HE KNEW THAT IT WAS A TROUBLESOME PROCESS, BECOMING A GOOD CLERGYMAN, SO
HE DETERMINED TO BECOME A GOOD PREACHER INSTEAD.
Phyllis sat alone in one of the drawing rooms, waiting until the hour of
four should arrive and bring into her presence the Rev. George Holland,
to plead his cause to her--to plead to be returned to her favor. He had
written to her to say that he would make such an attempt.
She had looked on him with favor for several months--with especial
favor for three months, for three months had just passed since she had
promised to marry him, believing that to be the wife of a clergyman
who, though still young, had two curates to do the rough work for
him--clerical charwomen, so to speak--would make her the happiest of
womankind. Mr. Holland was rector of St. Chad’s, Battenberg Square, and
he was thought very highly of even by his own curates, who intoned all
the commonplace, everyday prayers in the liturgy for him, leaving him
to do all the high-class ones, and to repeat the Commandments. (A
rector cannot be expected to do journeyman’s work, as it were; and it
is understood that a bishop will only be asked to intone three short
prayers, those from behind a barrier, too; an archbishop refuses to do
more than pronounce the benediction.)
The Rev. George Holland was a good-looking man of perhaps a year or
two over thirty. He did not come of a very good family--a fact which
probably accounted for his cleverness at Oxford and in the world. He was
a Fellow of his college, though he had not been appointed rector of
St. Chad’s for this reason. The appointment, as is well known (in the
Church, at any rate), is the gift of the Earl of Earlscourt, and it so
happened that, when at college together, George Holland had saved the
young man who a year or two afterward became Earl of Earlscourt from
a very great misfortune. The facts of the case were these: Tommy
Trebovoir, as he was then, had made up his mind to marry a lady whose
piquant style of beauty made the tobacconist’s shop where she served the
most popular in town. By the exercise of a great deal of diplomacy and
the expenditure of a little money, Mr. Holland brought about a
match between her and quite another man--a man who was not even on
a subsidiary path to a peerage, and whose only connection with the
university was due to his hiring out horses to those whom he called the
“young gents.” Tommy was so indignant with his friend for the part he
had played in this transaction he ceased to speak to him, and went the
length of openly insulting him. Six years afterward, when he had become
Earl of Earlscourt, and had espoused the daughter of a duke,--a lady who
was greatly interested in the advance of temperance,--he had presented
George Holland with the living at St. Chad’s.
People then said that Lord Earlscourt was a lesser fool than some of his
acts suggested. Others said that the Rev. George Holland had never been
a fool, though he had been a Fellow of his college.
They were right. George Holland knew that it was a troublesome process
becoming a good clergyman, so he determined to become a good preacher
instead. In the course of a year he had become probably the best-known
preacher (legitimate, not Dissenting) in London, and that, too,
without annoying the church-wardens of St. Chad’s by drawing crowds of
undesirable listeners to crush their way into the proprietary sittings,
and to join in the singing and responses, and to do other undesirable
acts. No, he only drew to the church the friends of the said holders,
whose contributions to the offertory were exemplary.
His popularity within a certain circle was great; but, as Lord
Earlscourt was heard to say, “He never played to the pit.”
He was invited to speak to a resolution at a Mansion House meeting to
express indignation at the maintenance of the opium traffic in China.
He was also invited by the Countess of Earlscourt to appear on the
platform to meet the deputation of Chinese who represented the city
meeting held at Pekin in favor of local option in England; for the
great national voice of China had pronounced in favor of local option in
England.
Shortly afterward he met Phyllis Ayrton, and had asked her to marry him,
and she had consented.
And now Phyllis was awaiting his coming to her, in order that he might
learn from her own lips what he had already learned from the letter
which he had received from her the day before; namely, that she found
it necessary for her own peace of mind to break off her engagement with
him.
Phyllis Ayrton had felt for some months that it would be a great
privilege for any woman to become the wife of a clergyman. Like many
other girls who have a good deal of time for thought,--thought about
themselves, their surroundings, and the world in general,--she had
certain yearnings after a career. But she had lived all her life in
Philistia, and considered it to be very well adapted as a place of abode
for a proper-minded young woman; in fact, she could not imagine any
proper-minded young woman living under any other form of government than
that which found acceptance in Philistia. She had no yearning to
startle her neighbors. With a large number of young women, the idea that
startling one’s neighbors is a career by itself seems to prevail just at
present; but Phyllis had no taste in this direction. Writing a book
and riding a bicycle were alike outside her calculations of a scheme of
life. Hospital nursing was nothing that she would shrink from; at the
same time, it did not attract her; she felt that she could dress quite
as becomingly as a hospital nurse in another way.
She wondered, if it should come to the knowledge of the heads of the
government of Philistia that she had a yearning to become the wife of
a clergyman, would they regard her as worthy to be conducted across the
frontier, and doomed to perpetual expatriation. When she began to think
out this point, she could not but feel that if she were deserving of
punishment,--she looked on expulsion from Philistia as the severest
punishment that could be dealt out to her, for she was extremely
patriotic,--there were a good many other young women, and women who were
no longer young, who were equally culpable. She had watched the faces of
quite a number of the women who crowded St. Chad’s at every service, and
she had long ago come to the conclusion that the desire to become the
wife of a clergyman was an aspiration which was universally distributed
among the unmarried women of the congregation.
She knew so much, but she was not clever enough to know that it was her
observance of this fact that confirmed her in her belief that it would
be a blessed privilege for such a woman as she to become the wife of
such a clergyman as George Holland. She was not wise enough to be able
to perceive that a woman marries a man not so much because she things
highly of marriage--although she does think highly of it; not so much
because she thinks highly of the man--though she may think highly of
him, but simply because she sees that other women want to marry him.
In three months she considered herself blessed among women. She was the
one chosen out of all the flock. She did not look around her in church
in pride of conquest; but she looked demurely down to her sacred books,
feeling that all the other women were gazing at her in envy; and she
felt that there was no pride in the thought that the humility of her
attitude--downcast eyes, with long lashes shading half her cheeks,
meekly folded hands--was the right one to adopt under the circumstances.
And then she saw several of the young women who had been wearing sober
shades of dresses for some years,--though in their hearts (and she knew
it) they were passionately attached to colors,--appearing like poppies
once more, and looking very much the better for the change, too; and
she felt that it was truly sad for young women to--well, to show
their hands, so to speak. They might have waited for some weeks before
returning to the colors of the secular.
She did not know that they felt that they had wasted too much time
in sober shades already. The days are precious in a world in which no
really trustworthy hair dye may be bought for money.
And then there came to her a month of coldly inquisitive doubt. (This
was when people had ceased to congratulate her and to talk, the nice
ones, of the great cleverness of George Holland; the nasty ones, of the
great pity that so delightful a man did not come of a better family.)
Why should she begin to ask herself if she really loved George Holland;
if the feeling she had for him should be called by the name of love, or
by some other name that did not mean just the same thing? Of course she
had thought a good deal--though her father did not know it--of love. She
had seen upon other people the effect of the possession of this gift of
love, how it had caused them to forget pain and poverty, and shame, and
infamy, and God, and death, and hell. Ah! that was love--that was love!
and she had hoped that one day such a gift of love would be given to
her; for it was surely the thing that was best worth having in the
world! Once or twice she had fancied that it was at the point of being
given to her. There had been certain thrilling passages between herself
and two men,--an interval of a year between each,--and there had also
been a kiss in an alcove designed by her dearest friend, Ella Linton,
for the undoing of mankind, a place of softened lights and shadowy
palms. It was her recollection of these incidents that had caused her
to fumble with the blind cord when her father had been suggesting to
her the disadvantages of inexperience in matters of the heart. But the
incidents had led to nothing, except, perhaps, a week or two of remorse.
But she could not help feeling, when that month of curious doubt was
upon her, that the little thrill which she had felt when one man had
put his arm around her for an instant, when another man--he was very
young--had put his lips upon her mouth--it was a straightforward
kiss--suggested a nearer approach to love than she had yet been
conscious of in the presence of George Holland. (He had never done more
than kiss her hand. Is it on record that any man did more when dressed
with the severity of the cleric?)
This was a terrible impression for a young woman to retain before her
engagement to a man has passed into its third month. Then she began to
wonder if all her previous ideas--all her previous aspirations--were
mistaken. She began to wonder if this was the reality of love--this
conviction that there was nothing in the whole world that she would
welcome with more enthusiasm than an announcement on the part of her
father that he was going on a voyage to Australia, and that he meant to
take her with him.
And then----
Well, then she threw herself upon her bed and wept for an hour one
evening, and for two hours (at intervals) another evening; and then
looked up the old published speeches made by a certain cabinet
minister in his irresponsible days, on a question which he had recently
introduced. Her father was bitterly opposed to the most recent views of
the minister, and was particularly anxious to confront him with his own
phrases of thirty years back. She spent four hours copying out the words
which were now meant by Mr. Ayrton to confound the utterer.