THE BARRIERS FALL.
There were marks of teeth on his right boot, but no marks at all on
his body. Fright--or fright following on that evening’s frenzy--had
killed him.
He was buried three days later, and Mr. Raymond read the service.
No rain had fallen, and the blood of the three hounds still stained
the gravel dividing the grave from the porch, where the crowd had
shot them down.
For a while his death made small difference to the family at the
Parsonage. They had fought his enmity and proved it not formidable
for brave hearts. But they had scarcely realised their success, and
wondered why his death did not affect them more.
About this time Taffy began to carry out a scheme which he and his
father had often discussed, but hitherto had found no leisure for--
the setting up of wooden crosses on the graves of the drowned
sailormen. They had wished for slate, but good slate was expensive
and hard to come by, and Taffy had no skill in stone-cutting.
Since wood it must be, he resolved to put his best work into it.
The names, etc., should be engraved, not painted merely. Some of the
pew-fronts in the church had panels elaborately carved in flat and
shallow relief--fine Jacobean designs, all of them. He took careful
rubbings of their traceries, and set to work to copy them on the face
of his crosses.
One afternoon, some three weeks after the Squire’s funeral, he
happened to return to the house for a tracing which he had forgotten,
and found Honoria seated in the kitchen and talking with his father
and mother. She was dressed in black, of course, and either this or
the solemnity of her visit gave her quite a grown-up look. But, to
be sure, she was mistress of Tredinnis now, and a child no longer.
Taffy guessed the meaning of her visit at once. And no doubt this
act of formal reconciliation between Tredinnis House and the
Parsonage had cost her some nervousness. As Taffy entered his
parents stood up and seemed just as awkward as their visitor.
“Another time, perhaps,” he heard his father say. Honoria rose
almost at once, and would not stay to drink tea, though Humility
pressed her.
“I suppose,” said Taffy next day, looking up from his Virgil,
“I suppose Miss Honoria wants to make friends now and help on the
restoration?”
Mr. Raymond, who was on his knees fastening a loose hinge in a
pew-door, took a screw from between his lips.
“Yes, she proposed that.”
“It must be splendid for you, dad!”
“I don’t quite see,” answered Mr. Raymond, with his head well inside
the pew.
Taffy stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and took a turn up and
down the aisle.
“Why,” said he, coming to a halt, “it means that you have won.
It’s victory, dad, and _I_ call it glorious!” His lip trembled.
He wanted to put a hand on his father’s shoulder; but his abominable
shyness stood between.
“We won long ago, my boy.” And Mr. Raymond wheeled round on his
knees, pushed up his spectacles, and quoted the famous lines, very
solemnly and slowly:
“‘And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!’”
“I see,” Taffy nodded. “And--I say, that’s jolly. Who wrote it?”
“A man I used to see in the streets of Oxford and always turned to
stare after: a man with big ugly shaped feet and the face of a god--a
young tormented god. Those were days when young men’s thoughts
tormented them. Taffy,” he asked abruptly, “should you like to go to
Oxford?”
“Don’t, father!” The boy bit his lip to keep back the tears.
“Talk of something else--something cheerful. It has been a splendid
fight, just splendid! And now it’s over I’m almost sorry.”
“What is over?”
“Well, I suppose--now that Honoria wants to help--we can hire workmen
and have the whole job finished in a month, or two at farthest: and
you--”
Mr. Raymond stood up, and leaning against a bench-end, examined the
thread of the screw between his fingers.
“That is one way of looking at it, no doubt,” he said slowly; “and I
hope God will forgive me if I have put my own pride before His
service. But a man desires to leave some completed work behind him--
something to which people may point and say, ‘_he_ did it.’
There was my book, now: for years I thought that was to be my work.
But God thought otherwise and (to correct my pride, perhaps) chose
this task instead. To set a small forsaken country church in order
and make it worthy of His presence--that is not the mission I should
have chosen. But so be it: I have accepted it. Only, to let others
step in at the last and finish even this--I say He must forgive me,
but I cannot.”
“Your book--you can go back to it and finish it.”
“I have burnt it.”
“Dad!”
“I burned it. I had to. It was a temptation to me, and until I
lifted it from the grate and the flakes crumbled in my hands the
surrender was not complete.”
Taffy felt a sudden gush of pity. And as he pitied suddenly he
understood his father.
“It had to be complete?”
“Either the book or the surrender. My boy”--and in his voice there
echoed the aspiration and the despair of the true scholar, who abhors
imperfection and incompleteness in a world where nothing is either
perfect or complete; “it is different with you. I borrowed you, so
to say, for the time. Without you I must have failed; but this was
never your work. For myself, I have learnt my lessons; but, please
God, you shall be my Solomon and be granted a temple to build.”
Taffy had lost his shyness now. He laid a hand on his father’s
sleeve.
“We will go on then.”
“Yes, we will go on.”
“And Jacky? Where has he been? I haven’t seen him since the Squire
died.”
Mr. Raymond searched in his coat-pocket and handed over a crumpled
letter. It ran:--
“Dear friend,--this is to say that you will not see me no more.
The dear Lord tells me that I have made a cauch of it.
He don’t say how, all He says is go and do better somewheres
else.
“Seems to me a terrable thing to think _Religion_ can be bad for
any man. It have done me such powars of good. The late Moyle
esq he was like a dirty pan all the milk turned sour no matter
what. Dear friend I pored Praise into him and it come out
Prayer and all for him self. But the dear Lord says I was to
blame as much as Moyle esq so must do better next time but feel
terrable timid.
“My respects to Masr Taffy. Dear friend I done my best I come
like _Nicodemus_ by night. Seeming to me when Christians fall
out tis over what they pray for. When they _praise God_ forget
diffnses and I cant think where the quaraling comes in and so
no more at present from
“Yours respffly
“J. Pascoe.”
After supper that night, in the Parsonage kitchen Humility kept
rising from her chair, and laying her needlework aside to re-arrange
the pans and kettles on the hearth. This restlessness was so unusual
that Taffy, seated in the ingle with a book on his knee, had half
raised his head to twit her when he felt a hand laid softly on his
hair, and looked up into his mother’s eyes.
“Taffy, should you like to go to Oxford?”
“Don’t, mother!”
“But you can.” The tears in her eyes answered his at once.
She turned to his father. “Tell him!”
“Yes, my boy, you can go,” said Mr. Raymond; “that is, if you can win
a scholarship. Your mother and I have been talking it over.”
“But--” Taffy began, and could get no further.
“We have money enough--with care,” said Mr. Raymond.
But the boy’s eyes were on his mother. Her cheeks, usually so pale,
were flushed; but she turned her face away and walked slowly back to
her chair. “The lace-work,” he heard her say: “I have been saving--
from the beginning--”
“For this?” He followed and took her hand. With the other she
covered her eyes; but nodded.
“O mother--mother!” He knelt and let his brow drop on her lap.
She ceased to weep; her palms rested on his bowed head, but now and
then her body shook. And but for the ticking of the tall clock there
was silence in the room.
It was wonderful; and the wonder of it grew when they recovered
themselves and fell to discussing their plans. In spite of his
idolatry, Mr. Raymond could not help remembering certain slights
which he, a poor miller’s son, had undergone at Christ Church.
He had chosen Magdalen, which Taffy knew to be the most beautiful of
all the colleges; and the news that his name had been entered on the
college books for years past gave him a delicious shock. It was now
July. He would matriculate in the October term, and in January enter
for a demyship. But (the marvels followed so fast on each other’s
heels) there would be an examination held in ten days’ time--actually
in ten days’ time--a “certificate” examination, Mr. Raymond called
it--which would excuse the boy not only the ordinary Matriculation
test, but Responsions too. And, in short, Taffy was to pack his box
and go.
“But the subjects?”
“You have been reading them and the prescribed books for four months
past. And I have had sets of the old papers by me for a guide.
Your mathematics are shaky--but I think you should do well enough.”
It was now Humility’s turn, and the discussion plunged among shirts
and collars. Never had evening been so happy; and whether they
talked of mathematics or of collars, Taffy could not help observing
how from time to time his father’s and mother’s eyes would meet and
say, as plainly as words, “We have done rightly.” “Yes, we have done
rightly.”
And the wonder of it remained next morning, when he awoke to a
changed world and took down his books with a new purpose.
Already his box had been carried into old Mrs. Venning’s room, and
his mother and grandmother were busy, the one packing and repacking,
the other making a new and important suggestion every minute.
He was to go up alone, and to lodge in Trinity College, where an old
friend of Mr. Raymond’s, a resident fellow just then abroad and
spending his Long Vacation in the Tyrol, had placed his own room at
the boy’s service.
To see Oxford--to be lodging in college! He had to hug his mother in
the midst of her packing.
“You will be going by the Great Western,” she said. “You won’t be
seeing Honiton on your way.”
When the great morning came, Mr. Raymond travelled with him in the
van to Truro, to see him off. Humility went upstairs to her mother’s
room, and the two women prayed together--
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”