A FOLLOWER.
The church bells were ringing, the Sunday-school had at last been
reduced to order, arranged in line, and wriggled, sinuous, worm-like,
along the road and up the avenue to the church porch. Lady Lamerton,
brandishing her sunshade as a field-marshal’s baton, kept the children
in place, and directed the head of the procession.
But with what heart-burnings, what envies, what excited passions did
that train sweep on its way. Some of the children had got more comfits
than others, and despised those less favoured by luck, and others
comfitless envied the more successful. Polly Woodley had secured more
comfits than the rest, and had them screwed in the corner of her
pocket-handkerchief, and she thrust it exultantly under the eyes of
Fanny White, who had come off with one only.
Some sobbed because they had crumpled their gowns, one boy howled
because in stooping he had ruptured his nether garments, Joan Ball had
broken the feather in her hat, and revenged herself on her neighbour by
a stab of pin. One child strewed its tongue with comfits, and when Lady
Lamerton did not observe, exposed its tongue to the rest of the children
to excite their envy. Another was engaged in wiping out of its eyes the
soapy water that in the scuffle had been squirted into them.
Captain Tubb dropped away at the church gates to shake hands with, and
talk to, some of the villagers, the inn-keeper to the Lamerton Arms, the
churchwarden, the guardian of the poor, and the miller, men who
constituted the middle crumb of the parochial loaf.
Lady Lamerton likewise deserted her charges at the porch, and having
consigned them to the clerk, returned on her course, entered the drive,
and proceeded to meet his lordship, that they might make their solemn
entrance into church together. Arminell had disappeared.
“Where is the girl?” asked her ladyship when she took my lord’s arm.
“Haven’t seen her, my dear.”
“Really, Lamerton,” said my lady, “she frightens me. She is so impulsive
and self-willed. She flares up when opposed, and has no more taste for
Sunday-school than I have for oysters. I do my best to influence her for
good, but I might as well try to influence a cocoa-nut. By the way,
Lamerton, you really must build us a Sunday-school, the inconveniences
to which we are subjected are intolerable.”
“Have you seen Legassick, my dear?”
“I believe he is standing by the steps.”
“I must speak to him about the road, it has been stoned recently.
Monstrous! It should have been metalled in the winter, then the stones
would have worked in, now they will be loose all the summer to throw
down the horses.”
“And you will build us a Sunday-school?”
“I will see about it. Won’t the keeper’s lodge do? The woman does not
wash downstairs on a Sunday.”
“I wish you kept school there one Sabbath day. You would discover how
great are the discomforts. Now we are at the church gates and must
compose our minds.”
“Certainly, my dear. The lord-lieutenant is going to make Gammon
sheriff.”
“Why Gammon?”
“Because he can afford to pay for the honour. The old squirearchy can’t
bear the expense.”
“Hush, we are close to the church, and must withdraw our minds from the
world.”
“So I will, dear. Eggin’s pigs have been in the garden again.”
“There’ll be the exhortation to-day, Lamerton, and you must stand up for
it. Next Sunday is Sacrament Sunday.”
“To be sure. I’ll have a lower line of wire round the fences. Those pigs
go where a hare will run.”
“Have you brought your hymnal with you?”
Lord Lamerton fumbled in his pocket, and produced his yellow silk
kerchief and a book together.
“That,” said his wife, “is no good; it is the old edition.”
“It doesn’t matter. I will open the book, and no one will be the wiser.”
“But you will be thinking during the hymn of Eggin’s pigs and Gammon’s
sheriffalty.”
“I’ll do better next Sunday. The gardener tells me they have turned up
your single dahlias.”
“Hush! we are in the church. Arminell is not in the pew. Where can she
be?”
Arminell was not in church. She was, in fact, walking away from it, and
by the time her father had entered his pew and looked into his hat, had
put a distance of half a mile between herself and the sacred building. A
sudden fit of disgust at the routine of Sunday duties had come over her,
and she resolved to absent herself that morning from church, and pay a
visit to a deserted lime quarry, where she could spend an hour alone,
and her moral and religious sense, as she put it, could recover tone
after the ordeal of Sunday-school.
“What can induce my lady to take a class every Sunday?” questioned
Arminell in her thought. “It does no good to the children, and it
maddens the teachers. But, oh! what a woman mamma is! Providence must
have been hard up for ideas when it produced my lady. How tiresome!”
These last words were addressed to a bramble that had caught in her
skirt. She shook her gown impatiently and walked on. The bramble still
adhered and dragged.
“What a nuisance,” said Arminell, and she whisked her skirt round and
endeavoured to pick off the brier, but ineffectually.
“Let me assist you,” said a voice; and in a moment a young man leaped
the park wall, stepped on the end of the bramble, and said, “Now, if you
please, walk on, Miss Inglett.”
Arminell took a few steps and was free. She turned, and with a slight
bow said, “I thank you, Mr. Saltren.” Then, with a smile, “I wish I
could get rid of all tribulations as easily.”
“And find them whilst they cling as light. You are perhaps not aware
that ‘tribulation’ derives from the Latin _tribulus_, a bramble.”
“So well aware was I that I perpetrated the joke which you have spoiled
by threshing it. Why are you not at church, Mr. Saltren, listening for
the rector’s pronunciation of the Greek names of St. Paul’s
acquaintances, in the hopes of detecting a false quantity among them?”
“Because Giles has a cold, and I stay at my lady’s desire to read the
psalms and lessons to him.”
“I wonder whether schooling Giles is as intolerable as taking Sunday
class; if it be, you have my grateful sympathy.”
“Your sympathy, Miss Inglett, will relieve me of many a tribulus which
adheres to my robe.”
“Is Giles a stupid boy and troublesome pupil?”
“Not at all. My troubles are not connected with my little pupil.”
“Class-taking in that Sunday-school is a sort of mental garrotting,”
said Arminell. “I wonder whether a teacher always feels as if his brains
were being measured for a hat when he is giving instruction.”
“Only when there is non-receptivity in the minds of those he teaches, or
tries to teach. May I ask if you are not going to church, Miss Inglett?”
“I have done the civil by attending the Sunday-school, and the articles
disapprove of works of supererogation. I am going to worship under the
fresh green leaves, and to listen to the choir of the birds—blackbird,
thrush, and ouzel. I am too ruffled in temper to sit still in church and
listen to the same common-places in the same see-saw voice from the
pulpit. Do you know what it is to be restless, Mr. Saltren, and not know
what makes you ill at ease? To desire greatly something, and not know
what you long after?”
The young man was walking beside her, a little in the rear,
respectfully, not full abreast. He was a pale man with an oval face,
dark eyes and long dark lashes, and a slight downy moustache.
“I can in no way conceive that anything can be lacking to Miss Inglett,”
he said. “She has everything to make life happy, an ideally perfect lot,
absolutely deficient in every element that can jar with and disturb
tranquillity and happiness.”
“You judge only by exterior circumstances. You might say the same of the
bird in the egg—it fits it as a glove, it is walled round by a shell
against danger, it is warmed by the breast of the parent, why should it
be impatient of its coiled up, comatose condition? Simply because that
condition is coiled up and comatose. Why should the young sponge ever
detach itself from the rock on which it first developed by the side of
the great absorbent old sponge? It gets enough to eat, it is securely
attached by its foot to the rock; it is in the oceanic level that suits
its existence. Why should it let go all at once and float away, rise to
the surface and cling elsewhere? Because of the monotony of its life of
absorption and contraction, and of its sedentary habits. But,
there,—enough about myself; I did not intend to speak of myself. You
have brambles clinging to you. Show me them, that I may put my foot on
them and free you.”
“You know, Miss Inglett, who I am—the son of the captain of the
manganese mine, and that his wife is an old lady’s maid from the park.
You know that I was a clever boy, and that his lordship most generously
interested himself in me, and when it was thought I was consumptive,
sent me for a couple of winters to Mentone. You know that he provided
for my schooling, and sent me to the University, and then most kindly
took me into Orleigh as tutor to your half-brother Giles, till I can
resolve to enter the Church, when, no doubt, he will some day give me a
living. All that you know. Do not suppose I am insensible to his
lordship’s kindness, when I say that all this goodness shown me has sown
my soul full of brambles, and made me the most miserable of men.”
“But how so?” Miss Inglett looked at him with unfeigned surprise. “As
you said to me, so say I to you, and excuse the freedom. Mr. Saltren has
everything to make life happy, education, comfortable quarters, kind
friends, an assured future, an ideally perfect lot, absolutely deficient
in disturbing elements.”
“Now you judge by the outside. I admit to the full that Lord Lamerton
has done everything he could think of to do me good, but can one man
calculate what will suit another? Will a bog plant thrive in loam, or a
heath in clay?”
“You do not think that what has been done for you is well done?”
“I am not inclined for the Church, I have a positive distaste for the
ministry, and yet Lord Lamerton is bent on my being a parson. If I do
not become one, what am I to be? I cannot go back to the life whence I
have been taken; I cannot endure to be with those who hold their knives
by the middle when eating, and drink their tea out of their saucers, and
take their meals in their shirt sleeves. Remember I have been translated
from the society to which by birth I belong, to another as different
from it as is that of Brahmins from Esquimaux; I cannot accommodate
myself again to what was once my native element. Baron Munchausen, in
one of his voyages, landed on an island made of cream cheese, and only
discovered it by the fainting of a sailor who had a natural antipathy to
cream cheese. I have come ashore on an island the substance of which is
altogether different from the soil where I was born. I cannot say I have
an ineradicable distaste for it, but that at first I found a difficulty
in walking on it. The specific gravity of cream cheese is other than
that of clay. Now that I have acquired the light and trippant tread that
suits, if I return to my native land, my paces will be criticised, and
regarded as affected, and myself as supercilious, for not at once
plodding from my shoulders like a ploughboy in marl. How was it with
poor Persephone who spent half her time in the realm of darkness and
half in that of light? She carried to the world of light her groping
tentative walk, and was laughed at, and when in Hades, she trod boldly
as if in day and got bruises and bloody noses. Even now I am in a state
of oscillation between the two spheres, and am at home in neither,
miserable in both. When I am in the cream-cheese island I never feel
that I can walk with the buoyancy of one born on cream-cheese. I can
never quite overcome the sense of inhaling an atmosphere of cheese,
never quite find the buttermilk squeezed out of it taste like aniseed
water.”
Arminell could not refrain from a laugh. “Really, Mr. Saltren, you are
not complimentary to our island.”
“Call it the Isle of Rahat la Koum, Turkish Delight, or Guava
Jelly—anything luscious. One who has eaten salt pork and supped vinegar
cannot at once tutor his palate to everything saccharine to a syrup.”
“But what really troubles you in the Isle of Guava?”
“I am not a native but a stranger. Your tongue is by me acquired. There
are even tones and inflexions of voice in you I cannot attain because my
vocal organs got set in another world. A man like myself taken up and
carried into a different sphere by another hand is inevitably so
self-conscious that his self-consciousness is a perpetual torment to
him. According to the apocryphal tale, an angel caught Habakkuk by the
hair and carried him with a mess of pottage in his hands through the
air, and deposited him in Daniel’s den of lions. Your father has been my
angel, who has taken me up and transported me, and now I am in a den of
lordly beasts who stalk round me and wonder how I came among them, and
turn up their noses at the bowl I carry in my shaking hands.”
“And you want to escape from us lions?”
“Pardon me—I am equally ill at ease elsewhere, I have associated with
lions till I can only growl.”
“And lash yourself raw,” laughed Arminell; “you know a lion has a nail
at the end of his tail, wherewith he goads himself.”
“I can torture myself—that is true,” said Saltren, in a disquieted tone.
“My lord will give me a living and provide for me if I will enter the
Church, but that is precisely an atmosphere I do not relish—and what am
I to do? I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.”
“Mr. Saltren, you are not at ease in the lions’ den, but suppose you
were to crawl out and get into the fields?”
“I should lose my way, having been carried by the angel out of my own
country. You see the wretchedness of my position, I am uncomfortable
wherever I am. In my present situation I imagine slights. Anecdotes told
at table make me wince, jokes fret me. Conversation on certain subjects
halts because I am present. Yet I cannot revert to my native condition;
that would be deterioration, now I have acquired polish, and have
progressed.”
“I should not have supposed, Mr. Saltren, that you were so full of
trouble.”
“No—looking on a rose-pip, all smoothness, you do not reckon on its
being full of choke within. And now—Miss Inglett, you see at once an
instance of my lack of tact and knowledge. I am in doubt whether I have
done well to pour out my pottle of troubles in your ear, or whether I
have behaved like a booby.”
“I invited you to it.”
“Precisely, but in the language of the Isle of Guava, words do not mean
what they are supposed to mean in the Land of Bacon. I may have
transgressed those invisible bounds which you recognise by an instinct
of which I am deficient. There are societies which have laws and signs
of fellowship known only to the initiated. You belong to one, the great
Freemasonry of Aristocratic Culture. You all know one another in it,
how—is inconceivable to me, though I watch and puzzle to find the
symbol; and your laws, unwritten, I can only guess at, but you all know
them, suck them in with mother’s milk. I have been brought up among you,
but I have only an idea of your laws, and as for your shibboleth—it
escapes me altogether. And now—I do not know whether I have acted
rightly or wrongly in telling you how I am situated. I am in terror lest
in taking you at your word I may not have grossly offended you, and lest
you be now saying in your heart, What an unlicked cub this is! how
ignorant of tact, how lacking in good breeding! He should have passed
off my invitation with a joke about brambles. He bores me, he is
insufferable.”
“I assure you—Mr. Saltren——”
“Excuse my interrupting you. It may, or may not be so. I dare say I am
hypersensitive, over-suspicious.”
“And now, Mr. Saltren, I think Giles is waiting for his psalms and
lessons.”
“You mean—I have offended you.”
“Not at all. I am sorry for you, but I think you are—excuse the
word—morbidly sensitive.”
“You cannot understand me because you have never been in my land. Baron
Munchausen says that in the moon the aristocrats when they want to know
about the people send their heads among them, but their trunks and
hearts remain at home. The heads go everywhere and return with a report
of the wants, thoughts and doings of the common people. You are the
same. You send your heads to visit us, to enquire about us, to peep at
our ways, and search out our goings, but you do not understand us,
because you have not been heart and body down to finger-ends and toes
among us, and of us—you cannot enter into our necessities and prejudices
and gropings. But I see, I bore you. In the tongue of the Isle of Guava
you say to me, Giles wants his psalms and lessons. Which being
interpreted means, This man is a bramble sticking to my skirts,
following, impeding my movements, a drag, a nuisance. I must get rid of
him. I wish you a good morning, Miss Inglett; and holy thoughts under
the greenwood tree!”