Mr. Dusautoy had given notice of the day of the Confirmation, when Mr.
Kendal called his wife.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘my dear, whether Sophia can spare you to take a
walk with me before church.’
Sophy, who was well aware that a walk with him was the greatest and
rarest treat to his wife, gave gracious permission, and in a few minutes
they were walking by the bright canal-side, under the calm evening
sunshine and deep blue sky of early autumn.
Mr. Kendal said not a word, and Albinia, leaning on his arm, listened,
as it were, to the stillness, or rather to the sounds that marked
it--the gurgling of the little streams let off into the water-courses in
the meadows; the occasional plunge of the rat from the banks, the sounds
from the town, softened by distance, and the far-off cawings of the
rooks, which she could just see wheeling about as little black specks
over the plantations of Woodside, or watching the swallows assembling
for departure sitting in long ranks, like an ornament along the roof of
a neighbouring barn.
Long, long it was before Mr. Kendal broke silence, but when at length he
did speak, his words amazed her extremely.
‘Albinia, poor Sophia’s admission into the Church has not been the only
neglect. I have never been confirmed. I intend to speak to Dusautoy this
evening, but I thought you would wish to know it first.’
‘Thank you. I suppose you went out to India too young.’
‘Poor Maria says truly that no one thought of these things in our day,
at least so far as we were concerned. I must explain to you, Albinia,
how it is that I see things very differently now from the light in which
I once viewed them. I was sent home from India, at six years old, to
correspondents and relations to whom I was a burthen. I was placed at a
private school, where the treatment was of the harsh style so common in
those days. The boys always had more tasks than they could accomplish,
and were kept employed by being always in arrears with their lessons.
This pressed less heavily upon me than on most; but though I seldom
incurred punishment, there was a sort of hard distrust of me, I believe
because the master could not easily overwhelm me with work, so as to
have me in his power. I know I was often unjustly treated, and I never
was popular.’
‘Yes, I can imagine you extremely miserable.’
‘You can understand my resolution that my boys should not be sent
to England to be homeless, and how I judged all schools by my own
experience. I stayed there too late, till I was beyond both tormentors
and masters, and was left to an unlimited appetite for books, chiefly
poetry. Our religious instruction was a nullity, and I am only surprised
that the results were not worse. India was not likely to supply what
education had omitted. Looking back on old journals and the like, I am
astonished to see how unsettled my notions were--my sublimity, which was
really ignorant childishness, and yet my perfect unconsciousness of my
want of Christianity.’
‘I dare say you cannot believe it was yourself, any more than I can.
What brought other thoughts!’
‘Practical obligations made me somewhat less dreamy, and my dear boy,
Edmund, did much for me, but all so insensibly, that I can remember no
marked change. I do not know whether you will understand me, when I say
that I had attained to somewhat of what I should call personal religion,
such as we often find apart from the Church.’
‘But, Edmund, you always were a Churchman.’
‘I was; but I viewed the Church merely as an establishment--human, not
divine. I had learnt faith from Holy Scripture, from my boy, from the
infants who passed away so quickly, and I better understood how to
direct the devotional tendencies that I had never been without, but the
sacramental system had never dawned on my comprehension, nor the real
meaning of Christian fellowship. Thence my isolation.’
‘You had never fairly seen the Church.’
‘Never. It might have made a great difference to me if Dusautoy had
been here at the time of my trouble. When he did come, I had sunk into
a state whence I could not rouse myself to understand his principles.
I can hardly describe how intolerable my life had become. I was almost
resolved on returning to India. I believe I should have done so if you
had not come to my rescue.’
‘What would you have done with the children?’
‘To say the truth I had idolized their brother to such an exclusive
degree, that I could not turn to the others when he was taken from me.
I deserved to lose him; and since I have seen this unfortunate strain of
melancholy developed in poor Sophia, who so much resembles him, I have
been the more reconciled to his having been removed. I never understood
what the others might be until you drew them out.’
Albinia paused, afraid to press his reserve too far; and the next thing
she said was, ‘I think I understand your distinction between personal
religion and sacramental truth. It explains what has often puzzled me
about good devout people who did not belong to the Church. The Visible
Church cannot save without this individual personal religion but without
having recourse to the Church, there is--’ she could not find the word.
‘There is a loss of external aid,’ he said; ‘nay, of much more. There
is no certainty of receiving the benefits linked by Divine Power to
her ordinances. Faith, in fact, while acknowledging the great Object of
Faith, refuses or neglects to exercise herself upon the very subjects
which He has set before her; and, in effect, would accept Him on her
terms, not on His own.’
‘It was not refusal on your part,’ said Albinia.
‘No, it was rather indifference and imaginary superiority. But I have
read and thought much of late, and see more clearly. If I thought of
this rite of Confirmation at all, it was only as a means of impressing
young minds. I now see every evidence that it is the completion of
Baptismal grace, and without, like poor Sophia, expecting that effects
would ever have been perceptible, I think that had I known how to seek
after the Spirit of Counsel and Ghostly Strength, I might have given
way less to the infirmities of my character, and have been less wilfully
insensible to obvious duties.’
‘Then you have made up your mind?’
‘Yes. I shall speak to Mr. Dusautoy at once.’
‘And,’ she said, feeling for his sensitive shyness, ‘no one else need
know it--at least--’
‘I should not wish to conceal it from the children,’ he answered, with
his scrupulous candour. He was supine when thought more ill of than he
deserved, but he always defended himself from undeserved credit.
‘Whom do you think I have for a candidate?’ said Mr. Dusautoy that
evening.
‘Another now! I thought you were talking to Mr. Kendal about the
onslaught on the Pringle pew.’
‘What do you think of my churchwarden himself?’
‘You don’t mean that he has never been confirmed!’
‘So he tells me. He went out to India young, and was never in the way of
such things. Well, it will be a great example.’
‘Take care what you do. He will never endure having it talked of.’
‘I think he has made up his mind, and is above all nonsense. I am sure
it is well that I need not examine him. I should soon get beyond my
depth.’
‘And what good did his depth ever do to him,’ indignantly cried Mrs.
Dusautoy, ‘till that dear good wife of his took him in hand? Don’t you
remember what a log he was when first we came--how I used to say he gave
you subscriptions to get rid of you.’
‘Well, well, Fanny, what’s the use of recollecting all our foolish first
impressions. I always told you he was the most able man in the parish.’
‘Fanny’ laughed merrily at this piece of sagacity, as she said ‘Ay, the
most able and the least practicable; and the best of it is, that his
wife has not the most distant idea that she has been the making of him.
She nearly quarrelled with me for hinting it. She would have it that
“Edmund” had it all in him, and had only recovered his health and
spirits.’
And, indeed, it was no wonder she was happy. This step taken of free
will by Mr. Kendal, was an evidence not only of a powerful reasoning
intellect bowed to an act of simple faith but of a victory over the
false shame that had always been a part of his nature. Nor did it
apparently cost him as much as his consent to Sophy’s admission into the
Church; the first effort had been the greatest, and he was now too much
taken up with deep thoughts of devotion to be sensitive as to the
eyes and remarks of the world. The very resolution to bend in faithful
obedience to a rite usually belonging to early youth and not obviously
enforced to human reason, nor made an express condition of salvation,
was as a pledge that he would strive to walk for the future in the
path of self-denying obedience. Who that saw the manly well-knit form
kneeling among the slight youthful ones around, and the thoughtful,
sorrow-marked brow bowed down beneath the Apostolic hand, could doubt
that such faith and such humble obedience would surely be endowed with
a full measure of the Spirit of Ghostly Might, to lead him on in his
battle with himself? Those young ones needed the ‘sevenfold veil between
them and the fires of youth,’ but surely the freshening and renewing
came most blessedly to the man weary already with sin and woe, and tired
out alike with himself and the world, because he had lived to himself
alone.