not as yet stand on the footing of betrothed
lovers; but neither of them doubted but that they soon would do so.
It was not without a sharp pang, however, that Felix learned that the
Pascals were going to Switzerland for the summer. He had an intense
longing to visit the land, of which his grandmother had so often spoken
to him, and where his father's grave lay. But quite apart from his duty
to the district placed under his charge, there was an obstacle in the
absolute interdiction Felicita laid upon the country where her husband
had met with his terrible death. It was impossible even to hint at going
to Switzerland whilst she was in her present state of health. She had
only partially recovered from the low, nervous fever which had attacked
her during the winter; and still those about her strove their utmost to
save her from all worry and anxiety.
The sultry, fervid days of August came; and if possible the narrow
thoroughfares of the Brickfields seemed more wretched than in the
winter. The pavements burned like an oven, and the thin walls of the
houses did not screen their inmates from the reeking heat. Not a breath
of fresh air seemed to wander through the low-lying streets, and a
sickly glare and heaviness brooded over them. No wonder there was fever
about. The fields were too far away to be reached in this tiring
weather; and when the men and women returned home from their day's work,
they sunk down in silent and languid groups on their door-steps, or on
the dirty flag-stones of the causeway. Even the professional beggars
suffered more than in the winter, for the tide of almsgiving is at its
lowest ebb during the summer, when the rich have many other and
pleasanter occupations.
Felix walked through his "parish," as he called it, with slow and weary
steps. Yet his holiday was come, and this was the last evening he would
work thus for the present. The Pascals were in Switzerland; he had had a
letter from Mrs. Pascal, with a few lines from Alice herself in a
postscript, telling him she and her father were about to start for
Engelberg to visit his father's grave for him. It was a loving and
gracious thing to do, just suited to Canon Pascal's kindly nature; and
Felix felt his whole being lifted up by it to a happier level. Phebe and
Hilda were gone to their usual summer haunt, Phebe's quaint little
cottage on the solitary mountain-moor; where he was going to join them
for a day or two, before they went to Mr. Clifford, in the old house at
Riversborough. His mother alone, of all the friends he had, was
remaining in London; and she had refused to leave until Phebe and Hilda
had first paid their yearly visits to the old places.
He reached his mission-room at last, through the close, unwholesome
atmosphere, and found it fairly filled, chiefly with working men, some
of whom had turned into it as being a trifle less hot and noisy than the
baking pavements without, crowded with quarrelsome children. It was,
moreover, the pay-night for a Providence club which Felix had
established for any, either men or women, who chose to contribute to it.
There was a short and simple lecture given first; and afterwards the
club-books were brought out, and a committee of working men received the
weekly subscriptions, and attended to the affairs of the little club.
The lecture was near its close, when a drunken man, in the quarrelsome
stage of intoxication, stumbled in through the open door. Felix knew him
by sight well; a confirmed drunkard, a mere miserable sot, who hung
about the spirit-vaults, and lived only for the drink he could pour down
his throat. There had been a vague instinctive dread and disgust for the
man, mingled with a deep interest he could not understand, in Felix's
mind. He paused for an instant, looking at the dirty rags, and bleared
eyes, and degraded face of the drunkard standing just in the doorway,
with the summer's light behind him.
"What's the parson's name?" he called in a thick, unsteady voice. "Is it
Sefton?"
"Hush! hush!" cried two or three voices in answer.
"I'll not hush! If it's Sefton, it were his father as made me what I am.
It were his father as stole every blessed penny of my earnings. It were
his father as drove me to drink, and ruined me, soul and body. Sefton!
I've a right to know the name of Sefton if any man on earth does. Curse
it!"
Felix had ceased speaking, and stood facing his little congregation,
listening as in a dream. The men caught the drunken accuser by the arms,
and were violently expelling him, but his rough voice rose above the
noise of the scuffle.
"Ay!" he shouted, "the parson won't hear the truth told. But take care
of your money, mates, or it'll go where mine went."
"Don't turn him out," called Felix; "it's a mistake, my men. Let him
alone. He never knew my father."
The drunkard turned round and confronted him, and the little assembly
was quiet again, with an intense quietness, waiting to hear what would
follow.
"Your father's name was Roland Sefton?" said the drunkard.
"Yes," answered Felix.
"And he was banker of the Old Bank at Riversborough?" he asked.
"Yes," said Felix.
"Then what I've got to say is this," went on the rough, thick voice of
the half-drunken man; "and the tale's true, mates. Roland Sefton, o'
Riversborough, cheated me out o' all my hard earnings--one hundred and
nineteen pounds--as I'd trusted him with, and drove me to drink. I were
a steady man till then, as steady as the best of ye; and he were a fine,
handsome, fair-spoken gentleman as ever walked; and we poor folks
trusted him as if he'd been God Almighty. There was a old deaf and dumb
man, called Marlowe, lost six hundred pound by him, and it broke his
heart; he never held his head up after, and he died. Me, it drove to
drink. That's the father o' the parson who stands here telling you about
Jesus Christ, and maybe trusted with your money, as I trusted mine with
him as cheated me. It's a true tale, mates, if God Almighty struck me
dead for it this moment."
There was such a tone of truth in the hoarse and passionate tones, which
grew steadier as the speaker gained assurance by the silence of the
audience, that there was not one there who did not believe the story.
Even Felix, listening with white face and flaming eyes, dared not cry
out that the accusation was a lie. Horrible as it was, he could not say
to himself that it was all untrue. There came flashing across his mind
confused reminiscences of the time when his father had disappeared from
out of his life. He remembered asking his mother how long he would be
away, and did he never write to her? and she had answered him that he
was too young to understand the truth about his father. Was it possible
that this was the truth?
In after years he never forgot that sultry evening, with the close,
noisome atmosphere of the hot mission-hall, and the confused buzzing of
many voices, which after a short silence began to hum in his ears. The
drunkard was still standing in the doorway, the very wreck and ruin of a
man; and every detail of his loathsome, degraded appearance was burnt in
on Felix's brain. He felt stupefied and bewildered--as if he had
received almost a death-blow. But in his inmost soul a cry went up to
heaven, "Lord, Thou also hast been a man!"
Then he saw that the cross lay before him in his path. "Whosoever will
come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow
me." It had seemed to Felix at times as if he had never been called upon
to bear any cross. But now it lay there close before him. He could not
take another step forward unless he lifted it up and laid it on his
shoulders, whatever its weight might be. The cross of shame--the bearing
of another's sin--his father's sin. His whole soul recoiled from it. Any
other cross but this he could have borne after Christ with willing feet
and rejoicing heart. But to know that his father was a criminal; and to
bear the shame of it openly!
Yet he could not stand there longer, fighting his battle, in the
presence of these curious eyes so keenly fastened upon him. The clock
over the door showed upon its dial only a minute or two gone; but to
Felix the time consumed in his brief foretaste of the cross seemed
years. He gathered together so much of his self-possession as could be
summoned at a moment's notice, and looked straight into the faces of his
audience.
"Friends," he said, "if this is true, it is as new to me as it is to
you. My father died when I was a boy of ten; and no one had a heart hard
enough to tell me then my father was a rogue. But if I find it is true,
I'll not rest day nor night till this man has his money again. What is
his name?"
"Nixey," called out three or four voices; "John Nixey."
Again Felix's heart sank, for he knew Simon Nixey, whose farm lay
nearest to Phebe's little homestead; and there was a familiar ring in
the name.
"Ay, ay!" stammered Nixey; "but old Clifford o' the Bank paid me the
money back all right; only I'd sworn a dreadful oath I'd never lay by
another farthin', and it soon came to an end. It were me as were lost as
well as the money."
"Then what do you come bothering here for," asked one of the men, "if
you've had your money back all right? Get out with you."
For a minute or two there was a scuffle, and then the drunkard was
hustled outside and the door shut behind him. For another half hour
Felix mechanically conducted the business of the club, as if he had been
in a dream; and then, bidding the members of the little committee good
night, he paced swiftly away from his district in the direction of his
home.