Stillness in the Meeting-house, save for the light swish of one
graveyard-tree against the window-pane, and the slow breathing of the
Quaker folk who filled every corner. On the long bench at the upper
end of the room the Elders sat motionless, their hands on their knees,
wearing their hats; the women in their poke-bonnets kept their gaze upon
their laps. The heads of all save three were averted, and they were
Luke Claridge, his only living daughter, called Faith, and his dead
daughter’s son David, who kept his eyes fixed on the window where the
twig flicked against the pane. The eyes of Faith, who sat on a bench at
one side, travelled from David to her father constantly; and if, once or
twice, the plain rebuke of Luke Claridge’s look compelled her eyes
upon her folded hands, still she was watchful and waiting, and seemed
demurely to defy the convention of unblinking silence. As time went on,
others of her sex stole glances at Mercy’s son from the depths of their
bonnets; and at last, after over an hour, they and all were drawn to
look steadily at the young man upon whose business this Meeting of
Discipline had been called. The air grew warmer and warmer, but no one
became restless; all seemed as cool of face and body as the grey gowns
and coats with grey steel buttons which they wore.
At last a shrill voice broke the stillness. Raising his head, one of the
Elders said: “Thee will stand up, friend.” He looked at David.
With a slight gesture of relief the young man stood up. He was good
to look at-clean-shaven, broad of brow, fine of figure, composed of
carriage, though it was not the composure of the people by whom he was
surrounded. They were dignified, he was graceful; they were consistently
slow of movement, but at times his quick gestures showed that he had
not been able to train his spirit to that passiveness by which he
lived surrounded. Their eyes were slow and quiet, more meditative than
observant; his were changeful in expression, now abstracted, now dark
and shining as though some inner fire was burning. The head, too, had
a habit of coming up quickly with an almost wilful gesture, and with an
air which, in others, might have been called pride.
“What is thy name?” said another owl-like Elder to him.
A gentle, half-amused smile flickered at the young man’s lips for an
instant, then, “David Claridge--still,” he answered.
His last word stirred the meeting. A sort of ruffle went through the
atmosphere, and now every eye was fixed and inquiring. The word was
ominous. He was there on his trial, and for discipline; and it was
thought by all that, as many days had passed since his offence was
committed, meditation and prayer should have done their work. Now,
however, in the tone of his voice, as it clothed the last word, there
was something of defiance. On the ear of his grandfather, Luke Claridge,
it fell heavily. The old man’s lips closed tightly, he clasped his hands
between his knees with apparent self-repression.
The second Elder who had spoken was he who had once heard Luke Claridge
use profane words in the Cloistered House. Feeling trouble ahead, and
liking the young man and his brother Elder, Luke Claridge, John Fairley
sought now to take the case into his own hands.
“Thee shall never find a better name, David,” he said, “if thee live a
hundred years. It hath served well in England. This thee didst do.
While the young Earl of Eglington was being brought home, with noise
and brawling, after his return to Parliament, thee mingled among the
brawlers; and because some evil words were said of thy hat and thy
apparel, thee laid about thee, bringing one to the dust, so that his
life was in peril for some hours to come. Jasper Kimber was his name.”
“Were it not that the smitten man forgave thee, thee would now be in a
prison cell,” shrilly piped the Elder who had asked his name.
“The fight was fair,” was the young man’s reply. “Though I am a Friend,
the man was English.”
“Thee was that day a son of Belial,” rejoined the shrill Elder. “Thee
did use thy hands like any heathen sailor--is it not the truth?”
“I struck the man. I punished him--why enlarge?”
“Thee is guilty?”
“I did the thing.”
“That is one charge against thee. There are others. Thee was seen
to drink of spirits in a public-house at Heddington that day.
Twice--thrice, like any drunken collier.”
“Twice,” was the prompt correction.
There was a moment’s pause, in which some women sighed and others folded
and unfolded their hands on their laps; the men frowned.
“Thee has been a dark deceiver,” said the shrill Elder again, and with
a ring of acrid triumph; “thee has hid these things from our eyes many
years, but in one day thee has uncovered all. Thee--”
“Thee is charged,” interposed Elder Fairley, “with visiting a play this
same day, and with seeing a dance of Spain following upon it.”
“I did not disdain the music,” said the young man drily; “the flute,
of all instruments, has a mellow sound.” Suddenly his eyes darkened, he
became abstracted, and gazed at the window where the twig flicked softly
against the pane, and the heat of summer palpitated in the air. “It has
good grace to my ear,” he added slowly.
Luke Claridge looked at him intently. He began to realize that there
were forces stirring in his grandson which had no beginning in Claridge
blood, and were not nurtured in the garden with the fruited wall. He was
not used to problems; he had only a code, which he had rigidly kept. He
had now a glimmer of something beyond code or creed.
He saw that the shrill Elder was going to speak. He intervened. “Thee is
charged, David,” he said coldly, “with kissing a woman--a stranger and
a wanton--where the four roads meet ‘twixt here and yonder town.” He
motioned towards the hills.
“In the open day,” added the shrill Elder, a red spot burning on each
withered cheek.
“The woman was comely,” said the young man, with a tone of irony,
recovering an impassive look.
A strange silence fell, the women looked down; yet they seemed not so
confounded as the men. After a moment they watched the young man with
quicker flashes of the eye.
“The answer is shameless,” said the shrill Elder. “Thy life is that of a
carnal hypocrite.”
The young man said nothing. His face had become very pale, his lips were
set, and presently he sat down and folded his arms.
“Thee is guilty of all?” asked John Fairley.
His kindly eye was troubled, for he had spent numberless hours in this
young man’s company, and together they had read books of travel and
history, and even the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe, though drama was
anathema to the Society of Friends--they did not realize it in the life
around them. That which was drama was either the visitation of God or
the dark deeds of man, from which they must avert their eyes. Their own
tragedies they hid beneath their grey coats and bodices; their dirty
linen they never washed in public, save in the scandal such as this
where the Society must intervene. Then the linen was not only washed,
but duly starched, sprinkled, and ironed.
“I have answered all. Judge by my words,” said David gravely.
“Has repentance come to thee? Is it thy will to suffer that which we
may decide for thy correction?” It was Elder Fairley who spoke. He was
determined to control the meeting and to influence its judgment. He
loved the young man.
David made no reply; he seemed lost in thought. “Let the discipline
proceed--he hath an evil spirit,” said the shrill Elder.
“His childhood lacked in much,” said Elder Fairley patiently.
To most minds present the words carried home--to every woman who had a
child, to every man who had lost a wife and had a motherless son. This
much they knew of David’s real history, that Mercy Claridge, his mother,
on a visit to the house of an uncle at Portsmouth, her mother’s brother,
had eloped with and was duly married to the captain of a merchant ship.
They also knew that, after some months, Luke Claridge had brought her
home; and that before her child was born news came that the ship her
husband sailed had gone down with all on board. They knew likewise that
she had died soon after David came, and that her father, Luke Claridge,
buried her in her maiden name, and brought the boy up as his son,
not with his father’s name but bearing that name so long honoured in
England, and even in the far places of the earth--for had not Benn
Claridge, Luke’s brother, been a great carpet-merchant, traveller, and
explorer in Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Soudan--Benn Claridge of the
whimsical speech, the pious life? All this they knew; but none of them,
to his or her knowledge, had ever seen David’s father. He was legendary;
though there was full proof that the girl had been duly married. That
had been laid before the Elders by Luke Claridge on an occasion when
Benn Claridge, his brother was come among them again from the East.
At this moment of trial David was thinking of his uncle, Benn Claridge,
and of his last words fifteen years before when going once again to the
East, accompanied by the Muslim chief Ebn Ezra, who had come with him
to England on the business of his country. These were Benn Claridge’s
words: “Love God before all, love thy fellow-man, and thy conscience
will bring thee safe home, lad.”
“If he will not repent, there is but one way,” said the shrill Elder.
“Let there be no haste,” said Luke Claridge, in a voice that shook a
little in his struggle for self-control.
Another heretofore silent Elder, sitting beside John Fairley, exchanged
words in a whisper with him, and then addressed them. He was a very
small man with a very high stock and spreading collar, a thin face, and
large wide eyes. He kept his chin down in his collar, but spoke at the
ceiling like one blind, though his eyes were sharp enough on occasion.
His name was Meacham.
“It is meet there shall be time for sorrow and repentance,” he said.
“This, I pray you all, be our will: that for three months David live
apart, even in the hut where lived the drunken chair-maker ere he
disappeared and died, as rumour saith--it hath no tenant. Let it be that
after to-morrow night at sunset none shall speak to him till that time
be come, the first day of winter. Till that day he shall speak to no
man, and shall be despised of the world, and--pray God--of himself. Upon
the first day of winter let it be that he come hither again and speak
with us.”
On the long stillness of assent that followed there came a voice across
the room, from within a grey-and-white bonnet, which shadowed a delicate
face shining with the flame of the spirit within. It was the face of
Faith Claridge, the sister of the woman in the graveyard, whose soul
was “with the Lord,” though she was but one year older and looked much
younger than her nephew, David.
“Speak, David,” she said softly. “Speak now. Doth not the spirit move
thee?”
She gave him his cue, for he had of purpose held his peace till all had
been said; and he had come to say some things which had been churning
in his mind too long. He caught the faint cool sarcasm in her tone, and
smiled unconsciously at her last words. She, at least, must have reasons
for her faith in him, must have grounds for his defence in painful days
to come; for painful they must be, whether he stayed to do their
will, or went into the fighting world where Quakers were few and life
composite of things they never knew in Hamley.
He got to his feet and clasped his hands behind his back. After an
instant he broke silence.
“All those things of which I am accused, I did; and for them is asked
repentance. Before that day on which I did these things was there
complaint, or cause for it? Was my life evil? Did I think in secret that
which might not be done openly? Well, some things I did secretly. Ye
shall hear of them. I read where I might, and after my taste, many
plays, and found in them beauty and the soul of deep things. Tales
I have read, but a few, and John Milton, and Chaucer, and Bacon, and
Montaigne, and Arab poets also, whose books my uncle sent me. Was this
sin in me?”
“It drove to a day of shame for thee,” said the shrill Elder.
He took no heed, but continued: “When I was a child I listened to the
lark as it rose from the meadow; and I hid myself in the hedge that,
unseen, I might hear it sing; and at night I waited till I could hear
the nightingale. I have heard the river singing, and the music of the
trees. At first I thought that this must be sin, since ye condemn the
human voice that sings, but I could feel no guilt. I heard men and women
sing upon the village green, and I sang also. I heard bands of music.
One instrument seemed to me more than all the rest. I bought one
like it, and learned to play. It was the flute--its note so soft and
pleasant. I learned to play it--years ago--in the woods of Beedon beyond
the hill, and I have felt no guilt from then till now. For these things
I have no repentance.”
“Thee has had good practice in deceit,” said the shrill Elder.
Suddenly David’s manner changed. His voice became deeper; his eyes
took on that look of brilliance and heat which had given Luke Claridge
anxious thoughts.
“I did, indeed, as the spirit moved me, even as ye have done.”
“Blasphemer, did the spirit move thee to brawl and fight, to drink and
curse, to kiss a wanton in the open road? What hath come upon thee?”
Again it was the voice of the shrill Elder.
“Judge me by the truth I speak,” he answered. “Save in these things my
life has been an unclasped book for all to read.”
“Speak to the charge of brawling and drink, David,” rejoined the little
Elder Meacham with the high collar and gaze upon the ceiling.
“Shall I not speak when I am moved? Ye have struck swiftly; I will draw
the arrow slowly from the wound. But, in truth, ye had good right to
wound. Naught but kindness have I had among you all; and I will answer.
Straightly have I lived since my birth. Yet betimes a torturing unrest
of mind was used to come upon me as I watched the world around us. I
saw men generous to their kind, industrious and brave, beloved by
their fellows; and I have seen these same men drink and dance and give
themselves to coarse, rough play like young dogs in a kennel. Yet, too,
I have seen dark things done in drink--the cheerful made morose, the
gentle violent. What was the temptation? What the secret? Was it but the
low craving of the flesh, or was it some primitive unrest, or craving of
the soul, which, clouded and baffled by time and labour and the wear of
life, by this means was given the witched medicament--a false freedom, a
thrilling forgetfulness? In ancient days the high, the humane, in search
of cure for poison, poisoned themselves, and then applied the antidote.
He hath little knowledge and less pity for sin who has never sinned.
The day came when all these things which other men did in my sight I
did--openly. I drank with them in the taverns--twice I drank. I met a
lass in the way. I kissed her. I sat beside her at the roadside and she
told me her brief, sad, evil story. One she had loved had left her. She
was going to London. I gave her what money I had--”
“And thy watch,” said a whispering voice from the Elders’ bench.
“Even so. And at the cross-roads I bade her goodbye with sorrow.”
“There were those who saw,” said the shrill voice from the bench.
“They saw what I have said--no more. I had never tasted spirits in my
life. I had never kissed a woman’s lips. Till then I had never struck my
fellow-man; but before the sun went down I fought the man who drove the
lass in sorrow into the homeless world. I did not choose to fight; but
when I begged the man Jasper Kimber for the girl’s sake to follow and
bring her back, and he railed at me and made to fight me, I took off my
hat, and there I laid him in the dust.”
“No thanks to thee that he did not lie in his grave,” observed the
shrill Elder.
“In truth I hit hard,” was the quiet reply.
“How came thee expert with thy fists?” asked Elder Fairley, with the
shadow of a smile.
“A book I bought from London, a sack of corn, a hollow leather ball, and
an hour betimes with the drunken chair-maker in the hut by the lime-kiln
on the hill. He was once a sailor and a fighting man.”
A look of blank surprise ran slowly along the faces of the Elders. They
were in a fog of misunderstanding and reprobation.
“While yet my father”--he looked at Luke Claridge, whom he had ever been
taught to call his father--“shared the great business at Heddington, and
the ships came from Smyrna and Alexandria, I had some small duties, as
is well known. But that ceased, and there was little to do. Sports are
forbidden among us here, and my body grew sick, because the mind had no
labour. The world of work has thickened round us beyond the hills. The
great chimneys rise in a circle as far as eye can see on yonder crests;
but we slumber and sleep.”
“Enough, enough,” said a voice from among the women. “Thee has a friend
gone to London--thee knows the way. It leads from the cross-roads!”
Faith Claridge, who had listened to David’s speech, her heart panting,
her clear grey eyes--she had her mother’s eyes--fixed benignly on him,
turned to the quarter whence the voice came. Seeing who it was--a widow
who, with no demureness, had tried without avail to bring Luke Claridge
to her--her lips pressed together in a bitter smile, and she said to her
nephew clearly:
“Patience Spielman hath little hope of thee, David. Hope hath died in
her.”
A faint, prim smile passed across the faces of all present, for all knew
Faith’s allusion, and it relieved the tension of the past half-hour.
From the first moment David began to speak he had commanded his hearers.
His voice was low and even; but it had also a power which, when put to
sudden quiet use, compelled the hearer to an almost breathless silence,
not so much to the meaning of the words, but to the tone itself, to
the man behind it. His personal force was remarkable. Quiet and pale
ordinarily, his clear russet-brown hair falling in a wave over his
forehead, when roused, he seemed like some delicate engine made to do
great labours. As Faith said to him once, “David, thee looks as though
thee could lift great weights lightly.” When roused, his eyes lighted
like a lamp, the whole man seemed to pulsate. He had shocked, awed,
and troubled his listeners. Yet he had held them in his power, and was
master of their minds. The interjections had but given him new means to
defend himself. After Faith had spoken he looked slowly round.
“I am charged with being profane,” he said. “I do not remember. But
is there none among you who has not secretly used profane words and,
neither in secret nor openly, has repented? I am charged with drinking.
On one day of my life I drank openly. I did it because something in me
kept crying out, ‘Taste and see!’ I tasted and saw, and know; and I know
that oblivion, that brief pitiful respite from trouble, which this
evil tincture gives. I drank to know; and I found it lure me into a new
careless joy. The sun seemed brighter, men’s faces seemed happier,
the world sang about me, the blood ran swiftly, thoughts swarmed in
my brain. My feet were on the mountains, my hands were on the sails of
great ships; I was a conqueror. I understood the drunkard in the first
withdrawal begotten of this false stimulant. I drank to know. Is there
none among you who has, though it be but once, drunk secretly as I drank
openly? If there be none, then I am condemned.”
“Amen,” said Elder Fairley’s voice from the bench. “In the open way by
the cross-roads I saw a woman. I saw she was in sorrow. I spoke to her.
Tears came to her eyes. I took her hand, and we sat down together. Of
the rest I have told you. I kissed her--a stranger. She was comely. And
this I know, that the matter ended by the cross-roads, and that by and
forbidden paths have easy travel. I kissed the woman openly--is there
none among you who has kissed secretly, and has kept the matter hidden?
For him I struck and injured, it was fair. Shall a man be beaten like a
dog? Kimber would have beaten me.”
“Wherein has it all profited?” asked the shrill Elder querulously.
“I have knowledge. None shall do these things hereafter but I shall
understand. None shall go venturing, exploring, but I shall pray for
him.”
“Thee will break thy heart and thy life exploring,” said Luke Claridge
bitterly. Experiment in life he did not understand, and even Benn
Claridge’s emigration to far lands had ever seemed to him a monstrous
and amazing thing, though it ended in the making of a great business in
which he himself had prospered, and from which he had now retired. He
suddenly realized that a day of trouble was at hand with this youth on
whom his heart doted, and it tortured him that he could not understand.
“By none of these things shall I break my life,” was David’s answer now.
For a moment he stood still and silent, then all at once he stretched
out his hands to them. “All these things I did were against our faith.
I desire forgiveness. I did them out of my own will; I will take up your
judgment. If there be no more to say, I will make ready to go to old
Soolsby’s hut on the hill till the set time be passed.”
There was a long silence. Even the shrill Elder’s head was buried in
his breast. They were little likely to forego his penalty. There was
a gentle inflexibility in their natures born of long restraint
and practised determination. He must go out into blank silence and
banishment until the first day of winter. Yet, recalcitrant as they held
him, their secret hearts were with him, for there was none of them but
had had happy commerce with him; and they could think of no more bitter
punishment than to be cut off from their own society for three months.
They were satisfied he was being trained back to happiness and honour.
A new turn was given to events, however. The little wizened Elder
Meacham said: “The flute, friend--is it here?”
“I have it here,” David answered.
“Let us have music, then.”
“To what end?” interjected the shrill Elder.
“He hath averred he can play,” drily replied the other. “Let us judge
whether vanity breeds untruth in him.”
The furtive brightening of the eyes in the women was represented in
the men by an assumed look of abstraction in most; in others by a bland
assumption of judicial calm. A few, however, frowned, and would have
opposed the suggestion, but that curiosity mastered them. These watched
with darkening interest the flute, in three pieces, drawn from an inner
pocket and put together swiftly.
David raised the instrument to his lips, blew one low note, and then
a little run of notes, all smooth and soft. Mellowness and a sober
sweetness were in the tone. He paused a moment after this, and seemed
questioning what to play. And as he stood, the flute in his hands, his
thoughts took flight to his Uncle Benn, whose kindly, shrewd face and
sharp brown eyes were as present to him, and more real, than those of
Luke Claridge, whom he saw every day. Of late when he had thought of
his uncle, however, alternate depression and lightness of spirit had
possessed him. Night after night he had troubled sleep, and he had
dreamed again and again that his uncle knocked at his door, or came and
stood beside his bed and spoke to him. He had wakened suddenly and said
“Yes” to a voice which seemed to call to him.
Always his dreams and imaginings settled round his Uncle Benn, until
he had found himself trying to speak to the little brown man across the
thousand leagues of land and sea. He had found, too, in the past that
when he seemed to be really speaking to his uncle, when it seemed
as though the distance between them had been annihilated, that soon
afterwards there came a letter from him. Yet there had not been more
than two or three a year. They had been, however, like books of many
pages, closely written, in Arabic, in a crabbed characteristic hand, and
full of the sorrow and grandeur and misery of the East. How many books
on the East David had read he would hardly have been able to say; but
something of the East had entered into him, something of the philosophy
of Mahomet and Buddha, and the beauty of Omar Khayyam had given a
touch of colour and intellect to the narrow faith in which he had been
schooled. He had found himself replying to a question asked of him in
Heddington, as to how he knew that there was a God, in the words of a
Muslim quoted by his uncle: “As I know by the tracks in the sand whether
a Man or Beast has passed there, so the heaven with its stars, the earth
with its fruits, show me that God has passed.” Again, in reply to the
same question, the reply of the same Arab sprang to his lips--“Does the
Morning want a Light to see it by?”
As he stood with his flute--his fingers now and then caressingly rising
and falling upon its little caverns, his mind travelled far to those
regions he had never seen, where his uncle traded, and explored.
Suddenly, the call he had heard in his sleep now came to him in this
waking reverie. His eyes withdrew from the tree at the window, as if
startled, and he almost called aloud in reply; but he realised where
he was. At last, raising the flute to his lips, as the eyes of Luke
Claridge closed with very trouble, he began to play.
Out in the woods of Beedon he had attuned his flute to the stir of
leaves, the murmur of streams, the song of birds, the boom and burden
of storm; and it was soft and deep as the throat of the bell-bird of
Australian wilds. Now it was mastered by the dreams he had dreamed
of the East: the desert skies, high and clear and burning, the desert
sunsets, plaintive and peaceful and unvaried--one lovely diffusion, in
which day dies without splendour and in a glow of pain. The long velvety
tread of the camel, the song of the camel-driver, the monotonous chant
of the river-man, with fingers mechanically falling on his little drum,
the cry of the eagle of the Libyan Hills, the lap of the heavy waters
of the Dead Sea down by Jericho, the battle-call of the Druses beyond
Damascus, the lonely gigantic figures at the mouth of the temple of Abou
Simbel, looking out with the eternal question to the unanswering desert,
the delicate ruins of moonlit Baalbec, with the snow mountains hovering
above, the green oases, and the deep wells where the caravans lay down
in peace--all these were pouring their influences on his mind in the
little Quaker village of Hamley where life was so bare, so grave.
The music he played was all his own, was instinctively translated from
all other influences into that which they who listened to him could
understand. Yet that sensuous beauty which the Quaker Society was so
concerned to banish from any part in their life was playing upon them
now, making the hearts of the women beat fast, thrilling them, turning
meditation into dreams, and giving the sight of the eyes far visions
of pleasure. So powerful was this influence that the shrill Elder twice
essayed to speak in protest, but was prevented by the wizened Elder
Meacham. When it seemed as if the aching, throbbing sweetness must
surely bring denunciation, David changed the music to a slow mourning
cadence. It was a wail of sorrow, a march to the grave, a benediction,
a soft sound of farewell, floating through the room and dying away into
the mid-day sun.
There came a long silence after, and David sat with unmoving look upon
the distant prospect through the window. A woman’s sob broke the air.
Faith’s handkerchief was at her eyes. Only one quick sob, but it
had been wrung from her by the premonition suddenly come that the
brother--he was brother more than nephew--over whom her heart had
yearned had, indeed, come to the cross-roads, and that their ways would
henceforth divide. The punishment or banishment now to be meted out to
him was as nothing. It meant a few weeks of disgrace, of ban, of what,
in effect, was self-immolation, of that commanding justice of the
Society which no one yet save the late Earl of Eglington had defied.
David could refuse to bear punishment, but such a possibility had never
occurred to her or to any one present. She saw him taking his punishment
as surely as though the law of the land had him in its grasp. It was not
that which she was fearing. But she saw him moving out of her life. To
her this music was the prelude of her tragedy.
A moment afterwards Luke Claridge arose and spoke to David in austere
tones: “It is our will that thee begone to the chair-maker’s but upon
the hill till three months be passed, and that none have speech with
thee after sunset to-morrow even.”
“Amen,” said all the Elders.
“Amen,” said David, and put his flute into his pocket, and rose to go.