STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Had any one told Basset, even that morning, that before night he would
seek the advice of the Riddsley curate, he would have met the
suggestion with unmeasured scorn. Probably he had not since his college
days spent an hour in intimate talk with a man so far from him in
fortune and position, and so unlike him in those things which bring men
together. Nor in the act of approaching Colet—under the impulse of a
few casual words and a sudden thought—was he able to understand or to
justify himself.
But when he rose to his feet after an hour spent beside the curate’s
dingy hearth—over the barber’s shop in Stream Street—he did not need to
justify the step. He had said little but he had heard much. Colet’s
tongue had been loosened by the sacrifice he had made, and inspired by
that love of his kind which takes refuge in the most unlikely shapes,
he had poured forth at length his beliefs and his aspirations. And
Basset, whose world had tottered since morning, for whom common things
had lost their poise and life its wonted aspect, began to think that he
had found in the other’s aims a new standpoint and the offer of a new
beginning.
The dip candles, which had been many times snuffed, were burning low
when the two rose. The curate, whose pale cheeks matched his bandaged
head, had a last word to say. “Of the need I am sure,” he repeated, as
Basset’s eye sought the cheap clock on the mantelpiece. “If I have not
proved that, the fault, sir, is mine. But the means—they are a question
for you; almost any man may see them more clearly than I do. By votes,
it may be, and so through the people working out their own betterment.
Or by social measures, as Lord Ashley thinks, through the classes that
are fitted by education to judge for all. Or by the wider spread, as I
hold, of self-sacrifice by all for all—to me, the ideal. But of one
thing I am convinced; that this tax upon the commonest food, which
takes so much more in proportion from the poor than from the rich, is
wrong. Certainly wrong, Mr. Basset,—unless the gain and the loss can be
equally spread. That’s another matter.”
“I will not say any more now,” Basset answered cautiously, “than that I
am inclined to your view. But for yourself, are there not others who
will not pay so dearly for maintaining it?”
A redness spread over the curate’s long horse-face. “No, Mr. Basset,”
he rejoined, “if I left my duty to others I should pay still more
dearly. I am my own man. I will remain so.”
“But what will you do when you leave here?” Basset inquired, casting
his eyes round the shabby room. He did not see it as he had seen it on
his entrance. He discerned that, small as it was, and shabby as it was,
it might be a man’s home. “I fear that there are few incumbents who
hold your views.”
“There are absentees,” Colet replied with a smile, “who are not so
particular; and in the north there are a few who think as I think. I
shall not starve.”
“I have an old house on the Derbyshire border twenty miles from here,”
Basset said. “A servant and his wife keep it, and during some months of
the year I live there. It is an out-of-the-way place, Mr. Colet, but it
is at your service—if you don’t get work?”
The curate seemed to shrink into himself. “I couldn’t trespass on you,”
he said.
“I hope you will,” Basset replied. “In the meantime, who was the man
you quoted a few minutes ago?”
“Francis Place. He is a good man though not as we”—he touched his
threadbare cloth—“count goodness. He is something of a Socialist,
something of a Chartist—he might frighten you, Mr. Basset. But he has
the love of the people in him.”
“I will see him.”
“He has been a tailor.”
That hit Basset fairly in the face. “Good heavens!” he said. “A
tailor?”
“Yes,” Colet replied, smiling. “But a very uncommon tailor. Let me tell
you why I quoted him. Because, though he is not a Christian, he has
ideals. He aims higher than he can shoot, while the aims of the
Manchester League, though I agree with them upon the corn-tax, seem to
me to be bounded by the material and warped by their own interests.”
Basset nodded. “You have thought a good deal on these things,” he said.
“I live among the poor. I have them always before me.”
“And I have thought so little that I need time. You must think no worse
of me if I wait a while. And now, good-night.”
But the other did not take the hand held out to him. He was staring at
the candle. “I am not clear that I have been quite frank with you,” he
said awkwardly. “You have offered me the shelter of your house though I
am a stranger, Mr. Basset, and though you must suspect that to harbor
me may expose you to remark. Well, I may be tempted to avail myself of
your kindness. But I cannot do so unless you know more of my
circumstances.”
“I know all that is necessary.”
“You don’t know what I am going to tell you,” Colet persisted. “And I
think that you should. I am going to marry the daughter of your uncle’s
servant, Toft.”
“Good Lord!” cried Basset. This was a second and more serious blow. It
brought him down from the clouds.
“That shocks you, Mr. Basset,” the curate continued with dignity, “that
I should marry one in her position? Well, I am not called upon to
justify it. Why I think her worthy, and more than worthy to share my
life, is my business. I only trouble you with the matter because you
have made me an offer which you might not have made had you known
this.”
Basset did not deny the fact. He could not, indeed. His taste, his
prejudice, his traditions all had received a blow, all were up in arms;
and, for the moment, at any rate he repented of his visit. He felt that
in stepping out of the normal round he had made a mistake. He should
have foreseen, he should have known that he would meet with such
shocks. “You have certainly astonished me,” he said after a pause of
dismay. “I cannot think the match suitable, Mr. Colet. May I ask if my
uncle knows of this?”
“Miss Audley knows of it.”
“But—you cannot yourself think it suitable!”
“I have,” Colet replied dryly, “or rather I had seventy pounds a year.
What girl, born in comfort, gently bred, sheltered from childhood could
I ask to share that? How could I, with so little in the present and no
prospects, ask a gentlewoman to share my lot?”
Basset did not reply, but he was not convinced. A clergyman to marry a
servant, good and refined as Etruria was! It seemed to him to be
unseemly, to be altogether wrong.
Colet too was silent a moment. Then, “I am glad I have told you this,”
he said. “I shall not now trespass on you. On the other hand, I hope
that you may still do something—and with your name, you can do much—for
the good cause. If rumor goes for anything, many will in the next few
months examine the ground on which they stand. It will be much, if what
I have said has weight with you.”
He spoke with constraint, but he spoke like a man, and Basset owned his
equality while he resented it. He felt that he ought to renew his offer
of hospitality, but he could not—reserve and shyness had him again in
their grip. He muttered something about thinking it over, added a word
or two of thanks—which were cut short by the flickering out of the
candle—and a minute later he was in the dark deserted street, and
walking back to his inn—not over well content with himself, if the
truth be told.
Either he should not have gone, he felt, or he should have gone the
whole way, sunk his ideas of caste, and carried the thing through. What
was it to him if the man was going to marry a servant?
But that was a detail. The main point was that he should not have gone.
It had been a foolish impulse—he saw it now—which had taken him to the
barber’s shop; and one which he might have known that he would repent.
He ought to have foreseen that he could not place himself on Colet’s
level without coming into collision with him; that he could not draw
wisdom from him without paying toll.
An impossible person, he thought, a man of ideas quite unlike his own!
And yet the man had spoken well and ably, and spoken from experience.
He had told the things that he had seen as he passed from house to
house, hard, sad facts, the outcome of rising numbers and falling
wages, of over-production, of mouths foodless and unwanted. And all
made worse, as he maintained, by this tax on bread, that barely touched
the rich man’s income, yet took a heavy toll from the small wage.
As he recalled some of the things that he had heard, Basset felt his
interest revive. Colet had dealt with facts; he had attempted no
oratory, he had cast no glamour over them. But he had brought to bear
upon them the light of an ideal—the Christian ideal of unselfishness;
and his hearer, while he doubted, while he did not admit that the
solution was practical, owned its beauty.
For he too, as we know, had had his aspirations, though he had rarely
thought of turning them into action. Instead, he had hidden them behind
the commonplace; and in this he had matched the times, which were
commonplace. For the country lay in the trough of the wave. Neither the
fine fury of the generation which had adored the rights of man, nor the
splendid endurance which the great war had fostered, nor the lesser
ardors of the Reform era, which found its single panacea in votes,
touched or ennobled it. Great wealth and great poverty, jostling one
another, marked a material age, seeking remedies in material things,
despising arms, decrying enthusiasm; an age which felt, but hardly
bowed as yet, to the breath of the new spirit.
But Basset—perhaps because the present offered no great prospect to the
straitened squire—had had his glimpses of a life higher and finer,
devoted to something above the passing whim and the day’s indulgence, a
life that should not be useless to those who came after him. Was it
possible that he now heard the call? Could this be the crusade of which
he had idly dreamed? Had the trumpet sounded at the moment of his
utmost need?
If only it were so! During the evening he had kept his sorrow at bay as
well as he could, distracting his thoughts with passing objects. Now,
as the boots ushered him up the close-smelling stairs to the inn’s best
room, and he stood in his hat and coat, looking on the cold bare aspect
and the unfamiliar things—he owned himself desolate. The thought of
Mary, of his hopes and plans and of the end of these, returned upon him
in an irresistible flood. The waters which he had stemmed all day,
though all day they had lapped his lips, overwhelmed him with their
bitterness. Mary! He had loved her and she—he knew what she thought of
him.
He could not take up the old life. She had made an end of that, the
rather as from this time onward the Gatehouse would be closed to him by
her presence. And the old house near Wootton where he had been wont to
pass part of his time? That hardly met his needs or his aspirations.
Unhappy as he was, he could not see himself sitting down in idleness,
to brood and to rust in a home so remote, so quiet, so lost among the
stony hills that the country said of it,
“Wootton under Weaver
Where God came never!”
No, he could hardly face that. Hitherto he had not been called upon to
say what he would do with his life. Now the question was put to him and
he had to answer it. He had to answer it. For many minutes he sat on
the bed staring before him. And from time to time he sighed.