TAFFY RINGS THE CHURCH BELL.
They were in the church--Squire Moyle, Mr. Raymond, and Taffy close
behind. The two men were discussing the holes in the roof and other
dilapidations.
“One, two, three,” the Squire counted. “I’ll send a couple of men
with tarpaulin and rick-ropes. That’ll tide us over next Sunday,
unless it blows hard.”
They passed up three steps under the belfry arch. Here a big bell
rested on the flooring. Its rim was cracked, but not badly. A long
ladder reached up into the gloom.
“What’s the beam like?” the Squire called up to someone aloft.
“Sound as a bell,” answered a voice.
“I said so. We’ll have en hoisted by Sunday, I’ll send a waggon over
to Wheel Gooniver for a tackle and winch. Damme, up there!
Don’t keep sheddin’ such a muck o’ dust on your betters!”
“I can’t help no other, Squire!” said the voice overhead; “such a
cauch o’ pilm an’ twigs, an’ birds’ droppins’! If I sneeze I’m a
lost man.”
Taffy, staring up as well as he could for the falling rubbish, could
just spy a white smock above the beam, and a glint of daylight on the
toe-scutes of two dangling boots.
“I’ll dam soon make you help it. _Is_ the beam sound?”
“Ha’n’t I told ’ee so?” said the voice querulously.
“Then come down off the ladder, you son of a--”
“Gently, Squire!” put in Mr. Raymond.
The Squire groaned. “There I go again--an’ in the House of God
itself! Oh! ’tis a case with me! I’ve a heart o’ stone--a heart o’
stone.” He turned and brushed his rusty hat with his coat-cuff.
Suddenly he faced round again. “Here, Bill Udy,” he said to the old
labourer who had just come down the ladder, “catch hold of my hat an’
carry en fore to porch. I keep forgettin’ I’m in church, an’ then on
he goes.”
The building stood half a mile from the sea, surrounded by the
rolling towans and rabbit burrows, and a few lichen-spotted
tombstones slanting inland. Early in the seventeenth century a
London merchant had been shipwrecked on the coast below Nannizabuloe
and cast ashore, the one saved out of thirty. He asked to be shown a
church in which to give thanks for his preservation, and the people
led him to a ruin bedded in the sands. It had lain since the days of
Arundel’s Rebellion. The Londoner vowed to build a new church there
on the towans, where the songs of prayer and praise should mingle
with the voice of the waves which God had baffled for him.
The people warned him of the sand; but he would not listen to reason.
He built his church--a squat Perpendicular building of two aisles,
the wider divided into nave and chancel merely by a granite step in
the flooring; he saw it consecrated, and returned to his home and
died. And the church steadily decayed. He had mixed his mortar with
sea-sand. The stonework oozed brine, the plaster fell piece-meal;
the blown sand penetrated like water; the foundations sank a foot on
the south side, and the whole structure took a list to leeward.
The living passed into the hands of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter,
and from them, in 1730, to the Moyles. Mr. Raymond’s predecessor was
a kinsman of theirs by marriage, a pluralist, who lived and died at
the other end of the Duchy. He had sent curates from time to time;
the last of whom was dead, three years since, of solitude and drink.
But he never came himself, Squire Moyle having threatened to set the
dogs on him if ever he set foot in Nannizabuloe; for there had been
some dispute over a dowry. The result was that nobody went to
church, though a parson from the next parish held an occasional
service. The people were Wesleyan Methodists or Bryanites.
Each sect had its own chapel in the fishing village of Innis, on the
western side of the parish; and the Bryanites a second one, at the
cross-roads behind the downs, for the miners and warreners and
scattered farmfolk.
_Ding--ding--ding--ding--ding_.
It was Sunday morning, and Taffy was sounding the bell, by a thin
rope tied to its clapper. The heavy bell-rope would be ready next
week; but Humility must first contrive a woollen binding for it, to
prevent its chafing the ringer’s hands.
Out on the towans the rabbits heard the sound, and ran scampering.
Others, farther away, paused in their feeding, and listened with
cocked ears.
_Ding--ding--ding_.
Mr. Raymond stood in the belfry at the boy’s elbow. He wore his
surplice, and held his prayer-book, with a finger between the pages.
Glancing down toward the nave, he saw Humility sitting in the big
vicarage pew--no other soul in church.
He took the cord from Taffy, “Run to the door, and see if anyone is
coming.”
Taffy ran, and after a minute came back.
“There’s Squire Moyle coming along the path, and the little girl with
him, and some servants behind--five or six of them. Bill Udy’s one.”
“Nobody else?”
“I expect the people don’t hear the bell,” said Taffy. “They live
too far away.”
“God hears. Yes, and God sees the lamp is lit.”
“What lamp?” Taffy looked up at his father’s face, wondering.
“All towers carry a lamp of some kind. For what else are they
built?”
It was exactly the tone in which he had spoken that afternoon at
Tewkesbury about men being like towers. Both these sentences puzzled
the boy; and yet Taffy never felt so near to understanding him as he
had then, and did again now. He was shy of his father. He did not
know that his father was just as shy of him. He began to ring with
all his soul--ding--ding-ding, ding-ding.
The old Squire entered the church, paused, and blew his nose
violently, and taking Honoria by the hand, marched her up to the end
of the south aisle. The door of the great pew was shut upon them,
and they disappeared. Before Honoria vanished Taffy caught a glimpse
of a grey felt hat with pink ribbons.
The servants scattered and found seats in the body of the church.
He went on ringing, but no one else came. After a minute or two
Mr. Raymond signed to him to stop and go to his mother, which he did,
blushing at the noise of his shoes on the slate pavement.
Mr. Raymond followed, walked slowly past, and entered the
reading-desk.
“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath
committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save
his soul alive....”
Taffy looked towards the Squire’s pew. The bald top of the Squire’s
head was just visible above the ledge. He looked up at his mother,
but her eyes were fastened on her prayer-book. He felt--he could not
help it--that they were all gathered to save this old man’s soul, and
that everybody knew it and secretly thought it a hopeless case.
The notion dogged him all through the service, and for many Sundays
after. Always that bald head above the ledge, and his father and the
congregation trying to call down salvation on it. He wondered what
Honoria thought, boxed up with it and able to see its face.
Mr. Raymond mounted an upper pulpit to preach his sermon. He chose
his text from Saint Matthew, Chapter vii., verses 26 and 27:
“_And every one that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them
not, shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon
the sand_;
“_And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew,
and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of
it_.”
Taffy never followed his father’s sermons closely. He would listen
to a sentence or two, now and again, and then let his wits wander.
“You think this church is built upon the sands. The rain has come,
the winds have blown and beaten on it; the foundations have sunk and
it leans to leeward.... By the blessing of God we will shore it
up, and upon a foundation of rock. Upon what rock, you ask?...
Upon that rock which is the everlasting foundation of the Church
spiritual.... Hear what comfortable words our Lord spake to Peter.
... Our foundation must be faith, which is God’s continuing
Presence on earth, and which we shall recognise hereafter as God
Himself.... Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen.... In other words, it is the rock we
search for.... Draw near it, and you will know yourself in God’s
very shadow--the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.... As
with this building, so with you, O man, cowering from wrath, as these
walls are cowering....”
The benediction was pronounced, the pew-door opened, and the old man
marched down the aisle, looking neither to right nor to left, with
his jaw set like a closed gin. Honoria followed. She had not so
much as a glance for Taffy; but in passing she gazed frankly at
Humility, whom she had not seen before.
Humility was rather ostentatiously cheerful at dinner that day; a
sure sign that at heart she was disappointed. She had looked for a
bigger congregation. Mrs. Venning, who had been carried downstairs
for the meal, saw this and asked few questions. Both the women stole
glances at Mr. Raymond when they thought he was not observing them.
He at least pretended to observe nothing, but chatted away
cheerfully.
“Taffy,” he said, after dinner, “I want you to run up to Tredinnis
with a note from me. Maybe I will follow later, but I must go to the
village first.”