The windows were all wide open, and a hot breeze of July, strong enough
almost to be called a wind, and laden with the scents of summer and the
hum of bees, poured boisterously into the room, stirring the papers on
the table and ruffling the grayish wiry hair of the writer. But this
invasion of the wind was clearly a thing often experienced, and, though
apparently welcomed, suitably guarded against, for the copious papers
that fluttered and rustled so busily to its touch were made secure from
disarrangement by stones and various small fragments that were placed on
top of their orderly heaps in order to prevent their taking flight.
Thus, at the right hand of the writer, on a little shelf of these
flutterers bound together by an elastic band and neatly docketed “Parish
Accounts,” there stood a small piece of basaltic rock, with a paper
label gummed to it, lettered in minute old English type, “Ye Sea of
Galilee, 1902.” “Ye Dead Sea, 1902,” a softer piece of pumice-stone,
prevented “Household Accounts (Stables)” from sowing themselves over the
room; while a larger slab of white marble--lay-brother, so to speak, to
the first two, and labelled “Acropolis, 1902” in Greek characters--kept
the very small packet of “Letters unanswered” in place; and a fragment,
with its ticket “St. Peter’s, Rome,” not stating, however, from what
part of the church it had been pilfered, kept Barr’s last list of “Seeds
for the Flower Garden” from going there. Bits of Jerusalem and Nazareth
were similarly useful.
The room was large, square, and commodious; lived in, as was evident
from a first glance, by some one who knew what he wanted in his study,
and put all things in their places; while a glance at his rather keen
and severe face might suggest that he had a slight tendency to put
people in their places also. There was nothing fortuitous or haphazard
about his arrangements; one felt instinctively that the owner kept about
him only such things as were in constant use, as, for instance, Barr’s
catalogue of seeds or that formed part of the constant background of his
mind, under which head we may class a terra-cotta reproduction of
Michael Angelo’s Moses, that stood on the top of a revolving bookcase in
the window, and a framed map of the Roman Forum (1904), with the latest
excavations outlined in red. Bookshelves took up the bulk of the
wall-space, which was otherwise decorated with prints of a Biblical
character. The floor was covered with red carpet, cut up by black lines
into lozenge-shaped squares, in the centre of each of which was a
fleur-de-lis, and it, like the prints and the weights that kept papers
in their places, had a serious and slightly ecclesiastical suggestion
about it. But just as nobody in this world is entirely cut out of one
piece, but is, to some extent, at any rate, of the nature of patchwork,
so too this room reflected a few slightly lighter characteristics. A
couple of golf balls, for instance, stood on the chimney-piece just
below the Sistine Madonna, bearing the marks of strenuous if slightly
misdirected usage, and in the centre of it was a pipe-rack, with half a
dozen well-coloured companions of the mouth in it. Here again
ecclesiasticism a little reasserted itself, for the rack was of fumed
oak, carved in a debased Gothic manner to represent a church window. A
very bulky and much-wadded sofa, of the type inexplicably known as
“Chesterfield,” denoted that there were moments in which the flesh
might be tired if not weak, while even there the eye--unless
closed--would, wherever it looked, be braced by the contemplation of
mottoes printed in large and very legible type. They were all most
suitable, and a baby in arms could have seen their applicability. Thus
on the jamb of each of the bookcases was a printed scroll, “Much have I
travelled in the realms of gold,” while on the pipe-rack, humorously
enough, though perhaps slightly incongruously, since it crossed the sill
of the Gothic church window, was written the quaintly altered quotation,
“The earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye”; a calendar on the table
was somewhat more prosaically inscribed “_Pereunt et imputantur_,” and
also “Days and moments quickly flying”; and across the gold frame of the
Sistine Madonna--again making up in suitability what it lacked in
ingenuity--was printed “_Gloria in Excelsis_.” A slightly wider flight
of fancy, however, was exhibited on the varnished wooden rim of the
writing-table itself, for here, in three-inch letters, was carved, “My
tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”
At this moment the truth and literal applicability of the text was not
quite being fulfilled. Leaving his tongue out of the question, the
writer was ready and his pen was ready, but the pen was poised, and the
writer was not writing. He had, in fact, got to the last paragraph of
the address he was going to give at the Mannington Literary and
Scientific Club, or, as Canon Alington playfully called it, “The
Literific,” on Tuesday evening next, on the very suggestive and
interesting subject “The True Test of Literary and Artistic
Immortality.” And the last paragraph he always held was the most
important of all, for it was like the last well-directed hammer-blow
that drives a nail-head flush with the board into which it has been
tapped. In fact, several minutes before he had written on his
blotting-paper in dotted lines, “_C’est le dernier pas qui coûte_,” and
had determined to have it put more permanently on to the inside margin
of his blotting-book, so that it should always be before him when he was
engaged in literary composition. He wanted a sounding conclusion, a last
well-directed blow, and he sat there some five minutes without writing.
Then he gave a little shake to his stylographic pen, and wrote:
“We may, then, consider it proved--though such a conclusion does
not really need proof, since it is its own evidence--that the
immortal in art and letters is always and for everyone identical
with the religious. Insofar”--he wrote it thus--“as art, be it
poetry, or fiction even, or painting, or sculpture, arouses
religious feelings in the observer, that work is, as we have
shown--and, indeed, as it shows itself--immortal in proportion to
the depth and reality of the religious feeling it arouses.”
Canon Alington paused a moment, wondering whether, strictly speaking, a
thing could be proportionately immortal. But since the whole phrase
expressed what he meant, he let it stand.
“That is why we are right in agreeing that the _Paradise Lost_ is
indescribably nobler and finer than even the ‘mighty-mouthed music’
of Shakespeare; that is why we unhesitatingly can affirm that the
glorious Sir Galahad and St. Agnes of the late Poet Laureate, why
even the terrible ‘Rake’s Progress’ of Hogarth, since it rouses our
religious sense by the horror with which we contemplate the result
of sin, will continue to be fixed stars in the heaven of human
achievement and aspiration for æons and æons after the corrupt
sentimentality of Mr. Swinburne and the degraded ideals of Wagner’s
_Gotterdammerung_----”
Canon Alington paused for a moment again, for he was not quite certain
how this last very difficult word was spelled, being, though a scholar
of dead languages, not so perfectly acquainted with the living. But a
brief visit to the realms of gold, where he at once put his hand on a
small German dictionary, relieved him from any anxiety on this score;
there were two “m’s,” as he had thought. The fact that he had never seen
the “Ring” did not prevent him from making this trenchant pronouncement
on its ideals, for he had glanced not so long ago at a translation of
it, which his brother-in-law, Hugh Grainger, had left in the house,
which was more than enough to make him certain that he was not
overstating the case, since, most unfortunately, he had opened it at
that passage in the Valkyrie where Wotan, father of gods and men,
enunciates such remarkable views on the subject of marriage.
But before returning to his table he took a pipe down from the Gothic
window rack (it was by reason of its shape that he had chosen it from
among twenty others), filled it, and lit it. Then he continued:
“have been consigned to the limbo of mere technical skill and mere
jingle of metre and melody out of which they came.”
He inhaled a long breath of tobacco-smoke. Even if the sentence about
Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” was a little “broad” for the Mannington
“Literific,” this uncompromising condemnation of Wagner and Swinburne
would show that, though he might be broad, he was also firm. The
sentence was well-balanced too, the last hammer-taps were descending
straight, and before proceeding he drew once or twice more at his pipe,
for tobacco (he was afraid this was a weakness of the flesh, and meant
to conquer it some day) always seemed to him to clarify his thought and
aid his sense of literary composition. It was for this reason that,
though he had tried giving up the use of it during last Lent, he had
taken to it again after the third Sunday in that season, since he had
thought, and his wife agreed with him, that his sermons suffered. This
reason, though of the sort which the cynical tend to distrust, was
indeed perfectly honest and genuine, and had not he thought that his
sermons lost impressiveness, or had not Agnes shared his fear, he would
have scorned to pamper the flesh in this manner; but since they did, it
was a misdirected effort of asceticism to continue this particular form
of abstinence. So instead he gave up for the remaining three weeks of
Lent putting sugar in his tea, and in spite of the fact that he disliked
this intensely--though, it is true, not quite so much as the abandonment
of tobacco--he was quite firm about it, since nothing except a carnal
appetite suffered.
Then, with the added inspiration of tobacco, he finished his peroration:
“Moreover, the sense of beauty is purely a function of the
imagination, and it is therefore our duty so to train and vivify it
that it perceives even through roughness and want of skill in the
artist’s execution, nay, even through superficial plainness or
ugliness that quality of high and true beauty which alone is worth
our attention and reverent admiration, and is, as we have said,
identical with religious feeling. So, just as in a plain face we
ought to and can discern the beauty of the spirit within, so in
literature and in all art it is in the moral significance of book
or picture or statue that we must seek true beauty, which alone is
the immortal element. Then to us the face of our fellow-men will be
beautiful because we see there the love and faith of the spirit
that animates them; a book will be beautiful because it tells us of
Christian qualities and points Christian lessons, and with
reverence and awe we shall close the volume or turn away from the
picture, or even statue, that we have contemplated, feeling that
dimly but surely we have caught a glimpse, a foreshadowing of the
truly immortal, a ray from the dawn of the everlasting day.”
“Everlasting day,” said Canon Alington aloud, and repeated it again
rather more sonorously. That was the last hammer-tap, and he drew a line
across the paper, and dated it.
Canon Alington’s handwriting was neat to the point of exquisiteness, and
since he was already quite certain of the correctness of his premises
and the justice of his conclusions, it was but a short work to run
through the finished paper again with an eye for punctuation and a
detective’s keenness for any possible slips of grammar, for his horror
of closed windows was outrivalled by his dread of split infinitives. His
brown, lean face, with its thick crop of hair just beginning to turn
gray, that rose upright in wiry fashion from his forehead, pointed to
great physical vigour, while the fact that on this broiling day he had
sat down directly after lunch and worked for more than three hours
without rising from his chair, except at the end of his business to get
that “earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye,” was sufficient
indication that no mental weakness belied his appearance of strong
vitality. He had written this paper, which would take him a full hour to
read at the “Literific,” without notes of any kind, and without (as he
found when he read it over) any of what he habitually called vain
repetition, or (another critical term of his) “confused noises within.”
All he had meant to say he had said, and, a rarer merit, he had said
absolutely nothing that he did not mean to say. The whole paper gave as
accurate a reflection of that which was in his mind as the best
looking-glass.
He placed his sheets when he had finished their revision under a piece
of labelled Sinaitic rock (1902), and then granted himself a few
minutes’ leisure as he smoked the remainder of the pipe which had
assisted him toward the composition of that uncompromising last
paragraph. Though he had been busily engaged all day, first in parish
business and then in this “literific” effort, he was not at all tired,
and indeed the rest of the hours till bedtime were not without further
duties. He had at present had no exercise all day, though he considered
exercise to be as distinct a duty as any other, since the body reacts on
the mind, and he purposed before dinner to do a little late seeding in
the garden, and finish up very likely with half an hour with the heavy
roller on the lawn. Then, too, he had long made it strictly incumbent
upon himself to do an hour’s reading every day; not of the kind that was
necessarily congenial to him, but reading which he felt it his duty to
do in order to keep abreast of the times. Had he been a selfish,
pleasure-loving person, he would certainly from preference have devoted
this hour to some well-thumbed favourite, such as “Paradise Lost,” or
Miss Corelli’s wonderful “Romance of Two Worlds.” But to be abreast with
the times he always made a point of keeping on hand some novel dealing
with affairs strictly of the present and its fashionable foibles and
frailties. He learned from this how frivolous and unearnest London
society was becoming, and could thus warn Mannington both by example and
precept against the insidious infection. Mannington, indeed, especially
in the summer months, he was afraid, was not altogether outside the
danger-zone, and perhaps spent more time over garden-parties,
strawberries, and scandal than was right. Not that Canon Alington was
sour or Puritanical, or at all underrated the value of timely social
gaieties; but to the unwary these things might tend to become an end in
themselves, or, more dangerous yet, degenerate into that continuous and
expensive round of pure pleasure, week in and week out, that seemed to
characterise the season in London. But the clergy generally, he
thought, did not make the most of their opportunities of usefulness by
not keeping abreast of the times, and warning their flocks of the
dangers that lurked beneath too great an indulgence of innocent and,
indeed, helpful socialites, and also by too sad an aspect at
tea-parties, or total abstention from them, which gave the impression
that they thought such things wrong. Canon Alington never fell into
these mistakes, and his wife’s fortnightly little dinners, which were
distinguished for their plain yet excellent cooking, the soundness of
the wines (though he was himself a teetotaller), and the sober
strenuousness of the conversation, from which indeed scarcely any topic
was barred, were quite a feature in Mannington society. The range of his
guests, too, was extremely broad; one was liable to meet there “the
military,” for Mannington was a garrison town; the “Close,” for it was a
cathedral one; the “county” (for his wife was a Grainger and quite
distinctly of the county), and many of the inhabitants of the detached
houses with gardens that stretched their feelers into the country, such
as The Firs, The Cedars, Apsley House, The Engadine, Holyrood, Holland
House, and heaps of manors and granges. Nor was there any hint of
religious disability in these parties; dissenting town councillors were
entertained there, and Canon Alington never showed a shade of abated
cordiality in his welcome of them, despite the great gulf that divided
him from them. Indeed, there was a reputed atheist among his regular
guests, who never went to any sort of church at all, and though there
was wonder in the Canon’s flock when first it was known that Mr. Frawley
had dined there (this, by the way, was common knowledge long before
lunch-time next day), this broadness perhaps set Canon Alington on a
higher pinnacle than ever. The text “all things to all men” was felt to
be at last rightly understood. He also dined at the Frawleys’s, and had
been asked to say grace, and did so. So Mr. Frawley, in his groping,
purblind way, was broad, too.
To-night, too, the duties of the host would be his also, for his wife’s
brother, Hugh Grainger, was coming to stop with them for a week-end of
Friday till Tuesday, and though it cannot be said, without gross misuse
of language, that he approved of Hugh, he could not help being somewhat
stimulated by him, and occasionally in his quick, youthful way Hugh made
remarks that the more mature and cultivated mind of Canon Alington found
very suggestive. It was he, for instance, who had said that the “Rake’s
Progress” was unsuitable to put up in a drawing-room because it was so
intensely and violently moral; you might as well have gramophones
shouting the Ten Commandments all day on a side-table; and though this
remark was, of course, exaggerated and implied a certain flippancy that
the Canon did not find at all to his taste, this had not prevented him
from using the germ of truth which it contained in his recently-written
paper for the “Literific.” Hugh also, in point of fact, had been the
author of the little conceit about the earliest pipe, though it is only
just to him to say that he had no idea this was to be or had been
solemnly inscribed on the sill of the Gothic window of a pipe-rack. Yet
Canon Alington had been more than half author of it, for he had quoted
the original line of Tennyson to Hugh, who had merely said:
“Birdseye! Put it on your pipe-rack.”
Indeed, Hugh had not known where the original quotation came from, for
with all his superficial quickness he seemed to his brother-in-law to
have very little real knowledge, and the Canon often told him that what
he needed was “deepening.”
His meditation over this half-pipe of tobacco lasted but a few minutes,
for it was alien to his native activity of mind to indulge in vague
reflections of any kind, and soon he took up the morning paper of the
day, which, so busy had he been, he had not yet had time to look at.
Outside he heard the crunch of the gravel of what is called the
“carriage-sweep,” but it was probably not Hugh, who usually arrived only
just before dinner-time; and if it was a caller, his wife was out, and
he himself was never disturbed in his study for any chance visitor.
Indeed, on the outside door of it he had playfully put up the motto,
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” and the explanation of it often
formed a pleasant little topic at his dinner-parties, when he and his
men-guests crossed the hall to join the rest of the company in the
drawing-room.
So he turned over the pages of his paper, secure from interruption. In
the general way, there was not much to detain him, but in “London Day by
Day” a short paragraph concerning the huge success of this new play,
“Gambits,” arrested him, and he read it with some distress, remembering
the original criticism of the drama that had appeared in the same paper,
which had shown him so clearly that this play was typical of all those
tendencies of the day which seemed to him so dangerous. For--such was
the outline of the plot--a girl had been married young, far too young,
in fact, to a man much older than herself, who, as Canon Alington easily
saw, was a person of extreme feebleness and indecision of mind.
Subsequently she fell in love with a young cousin of her husband who
lived with them, and though there was no suggestion of infidelity on her
part, yet it was clear that the author’s intention (one Andrew Robb,
from the solid sound of which something better might have been expected)
was that pity and sympathy should be extended to them both. It was only
by degrees that the indecisive husband saw and realised this miserable
state of affairs, and, after wretched vacillations, committed suicide.
That, to put it baldly (and Canon Alington always put baldly affairs
with which he felt no sympathy), was the skeleton of the play of which
the _Daily Telegraph_ had so warm and appreciative a critique. And now
it appeared that London was going mad over the play, and pined to know
who Andrew Robb was. But the Canon’s opinion of London had always been
low. The very fact, too, that the play itself was said to be beautifully
written, to be instinct with humanity and true pathos, made it all the
more dangerous. In no single point were any of the tests of literary and
artistic immortality, which he had laid down so convincingly in his
paper of this afternoon, satisfied. A husband committed suicide because
his wife had weakly allowed herself to fall in love with somebody else.
There could not possibly be any germ of immortality in this hodge-podge
of weakness and wickedness. Yet in the interval it looked as if it was
going to live long and lustily. And it was called human! Frail and
feeble as Canon Alington knew humanity, alas, to be, he did not think of
it so badly as that!
At this point, however, his musings, set up again by that paragraph,
were interrupted, for the carriage, the departing wheels of which had
just again crunched the gravel, contained not callers, but Hugh, who had
caught an earlier train. He crossed the grass to below the window of the
study, put his hand on to the sill, and vaulted on to it, upsetting a
small saucer of seeds which had been put there to soak before being
planted.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve upset something. How are
you, Dick?”
Dick, it must be confessed, had constantly to make little efforts of
self-control when Hugh was in the house. He made them quite willingly,
and was ashamed to think that they were efforts. He made one now.
“Ah, there you are, Hugh!” he said cordially. “How are you? What
burglarious entry! And what’s the damage?”
“I seem to have upset some little beans,” said Hugh. “I sat down on half
the saucer, so the rest tipped up.”
“Better than that you should tip up,” said his brother-in-law. “It was
only some of those new lupins I was going to sow. All gone on the lawn,
have they? It is of no consequence. Luckily I have some more, and I will
put them to soak and sow them to-morrow instead. ‘That shall be
to-morrow, not to-night.’ Rather neat, eh? Browning.”
Hugh gingerly but successfully accomplished the task of getting through
the window into the room. Somehow, if his brother-in-law had said, “You
clumsy brute, how beastly careless you are!” he would have felt less
blamed than being not blamed at all in this Christian manner.
“And how’s Agnes?” he said, shaking hands.
“Very well, and as busy as we all are down here. She said she would very
likely be late for tea, and told us not to wait.”
“I hope I haven’t interrupted you at--at anything,” said Hugh, unable
for the moment to remember the names of things that made the Canon so
busy.
“Not in the least. I had finished my paper, and perhaps you have saved
me from the fate of idle hands. Shall we go out and have tea in the
garden? It is cooler, I think, out of doors.”
“And there seems to be less of a gale out of doors than in your study,”
remarked Hugh. “But you always like living in a Temple of the Winds.”
The Canon smiled approvingly; anything suggestive of a classical
allusion always pleased him, though exactly how he would have reconciled
his love for the classics with the view he had so pointedly expressed
to-day that all art to be immortal must be religious would perhaps have
puzzled him. But he had arrived at an age and a dignity which put him
generally beyond the risk of being asked awkward questions. Hugh,
however, sometimes asked things which his brother-in-law felt sure he
would understand when he was older, and they occasionally had what the
Canon called “great arguments” together.
“Ha! Temple of the Winds!” he said. “Hall of Æolus! Æolian hall. I’ll
call the study Æolian Hall. Capital! I’m naming--or, rather, Agnes and I
are naming all the rooms. It gives a house so much more character.”
They strolled out into the hall.
“Agnes thought of an excellent name to put on the baize door of the
passage to the servants’ room,” he continued. “She suggested--in fact,
she invented--the word ‘Abigailia,’ the country of the maid-servants,
you see. Abigaildom was her first suggestion, but I proposed Abigailia
on the analogy of Philistia. The whole idea, though, was hers. Come
through the dining-room; we shall go out without being seen from the
front if anybody calls. And they will truthfully say that we are all
out.”
They passed accordingly through the dining-room, where the blinds were
down to keep out the afternoon sun, and the table-cloth already laid for
dinner glimmered whitely in the dusk. It was not, however, so dark that
Hugh could not read over the chimney-piece, in Roman characters, “They
sat down to eat and drink,” while over the door into the garden was the
appropriate conclusion, “And rose up to play.”
“And you have been in London all these last three months, have you not?”
he went on. “Busy, I suppose, or at any rate occupied? Agnes was very
neat on the subject the other day. She said, ‘In town they seem to make
a business of pleasure, whereas here I am sure we make a pleasure of
business.’ Like all true wit, too, it contains a profound truth.”
This true wit, however, did not inspire Hugh with any fresh thoughts on
the subject, and he changed the subject with some abruptness.
“Oh, yes, one is always occupied in London!” he said. “By the way, do
you know if Mrs. Allbutt is down here? You know her, don’t you? Which is
her house? I have not been down since she moved here.”
Dick Alington’s face grew slightly reserved.
“Yes, she has taken Friars Grange,” he said; “the house by the river.
She has, however, called it Chalkpits, which she tells me is its real
name on the old leases. A pity, I think, rather. Of course, I should be
the last to decry the spirit of antiquarian exactitude, but it is
possible to lose the sense of romance in what is after all mere
pedantry.”
“Oh, I think I feel with her!” said Hugh. “Every retired grocer lives in
a grange.”
But the slight reserve that had come over the Canon at the mention of
Mrs. Allbutt was not due to pedantry. The real reason appeared now.
“She was here, anyhow, last Sunday,” he said, “because she asked Agnes
and me to dine with her in the evening. We both thought it a very odd
thing to do. We declined, of course.”
“Why?” asked Hugh rather thoughtlessly. Then, so he flattered himself,
he remembered. “Oh, I see, evening church!” he said.
His brother-in-law again stiffened slightly, but replied with the most
scrupulous honesty.
“No, we should have had time to go after church,” he said, “had we
wished. Indeed, Agnes guessed that the dinner was at the unusually late
hour of half-past eight to enable us to do so. But it is against our
principles to dine out Sunday.”
Canon Alington, who seldom moved about his garden without a spud in his
hand, neatly extracted a dandelion from the short velvet of the lawn,
and relaxed a little.
“Of course, I do not say that it is morally wrong to dine out on
Sunday,” he said, “because that would be a narrow view of which, I
trust, I should not be guilty. It is, of course, also quite possible
that as Mrs. Allbutt has only been here so short a time she did not know
our views on the subject, for I am aware that many of the clergy do not
agree with me in my idea of the observance of Sunday. But let that pass.
I hope Mrs. Allbutt will be an acquisition to the parish.”
“She would be an acquisition to any parish,” said Hugh. “She is quite
entirely charming. During the last fortnight I have often met her at
Lady Rye’s.”
Canon Alington warmed to this.
“Ah, there is an admirable woman!” he said. “She has a truly serious
sense of the responsibility which wealth and position give. If Mrs.
Allbutt is like her, we are indeed fortunate. And certainly Agnes is
favourably impressed with her, and Agnes’s impressions are not often
erroneous. She has been very handsome in the way of subscriptions
already.”
“She is also very handsome in the way of features,” said Hugh, with a
touch of flippancy.
The planting of the lupin-seeds which Hugh had upset was to have been
part of what Canon Alington called the horticultural curriculum for the
evening, and since that was no longer possible, gardening operations
were deferred _in toto_ till the morrow, and the two walked over to the
adjoining golf links to play a short round before dinner. As he had
often done before, Canon Alington, having spun a coin to decide who
should drive first, asked Hugh if he would have “_capita aut caudæ_,”
and Hugh, having won, had the bright thought of replying “_Habeo
honorem_.” Dick, however, demurred to this as being an improper use of
the Latin word “_honor_,” which meant not “honour,” but “public office.”
Agnes Alington was older than Hugh by several years. She had married
young, at the age of eighteen, when a girl’s character, so to speak, is
in the state of an ingot of red-hot iron, fresh taken from the furnace,
and easily and glowingly to be fashioned into any shape that her
blacksmith desires. The blacksmith in this case being Canon Alington, it
was not difficult to forecast that in a very short space of time she
would be hammered into a shape on which the author had stamped his own
very distinct and efficient personality, and be, so to speak,
hall-marked with him. This formation of his wife’s mind, a task which
Dick had definitely set himself and earnestly carried out, was very soon
accomplished, with the result, as might have been expected, that Agnes
became extraordinarily like him. This too had happened, that as she
became more like him he began to admire her more and more for all those
qualities which under his tuition sprang up like rather stiff flowers in
her character. He had exactly the same qualities himself, but in his
busy and strenuous life he had no time to admire them in himself, nor
sufficient self-consciousness to think about them at all except in as
far as the deeds they dictated were his duty. But somehow when he saw
them so brilliant and vigorous in his wife, the ordinary human love,
under direction of which he had wooed and won her, became a very
steadfast and solid thing, founded (though the foundation had been added
afterward) on the granite of imperishable esteem and respect. In all
points, indeed, the welding bore the trace of the hammerer’s
characteristics, and in a quality so personal and essential, one would
have said, as that of humour Agnes now completely resembled her husband,
though at the time of her marriage she was quite capable, like her
brother, of telling fairy-tales to children out of her own head. But
to-day the light side of things was sufficiently represented in her life
if from time to time she could strike out some idea akin to that under
inspiration of which she had suggested “Abigaildom” for the baize door
of the passage leading to the maidservants’ rooms. She had become an
ideal helpmeet for him and she truly and without exaggeration expressed
what he was to her in a pet name for him, which was Galahad, again often
abbreviated into the _nom de foyer_ of Laddie. Rarely, indeed does it
happen that two people are so thoroughly and essentially suited to each
other as these were, and in all the difficulties and perplexities no
less than in all the happiness and joys of their excellent and admirable
lives they were truly one. And the seed of this thoroughly happy
marriage was set in their two children, who had neither of them ever
given their parents a single moment of anxiety, except as regards their
eyesight, which necessitated their both wearing spectacles. These were a
boy and girl, now aged nine and eight respectively. Their names were
Ambrose and Perpetua, the calendar saints of the days on which they had
been born.
Perpetua on the occasion of Hugh’s visit happened to be away from home,
staying with an aunt by the seaside for a week, but when the two men
came back from their golf they found Ambrose walking by himself up and
down the gravel path of the kitchen garden, and he ran to meet them.
Hugh, though in general fond of children, was terrified of Ambrose
because of his stainless character and his consciousness of virtue.
“How are you, Uncle Hugh?” said Ambrose very properly. “Mamma told me
you were coming to-day, and I was so pleased!”
“Why, that’s awfully jolly of you,” said Hugh. “And where’s Perpetua?”
“She is staying with Aunt Susan. I made a calendar of the days when she
would be away, and I cross one off every evening. Don’t I, papa?”
“Yes, my son. Is your mother in?”
“Oh, yes, we came in together about half an hour ago! We went to see a
poor woman who is ill, and I took her some strawberries. They were my
own, from my own garden. I carried them in a cabbage-leaf.”
“Strawberries?” said Hugh. “How delicious! Let’s go and eat some. I
haven’t had any strawberries since--since lunch.”
Ambrose’s face gleamed with pleasure.
“That would be nice,” he said, “but those were my strawberry ration for
to-day. My ration is a baker’s dozen of strawberries, which is thirteen,
you know.”
Hugh’s face fell.
“I see,” he said, “I suppose I’ve had my ration, too. Besides, I expect
it’s time for me to dress for dinner.”
“Then I shall come in, too. I come down to dinner now, Uncle Hugh. At
least, I sit with papa and mamma while they have theirs, until it
strikes eight.”
The boy ran on in front of them, leaving his father and Hugh behind.
“The two children are devoted to each other,” said their father. “And
they vie with each other in kindly deeds. The boy gave all his
strawberries for the day to the sick woman. It was entirely his own
idea, too; he asked me if he might.”
“I should have told him not to jaw, but eat them himself,” said Hugh, in
a sudden access of internal revolt.
Canon Alington looked at him a moment in silence.
“I fancy it is time for us to dress,” he said tactfully.