_Where there’s a Will, there’s a Way_
On his return from college for the summer vacation, his course almost
completed, Mr. Trimblerigg found Uncle Phineas with his feet gathered
up for death, though not immediately. He was confined to the house and
did not go out; presently did not even come downstairs. Caroline, of
course, was still with him, somewhat colourless as a companion, but
efficient as a housekeeper.
It would be difficult to say whether she was also a True Believer, in
the doctrinal sense, because to her doctrine meant nothing. She was one
of those comfortable characters who, in matters of faith, can believe
anything, and never actively disbelieve anything they are told by those
whom they respect and look up to. Otherwise, in worldly affairs, she
was quite sensible.
When she opened the door to Mr. Trimblerigg she showed pleasure in his
arrival. He called her ‘cousin,’ and kissed her, thereby committing
himself to nothing but a more open acceptance of the kinship which
had existed before intimacy began. Still it prepared the ground
provisionally, and the blush with which she accepted the salutation
made her look almost pretty: in her large cream-coloured way, with
under-edges of pink, she was personable though she lacked personality;
and she was very pleasant to touch, a point which with Mr. Trimblerigg
mattered on the whole more than good looks, and very much more than
intellect.
In the balm of her smile she said, ‘Uncle has been expecting you.’
‘So have you,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg; ‘and I’ve been expecting myself.’
Thus, footing it easily, he came into the house of his expectations,
and went up to his uncle’s room.
It was a momentous interview. The old man’s beard had whitened and was
beginning to slope from the horizontal to the perpendicular: voice and
hand were tremulous; but his eyes, whether he saw well or ill with
them, retained their keen look: and Jonathan still felt, in a lesser
degree, as he did with Davidina, that he was being examined as to his
character. For in spite of submissive hours in the past, he suspected
that as yet Uncle Phineas had never quite trusted him; that there was
something missing which all his art and solicitude could not supply.
Indeed it was so; temperamentally Mr. Trimblerigg was not cut to the
pattern of True Belief; whereas, for Uncle Phineas to be outside True
Belief, was to be spiritually in chaos; and the small ugly chapel which
he had built for his own ministry of the Word was to him a veritable
city of light. And now he knew that he was leaving it.
‘I’m glad you’ve come, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got a preacher,
only one that comes once a month; it’s only praying and reading most
Sabbath days now; and there’s some that aren’t faithful. Are you
willing to take the work now you’re home again?’
Mr. Trimblerigg said that he would.
‘I wonder,’ said the old man, fixing him with his gaze, ‘whether you’ll
be contented to stay here after I’m gone?’
‘I shall do what the Lord tells me,’ said Jonathan.
‘Let’s ask Him now,’ said Uncle Phineas. ‘Bring me the Book.’
There was no reason why Mr. Trimblerigg should refuse; but it was a
curious experience to see that the Book opened where a marker had
been placed in it; to see the old man pass his hand over to the left,
measure his finger up the page and lay it on an exact spot. Nor did he
wonder then, when the text was read, that his future had been fixed for
him in terms that he could not dispute.
‘And Laban said unto him, I pray thee if I have found favour in thine
eyes, _tarry_; for I have learned by experience that the Lord hath
blessed me for thy sake. And he said, “Appoint me thy wages, and I will
give it”.’
After Heaven had thus spoken there was a pause; then Phineas said, ‘The
word “Tarry” is in italics, Jonathan. That seems to point, doesn’t it?
Have you any doubt left in you now, about what God means you to do?’
‘No, Uncle,’ replied Mr. Trimblerigg, ‘I have none.’ The text, in fact,
had not altered by a hair’s breadth his views of the career he was to
run.
‘“Appoint me thy wages and I will give it,”’ went on the old man. ‘That
comes in too. But it isn’t wages exactly, is it, Jonathan? Though you
may call it so for want of a better word. You know that I’ve made two
wills, don’t you, Jonathan?’
Yes: Jonathan had heard it.
‘I haven’t forgotten you, Jonathan. I’ve remembered you in both; but I
haven’t left you so much in the one as in the other. You see, I’d got
Davidina in my mind, then: and there was Caroline, too.... I should
be leaving you more, Jonathan, if it wasn’t for Caroline. But now,
she’s lived with me all these last years, I’ve got to provide for
her--differently to what I meant.’
He spoke slowly, picking his words a little. Mr. Trimblerigg listened
to them without disappointment or dismay. He had no objection to
Caroline being provided for on a generous scale; and as his own share
was apparently to be increased, Davidina was now evidently the one who
would have to give way.
‘And then,’ said his uncle, ‘there was the chapel to think about. Now
that you’ve accepted the Lord’s word I know what to do.’
With quavering hand he drew out a key, and directed his nephew to a
drawer with certain contents.
Under instruction Mr. Trimblerigg brought him the two documents.
He looked them through, and separating the one from the other had
it returned to the drawer and locked back into safety. He then did
something which convinced Mr. Trimblerigg that at last he trusted him.
He put into his hands the remaining document.
‘When you go downstairs, Jonathan, put that into the fire,’ he
said, ‘and see that it burns. It’s not wanted now.’ And as he heard
those words Mr. Trimblerigg felt that his future was assured (and
incidentally Caroline’s also). His anxieties were all over, but
curiosity remained.
When Uncle Phineas dismissed him he went downstairs with spirits
quietly elated; and seeing that his future wife was then busily
occupying the kitchen, he went into the parlour to consider matters.
First he opened and read the discarded will; its contents were not
sensational, but they would, had they outlived the testator, have
disappointed him. His uncle had left him an income of a hundred pounds,
and his books. The chapel went to Trustees with a small stipend for
the ministry of the Word according to the tenets of True Belief. The
residue of his property, real and personal, was divided in equal
portions between Caroline and Davidina; Caroline’s share including the
house he lived in. This meant that Caroline and Davidina would have
each got an income of over two hundred a year, of rising value.
When Caroline went up aloft at the ringing of Uncle Phineas’s handbell,
Mr. Trimblerigg went into the kitchen and without reluctance put the
document into the fire according to his instructions. And when Caroline
came down again to go on with the cooking, he proposed to her and was
accepted.
This was the beginning of quite the happiest three weeks in his life,
for as soon as Mr. Trimblerigg made up his mind to marry Caroline,
he also made up his mind to be in love with her. He did not find
any more difficulty in this swift embrace of new affections than in
the equally swift embrace of new convictions as soon as they suited
him. Circumstances had provided him with sufficient reasons for
making Caroline his wife; and as love made the proposal so much more
palatable, he bestowed upon her that extra gift with the demonstrative
ardour that was his nature; and in the extended opportunities afforded
by courtship he continued to find her very pleasant to the touch:
a little unemotional perhaps, but good-tempered, contented, and an
excellent cook; and it was clear that in her quiet, half-motherly way
she very much admired him.
Uncle Phineas received the news without comment; and three weeks
later, with a final gathering-up of his patriarchal feet, died in the
beginning of his eighty-seventh year just about tea-time.
Mr. Trimblerigg ran for the woman who was to lay him out (since in that
matter old age requires extra haste when the legs have died bent), then
walked on to give instructions to the undertaker. Returning presently
to a house where the womenfolk were busy at their obsequious duties,
he sought and found a key which he knew by sight, and got out the will.
Under it lay a sealed letter addressed to Davidina. This puzzled and
slightly startled him; but for the present he laid it by as an item of
comparative unimportance. What startled him much more, however, were
the provisions which he found in the surviving will. His own share of
it was indeed larger. He found himself owner not only of the house, the
books and the furniture, but of the chapel also, with an accompanying
income of a hundred and fifty pounds, to be his so long as he remained
the local minister of the True Believers. This stipend was in the hands
of Trustees. All the rest of the estate, amounting to an annual value
of five hundred pounds went to Davidina.
Mr. Trimblerigg lost his temper; for a moment it almost seemed that
his uncle had made him destroy the wrong will. But there, for himself,
though tied by conditions, was the larger bequest; he could not but
admit that here a modest livelihood was provided for him: enough in
that retired district where all lived simply to enable him to marry and
have a family. On the other hand, it bound him to the place, and bound
him still more stiffly to the tenets of True Belief. There was the
further bewilderment that Davidina got all the rest, the bulk of the
estate; and that Caroline got nothing.
And now, of course, the letter to Davidina became important. He went
upstairs, got it from the drawer, and brought it down. The seal was a
purely conventional precaution, easy to get through and to replace;
while as for the adhesive flap there are ways also of dealing with that
which every one knows. Adopting one of them he became cognizant of the
contents. It appeared then that, after all, his Uncle Phineas had not
trusted him; and that, in spite of their apparent estrangement of late
years, he did trust Davidina absolutely. The letter informed Davidina
that while her benefit under the will was without legal condition,
it was the testator’s wish and request that if fifteen years after
his death her brother Jonathan was still an active minister of the
True Believers she should surrender to him one-half of the estate now
bequeathed to her; and that, as a necessary precaution, she should make
a will securing him the same advantage under the same conditions. And
following on this came a statement more startling than all: ‘I have
made no special provision for Caroline, as I intend that she shall
marry Jonathan.’ And with that the communication ended.
Mr. Trimblerigg looked up from it into a changed world. Just as he
thought to be starting on his forward career, he had become a cypher
in the hands of others. The word ‘Tarry’ stared him in the face; in
italics, as his uncle had remarked. Here and now he had been left to
Caroline, in order to provide her with a home; and in the future to the
tender mercies of Davidina--who was not even legally bound, when the
time came, to act on her instructions.
Fifteen years! The time was fatal to his prospects; it mattered nothing
to his career that now, in his twenty-first year, he happened to be
a member of the antiquated sect of True Believers; it would matter
everything if he were bound to it for another fifteen years. He would
then be nearing forty; how could he become the leader of the Free
Evangelicals, foremost figure of the Free Church Union in its march
toward liberal Theology, if in fifteen years’ time he was still
saddled with the tenets of True Belief to the extent of having to
preach them? He saw the meaning of it. His uncle had not trusted him;
and was as far from trusting him as ever, at the moment when he had
placed in his hands the other will to have it destroyed. It stung him
to the quick that a simple and rather stupid old man should thus have
got the better of him--to the extent at least of controlling the offer
or withdrawal of a prospective income of four hundred a year. A hundred
and fifty of it depended on his remaining in the local ministry; that
did not so much matter; but the rest depended on his remaining in the
connection at the very height of his powers; and that he did not for
a moment intend. No; even in the shock of disappointment and all the
callowness of untried youth, he knew that he was worth more. And in a
moment he had decided: henceforth his career was to be a tussle between
him and old Uncle Trimblerigg; they would see which would come out
first.
While thus he straightened out his problem below, Uncle Phineas was
being straightened out upstairs. It was the easier job of the two and
would soon be over; Jonathan had no time to lose. And so collectedly,
with presence of mind, he restored the letter to its envelope, licked
and sealed it, and returned letter and will to the drawer from which he
had taken them, leaving them to be found by others.
Three days later he prayed and preached at the funeral with great
success. People flocked to hear him, for it was already known in the
surrounding district, which had sampled his early efforts, that he was
going to become a great orator. Within a year he was due to enter the
ministry: and the True Believers swelled with a sense of triumph that
once more they were going to have among them a shining light.
In the domestic privacy of the Trimblerigg family, when the funeral was
over, the will was ceremonially opened and read; and Jonathan received
with Christian resignation the announcement that Davidina was her
uncle’s chief beneficiary.
A few days later he gave Davidina a chance to speak of the thing he
knew, by inquiring:
‘Uncle Phineas left a letter for you, didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said Davidina, and was for saying no more. But Mr. Trimblerigg
could not quite let it stop at that.
‘Anything that concerns others besides yourself?’
‘Yes,’ said Davidina again. ‘He told me that you were going to marry
Caroline, and sent you his love.’
So apparently Davidina meant that he was not to know. For once he had
beaten her; and even if it were to bring him nothing in the end there
was satisfaction in that thought.