CHAPTER V.
Mr. Conyerswas one of the county gentry by birth, but it seemed as if the whole theory of heredity, as well as tradition, fell through in his case. The people had been used to jolly parsons, who rode to hounds and could stand up to their bottles of port quite as well as the laity. Indeed, it was reported that Mr. Conyer’s predecessor upon occasions only got to church in time to hustle his cassock on over his hunting jacket and breeches. But Conyers was more soul and spirit than body. He grew up tall, pale, slender, with but one wish on earth—to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was an ascetic by nature—an ascetic among people whose temperaments were sybaritic, and to whom nature and circumstance cried perpetually, “Eat, drink, and be merry.� They were a very honest and chivalrous people, but their spiritual part had been feebly developed. Religion to them meant morality. To Conyers it meant morality and the whole question of man’s relations to his Maker besides.
Conyers fancied that when he had begun his scholastic training for the ministry he would enter upon that course of enlightenment of the soul for which he longed. He was cruelly disappointed. He got a great deal of morality still, a little weaktheology, and a general recommendation from his ecclesiastical superiors not to be too curious. He was astute enough to see that morality was one thing and religion another, but that as long as he maintained a high standard of personal behaviour he would be allowed a fearful liberty in his beliefs. It was not an age or a place of religious enquiry, and Conyers found that all the excellent young men prepared with him for the ministry, were perfectly well satisfied with historical and biblical explanations which, to him, appeared grotesquely insufficient. When his soul craved a knowledge of the Christian religion from its beginning, and when he would have studied it from the point of sincere belief in regard to its scope, design, and its effect on man, he was expected to confine his investigations within an inconceivably narrow range. Although knowing instinctively the difference between moral practices and religious beliefs, Conyers was too earnest a lover of moral beauty to put faith in any except a good man, and he early found that some very bad men were the fountain head of certain of his beliefs. He did not lack either courage or good parts, but he lacked knowledge dreadfully, and there was no fountain open to him. But the seal of the Levite was put upon him at his birth; tormented with doubts, longings, and terrible questionings, he must still preach the Word. He kept his burning thoughts to himself, and received ordination from highly moral men who had never thought enough to harbour a doubt. He went back to his native county an ordained clergyman, to begin what he believed to be his labour in his Master’s vineyard. But never hadshepherd such a flock. When he tried to teach them spiritual things, they resented it as an attack on their morals. Old Tom Shapleigh, who was a vestryman, embodied the prevailing sentiment in his reply to Conyers when the clergyman tried to find out old Tom’s spiritual attitude.
“Now, look here, Conyers, I’ve known you ever since you were born, and I was a regular communicant in Abingdon church before your father married your mother. I was married by a bishop—yes, zounds, sir, by a bishop!—and pretty dear it cost me in more ways than one. I don’t ill-treat my wife, or starve my negroes, or cheat my neighbour, and, further than that, you have nothing to do. Spiritual attitude be hanged! Go after the women if you want to talk that sort of thing.�
Some of the women, notably Mrs. Blair, had a tender, religious sentiment that was grateful to poor Conyers, going blindly upon his way. But he could not accept the popular doctrine that only women had any spiritual side. To him the great fundamental facts of existence—the soul, the future life, all the mysterious hopes and fears of poor humanity concerning that future life—were problems that no thinking man could thrust aside. But when he tried to penetrate further than Mrs. Blair’s simple belief, her daily reading of the Bible to her children and servants, he found that he only startled and confused her. When he tried to get at the master of the house, Blair flatly refused to have anything to say regarding the state of his soul. The men like old Tom Shapleigh guyed Conyers; the men of finer fiber, like Jack Blair, avoided him. When Mr. Conyers,meeting Blair in the road, tried to talk religion to him, Blair put spurs to his horse and galloped off, laughing. When Conyers came to Newington on the same errand Blair announced to his wife that it was useless.
“I’ll be shot if any parson living shall meddle with my religion! I don’t mind a little sermonising from you, my dear, and you know I made an agreement with you that if you’d let me smoke in the drawing-room I’d stand a chapter in the Bible every night; and the fact is, a man will take a little religious dragooning from his wife or his mother without grumbling. But when it comes to a man’s trying it—why, Conyers is an ass, that’s all.�
Poor Conyers, repulsed on every side, knew not what to do. He found but one person in the whole community willing tothinkon the subject of religion, although the women were usually quite ready enough tofeel. This was Sylvia Shapleigh. But Sylvia wanted to be instructed.
“Tell me,� she said, “what is true? The Bible puzzles me; I can’t understand it. Do you?�
Conyers remained silent.
“I see the necessity for right living, Mr. Conyers, for right feeling; but—there is something more. I know it as well as you.�
Conyers’s glance sought Sylvia’s. Usually his eyes were rather cold and expressionless, but now they were full of a strange distress, an untold misery. Here was the first human being who had ever asked him for knowledge, and he was as helpless to answer her as a little child. And he aspired to be a teacher of men! He went home and studied furiously atsome expurgated copies of the Fathers he possessed, and at a few more or less acute commentaries upon them: they did not give him one ray of light. He had two or three one-sided histories of the Reformation: these he read, and cast them aside in disgust. The readiness with which creeds were made, changed, made again, in the fifteenth century had always astounded and disheartened him. The old, old difficulty came back to him—provision was made everywhere for man’s moral nature, and he earnestly believed that provision had been made for man’s spiritual nature, but he could not find that provision in the narrow sphere to which his learning and his observation was confined. But cast, as he was, upon a vast and unknown sea of doubt, and feeling that he knew nothing, and could explain nothing, he confined himself to a plain and evangelical style of preaching and an ascetic strictness of life. He made some vain appeals for help from his ecclesiastical superior, the bishop, but the bishop plainly did not understand what Conyers was after, and bade him rather sharply to cease from troubling. He reminded Conyers of what a good salary Abingdon church paid him, and in what a very agreeable and hospitable community his lot was cast. As for the salary, it was very good on paper. But the laity had a fearful power over the clergy, for all of a clergyman’s comfort depended upon whether he made himself agreeable to his parishioners or not. Conyers found this the most harrowing, debasing, unapostolic circumstance in all his long list of miseries. He earned a living, but he had trouble in getting it. He was distinctly unpopular, and one of his first acts after taking charge of theparish was calculated to foment his unpopularity. He had scruples about slavery, as he had about everything, for he was a man tormented by a devil of scrupulosity. He had inherited five negroes, and these he set free and commended them to God. The result was appalling. Of the five, two became confirmed criminals, two died of exposure and neglect of themselves, and one was hanged for murder. The planters, seeing their own well-fed, well-cared-for slaves around them, pointed to Conyers’s experiment with triumph.Thatwas what freeing a lot of irresponsible half-monkeys meant! This humble tragedy haunted Conyers night and day, and almost drove him mad. Conyers had not been a young man when he was ordained, but after this he lost every vestige of youth. There were cruel hollows in his face, and his strange eyes grew more and more distressed in their expression. Nevertheless, he would not abandon any one of his theories and principles. The people were far from vindictive. On the contrary, they were singularly amiable and easy-going; and had they been any less easy-going, pastor and people would certainly have parted company. It would have required a concerted effort to get rid of him, and Conyers, although he would cheerfully have given up his daily bread for conscience’ sake, yet could not bear to part with his dream of being a teacher and preacher. And he knew what a discredited clergyman meant. So, alternately harassed with doubts and fixed in a dull despair, he presented that spectacle which the heathen philosopher declared to be the most touching sight in the world—a good man in adversity. His adversity had a practical side to it, too. As his congregationdid not like him, they were lax about paying his salary. The pastors they were used to complained readily enough when the stipend was not forthcoming and drummed up delinquents briskly, which was a very good and wholesome thing for the delinquents; and it had not been so very long ago since the heavy hand of the law was laid upon parishioners who were forgetful of this. But the people waited for Conyers to remind them of what they owed, and he would rather have starved by inches than have asked them for a penny. So in this hospitable, delightful parish he was miserably, desperately poor. The only thing he wanted of his parishioners was what was due him, and that was the only thing they would not give him, for they were not ungenerous in other ways, and occasionally sent him bottles of Madeira when the rectory roof was leaking, and old Tom Shapleigh sent him regularly every winter a quarter of beef, which spoiled before the half of it was eaten. Conyers still took comfort in the tender emotional religion of some of the women, but Sylvia Shapleigh, whose restless mind traversed mental depths and heights unknown to most women, was the one, single, solitary person in the world who really understood why it was that Conyers was not a happy man. Sylvia herself, with a great flow of spirits and much wit and a ridiculously overrated beauty, was not happy either. Her good looks were overrated because she was so charming; but as she passed for a beauty it was all one. She had, it is true, a pair of lovely grey eyes, and a delicate complexion like a March primrose, and her walk was as graceful as the swallow’s flight. She was getting perilouslyfast out of her twenties, and there was apparently no more prospect of her marrying than at eighteen. Yet, just as people always expected Skelton to perform some wonderful intellectual achievement, so they still expected Sylvia to make a great match.
At last, fifteen years after Skelton had left Deerchase, he returned to it as suddenly as he left it. He brought with him Bob Skinny, who had become a perfect monster of uppishness, airs, and conceit; Bulstrode, who was understood to be a remarkable scholar and Skelton’s assistant in preparing the great work that was to revolutionise the world; and Lewis Pryor, a black-eyed boy whom Skelton represented to be the orphan child of a friend of his, a professor at Cambridge. People were still talking about Skelton’s wonderful promise. He was then getting on towards forty years old, and had not written a line since “Voices of the People.� The subject he was engaged upon for his wonderful forthcoming book was not precisely known, but it was understood to be a philosophical work, which would not leave the Christian religion a leg to stand upon.