THE RECTORY DRAWING-ROOM.
The call was upon his curate. It was years since he had entered the
rectory. The people who last occupied it, he had scarcely known, and
even during its preparation for Wingfold he had not gone near the place.
Yet of that house had been his dream as he stood in his mare's stall,
and it was with a strange feeling he now approached it. Friends
generally took the pleasanter way to the garden door, opening on the
churchyard, but Mr. Bevis went round by the lane to the more public
entrance.
All his years with his first wife had been spent in that house. She was
delicate when he married her, and soon grew sickly and suffering. One
after another her children died as babies. At last came one who lived,
and then the mother began to die. She was one of those lowly women who
apply the severity born of their creed to themselves, and spend only the
love born of the indwelling Spirit upon their neighbors. She was rather
melancholy, but hoped as much as she could, and when she could not hope
did not stand still, but walked on in the dark. I think when the sun
rises upon them, some people will be astonished to find how far they
have got in the dark.
Her husband, without verifying for himself one of the things it was his
business to teach others, was yet held in some sort of communion with
sacred things by his love for his suffering wife, and his admiration of
her goodness and gentleness. He had looked up to her, though several
years younger than himself, with something of the same reverence with
which he had regarded his mother, a women with an element of greatness
in her. It was not possible he should ever have adopted her views, or in
any active manner allied himself with the school whose doctrines she
accepted as the logical embodiment of the gospel, but there was in him
all the time a vague something that was not far from the kingdom of
heaven. Some of his wife's friends looked upon him as a wolf in the
sheepfold; he was no wolf, he was only a hireling. Any neighborhood
might have been the better for having such a man as he for the parson of
the parish--only, for one commissioned to be in the world as he was in
the world!--why he knew more about the will of God as to a horse's legs,
than as to the heart of a man. As he drew near the house, the older and
tenderer time came to meet him, and the spirit of his suffering,
ministering wife seemed to overshadow him. Two tears grew half-way into
his eyes:--they were a little bloodshot, but kind, true eyes. He was not
sorry he had married again, for he and his wife were at peace with each
other, but he had found that the same part of his mind would not serve
to think of the two: they belonged to different zones of his unexplored
world. For one thing, his present wife looked up to him with perfect
admiration, and he, knowing his own poverty, rather looked down upon her
in consequence, though in a loving, gentle, and gentlemanlike way.
He was shown into the same room, looking out on the churchyard, where in
the first months of his married life, he sat and heard his wife sing her
few songs, accompanying them on the little piano he had saved hard to
buy for her, until she made him love them. It had lasted only through
those few months; after her first baby died, she rarely sang. But all
the colors and forms of the room were different, and that made it easier
to check the lump rising in his throat. It was the faith of his curate
that had thus set his wife before him, although the two would hardly
have agreed in any confession narrower than the Apostles' creed.
When Wingfold entered the room, the rector rose, went halfway to meet
him, and shook hands with him heartily. They seated themselves, and a
short silence followed. But the rector knew it was his part to speak.
"I was in church this morning," he said, with a half-humorous glance
right into the clear gray eyes of his curate.
"So my wife tells me," returned Wingfold with a smile.
"You didn't know it then?" rejoined the rector, with now an almost
quizzical glance, in which hovered a little doubt. "I thought you were
preaching at me all the time."
"God forbid!" said the curate; "I was not aware of your presence. I did
not even know you were in the town yesterday."
"You must have had some one in your mind's eye. No man could speak as
you did this morning, who addressed mere abstract humanity."
"I will not say that individuals did not come up before me; how can a
man help it where he knows every body in his congregation more or less?
But I give you my word, sir, I never thought of you."
"Then you might have done so with the greatest propriety," returned the
rector. "My conscience sided with you all the time. You found me out.
I've got a bit of the muscle they call a heart left in me yet, though it
_has_ got rather leathery.--But what do they mean when they say you are
setting the parish by the ears?"
"I don't know, sir. I have heard of no quarreling. I have made some
enemies, but they are not very dangerous, and I hope not very bitter
ones; and I have made many more friends, I am sure."
"What they tell me is, that your congregation is divided--that they take
sides for and against you, which is a most undesirable thing, surely!"
"It is indeed; and yet it may be a thing that, for a time, can not be
helped. Was there ever a man with the cure of souls, concerning whom
there has not been more or less of such division? But, if you will have
patience with me, sir, I am bold to say, believing in the force and
final victory of the truth, there will be more unity by and by."
"I don't doubt it. But come now!--you are a thoroughly good
fellow--that, a blind horse could see in the dimmits--and I'm
accountable for the parish--couldn't you draw it a little milder, you
know? couldn't you make it just a little less peculiar--only the way of
putting it, I mean--so that it should look a little more like what they
have been used to? I'm only suggesting the thing, you know--dictating
nothing, on my soul, Mr. Wingfold. I am sure that, whatever you do, you
will act according to your own conscience, otherwise I should not
venture to say a word, lest I should lead you wrong."
"If you will allow me," said the curate, "I will tell you my whole
story; and then if you should wish it, I will resign my curacy, without
saying a word more than that my rector thinks it better. Neither in
private shall I make a single remark in a different spirit."
"Let me hear," said the rector.
"Then if you will please take this chair, that I may know that I am not
wearying you bodily at least."
The rector did as he was requested, laid his head back, crossed his
legs, and folded his hands over his worn waist-coat: he was not one of
the neat order of parsons; he had a not unwholesome disregard of his
outermost man, and did not know when he was shabby. Without an atom of
pomposity or air rectorial, he settled himself to listen.
Condensing as much as he could, Wingfold told him how through great
doubt, and dismal trouble of mind, he had come to hope in God, and to
see that there was no choice for a man but to give himself, heart, and
soul, and body, to the love, and will, and care of the Being who had
made him. He could no longer, he said, regard his profession as any
thing less than a call to use every means and energy at his command for
the rousing of men and women from that spiritual sleep and moral
carelessness in which he had himself been so lately sunk.
"I don't want to give up my curacy," he concluded. "Still less do I want
to leave Glaston, for there are here some whom I teach and some who
teach me. In all that has given ground for complaint, I have seemed to
myself to be but following the dictates of common sense; if you think me
wrong, I have no justification to offer. We both love God,----"
"How do you know that?" interrupted the rector. "I wish you could make
me sure of that."
"I do, I know I do," said the curate earnestly. "I can say no more."
"My dear fellow, I haven't the merest shadow of a doubt of it," returned
the rector, smiling. "What I wished was, that you could make me sure _I_
do."
"Pardon me, my dear sir, but, judging from sore experience, if I could I
would rather make you doubt it; the doubt, even if an utter mistake,
would in the end be so much more profitable than any present
conviction."
"You have your wish, then, Wingfold: I doubt it very much," replied the
rector. "I must go home and think about it all. You shall hear from me
in a day or two."
As he spoke Mr. Bevis rose, and stood for a moment like a man greatly
urged to stretch his arms and legs. An air of uneasiness pervaded his
whole appearance.
"Will you not stop and take tea with us?" said the curate. "My wife will
be disappointed if you do not. You have been good to her for twenty
years, she says."
"She makes an old man of me," returned the rector musingly. "I remember
her such a tiny thing in a white frock and curls. Tell her what we have
been talking about, and beg her to excuse me. I _must_ go home."
He took his hat from the table, shook hands with Wingfold, and walked
back to the inn. There he found his horses bedded, and the hostler away.
His coachman was gone too, nobody knew whither.
To sleep at the inn would have given pointed offense, but he would
rather have done so than go back to the Manor House to hear his curate
abused. With the help of the barmaid, he put the horses to the carriage
himself, and to the astonishment of Mrs. Ramshorn and his wife, drew up
at the door of the Manor House.
Expostulation on the part of the former was vain. The latter made none:
it was much the same to Mrs. Bevis where she was, so long as she was
with her husband. Indeed few things were more pleasant to her than
sitting in the carriage alone, contemplating the back of Mr. Bevis on
the box, and the motion of his elbows as he drove. Mrs. Ramshorn
received their adieux very stiffly, and never after mentioned the rector
without adding the epithet, "poor man!"
Mrs. Bevis enjoyed the drive; Mr. Bevis did not. The doubt was growing
stronger and stronger all the way, that he had not behaved like a
gentleman in his relation to the head of the church. He had naturally,
as I have already shown, a fine, honorable, boyish if not childlike
nature; and the eyes of his mind were not so dim with good living as one
might have feared from the look of those in his head: in the glass of
loyalty he now saw himself a defaulter; in the scales of honor he
weighed and found himself wanting. Of true discipleship was not now the
question: he had not behaved like an honorable gentleman to Jesus
Christ. It was only in a spasm of terror St. Peter had denied him: John
Bevis had for nigh forty years been taking his pay, and for the last
thirty at least had done nothing in return. Either Jesus Christ did not
care, and then what was the church?--what the whole system of things
called Christianity?--or he did care, and what then was John Bevis in
the eyes of his Master? When they reached home, he went neither to the
stable nor the study, but, without even lighting a cigar, walked out on
the neighboring heath, where he found the universe rather gray about
him. When he returned he tried to behave as usual, but his wife saw that
he scarcely ate at supper, and left half of his brandy and water. She
set it down to the annoyance the curate had caused him, and wisely
forbore troubling him with questions.