FOXGLOVE MANOR
A Novel
By Robert W. Buchanan
In Three Volumes, Vol. I.
London
Chatto And Windos, Piccadilly
1884
PREFATORY NOTE.
The following attempt at a tragedy in fiction (a tragedy, however,
without a tragic ending) must not be construed into an attack on the
English priesthood generally. I have simply pictured, in the Rev.
Charles Santley, a type of man which exists, and of which I have had
personal experience. Fortunately, such men are uncommon; still more
fortunately, the clergymen of, the English Establishment are for
the most part sane and healthy men, too unimaginative for morbid
deviations.
ROBERT BUCHANAN.
FOXGLOVE MANOR.
CHAPTER I. ST. CUTHBERT’S.
|As the sweet, clear voices of the surpliced choristers rose in the
closing verse of the hymn, and the vicar, in his white robe and
violet hood, ascended the pulpit steps, old Gabriel Ware, sexton and
doorkeeper of St. Cuthbert’s, limped across the pavement and slipped
into the porch, as his custom was at sermon-time on Sunday afternoons.
He waited till the singing had ceased and the congregation had settled
in their pews; and while he listened to the vicar announcing his
text--“For in Him we live, and move, and have our being”--he fumbled
in the pockets beneath his black gown of office, and then limped
noiselessly out into the sunshine, where, after a glance round him, he
pulled out a short clay pipe, well seasoned, filled it with twist, and
began his usual after-dinner smoke.
It was a hot, shimmering July afternoon, and it was much pleasanter to
sit out of doors on a tombstone, listening to the vicars voice as it
came though the dark lancets like a sound of running water.
Half a mile or so away, nestled in trees, was the village of Omberley,
with its glimpses of white walls and tiled or slated roofs. Then there
were soft, hazy stretches of pasture, with idyllic groupings of cattle
and sheep and trees. The fields of wheat and barley, turnips and
potatoes, lay out idle and warm, growing and taking no care, and
apparently causing none. The sight and smell of the land filled
Gabriel with a stolid satisfaction at the order of nature and the
providential gift of tobacco.
There was but the faintest breeze stirring, and it wafted all manner
of sweet odours and lulling whispers about the graveyard. Everywhere
there was evidence of a fervent throbbing vitality and joyousness. The
soft green turf which spread all round the church to the limits of the
churchyard, here billowing over a nameless grave, here crusting with
moss the base of a tombstone or a marble cross or a pillared urn,
here edging round an oblong plot brilliant with flowers and hothouse
plants,--the very turf seemed stirred by glad impulses, and quivering
with a crush of hurrying insect life. Daisies and buttercups and
little blue and pink eyed flowers danced among the restless spears of
grass with a merry hardihood. Laburnums and sycamores stood drowsing
in the hot shining air, but they were not asleep, and were not silent,
A persistent undertone came from among their shadowy boughs, as if
the sap were buzzing through every leaf and stalk. Up their trunks,
toiling through the rugged ravines of the rough bark, travelling
along the branches, flitting from one cool leaf to another, myriads of
nameless winged and creeping things went to and fro, and added their
murmurs to the vast, vague resonance of life. A soft, ceaseless
whispering was diffused from the tall green spires of a row of poplars
which Went along the iron railing that separated the enclosure from
the high-road. Blue and yellow butterflies fluttered from one ‘flowery
grave to another; the big booming humble-bee went blundering among the
blossoms; a grasshopper was: singing shrilly in the bushes near the
railing; a laborious caravan of ants was crossing the stony wilderness
of the gravel path; a dragon-fly hawked to and fro beneath the
sycamores; small birds dropped twittering on cross or urn for an
instant, flashed away up into a tree, and then darted off into the
fields, as though too full of excitement and gamesomeness to rest more
than a moment anywhere. Soft fleecy masses of luminous cloud slumbered
in the hot blue sky overhead, and only in its remote deeps did there
seem to be unimpassioned quietude and a sabbath stillness--only there
and in the church.
Notwithstanding the dazzling sunshine and the heat, the church was
cool and dim and fragrant. The black and red tiles of the pavement,
the brown massive; pillars and airy arches of sandstone, the oaken
pews, the spacious, sanctuary with, its wide, stone steps, affected
one with a. refreshing sense of coolness and comfort. The light
entered soft and subdued through richly stained glass, for the windows
looked, not on familiar breadths, of English landscape glowing
and ripening in the July sun, but seemed rather to open into the
strangely coloured world of nineteen centuries ago. The blessing of
the little children, the raising of Lazarus, the interview at the well
with the woman of Samaria, the minstrel rout about the house of the
ruler whose little maid lay not dead but sleeping, took the place
of the mundane scenes beheld through unhallowed windows. Even the
unpictured lancets were filled with leaded panes of crimson and blue
and gold. Then there was a faint, pleasant odour of incense about the
building, emphasizing the contrast between the mood of nature and the
mood of man. St. Cuthberts was floridly ritualistic, and the vicar
was one of those who felt that, in an age of spiritual disquiet
and unbelief, a man cannot cling with too many hands to the great
Revelation which appeared to be daily growing more elusive, and who
believed that if the soul may be lost, it may also be, in a measure,
saved through the senses. Feigned devotions and the absence of any
appeal to the physical nature of man had, he was convinced, drawn
innumerable souls into indifference on the one hand, and into
Catholicism on the other. If there was a resurrection of the body as
well as of the soul, surely the body ought not to be abandoned as a
thing accursed, from which no good can come. The vicar encountered no
difficulty in realize ing his views of the dignity of flesh and blood
at St. Cuthbert’s.
A thick, softly toned carpet lay on the broad stone steps which led
up to the communion table. Behind the communion table, and for some
distance to right and left, the sanctuary walls were hung with richly
coloured tapestry. The table itself--or the altar, as it was usually
called--was draped with violet silk, embroidered with amber crosses,
and upon it stood a large crucifix of brass, with vases of flowers,
and massive brazen candlesticks on either side. In the centre a
large brass gasalier was suspended from a large ring, containing
an enamelled cross, and beneath it hung an oil-lamp, which was kept
perpetually burning. Amid all the coolness and fragrance and mystical
flush of colour, that little leaf of flame floating in its glass cup
attracted the attention of the stranger most singularly. It piqued the
imagination, and added an indescribable feeling of hallowed sorcery to
the general effect, which was that of an influence too spiritual
not to excite reverence, but too sensuous to be considered sacred.
Stepping out of the churchyard, with its throbbing warmth and glad
undertones of commotion, into the cool, soft-lighted, artificially
coloured atmosphere of the church, one might have felt as if
dropped into the Middle Ages, but for the modern appearance of the
congregation.
St. Cuthbert’s was the fashionable place of worship at Omberley, and
its afternoon service was always well attended, though at a glance
one perceived, from the chromatic effect of the pews, that the large
majority of the congregation were of the more emotional sex. As the
vicar gave out his text, his taste for the bright and beautiful must
have been gratified by the flowers and feathers and dainty dresses,
and still more by the rows of young and pretty faces which were raised
towards the pulpit with such varied expression of interest, affection,
and admiration.
The Rev. Charles Santley had been Vicar of St. Cuthbert’s for little
less than a year. He was unmarried, just turned thirty, a little over
the middle height, and remarkably handsome. It was not to be wondered
at that, with such recommendations, the new vicar had at the very
outset fascinated the maids and matrons of his congregation. A bright
shapely face, with soft dark eyes, a complexion almost feminine in its
clear flush, a broad scholarly forehead, black hair slightly thinned
with study on the brow and at the temples, black moustache and short
curling black beard,--such was the face of the vicar as he stood
uncovered before you. His voice was musical and sympathetic; the
pressure of his hand invited confidence and trust; his soft dark eyes
not only looked into your heart, but conveyed the warmth and eagerness
of his own; you felt instinctively that here you might turn for help
which would never be found wanting, and seek advice that would never
lead you astray, appeal for sympathy with a certainty that you would
be understood, obey the prompting to transfer the burthen of spiritual
distress with a sure knowledge that your self-esteem would never be
wounded. Of course there were ladies of a critical and censorious
disposition among his flock, but even these were forced to acknowledge
the charm of his presence and the kindliness of his disposition. Among
the men he was less enthusiastically popular, as was natural enough;
but he was still greatly liked for his frankness and cordiality, and
his keen intellect and sterling common sense commanded their respect.
On one thing you might always reckon at St. Cuthbert’s--a thoughtful,
eloquent sermon, delivered in a voice full of exquisite modulations.
It happened often enough that the preacher forgot the capacities of
his hearers, and became dreamy and mystical; but, though you failed to
comprehend, you were conscious that the fault lay less with him than
with your own smaller spiritual nature. This, too, happened only in
certain passages, and never throughout an entire discourse. He began
on the grass, as the lark does, and gradually rose higher and higher
in the brightening heavens till your vision failed; but, if you waited
patiently, he descended again to earth, still singing.
On this Sunday afternoon, preaching from the text in the Acts, he
held his hearers spell-bound at the outset. Referring to the memorable
discourse in which the text occurs, he conjured up before them
Athens--glittering, garrulous, luxurious, profligate--the Athens St.
Paul had seen. The vivid picture was crowded with magnificent temples,
countless altars, innumerable shapes of mortal loveliness. Here
was the Agora, with its altar of the Twelve Gods, and its painted
cloisters, and its plane trees, beneath whose shade were disputing
groups of philosophers, in the garb of their various sects. Gods
and goddesses, in shining marble, in gold and ivory, caught the eye
wherever it fell. There were altars to Fame and Health and Energy, to
Modesty and Persuasion, to Pity and to Oblivion. On the ledges of the
precipitous Acropolis glittered the shrines of Bacchus and Æscülapius,
Venus, Earth, and Ceres. Over all towered the splendid statue of
Pallas, cast from the brazen spoils of Marathon, visible, as it
flashed in the sun, to the sailor doubling the distant promontory of
Sunium. Every divinity that it had entered into the imagination of man
to, conceive or the heart of man to yearn for, every deified attribute
of human nature, had here its shrine or its voluptuous image. “Ye men
of Athens, all things which I behold bear witness to your carefulness
in religion.” It was easier, said the Roman satirist, to find a god
than a man in Athens. And yet these men, with all their civilization,
with all their art and poetry and philosophy, had not found God, and,
notwithstanding all the statues and altars they had erected, were
aware that they had not found Him; for St. Paul, as he traversed
their resplendent city, and beheld their devotions, had found an altar
with this inscription, “_To the Unknown God._” Referring then to
those “certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics,” who
encountered the apostle, he briefly sketched the two great systems of
Greek speculation, and their influence on the morality of the age: the
pantheism of the Stoics, who recognized in the universe a rational,
organizing soul which produced all things and absorbed all
things,--who perceived in pleasure no good, in pain no evil,--who
judged virtue to be virtue and vice vice, according as they conformed
to reason; the materialism of the Epicureans, who perceived in
creation a fortuitous concourse of atoms, acknowledged no Godhead,
or, at best, an unknowable, irresponsible Godhead, throned in happy
indifference far beyond human imptration,--taught that the soul
perished as the body perished, and was dissipated like a streak of
morning cloud into the infinite azure of the inane. Following Paul as
the philosophers “took him and brought him unto Areopagus,” where from
immemorial time the judges, seated on benches hewn out of the rock,
had sat under the witnessing heavens, passing sentence on the greatest
criminals and deciding the most solemn questions of religion, he
glanced down once more at the city glittering with temples and
thronged with gods and goddesses, and bringing into broad contrast
the radiant Apollo and the voluptuous Aphrodite, with the scourged and
thorn-crowned figure on the cross, he read the message of the apostle
to the pagan world. On how many altars to-day might not the words “To
the Unknown God” be fittingly inscribed! “In Him we live, and move,
and have our being;” but how few of us have “felt after” and found
Him! In a strain of impassioned eloquence the preacher spoke of that
unseen sustaining presence, which brooded over and encompassed us; of
the yearning of the human heart for communion with the Creator; of the
cry of anguish which rose from the depths of our being, when our
eyes ached with straining into the night and saw nothing, when our
quivering hands were reached out into the infinite and clasped but
darkness; of the intense need we felt for a personal, tangible,
sympathetic Being, for an incarnation of the divinity; of those
ecstatic ascensions of the soul, in which man “felt after” and
actually touched God; and, as he spoke, his glowing words gradually
ceased to convey any definite meaning to the great majority of his
hearers: but one face, flushed with joyous intelligence, one young
beautiful face, with large, liquid blue eyes of worship, and with
eager tremulous lips, was all the while turned fixedly up to his.
Seated in a little curtained nook near the organ, a slim, fair girl
of two and twenty watched the preacher with almost breathless
earnestness. She was a bright little fragile-looking blossom of a
being, who seemed scarcely to have yet slipped out of her girlhood.
Her face was of that delicate white, tinged with a spot of pink, which
so often indicates a consumptive constitution, but in her case
this delicacy of complexion was owing rather to the fineness of the
material of which nature had moulded her. Light fine hair, in silky
confusion rather than curls, clustered about her forehead and temples.
Her little hands still clasped the music-book from which she had been
playing the accompaniment of the hymn--for Edith Dove was the organist
of St. Cuthbert’s--as though from the outset she had been too absorbed
to remember that she was holding it.
Occasionally the vicar turned towards the aisle in which she sat, and
his glance rested on her for a moment, and each time their eyes met
Edith’s heart beat more rapidly, and a deeper tinge of rose-colour
brightened her cheeks. But Mr. Santley showed no sign of kindred
emotion; he was wholly absorbed in the fervid thoughts which flowed
from his lips in such strains of exaltation. As his eyes wandered
over the congregation, however, he suddenly saw another face which was
turned attentively towards him, and which made him pause abruptly. He
stopped in the midst of a sentence. He felt the action of his heart
cease, and he knew that the blood was driven from his cheeks. He
looked dazedly down at his manuscript, but was unable to find the
place where his memory had failed him. For a few seconds there was
dead silence in the church, and the eyes of the congregation were
turned inquiringly towards the pulpit. Then, stammering and flushing,
he resumed almost at haphazard. But the enthusiasm of the preacher had
deserted him; his attention was distracted by a rush of recollections
and feelings which he could not banish; the words he had written
seemed to him foreign and purposeless, and it was only with a resolute
effort that he constrained himself to read the parallel he had drawn
between the pantheism and materialism of the days of St. Paul and
those of our own time. To the close of his sermon he never once
ventured to turn his eyes again in the direction of that face, but
kept them fixed resolutely upon his manuscript. Not till he had
descended the pulpit steps and was crossing the chancel, did he hazard
a glance across the church towards that disquieting apparition.
When the service was ended, and the choristers, headed by the
cross-bearer, had passed in procession down the nave to the vestry,
the vicar hastily disrobed and issued into the churchyard. As with a
strange fluttering hopefulness he had half anticipated, he was being
waited for. A lady was moving slowly about among the graves, pausing
now and again to read an inscription on a stone, but keeping a
constant observation on the church doors. As he came out of the porch,
she advanced to meet him, with a smile upon the face which had so
terribly disconcerted him. She was a most beautiful, starry-looking
creature--a tall, graceful, supple figure, with the exquisitely
moulded head of a Greek statue; a ripe rich complexion suffused with
a blush-rose tint; large lovely black eyes full of fire and softness;
long, curved, black eyelashes; a profusion of silky black hair parted
in little waves on a broad, bright forehead; and a pair of sweet, red
lips.
She held out a little white hand to him, and, as he took it, their
first words were uttered simultaneously.
“Ellen!”
“Mr. Santley!”
“I never dreamed,” said the vicar, excitedly, “I never dared to hope,
to see you again!”
“Oh, the world is very small,” she replied gaily, “and people keep
crossing each other at the most unexpected times and in the oddest
of places. But I am so glad to see you. Are you doing well? You can
scarcely imagine how curious it was when I recognized you to-day. Of
course I had heard your name as our vicar, but I had no idea it could
be _you_.”
“I am sure you are not more glad than I am,” rejoined the vicar. “Are
you staying at Omberley? Have you friends here?”
She regarded him for a moment with a mixed expression of surprise and
amusement.
“Do you not know that I am one of your parishioners now?” she asked,
with a pleasant laugh.
He looked wonderingly into her dark, joyous eyes, and felt a sudden
sense of chill and darkness within him, as a quick intelligence of who
and what she now was flashed into his mind.
“Are you at the Manor?” he asked, in a low, agitated voice.
“Yes,” she answered, without noticing his emotion. “We arrived only
yesterday, and have hardly had time yet to feel that we are at home;
but I could not resist the inclination to see what sort of a church,
and what sort of a vicar,” she added, with a glance of sly candour,
“we had at St. Cuthbert’s. I am really so glad I came. Of course you
will call and see us as soon and as often as you can, will you not?
Mr. Haldane will be delighted, I know.”
“You are very kind,” said the vicar, scarcely aware of what he was
saying.
“Indeed, I wish to be so,” she replied, smiling. “Of course you know
Mr. Haldane?”
“No; I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. He--you had gone
abroad before I came to Omberley.”
“Then you have not been here long?”
“Not quite a year yet.”
“And do you like the place--and the people?”
“Both, very much indeed!”
“You are not married yet, I think Mr. Haldane said?”
The vicar looked at her with a sadness that was almost reproachful as
he answered, “No; I have my sister living with me.”
“How pleasant! You _must_ bring Miss Santley with you when you come,
will you not?”
As she spoke she moved slowly towards the gateway opening on to the
road, where a little basket-carriage was awaiting her. He accompanied
her, and for a few seconds there was silence between them. Then they
shook hands again before she got into the carriage, and she repeated
her assurance--
“I am so glad to have met you, Mr. Santley!”
She took the reins, and, lightly flicking the ponies with the whip,
flashed upon him a farewell smile from those dark, spiritual eyes and
laughing lips.
The vicar turned back into the churchyard, and following a narrow
path that led across the sward through a wicket and a small beech
plantation, entered the Vicarage with a pale, troubled face.