The time passed very pleasantly at Caistorholm Vicarage. Edward rose
betimes each morning, and was often deep immersed in the intricacies of
the Skerne Iron Works Company’s accounts long before his host had
quitted his downy bed, and could with clear conscience enter into those
delights of country-life that were to him all the sweeter because
unaccustomed. The glories of the Vicarage garden were on the wane, but
its orchard was prepared to yield its juicy fruits. The fields were fast
ripening for the sickle. The great calm and hush of those pastoral
scenes stole over his senses like a young child’s sleep. There were no
revelries, but there was constant interest. The Archdeacon had suggested
a dinner-party, but Edward had been so emphatic in his declarations of
preference for quiet, the project had been abandoned. A neighbouring
vicar or rector dropped in occasionally for luncheon, and was easily
persuaded to stay for dinner. Edward had, at first, spoken rarely and
with reserve about matters social and political—doctrine was avoided
by common consent. Strange, one may pass a month in a clergyman’s
house and never hear religion discussed. Presumably the household has so
long taken fundamental dogma for granted that the possibilities of wide
divergence amounting to repudiation is not so much as thought of. Edward
saw with amaze men of unquestioned scholarship and intelligence equally
indisputably above the average grow warm and excited in discussing the
Eastward position, incense, lights, stoles, birettas, man millinery
generally. He itched to tell them that the vast bulk of those who should
be their flock didn’t care a brass farthing about genuflexions or
ecclesiastical trappings. What the human soul yearns to understand is
the Divine rule and ordinance, if rule and ordnance there be and not
blind chaos; to know if man be indeed _Imaginis Imago_, or but the last
if not the final link of a chain long drawn out with a protoplasm at one
end of it; if there is indeed and in very sooth a God our Father, who
sees and loves and can be moved by prayer, if man have in truth an
immortal spirit or is like unto the beasts that perish; if it be true
that after death comes the judgement, when the gross inequalities of
this world shall be made right and virtue shall indeed reign. Edward
knew, as any man with ears to hear may know, that the avowed scepticism
of mankind is a mere speck of dust compared with the huge mass of
practical perhaps unconscious, infidelity that pervades society. It
filled him with impatient scorn that men who should be leaders of
thought, able to give counsel and enlightenment to those who grope in
darkness, should spend the priceless years in mumbling twaddling
homilies and in agitated harassment about stage effects. He could not
interest himself in the question how far a beneficed incumbent may go on
the road to Rome without jeopardising his living. He longed to tell
these clerical traitors who let “I dare not wait upon I would,” that
in this country any man worth his salt, who had a message to give, need
not be uneasy about the forthcoming of the salt. He could go back to
Yorkshire, he reflected sardonically, and find a score of half-educated
weavers who had borne hunger and thirst, imprisonment, and stripes for
conscience sake, and were ready to do it again and glory in the doing.
But, then, hunger and thirst and imprisonment and stripes are one thing
to a man to whom hunger and thirst and oppression are the daily lot, and
quite another to a sleek, soft man who basks in the sunshine all his
days and counts himself piteously poor and an object of commiseration
on five hundred a year. “Why, don’t you all turn dissenters?” he
asked of a clerical party one evening, as they lingered over the desert.
“You all find fault with your Bishop. The poor man can apparently do
nothing right. If you were dissenting ministers you would be your own
bishops.”
“I fancy, my dear Beaumont, the dissenters have their Trust deeds.”
“Oh, Trust deeds—a fico for your Trust deeds. They talk about
driving a coach and six through an Act of Parliament—why, a regiment
of soldiers could walk through a Trust deed. ’Tis an instrument as
little resorted to for the purpose of torture in a Nonconformist church
as the thumbscrew in the Tower of London. Besides a man isn’t a
fixture in a Dissenting Church. When he has talked himself dry, or made
more enemies than friends, he can always change pulpits with another
fellow who has talked himself dry or made more enemies than friends.”
“There are our social status and influence to be considered,” said a
sucking young curate just emerged from the Bishop’s Hostel. “Our
mere position invests us with a sacred authority never wielded by a mere
dissenter.”
“Your social position is largely the result of social factors. The
Established Church draws its ministers mainly from families socially
established, and they receive not only the education and culture, but
also the social stamp of Oxford or Cambridge. The dissenting parson is
often the son of a grocer or a shoemaker, and receives a surface polish
and a surfeit of theology at a training college, but seldom loses the
smell of the ancestral shop. Your clergyman is a gentleman first, a
clergyman afterwards. Turn all your well-born scholars into Methodists,
and your half-educated social inferiors into the Church, and you would
reverse the present social positions of the established and the
nonconforming divines.”
“Then you think our present social superiority, and therefore our
greater influence for good, for, of course, it is only to be valued for
that, is a matter of birth and education.”
“Largely, but not entirely. You see, your present status is official.
You owe your posts directly or indirectly to the Crown. You are part of
the machinery of the State. And it is surprising how mere officialism
and the possession of authorised and acknowledged titles impress the
popular imagination in this country. You see it all through. Dub a man
M.A. or LL.D., and the general man will persist in thinking him a better
scholar than another who far surpasses him, but has not received the
hall-mark of a University. So put a man in uniform with epaulettes and
dub him an officer. He bears a social cachet, though he may be a
poltroon and a blackguard. It is largely an affair of clothes and names
and State-connection. You clergymen, if you really care about retaining
your social importance, would commit social suicide if you got
yourselves disestablished, even if you retain those endowments and other
fleshpots you are so concerned about, but which appear to me the element
you could most easily compensate under a system of voluntaryism.”
“Then you think, Mr. Beaumont,” asked the Rector of Fillingham,
“our policy is to let well alone?”
“Yes, if you’re let. I think if I were an incumbent with a fat
living I could swallow my bishop and make no bones about it. Remember
the dissenting parsons have their deacons, and I can conceive of nothing
more galling than for a man of principle and education to have to trim
his sails to suit the views of a coarse, uneducated deacon with all the
soul of a village tyrant, just because he happens to have more money
than some of the humbler worshippers. I should preach either him or
myself out of the conventicle.”
“Ah! he would be your bishop,” laughed the Archdeacon.
“Those dissenters are just the plague of my life,” confided one of
the country vicars from a neighbouring parish. “Just fancy, Mr.
Beaumont, there aren’t five hundred families in all my parish, and yet
there is besides mother church, a Wesleyan chapel, a Congregational and
a Baptist. It turns my modest glass of wine and my crust to gall and
ashes when I think of it.”
“Oh! I know something of the feeling, Vicar. You don’t suppose I
like to see people taking their cases to the man next door, who, I am
persuaded is not half so fine a fellow as I am. But you can’t go
begging for communicants, any more than I can go touting for clients.
Besides, what does it matter in which church a man saves his soul alive,
so long as it is saved. _Ut palata, sic judicia_ is of universal
application.”
“Ah! but can a man be saved outside the true Church?” asked the
young curate from the Bishop’s Hostel.
“That’s a question the next Roman Catholic parish priest might have
something to say about,” rejoined Edward. “Anyway, people seem
willing to risk it. Don’t you think, Archdeacon, instead of trying to
filch flocks from the folds, the shepherds of the Church could find
quite enough to do in casting their crooks about those wandering sheep
that are utterly lost in the wilderness?”
“Pray condescend to particularise, Mr. Beaumont,” begged his host.
“Well, a day or two before I came down here a vulgar case, of which I
need not trouble you with the details, gave me a glimpse of the workings
of the Salvation Army.”
“A most valuable institution, no doubt,” said the Archdeacon.
“Yes,” said Edward, “but you will pardon my saying—why a
Salvation Army at all? Here are more than half our churches and chapels
with yawning pews, and out in the street are crowds of earnest
enthusiasts following a dancing Dervish and a big drum.”
“You wouldn’t have me dancing in my cassock through Caisterholm, and
the parish clerk or verger tinkling a tambourine?”
“Well, no. But, after all, if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet,
Mahomet must go to the mountain. And that’s just General Booth’s
secret.”
“A very latitudinarian young man,” commented one vicar to another,
as they jogged home together in the still autumnal evening through the
fragrant hedgerows. “Whatever did St. Clair mean by taking advice from
a man like him. But the man may be a good lawyer for all that, and I
won’t look too closely at his Church principles if he’ll pull my
good sovereigns out of those infernal Skerne blasts.”
The Archdeacon himself, before Beaumont had been a week under his roof,
had conceived not only a high opinion of his guests’ acumen and legal
attainments, but also a warm regard for himself personally. Their very
points of difference seemed to enhance the pleasure the cleric found in
the lawyer’s society and conversation. It is true they approached
almost every subject from an entirely different point of view, and
therein lay constant danger of friction or collision. But Edward had
ever a seemly consideration for his senior in years and a ready
concession of whatever deference the Archdeacon’s ecclesiastical
dignity reasonably demanded. There is, perhaps, nothing so well designed
as practice in the Courts to develop in a man a happy blending of due
submission to authority with the respectful but unflinching assertion of
one’s own opinions. The Archdeacon declared in later years that it was
as great a pleasure to be routed in argument by Beaumont as to prevail,
for the fellow had a sweet reasonableness about him that took away the
sting of defeat, and almost persuaded the vanquished that he himself was
victor. The elder man was fond of controversy if it were not pushed too
far, of debate if it were conducted decently. It was an intellectual
treat to meet a man with the generous enthusiasm of youth and with ideas
outside the narrow range with which a country clergyman, whose only
associates are clergymen like unto himself, must, almost perforce, be
content. Though not so disputative as the man who repined because the
very wife of his bosom was ceasing to contradict him, the Archdeacon
wearied at times of speaking _ex cathedra_ Moreover, in a society drawn
almost exclusively from one’s fellows controversy lacked not only
variety of interest but variety of treatment. No doubt the smooth
serenity of a soundly Conservative orthodoxy was an excellent thing, but
the Vicar of Caistorholm confessed to himself that Beaumont’s radical
heterodoxy, if a disturbance, was one that acted as a mental tonic and
wholesome fillip. Exercise is a disturbance; but it is recommended for
the liver. Mr. St. Clair acknowledged with a sigh that, intellectually
and spiritually, life at Caistorholm might be serene, but it was
unquestionably sluggish.
“We touched on Disestablishment the other evening,” he said one day
to Edward, as they walked together in the peaceful afternoon of a mellow
autumn day about the Vicarage gardens; “I did not encourage you to
pursue the subject, because some of our friends are very sensitive on
that topic. To us clergymen, you know, the Church is as the Ark to the
Levites, not to be touched by unholy hands.”
“Well,” said Edward, smiling, “I’ve no mind to bring upon myself
the fate of Uzzah—at all events, I must avoid it whilst I am at the
Vicarage. Percz-Uzzah is not near so pretty a name as Caistorholm.”
“But though I did not think it desirable to discuss the question when
some of my friends were present who are, I fear, too apt to confound
persons and principles and to think suspiciously, if not evilly, of a
man who differs from them as widely as I know you do, I hope you will
not conclude I shrink from discussing it. Nay, I confess, I should like
to know your views on the question more at large, for then we of the
Order should at least know how we appear to the outer world and learn
the worst we have to expect.”
“To tell the truth, Mr. St. Clair, it is a question I have little at
heart. It has always seemed to me more an affair between Church and
Chapel than one that concerns the masses very largely. And, you see, if
I’m but an indifferent Churchman I’m just as bad a Chapel man.
Indeed, so far as I can see, a Chapel man is only an average
Trinitarian, plus envy, indocility, and cant. In the abstract, of
course, I certainly think the Establishment cannot be justified to-day
whatever might have been said for it, at the reformation, say. As for
your endowments, I think the nonconforming envy of them simply
contemptible, and the claim that they ought to be applied to national
education, free libraries, art galleries, etc., a mere pretence. If John
Bull wants art galleries he can afford to pay for them without taking
the coat off your back. No! I don’t feel like slapping you in the
face, Archdeacon, just to pleasure the Rev. Josiah Boanerges, who would
have no objection to be snugly endowed himself. Frankly, I don’t think
the Church will fall from any blows that may be dealt from without. Its
danger lies in the dry-rot that is silently but surely Consuming the
inner rafters and supports.”
“Dry rot, my dear Beaumont!”
“Yes, dry-rot. If I speak at all you must let me speak frankly, and
you know I do not want to wound your sensibilities. Burns, after all,
was foolish to sigh for the gift to see ourselves as others see us. It
might from ‘mony a faultie free us and sair mistake’; but it would
so rudely and so constantly shake our serenity that life would not be
worth the living. Let us change the subject, Archdeacon.”
“Well, I’ll tell you frankly enough the great danger of the Church.
You know it is a common lament that your services, in the towns, I mean,
attract the women, not the men?”
The Vicar bowed a silent assent.
“Now, how do you account for it, Mr. St. Clair?”
“I can only suggest spiritual indifference.”
“Nay, I cannot subscribe to that. Take my town. Let a good speaker be
announced to deliver an address on political or social questions he can
fill the Town Hall with men and women, mostly men, of every
grade—clergy men, dissenting ministers, lawyers, doctors,
manufacturers, merchants, shop-keepers; and working-men.”
“Yes, but that is to hear about worldly affairs, Beaumont, not
heavenly. Your lecturers deal with to-day and here. I speak of to-morrow
and there.”
“Ah! well, Archdeacon, I think you will find if a man is anxious about
setting matters right to-day and here he will not be indifferent about
to-morrow and there. But you must satisfy him there is a to-morrow and
there.”
“But that is of course.”
“To you, yes. But to how many? I don’t judge men by their
professions or their creeds. I judge them by their acts. And so judged I
conclude that for most men to-day and here are very real, to-morrow and
there are very visionary, very problematical; so distant, so uncertain,
as to be a negligible quantity.”
“Then you would have us?”
“I would have the Church remember that we live in a questioning age,
an age when the fact of an institution or an opinion being hoary with
age, so far from rendering it secure from investigation rather makes it
an object of suspicion. We have found our forefathers wrong in so many
things, and we have improved on them so much, that we have lost our
confidence in their judgment. The Church drones about things nobody
questions I mean what Matthew Arnold calls ‘right conduct,’ what you
call ‘righteousness’; it dogmatises, I mean asserts positively or
takes for granted things which an increasing number of intelligent men
are very far indeed from taking for granted. Men will no more endure
being droned to about right conduct than they will submit to having it
eternally dinned into their ears that twice two makes four. They cry you
‘granted.’ They go to Church for bread and you give them a stone.
They seek for guidance and assurance, if guidance and assurance there
may be, on matters you have made a special study, and instead of showing
them how to be sure, you only tell them that you are sure.”
“What more can we do? People don’t believe, because their hearts are
corrupt, and they don’t want to believe. If anyone wish to know the
truth let him seek it on his knees. ‘The wind bloweth where it
listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whither it
cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the
Spirit.’”
“Possibly,” said Edward, dryly. “We quote authorities in the Law
Courts, Mr. St. Clair; but, you see, they are of acknowledged validity
there. The suitors in our Courts are bound by the law they seek to
invoke, and submit themselves to the jurisdiction when they enter their
plaints. You see, the whole point is that, to-day, you have to deal with
honest doubters who deny the authority of your authority, and your only
answer is a _petitio principis_. But I see Miss St. Clair is ready for
her expedition to the village, and I am to have the honour of
accompanying her.”
The Archdeacon looked thoughtfully at the figures of his daughter and
guest, as, side by side, apparently in gay converse, they passed down
the Vicar’s Walk that led through orchard and paddock, past the hoary
church and mouldering churchyard into the road that led to the
straggling rows of peasants’ and small farmers’ houses, with here
and there a shop, that constitute the village of Caistorholm. He could
not fail to observe that Eleanor took pleasure in the lawyer’s
company, that her glance had been brighter, her face happier of late.
Mr. St. Clair was glad that Edward’s stay at the Vicarage should be
made pleasant to him, and that his daughter should find a visit that
might have developed into a visitation an agreeable break in the
monotony of rural life. It was, of course, eminently satisfactory that
the stranger whom he had been advised to consult and to trust in a
matter of the very gravest importance should turn out to be not only a
sound and reliable lawyer and a shrewd business man, but also a
well-educated, well-read man, with the manners of a gentleman. Mr. St.
Clair’s acquaintance with solicitors was chiefly confined to the
urbane practitioners who dealt in advowsons or were learned in
dilapidations, and with them he had permitted himself rather a
condescending affability. From the first he had recognised that he could
not patronise Beaumont, and had enjoyed the discomfiture and amazement
with which Squire Wright had retired from his attempt in that direction,
and which had so affected him that he had given the Vicarage a wide
berth ever since. But Mr. St. Clair told himself that, after all, he
knew very little about Beaumont. His old college friend, Fortescue, had
told him that he had heard the best accounts of Beaumont’s successful
conduct of a difficult and delicate matter, in which a mutual friend had
been embroiled, and on his recommendation, and not without some natural
hesitation, he had invited Edward to his home, feeling that he would
rather confide to a stranger living at a distance than to a Lincoln
lawyer the whole story of what he was now fully persuaded had been his
very foolish, nay, reckless speculations in the Skerne shares. With
Edward as a legal adviser he felt that he had more than reason to be
satisfied, and he had enjoyed his conversation and the interchange of
thought not a little. But he noticed with anything but satisfaction that
Edward had made his conversation very acceptable to the stately Eleanor,
who was not easily pleased. Not one afternoon passed but the young
people found some occasion for being together—a round of parochial
visits in which Edward carried the basket, and supplemented Eleanor’s
tracts with covert half-crowns to rheumatic and asthmatical pensioners;
a drive in Eleanor’s pony-carriage to some object of antiquarian
interest, an ancient tower or a ruined church—who does not know the
devices by which the tedium of the country is enlivened for the visitor
from the towns?
On these excursions the Archdeacon felt he could not, even privately to
his daughter, put an embargo, without giving them an importance which
they might not deserve, and even suggesting to his daughter’s mind
ideas that might never lodge there unless suggested. To be sure, the
Archdeacon might accompany the young folk on these jaunts; but the
archdeacon, like many less exalted individuals, liked to take his ease
of an afternoon, and found himself on all the better terms with himself
and mankind in general for forty winks in the armchair of his study,
after luncheon of an afternoon, when it was a matter of faith in the
household that he was meditating his next Sunday sermon, and must on no
account be disturbed.
And so it came about that if Edward spent many a long hour with the
father over the wearying and irritating concerns of the Iron Works, or
holding forth, as was his wont, upon topics of more general interest,
sometimes startling, sometimes alarming, but always interesting the
Vicar, he spent also hours that seemed neither long, tedious, nor
irritating with Eleanor St. Clair, when we may be sure the subjects of
conversation were neither law nor theology nor commerce.
“This kind of thing, Miss St. Clair, is idyllic,” said Beaumont.
“I have always had my mental picture of the Lady Bountiful of a
village. She must, of course, be beautiful, with a soft, musical, tender
voice, a heart quick to feel, and a soft and lily-white hand quick to
help. Her path is strewn beneath her feet with the heartfelt blessings
of the poor and afflicted. She moves a ministering angel among the
hovels of the destitute.”
“Ah! now, Mr. Beaumont, you are laughing at me. Surely you would have
me help the sick and needy.”
“It is the most priceless prerogative of the rich, and if I seem to
mock I hasten to cry _peccavi_. But, seriously, this kind of parochial
charity is but a dainty dilettantism, and you engage in it, Miss St.
Clair, I beg you to confess, partly because it grieves you to see
suffering without trying to relieve it and partly because it is
picturesque.”
“Then I shall confess nothing of the kind, Mr. Beaumont. It is my
simple duty to visit the sick and to do what little I can to ease their
pains.”
“There’s Stokes the cobbler laid up with the lumbago, I am told. I
went into his little shop the other day to get a trifling repair done,
and the poor old fellow was nearly doubled up with pain, and, if I’m
not very much mistaken, slowly dying of hunger. Shall we take Stokes the
cobbler on our round?”
“Stokes does not belong to us, Mr. Beaumont. Papa would not like me to
visit him. And I’m not sure that Stokes would be over civil to me.”
“He seemed a surly sort of customer, truly. I was chatting away quite
comfortably with him when I mentioned casually that I was staying at the
Vicarage. Then he seemed to shut himself up as I’ve seen a flower do
in an east wind. Is there war between him and the Vicarage?”
“As if there could be! Papa would not condescend to notice anything
such a man could say or do. All the same, it isn’t nice to be called a
whited sepulchre, and I believe that is Stokes’ mildest epithet for
papa.”
“Then he’s a dissenter, I suppose. He did not appear unctuous enough
for hat. But religion may have disagreed with him. I have observed that
with some people it acts like whey in a curd.”
“They say,” spoke Eleanor, with bated breath, “he’s a
Bradlaughite, an atheist. He talks about Tom Paine and the rights of
man.”
“And how does he live?”
“As you know, he is a cobbler. But I don’t suppose he gets much
work. It is very inconvenient. Of course, we cannot send our repairs to
him, and his being here prevents another setting up in the village.”
“It’s most inconsiderate of him,” said Beaumont, gravely. “He
ought to be made to see that he is inconveniencing the servants of the
Vicarage. No doubt, if he were told, he would go away, and make room for
a better man. Then he doesn’t get much work?”
“Very little. He seems to spend most of his time, in the summer, in
the fields; and I have heard he has a curious gift of taming birds and
animals. I fancy he ekes out a scanty livelihood that way.”
“Perhaps he has taken to birds and animals because he can’t get men
and women to have anything to do with him. A man must love something or
other.”
“What! all men?”
“Yes, I suppose so—all men. Even lawyers.”
“I know one lawyer who is very fond of something.”
“And of someone?”
“I said something, sir!”
“And that is?”
“Lecturing other people.”
“A hit, a most palpable hit, Miss St. Clair. I own my fault. But
confess I don’t pretend to be a bit better than my neighbours. But
about this Stokes, now. He interests me.”
“Of course.”
“Why of course?”
“Well, you see, Stokes would be all right if he would only take things
as he finds them. Why can’t he come to church like other people, and
be a decent member of society? Instead of that he goes on Saturday night
to the public-house and talks—oh! horrid things—blasphemy and high
treason, to the labourers. Papa says if his ricks are burned he shall
have Stokes arrested as an accessory before the fact.”
“I don’t suppose Mr. St. Clair will entrust me with the brief for
the prosecution.”
“Oh, no! If you don’t take care, sir, you’ll have enough to do to
defend yourself some fine day. But I’ve done Stokes an injustice. I
said he went to the public-house. He used to; but the Publican refused
to serve him any more.”
“Got too much to drink, I suppose. I always knew tailors were a
guzzling lot. Tailoring runs to drink, as naturally as cobbling to
atheism. I don’t know why, but cobblers are all free-thinkers and
tailors and lawyers’ clerks born tosspots.”
“Well, you’re out this time, Mr. Beaumont. The landlord—he’s
people’s warden, you know, at the church and a most respectable
man—turned Stokes out because, whenever he went of a Saturday night,
he drank only one mug of small beer in a matter of three hours, and all
the time discoursed of nothing but the evils of strong drink. He so
frightened our undergardener, who was of the company, that he turned
teetotaller, and got my maid to stitch him a piece of blue ribbon in the
lapel of his Sunday coat.”
“That was carrying the war into the enemy’s camp with a vengeance.
Well, he won’t be able to corrupt the farm labourers any longer of a
Saturday night now he’s ejected from the ‘Blue Boar.’”
“Oh! they’ve started a club, and Joseph Arch came to open it. Papa
was so upset he fled to Lincoln, and stopped a whole week at the Palace,
though he does nothing but quarrel with the dear bishop.”
“And I suppose the Vicarage set the fashion in tabooing this poor son
of St. Crispin?”
“Of course, papa cannot countenance atheism and arson”
“Clearly. But if the man’s ill, the man’s ill, and atheist or no
atheist the man’s a man. I’m sorry I didn’t know more about him
when I went to have my boot stretched. However, the other boot isn’t
very comfortable, that’s one consolation.”
They walked on in silence for a time. Then, apropos of nothing, Eleanor
said, very quietly: “The man must have some good about him or he
wouldn’t be so fond of birds and animals. I think my boot is not very
comfortable, Mr. Beaumont.”
Edward laughed gaily. “What will the Archdeacon say?”
“Oh! papa won’t mind. He’ll probably tell me I’m a goose for my
pains.”
“Ah! well; I don’t know. I think the Church makes a mistake in being
so discriminating in its charity.”
“You are a universal fault-finder, Mr. Beaumont. But I suppose that is
what makes you a Radical. It must be a very unhappy state of mind—to
be always seeing the imperfections of things.”
“Somebody must do it, Miss St. Clair. Even critics have their uses.
But when you announced so unexpectedly that your shoe pinched you, I was
wondering how Sister Gertrude would have dealt with old Stokes.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister. Do tell me about her.”
“Well you see, I haven’t, except in a very broad sense. Sister
Gertrude is the name of a young lady I met under rather interesting
circumstances. Shall I tell you about her?”
Then Edward narrated the story of the troubles of Patrick Sullivan.
“Was she very beautiful?”
“Very. It was a sort of awful beauty. You forgot the artistic delight
inspired by her perfection of form, colour, and expression, in the sense
that you gazed upon one who was superior to mere charm of person. There
seemed something like sacrilege in thinking of her as beautiful. I
suppose a devout Catholic does not let his thoughts dwell upon the
physical charms of the Madonna.”
“You cease to be critical, Mr. Beaumont, sometimes I see. And she was
a lady, you say?”
“Unquestionably, or I’m no judge.”
“But, after all, this lady only does ostentatiously and to the sound
of the drum and the tambourine what I, what we, try to do quietly and
unostentatiously. You sneer at my tracts; but as I have no gifts for
sermon-making, what can I do but take a tract?”
“Oh! I don’t find fault with the tracts, Miss St. Clair, though
they’re twaddly things.”
Miss St. Clair smiled.
“I fear they’re very goody-goody. But I don’t write them, you
know. Why don’t you write a tract yourself, Mr. Beaumont, and show the
world how it should be done?”
“Again a hit, a most palpable hit. But you see, that isn’t my
line.”
“No; your line is fault-finding. What’s that Latin papa always
quotes—_si possis, ernenda_. I forget the rest.”
“_Si non, his utere mecum_,” completed Edward. “Well, I won’t
amend your tracts, still less use them. A Radical has greater work cut
out for him. You see that hind labouring in the field yonder, Miss St.
Clair? Now, I think I know the kind of life that man leads. He toils
like a slave year in and year out for a wretched twelve shillings a
week. He lives on fat bacon and cabbage and coarse bread. His thatched
cottage is small, dark, unwholesome. There is a cesspool at his very
door and a dunghill under his window. His great dissipation is a quart
of beer and a big drunk at harvest time. He can scarcely read, and if he
could read he has no literature but a Bible, of which only very small
portions are intelligible to him for want of other knowledge, and, of
course, your tracts. When he is old, and rheumatism wracks his bones,
and he is past work, he and his dame must either be burdens on their
children, who will be no better off than he is now, or go to the Union
Workhouse. And this kind of thing has been going on for generation after
generation, and all the suggestion the Church, or Sister Gertrude I
suppose for that matter, has to make, takes the form of a bottle of
medicine, a roll of flannel, and a tract or a sermon.”
Edward spoke warmly indignantly.
“And you?” said Miss St. Clair.
“I—nay, not I. Say We. We, Radicals I mean, would tell that man he
is a fool to be content to till the land all his life for another to
reap the harvest. We don’t think that it is one of the divinely
ordained laws of nature that there should be a Squire Wright and a
Hodge.”
“There always has been, there always will be, just as there have
always been horses and riders.”
“And hammers and anvils? Well, we Radicals think otherwise. We say
that it is better that all men should walk on their own legs than that
one should be borne in a palanquin. Some day the people will examine the
title deeds of your Squire Wrights.”
“That will be a fat day for the lawyers, Mr. Beaumont,” suggested
Eleanor mischievously.
“Nay, in the ideal state there’ll be no lawyers.”
“And clearly there’ll be no critics; there’ll be nothing to
criticise. Poor Mr. Beaumont. How unhappy you’ll be. _Quelle triste
veillesse vous vous preparez_.”
“Oh, well, imperfection will last my time, Miss St. Clair. And if I
cannot find perfection in this sweet Arcadia of yours, why I deserve to.
. . .”
“Get Sister Gertrude to find it for you in the slums. How provoking
there’s the bell, and only just time to dress for dinner.”