Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.
--EMERSON.
"Of course, Hester," said Mr. Gresley, leading the way to his study and
speaking in his lesson-for-the-day voice, "I don't pretend to
write"--("They always say that," thought Hester)--"I have not sufficient
leisure to devote to the subject to insure becoming a successful author.
And even if I had I am afraid I should not be willing to sell my soul to
obtain popularity, for that is what it comes to in these days. The
public must be pandered to. It must be amused. The public likes smooth
things, and the great truths--the only things I should care to write
about--are not smooth, far from it."
"No, indeed."
"This little paper on 'Dissent,' which I propose to publish in pamphlet
form after its appearance as a serial--it will run to two numbers in the
_Southminster Advertiser_--was merely thrown off in a few days when I
had influenza, and could not attend to my usual work."
"It must be very difficult to work in illness," said Hester, who had
evidently made a vow during her brief sojourn in the garden, and was now
obviously going through that process which the society of some of our
fellow-creatures makes as necessary as it is fatiguing--namely, that of
thinking beforehand what we are going to say.
Mr. Gresley liked Hester immensely when she had freshly ironed herself
flat under one of these resolutions. He was wont to say that no one was
pleasanter than Hester when she was reasonable, or made more suitable
remarks. He perceived with joy that she was reasonable now, and the
brother and sister sat down close together at the writing-table with the
printed sheets between them.
"I will read aloud," said Mr. Gresley, "and you can follow me, and stop
me if you think--er--the sense is not quite clear."
"I see."
The two long noses, the larger freckled one surmounted by a _pince-nez_,
the other slightly pink, as if it had absorbed the tint of the
blotting-paper over which it was so continually poised, both bent over
the sheets.
Through the thin wall which separated the school-room from the study
came the sound of Mary's scales. Mary was by nature a child of wrath, as
far as music was concerned, and Fräulein--anxious, musical Fräulein--was
strenuously endeavoring to impart to her pupil the rudiments of what was
her chief joy in life.
"'Modern Dissent,'" read aloud Mr. Gresley, "by Veritas."
"_Veritas_!" repeated Hester. Astonishment jerked the word out of her
before she was aware. She pulled herself hastily together.
"Certainly," said the author, looking at his sister through his glasses,
which made the pupils of his eyes look as large as the striped marbles
on which Mary and Regie spent their pennies. "Veritas," he continued,
"is a Latin word signifying Truth."
"So I fancied. But is not _Truth_ rather a large name to adopt as a _nom
de guerre_? Might it not seem rather--er--in a layman it would appear
arrogant."
"I am not a layman, and I do not pretend to write on subjects of which I
am ignorant," said Mr. Gresley, with dignity. "This is not a work of
fiction. I don't imagine this, or fancy that, or invent the other. I
merely place before the public, forcibly, and in a novel manner, a few
great truths."
Mary was doing her finger exercises. C, C, C, with the thumb; D, D, D,
with the first finger, Fräulein was repeating. "Won! two! free! Won!
two! free!" with a new intonation of cheerful patience at each
repetition.
"Ah!" said Hester. "A few great truths. Then the name must be 'Veritas.'
You would not reconsider it?"
"Certainly not," said Mr. Gresley, his eye challenging hers. "It is the
name I am known by as the author of 'Schism.'"
"I had momentarily forgotten 'Schism,'" said Hester, dropping her
glance.
"I went through a good deal of obloquy about 'Schism,'" said Mr. Gresley
with pride, "and I should not wonder if 'Modern Dissent' caused quite a
ferment in Middleshire. If it does, I am willing to bear a little spite
and ill-will. All history shows that truth is met at first by
opposition. Half the country clergy round here are asleep. Good men, but
lax. They want waking up. I said as much to the Bishop the other day,
and he agreed with me; for he said that if some of his younger clergy
could be waked up to a sense of their own arrogance and narrowness he
would hold a public thanksgiving in the cathedral. But he added that he
thought nothing short of the last trump would do it."
"I agree with him," said Hester, having first said the sentence to
herself, and having decided it was innocuous.
The climax of the music lesson had arrived. "The Blue Bells of
Scotland"--the sole _Clavier Stück_ which Mary's rigidly extended little
starfishes of hands could wrench out of the school-room piano--was at
its third bar.
"Well," said Mr. Gresley, refreshed by a cheering retrospect. "Now for
'Modern Dissent.'"
A strenuous hour ensued.
Hester was torn in different directions, at one moment tempted to allow
the most flagrant passages to pass unchallenged rather than attempt the
physical impossibility of interrupting the reader only to be drawn into
a dispute with him, at another burning to save her brother from the
consequences which wait on certain utterances.
Presently Mr. Gresley's eloquence, after various tortuous and unnatural
windings, swept in the direction of a pun, as a carriage after following
the artificial curves of a deceptive approach nears a villa. Hester had
seen the pun coming for half a page, as we see the villa through the
trees long before we are allowed to approach it, and she longed to save
her brother from what was in her eyes as much a degradation as a _tu
quoque_. But she remembered in time that the Gresleys considered she had
no sense of humor, and she decided to let it pass. Mr. Gresley enjoyed
it so much himself that he hardly noticed her fixed countenance.
Why does so deep a gulf separate those who have a sense of humor and
those who, having none, are compensated by the conviction that they
possess it more abundantly? The crevasse seems to extend far inland to
the very heights and water-sheds of character. Those who differ on humor
will differ on principles. The Gresleys and the Pratts belonged to that
large class of our fellow-creatures who, conscious of a genius for
adding to the hilarity of our sad planet, discover an irresistible
piquancy in putting a woman's hat on a man's head, and in that "verbal
romping" which playfully designates a whiskey-and-soda as a gargle, and
says "au reservoir" instead of "au revoir."
At last, however, Hester nervously put her hand over the next sheet, as
he read the final words of the last.
"Wait a moment," she said, hurriedly. "This last page, James. Might it
not be well to reconsider it? Is it politic to assume such great
ignorance on the part of Nonconformists? Many I know are better educated
than I am."
"My dear," said Mr. Gresley, "ignorance is at the root of any difference
of opinion on such a subject as this. I do not say wilful ignorance, but
the want of sound Church teaching. I must cut at the roots of this
ignorance."
"Dear James, it is thrice killing the slain. No one believes these
fallacies which you are exposing--the Nonconformists least of all. Those
I have talked with don't hold these absurd opinions that you put down
to them. You don't even touch their real position. You are elaborately
knocking down ninepins that have never stood up, because they have
nothing to stand on."
"I am not proposing to play a game of mental skittles," said the
clerical author. "It is enough for me, as I said before, to cut at the
roots of ignorance wherever I see it flourishing, not to pull off the
leaves one by one as you would have me do by dissecting their opinions.
This may not be novel, it may not even be amusing, but, nevertheless,
Hester, a clergyman's duty is to wage unceasing war against spiritual
ignorance. And what," read on Mr. Gresley, after a triumphant moment in
which Hester remained silent, "is the best means of coping against
ignorance, against darkness"--("It was a root a moment ago," thought
Hester)--"but by the infusion of light? The light shineth in darkness,
and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Half a page more and the
darkness was 'Modern Dissent.' Hester put her hand over her mouth and
kept it there.
The familiar drama of a clerical bull and a red rag was played out
before her eyes, and, metaphorically speaking, she followed the example
of the majority of laymen and crept up a tree to be out of the way.
When it was all over she came down trembling.
"Well! what do you think of it?" said Mr. Gresley, rising and pacing up
and down the room.
"You hit very hard," said Hester, after a moment's consideration. She
did not say, "You strike home."
"I have no opinion of being mealy-mouthed," said Mr. Gresley, who was
always perfectly satisfied with a vague statement. "If you have anything
worth saying, say it plainly. That is my motto. Don't hint this or that,
but take your stand upon a truth and strike out."
"Why not hold out our hands to our fellow-creatures instead of striking
at them?" said Hester, moving towards the door.
"I have no belief in holding out our hands to the enemies of Christ,"
Mr. Gresley began, who in the course of his pamphlet had thus gracefully
designated the great religious bodies who did not view Christianity
through the convex glasses of his own mental _pince-nez_. "In these days
we see too much of that. I leave that to the Broad Church, who want to
run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I, on the contrary--"
But Hester had vanished.
There was a dangerous glint in her gray eyes, as she ran up to her
little attic.
"According to him, our Lord must have been the first Nonconformist," she
said to herself. "If I had stayed a moment longer I should have said so.
For once I got out of the room in time."
Hester's attic was blisteringly hot. It was over the kitchen, and
through the open window came the penetrating aroma of roast mutton newly
wedded to boiled cabbage. Hester had learned during the last six months
all the variations of smells, evil, subtle, nauseous, and overpowering,
of which the preparation of food--and, still worse, the preparation of
chicken food--is capable. She seized her white hat and umbrella and fled
out of the house.
She moved quickly across a patch of sunlight, looking, with her large
white, pink-lined umbrella, like a travelling mushroom on a slender
stem, and only drew rein in the shady walk near the beehives, where the
old gardener, Abel, was planting something large in the way of "runners"
or "suckers," making a separate hole for each with his thumb.
Abel was a solid, pear-shaped man, who passed through life bent double
over the acre of Vicarage garden, to which he committed long lines of
seeds, which an attentive Providence brought up in due season as "curly
kebbidge" or "salary" or "sparrow-grass."
Abel had his back towards Hester, and only the corduroy half of him was
visible as he stooped over his work. Occasionally he could be induced to
straighten himself, and--holding himself strongly at the hinge with
earth-ingrained hands--to discourse on polities and religion, and to
opine that our policy in China was "neither my eye nor my elber." "The
little lady," as he called Hester, had a knack of drawing out Abel; but
to-day, as he did not see her, she slipped past him, and, crossing the
church-yard, sat down for a moment in the porch to regain her breath,
under the card of printed texts offered for the consideration of his
flock by their young pastor.
"How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God,"
was the culling from the Scriptures which headed the selection.[A]
Hester knew that card well, though she never by any chance looked at it.
She had offended her brother deeply by remonstrating, or, as he called
it, by "interfering in church matters," when he nailed it up. After a
few minutes she dropped over the low church-yard wall into the meadow
below, and flung herself down on the grass in the short shadow of a yew
near at hand. What little air there was to be had came to her across the
Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank and
whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred
times before.
[Footnote A: A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in
August, 1898, in the porch of a country church.]
Hester's irritable nerves relaxed. She stretched out her small, neatly
shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and
presently could afford to smile.
"Dear James," she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, "I wish we
were not both writers, or, as he calls it, 'dabblers with the pen.' One
dabbler in a vicarage is quite enough."
She took out her letters and read them. Only half of them had been
opened.
"I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings," she said, as she
settled herself comfortably.
Rachel's letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to
the end.
"And so she is leaving London--isn't this rather sudden?--and coming
down at once--to-day--no, yesterday, to Southminster, to the Palace. And
I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the
Bishop will come too. I should be glad if I were not so tired."
Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster. In
the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral pricking
up through the blue. Everything was very silent, so silent that she
could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike
twelve. A whole hour before luncheon!
The miller's old white horse, with a dip in his long back and a
corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the
sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor's.
A little bunch of red and white cows, knee-deep in the water, were
swishing off the flies with the wet tufts of their tails. Hester watched
their every movement. She was no longer afraid of cows. Presently, as if
with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of
the contemplative life by an exhibition of humor, and, scrambling out of
the water, proceeded to canter along the bank with stiff raised tails,
with an artificial noose sustained with difficulty just above the tuft.
"How like James and the Pratts!" Hester said to herself, watching the
grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be
very fatiguing to be so comic."
Hester had been up since five o'clock, utilizing the quiet hours before
the house was astir. She was tired out. A bumblebee was droning sleepily
near at hand. The stream talked and talked and talked about what he was
going to do when he was a river. "How tired the banks must be of
listening to him!" thought Hester, with closed eyes.
And the world melted slowly away in a delicious sense of well-being,
from which the next moment, as it seemed to her, she was suddenly
awakened by Mr. Gresley's voice near at hand.
"Hester! _Hester_! HESTER!"
"Here! here!" gasped Hester, with a start, upsetting her lapful of
letters as she scrambled hastily to her feet.
The young vicar drew near, and looked over the church-yard wall. A large
crumb upon his upper lip did not lessen the awful severity of his
countenance.
"We have nearly finished luncheon," he observed. "The servants could not
find you anywhere. I don't want to be always finding fault, Hester, but
I wish, for your own sake as well as ours, you would be more punctual at
meals."
Hester had never been late before, but she felt that this was not the
moment to remind her brother of that fact.
"I beg pardon," she said, humbly. "I fell asleep."
"You fell asleep!" said Mr. Gresley, who had been wrestling all the
morning with platitudes on "Thy will be done." "All I can say, Hester,
is that it is unfortunate you have no occupation. I cannot believe it is
for the good of any of us to lead so absolutely idle a life that we fall
asleep in the morning."
Hester made no reply.