If you feel no love, sit still; occupy yourself with things,
with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men.
--TOLSTOY.
In Wentworth's youth he had been attracted towards many, besides the
Bishop, among the bolder and less conventional of his contemporaries.
Their fire, their energies, their enthusiasm, warmed his somewhat
under-vitalized nature. He regarded himself as one of them, and his
refinement and distinction drew the robuster spirits towards himself.
But gradually, as time went on, these energies and enthusiasm took form,
and, alas! took forms which he had not expected--he never expected
anything--and from which his mind instinctively recoiled. He had
supposed that energy was energy. He had not realised that it was life in
embryo, that might develop, not always on lines of beauty, into a new
policy, or a great discovery, or a passion, or a vocation. He hated
transformations, new births, all change. His friends at first rallied
him unmercifully, then lost patience, and finally fell from him, one by
one. Some openly left him, the more good-natured among them forgot him,
and if by chance they found themselves in his society, hurried back with
affectionate cordiality to reminiscences of school and college life,
long-passed milestones before the parting of the ways.
The Bishop when he plunged into his work also for a time lost sight of
Wentworth, but when he was appointed to the See of Lostford, within
five miles of Barford, the two men resumed, at first with alacrity,
something of the old intercourse.
Wentworth had an element of faithfulness in him which enabled him to
take up a friendship after a long interval, but it was on one condition,
namely that the friend had remained _plante la_ where he had been left.
If in the meanwhile the friend had moved, the friendship flagged.
It was soon apparent that the Bishop had not by any means remained
_plante la_, and the friendship quickly drooped. It would long since
have died a natural death if it had not been kept alive by the Bishop
himself, a man of robust affections and strong compassions, without a
moment to spend on small resentments. After Michael's imprisonment he
had redoubled his efforts to keep in touch with Wentworth, and the great
grief of the latter, silently and nobly endured, had been a bond between
the two men which even a miserable incident which must have severed most
friendships had served to loosen, not to break.
The Bishop had in truth arrived at Barford, and was now sitting
apparently unoccupied by the library fire. To be unoccupied even for an
instant except during recuperative sleep was so unusual with the Bishop,
so unprecedented, that his daughter would have been terrified could she
have seen him at that moment. He had only parted from her and her
husband at mid-day, yet it was a sudden thought suggested by his visit
to them which was now holding him motionless by the fire, his lean
person bulging with unanswered letters.
The Bishop was a small ugly man of fifty, unconventional to the core,
the younger son of a duke, and a clergyman by personal conviction. He
had been born in a hurry, and had remained in a hurry ever since. He had
neither great administrative capacities, nor profound scholarship, but
what powers he had were eked out by a stupendous energy. His Archbishop
said that he believed that the Bishop's chaplains died like flies, and
that he merely threw their dead bodies into the Loss, which flowed
beneath his palace windows, without even a burial service. His chaplains
and secretaries certainly worked themselves to the bone for him. They
could have told tales against him, but they never did. For it was a
strain to serve the Bishop, to get his robes thrown over him at the
right--I mean the last--second, to thrust him ruthlessly into his
carriage just in time to catch the tail ends of departing trains--he
generally travelled with the guard. His admirable life had been spent in
a ceaseless whirl. He had never had time to marry. He had hurried to the
altar when he was an eager curate with a pretty young bride who was a
stranger to him, whom his mother had chosen for him. During the years
that followed what little he saw of her at odd moments he liked. After
ten years of what he believed to be married life she died, leaving one
child; tactful to the last, pretty to the last, having made no claim
from first to last, kissing his hand, and thanking him for his love, and
for the beautiful years they had spent together.
His friends said that he bore her loss with heroism, but in reality he
missed her but little. Her death occurred just after he had become an
ardent suffragan. His daughter grew up in a few minutes, and quickly
took her mother's place. She was her mother over again in character and
appearance. His wife had lived in his house for ten years, his daughter
for twenty. By dint of time he learned to know her as he had never known
her mother. At twenty she married his chaplain.
The chaplain was a tall, stooping, fleckless, flawless, mannerless,
joyless personage, middle-aged at twenty-eight, with a voice like a
gong, with a metallic mind constructed of thought-tight compartments,
devoted body and soul to the Church, an able and indefatigable worker,
smelted from the choice ore of that great middle class from which, as we
know, all good things come. That he was a future ornament, or at any
rate an iron girder of the Church was sufficiently obvious.
The Bishop saw his worth, and ruefully endured him until the chaplain,
in the most suitable language, desired to become his son-in-law, and
that at the most inconceivably awkward moment, namely, just when the
Bishop had presented him with a living. The marriage had to be. The
daughter wished it with an intensity that amazed her father. And
gradually the Bishop discovered that he detested his paragon of a
son-in-law. But why? It was not jealousy. He really was a paragon, not a
sham. To the Bishop it seemed, and with truth, that any other woman
would have done as well as his daughter, that her husband neither
understood her nor wished to understand her, that he accepted ruthlessly
without knowing that he accepted it, her selfless devotion, that he used
her as a cushion to make his rare moments of leisure more restful, that
her love was not even a source of happiness to him, only a solace. And
she, extraordinary to behold, was radiantly content.
"_Just like her mother over again_," the Bishop had wrathfully said to
himself as he drove away from his daughter's door. And at that moment a
slide was drawn back from his mind, and he saw that the marriage was a
replica of his own, except in so far that his son-in-law, greatly
assisted by circumstances, had actually taken a little trouble to
arrange his marriage for himself, while the Bishop's--what there was of
it--had been done for him by his mother.
Till this morning he had believed his marriage to have been an ideally
happy one, that he had felt all that man can feel; and he had been
inclined to treat as womanish the desperate desolation of men who had
after all only suffered the same bereavement as he had himself, and
which he had quickly overcome. He saw now that he had missed happiness
exactly as his son-in-law was missing it. The same thing had befallen
them both. Love could do there no mighty works because of their
unbelief. When he remembered his wife's face he realised that her joy
had been something beyond his ken. He had not shared it. He had not
known love, even when it had drawn very nigh unto him.
As he waited motionless for Wentworth to come in, his strong, intrepid
mind worked. The Bishop at fifty went to school to a new thought. It was
that power of going to school at fifty to a new thought which had made
his Archbishop, who loved him, give him the See of Lostford, to the
amazement of the demurer clergy who were scandalised by his
unconventionality, and his fearful baldness of speech. They could only
account for the appointment by the fact that he was the son of a duke.
It was that power which made the Bishop seem a much younger man than
Wentworth, who was in reality ten years his junior. The Bishop was still
a learner. He still moved with vigour mentally. Wentworth, on the
contrary, had arrived--not at any place in particular, but at the spot
where he intended to remain. His ideas, and some of them had been rather
good ones at twenty-five, had suffered from their sedentary existence.
They had become rather stout. He called them progressive because in the
course of years he had perceived in them a slight glacier-like movement.
To others they appeared fixed.
Wentworth's attitude towards life, of which he was so fond of speaking,
was perhaps rather like that of a shrimper who, in ankle-deep water,
watches the heavily freighted whale boats come towering in. He does not
quite know why he, of all men, with his special equipment for the
purpose, and his expert handling of the net, does not also catch whales.
That they seldom swim in two-inch water does not occur to him. At last
he does not think there are any whales. He has exploded that fallacy.
For, in a moment of adventurous enthusiasm, counting not the cost, did
he not once wade recklessly up to his very shoulders in deep water: _and
there were no whales_,--only pinching crabs. Crabs were the one real
danger, the largest denizens of the boundless main, whatever his former
playmates the whalers might affirm.
When the shrimper and the whaler had dined together, and the Bishop had
heard with affectionate sympathy the little there was to hear
respecting Michael, and the conversation tended towards more general
topics, the radical antagonism between the two friends' minds threatened
every moment to make itself felt.
The Bishop tried politics somewhat tentatively, on which they had
sympathised in college days, but it seemed they had widely diverged
since. Wentworth, though he frequently asserted that no one enjoyed more
than he "the clashing of opposite opinions," seemed nevertheless only
able to welcome with cordiality a mild disagreement, just sufficiently
defined to prove stimulating to the expression of his own views. A wide
divergence from them he met with a chilly silence. He did so now. The
Bishop looked at his neat ankle, and changed the subject.
"Have you seen or heard anything of Everard Constable since he came into
his kingdom, such a very unexpected kingdom, too?"
"No. I fancy he is still abroad. But I can't say that for some time past
I have found Constable's aims in life very sympathetic. His unceasing
struggle after literary fame appears to me somewhat undignified."
"Oh! come. Give the devil his due. Constable can write."
"Of course, of course. That is just what I am saying. But he and I
differ too widely in our outlook on life to remain really intimate. He
cares for the big things, ambition, popularity, a prominent position,
luxury. He will enjoy being a personage, and having wealth at his
command. For my part, I am afraid I care infinitely more for the small
things of life, love, friendship, sympathy."
"The _small_ things! Good Lord!" said the Bishop, and his jaw dropped.
He also dropped the subject.
"I ran up against Grenfell last week," he continued immediately. "Do you
see _him_ now? You and he used to be inseparable at Cambridge."
Wentworth became frigid.
Grenfell had accused him at their last meeting of being an old maid, an
accusation which had wounded Wentworth to the quick, and which he had
never forgotten or forgiven. He had not in the least realised that
Grenfell was not alluding to the fact that he happened to be unmarried.
"I can't say I care to see him now," he said. "He has become entirely
engrossed in his career. A simple life like mine, the life of thought,
no longer interests him. He is naturally drawn to people who are playing
big parts."
"What nonsense! He is just the same as ever. A little vehement and
fiery, but not as much as he was. They say he will be the next
Chancellor of the Exchequer to a certainty."
"I daresay he will. He has the art of keeping himself before the public
eye. Being myself so constituted--it is not any virtue in me, only a
constitutional defect--that I cannot elbow for a place, it is difficult
for me to understand how another, especially a man like Grenfell, can
bring himself to do so. I had always thought he was miles above that
kind of thing."
"So he is. So he is. A blind man can see Grenfell's unworldliness. It
sticks a yard out of him. My dear Wentworth, if energetic elbows were,
as you imply, the key to success, how do you account for the fact that
hundreds of painful persons have triumphantly passed that preliminary
examination who never achieve anything beyond a diploma in the art of
pushing?"
Wentworth did not answer.
He firmly believed that in order to attain the things he had not
attained, had never striven for, of which he invariably spoke
disparagingly, but which he secretly and impotently desired, the
co-operation of certain ignoble qualities was essential, sordid allies
whom he would have disdained to use.
"I don't blame Grenfell," he said at last. "He had his way to make. I
know how blinding the glamour of ambition is, how insidious and
insistent the claims of the world may become. I don't pretend to be
superior to certain temptations if they came in my way. But I happen to
have kept out of their way. That is all."
"You have certainly kept out of the way of--nearly everything."
"For my part, I daresay I am hopelessly out of date, but I value beauty
and peace and simplicity higher than a noisy success. But a noisy
success is the one thing that counts nowadays."
"Does it?"
"And Grenfell has taken the right steps to gain it. If a man craves for
popularity, if he really thinks the bubble worth striving for, he must
lay himself out for it. If he wants a place he must jostle for it. If he
wants power he must discard scruples. If he wants social success it can
be got--we see it every day--by pandering to the susceptibilities and
seeking the favour of influential persons. Everything has its price. I
don't say that everyone obtains these things who is ready to bid for
them. But some do. Grenfell is among those who have. I don't blame him.
I am not sure that I don't rather envy him."
The Bishop could respect a conviction.
"Are you not forgetting Grenfell's character?" he said gently, as one
speaks to a sick man. "Think of him, his nobility, his integrity, his
enthusiasm, his transparent unworldliness which so often in the old days
put us all to shame!"
"That is just what makes it all so painful to me," said Wentworth, and
there was no possibility of doubting his sincerity. "That contact with
the world can taint even beautiful natures like his. He was my ideal at
one time. I almost worshipped him at Cambridge."
"I love him still," said the Bishop. "A cat may look at a king, so I
suppose a poor crawler of a bishop may look at a man like Grenfell.
Don't you think, Wentworth, that sometimes a man who succeeds may have
worked as nobly as a man who fails--you always speak so feelingly of
failure, it is one of the many things I like about you. Don't you think
that perhaps sometimes success may be--I don't say it always is--as
high-minded as failure, that a hard-won victory may be as honourable as
defeat, that achievement may _sometimes_ be the result not of chance or
interest, but of unremitting toil? Don't you think you may be
unconsciously cutting yourself adrift from Grenfell's friendship by
attributing his success to unworthy means which a man like him could
never have stooped to?"
"It is he who has cut himself adrift from me," said Wentworth icily. "I
have not changed."
"That is just it. A slight change, shall we say expansion on your part,
might have enabled you to"--the Bishop chose his words as carefully as a
doctor counts drops into a medicine glass--"to keep pace with him?"
"I do not regard friendship as a race or a combat of wits," said
Wentworth. "Friendship is to my mind something sacred. I hope I can
remain Grenfell's friend without believing him to be absolutely
faultless. If he is so unreasonable as to expect that of me, which I
should not for a moment expect of him, why then----" Wentworth shrugged
his shoulders.
One of the few friends who had not drifted from him looked at him with
somewhat pained affection.
Why does a life dwelt apart from others tend to destroy first generosity
and then tenderness in man and woman? Why does one so often find a
certain hardness and inhumanity encrusting those who have withdrawn
themselves behind the shutters of their own convenience, or is it, after
all, their own impotence?
"Has he always been hard and cold by nature?" said the Bishop to
himself, "and is the real man showing himself in middle age, or is his
meagre life starving him?"
He tried again.
"You nearly lost my friendship a year ago by attributing a sordid motive
to me, Wentworth."
Wentworth understood instantly.
"That is all past and forgotten," he said quickly. "I never think of it.
Have I ever allowed it to make the slightest difference?"
"No," said the Bishop, looking hard at him, "and for that matter neither
have I. We have never talked the matter out. Let us do so now. I don't
suppose you have forgotten the odium I incurred over the living of
Rambury. It had been held for generations by old men. It had become a
kind of clerical almshouse. When it fell vacant there was of course yet
another elderly cleric----"
"My uncle," said Wentworth, "a most excellent man."
"Just so, but in failing health. Rightly or wrongly I was convinced that
it was my duty to give the place a chance by putting there a younger
man, of energy and capacity for hard work. I gave it to my future
son-in-law as you know."
Wentworth nodded. "Everyone said at the time he was an excellent man,"
he said with evident desire to be fair.
"I daresay, but that is not the point. The point is that I had no idea
that iron traction engine wanted to marry my daughter or anybody's
daughter. The tactless beast got up steam and proposed for her the day
after I had offered him the living. He had never given so much as a
preliminary screech on the subject, never blown a horn to show what his
horrid intentions were--I only hope that if I had known I should still
have had the moral courage to appoint him. The Archbishop assures me I
should--but I doubt it. I was loudly accused of nepotism, of course.
Your uncle, who died soon afterwards, forgave me in the worst of taste
on his deathbed. I had no means of justifying myself. The Archbishop and
Grenfell and a few other old friends believed. _Why were you not among
those old friends, Wentworth?_"
"I _was_ among them," said Wentworth, meeting the Bishop's sombre eyes.
"You never answered it, so I suppose you never received it, but at the
time I wrote you a long letter assuring you that I for one had not
joined in the cry against you, even though my uncle did. I frankly owned
that, while I regarded the appointment as an ill-considered one, I took
for granted that Mr. Rawlings was suited for the place. I said that I
knew you far too well to suppose even for a moment that you would have
given the post to a man, even if he were your son-in-law, unless he had
been competent to fill it. You never answered the letter, so I suppose
it failed to reach you."
"I received it," said the Bishop slowly. "I felt it to be an
illuminating document, but it did not seem to call for an answer. It was
in itself a response to a tacit appeal."
There was a pause, and then he continued cheerfully. "Rawlings has
proved himself dreadfully competent as you prophesied, and Lucy is very
happy in her new home. I came on from there this morning. My son-in-law,
with the admirable promptitude and economy of time which endeared him to
me as my chaplain, had arranged that every moment of my visit should be
utilised; that I should christen their first child, dedicate a
thank-offering in the shape of a lectern, consecrate the new portion of
the churchyard, open a reading-room, and say a few cordial words at a
drawing-room meeting before I left at mid-day. I told him if he went on
like this he would certainly come to grief and be made a bishop some
day. But he only remarked that he was not solicitous of high
preferment. I think you would like Rawlings if you knew him better. You
and he have a certain amount in common. I must own that I am glad that
it is Lucy who has to put up with him and not I. I should think even God
Almighty must find him rather difficult to live with at times. And now,
Wentworth, if I am to be up and away at cock-crow, I must go to bed."
But the Bishop did not go to bed at once when Wentworth had escorted him
to his room.
"It was no use," he said to himself. "It was worth trying, but it was no
use. He never saw that he had misjudged me. He met my eye. He has a
straight, clean eye. He is sincere as far as he goes, but how far _does_
he go? He has never made that first step towards sincerity of doubting
his own sincerity. He mistakes his moods for convictions. He has never
suspected his own motives, or turned them inside out. He suspects those
of others instead. He is like a crab. He moves sideways by nature, and
he thinks that everyone else who moves otherwise is not straightforward,
and that he must make allowances for them. According to his lights he
has behaved generously by me. Has he! Damn him! God forgive me. Well, I
must stick to him, for I believe I am almost the only friend he has left
in the world."