“The Vicarage,Caistorholm,Lincs.August 10, 188“DEAR SIR,—I am strongly recommended by my esteemed friend, Mr. Fortescue, to seek your advice and professional assistance in a somewhat complicated matter in which I am very seriously concerned. Unfortunately, the absence of the Bishop on the Continent has thrown an unusual stress of diocesan work upon me, and I cannot very well pay a visit to Yorkshire at this juncture. Moreover, if you should be disposed to undertake the protection of my interests, the matter is such as to render a visit by you—probably, indeed, many visits—to this neighbourhood, indispensable. May I suggest, then, that you should accept the modest hospitality of the Vicarage for a few days. If you can come, I hope you can come at a very early day. You will find the route by Doncaster a convenient one, and if you will apprize me of the time of your arrival, I will send the carriage to meet your train. Believe me, Mr. Fortescue has spoken to me of you in such terms that I hope your many engagements will not preclude you from giving your valued time and attention to the affair in which I hope to have the benefit of your advice.Yours faithfully,HUGH ST. CLAIR,Archdeacon.”
“The Vicarage,Caistorholm,Lincs.August 10, 188“DEAR SIR,—I am strongly recommended by my esteemed friend, Mr. Fortescue, to seek your advice and professional assistance in a somewhat complicated matter in which I am very seriously concerned. Unfortunately, the absence of the Bishop on the Continent has thrown an unusual stress of diocesan work upon me, and I cannot very well pay a visit to Yorkshire at this juncture. Moreover, if you should be disposed to undertake the protection of my interests, the matter is such as to render a visit by you—probably, indeed, many visits—to this neighbourhood, indispensable. May I suggest, then, that you should accept the modest hospitality of the Vicarage for a few days. If you can come, I hope you can come at a very early day. You will find the route by Doncaster a convenient one, and if you will apprize me of the time of your arrival, I will send the carriage to meet your train. Believe me, Mr. Fortescue has spoken to me of you in such terms that I hope your many engagements will not preclude you from giving your valued time and attention to the affair in which I hope to have the benefit of your advice.Yours faithfully,HUGH ST. CLAIR,Archdeacon.”
“The Vicarage,
Caistorholm,
Lincs.
August 10, 188
“DEAR SIR,—
I am strongly recommended by my esteemed friend, Mr. Fortescue, to seek your advice and professional assistance in a somewhat complicated matter in which I am very seriously concerned. Unfortunately, the absence of the Bishop on the Continent has thrown an unusual stress of diocesan work upon me, and I cannot very well pay a visit to Yorkshire at this juncture. Moreover, if you should be disposed to undertake the protection of my interests, the matter is such as to render a visit by you—probably, indeed, many visits—to this neighbourhood, indispensable. May I suggest, then, that you should accept the modest hospitality of the Vicarage for a few days. If you can come, I hope you can come at a very early day. You will find the route by Doncaster a convenient one, and if you will apprize me of the time of your arrival, I will send the carriage to meet your train. Believe me, Mr. Fortescue has spoken to me of you in such terms that I hope your many engagements will not preclude you from giving your valued time and attention to the affair in which I hope to have the benefit of your advice.
Yours faithfully,
HUGH ST. CLAIR,
Archdeacon.”
“Who’s ‘my friend Mr. Fortescue’?” queried Beaumont. “Never heard of him in my life that I can remember. Tell you what, Sam, seems to me this letter’s missed its way. St. Clairs and Fortescues and crests and mottoes aren’t much in our line, eh? Memorandum heads from Plover Mills, Telephone address No.—is more our form. Yet here it is as plain as a pike-staff, ‘Edward Beaumont, Esq., solicitor, Huddersfield.’”
“I fancy I’ve heard my reverend relative talk of a Fortescue he knew at Cambridge. I daresay that’s the way it’s worked round. Anyhow, assuming the letter’s for you, what do you mean to do? Go, of course.”
“Well, no, Sam, I think not. You see, Archdeacons and I don’t assimilate somehow. Who was it that wondered how the old augurs and haruspices kept their faces when they saw each other? Well, I’m that way with parsons. Not that I ever came across a live Archdeacon. But I suppose he’ll be a cleric, double distilled. I think you’d better write and offer your own valuable services. Besides, it looks like chamber business, and that’s your department, you know.”
“Well, I’m not having any, thank you, Beaumont. I pass this deal. I’ve no sort of fancy for passing a week in a country vicarage with a parson double-distilled or diluted. I know the kind of thing; family prayers at eight, croquet with the parsonettes till luncheon, cold mutton and rice pudding and small beer, inspection of the village school at three, yawn yourself to death till dinner, heavy joint, sodden pudding, cheap claret, family prayers again at ten, no beer, no baccy, no cards, unless its back-gammon or whist for penny points and no grog. A washed-out archdeaconess, gushing or prim daughters, a dozen of ’em, a cub of a son home from the local grammar-school, a noodle of a curate, and the devil and all to pay if you wink at the chambermaid. No thank you, Beaumont, you’re the man asked for, and ought to go. You can talk theology till you’re black in the face, and flirt mildly with the saintly misses, take it out of the curate generally, and perhaps shoot a rabbit or two if you fancy yourself with a gun,” concluded Sam, viciously.
And so it came to pass that Edward Beaumont some three days later found himself in a market train crawling between Doncaster and Caisterholm, marvelling at the, to him, new and unaccustomed types he saw on the platforms or had for companions in his department—gentlemen farmers, with a horsey look, ponderous bucolics, farmers of their thousand acres, and slouching, sleepy peasants, with occasional glimpses of country Hebes, with tangled, tawny locks, blooming cheeks, cherry lips, dancing eyes of azure hue, bidding noisy farewells or boisterous greetings to bent and wrinkled parents as they left for or returned to their rural homes from domestic service in the colliery towns, where so many leave their roses and their innocency. As the train crept its leisurely way into the heart of the fen country, with its thorpes and long spires or hoary towers, its dykes and placid streams—the majestic Trent spanned and left many miles behind—its hazel groves, its clustered copses, its broad expanse of teeming soil, groaning in labour of the bearded barley and the golden wheat, Beaumont could scarcely realise that but a few hours’ journey had borne him from the rough, brown, bare, moor-crested hills of his home, with their streams all foul with the waste of the dye-pans, the sky greyed by the smoke of a legion of long and lean mill-chimneys, sallow, gaunt, eager-visaged, restless mill hands, rude and assertive of speech, clattering everywhere with clogged feet, all nerve, hurry, impatience, and irreverence. When he asked his whereabouts, and was told that the Parts of Holland lay to his left, he could have well-believed that he had slept and awoke in the flat land of Hans and Frau and schiedam. The talk, such as there was, of his companions for the first few miles had been of mangols and “’tates,” of beasts and calves, of tithes and rents, of bushels and loads, and the dreadful low prices ruling at the Corn Exchange in Doncaster. The farmers had talked with dreamy complacency of inevitable ruin, and seemed to be sheathing themselves in fat as they progressed comfortably to the Bankruptcy Court. There had been a good many clergymen travelling by the same train for short distances, and they seemed as learned in matters agricultural as their parishioners. One, indeed, had spoken of chemistry and scientific agriculture, and certain classes that were spoken of for the farmers, with professors from London, and the farmers had listened with tolerant contempt, but with the evident conviction that nothing was to be learned from gentlemen in London.
“I went to one o’ the classes when I was staying with my missus’ brother, Selby way. An’ if he didn’t talk of oxides an’ nitrates. If he’d ha’ talked about poor-rates and sheep scab there’d ha’ been some sense in it.”
Edward Beaumont did not anticipate his stay at Caistorholm Vicarage without some inward trepidation. To begin with, he did not quite know what manner of man an Archdeacon might be. He had a vague memory that Lord Palmerston had defined an Archdeacon to be a priest who discharged archidiaconal functions; but that did not seem to help him much. His own acquaintance among ministers of religion lay chiefly among the professors of dissenting doctrines with whom his political activities had brought him into contact on the Liberal Two Hundred and on platforms. He bethought him of two doctors of divinity of his own town, one a pillar of Congregationalism, a Scotchman, long, lean, ascetic, but a scholar; the other a Boanerges of the Baptist faith, loud, blatant, pushing, with an American degree. A week of either in the enforced companionship of a country house would be badly paid by any fee the most indulgent taxing-master would be likely to approve. But an Archdeacon! That might mean anything from a prince of the Church, haughty, dignified unconsciously patronizing, to a country vicar with a sounding title, but differing only from an educated farmer in the necessity of preaching a sermon a week to a sprinkling of clodhoppers and pensioners.
“Anyhow, I won’t be patronized!” resolved Edward, as he drew near his destination. “If I find the place too much of a bore, or too much against the grain, I can either chuck the thing altogether or send Storth. He’s got a better stomach for spattle than I have, and if there’s a decent inn in the place, with a respectable tap, Master Sam will comfort himself o’ nights for the ennui of the days.”
The station at Caistorholm seemed to consist of a platform and a wooden waiting-room, a porter’s-room, and a ticket-office. An aged station-master received his portmanteau, and told him a carriage from the Vicarage was waiting outside for a gent from Yorkshire. A steep flight of wooden steps led from the top of the embankment, on which the station stood, to the long, straight, chalky road outside—a Roman road Edward learned later, straight as an arrow’s flight, running mile after mile in undeviating line—“the shortest distance between two extreme points,” ruminated Edward. A neat dogcart was at the foot of the steps, a natty groom stood at the head of the mettlesome cob; the aged porter, descending the steps with difficulty, placed Edward’s portmanteau at the back of the phaeton, received a more liberal tip, as he reflected subsequently, than he was accustomed to receive from visitors to the Vicarage, and the mare, at a word, jumped to the collar, and the carriage bowled away. On each side the road a broad, unfenced ditch ran between the highway and the hedgerows that fenced the spreading acres of potatoes, cabbage, and turnip that spread on either side, far as the eye could reach, in one vast expanse of weary level, unbroken save by an occasional windmill, whose great wheels turned slowly with many a creak and groan in the warm autumn air.
“These roads must be dangerous on a dark night,” suggested Beaumont, by way of breaking a silence that was becoming irksome.
“Not when you knows the road, sir.”
“The farmers hereabout must be a remarkably temperate sort of men!”
“’Taint the farmers, sir, it’s the hosses. Give a hoss his head if you be o’ercome yourself, sir, an’ he’ll bring you home all right, never fear. That’s my advice.”
“I don’t drive myself,” said Edward, smiling, “when I do I’ll remember your advice. Though I’m more by way of giving advice than taking it.”
“Doctor Gummidge, sir, the young ’un, he hasn’t been in these parts above ten year or so. He take a deal aboard, he do, to be sure, an’ he never had a spill yet that I heerd tell on. If you can’t trust a hoss, sir, why, sell him or shoot him, that’s what I say. That’s the Vicarage, sir, between the trees. If you’ll hold the reins, I’ll open the gates of the drive. Woa, lass.”
A wide, well-kept carriage drive swept up between fields of what Edward rightly surmised to be ancient glebe, in which a few sheep grazed placidly, lifting drowsy heads to gaze unconcernedly at the high stepping mare, a turkey, angrily suffused about the head, gobbled in indignant protest, and a peacock, with outspread tail, strutted resplendent. An Alderney whisked the flies from its back lazily as it chewed its cud. A sunk fence divided the paddocks from a large lawn, which, with flower beds of varied shape, rich in a declining bloom, extended to the long French windows of a massive, square, two-storied building of deep-toned, ruddy brick, about which the ivy and the honeysuckle climbed and clustered in rich luxuriance. At the trellised porch of the main entrance stood a tall, well-built, portly man of some sixty years. His face was full and clean-shaven, his teeth perfect, his hair, still abundant, snowy white. His broad shoulders, well thrown back, enabled him to bear without loss of dignity a becoming fullness of habit. The hand, which was extended in greeting to Edward, was plump, white, and soft, the voice refined and mellow.
“You’re train was late, of course, Mr. Beaumont. If a train arrived punctually at Caistorholm we should expect a revival of miracles in the Church. You shall go to your room now, and we can have a chat in my study before dinner. We dine early, six o’clock. I hope you won’t find that too early for you; but you must try to put up with our country ways.”
The ordinary dinner-hour at Huddersfield was one o’clock. At the club or hostelries at which Beaumont was fain to dine, if he wished for ought more than the chop or steak beyond which the culinary skill of his landlady seldom adventured, one o’clock was the sacred hour of dinner, and at that time the manufacturers, merchants, and professional men took their substantial mid-day meal. To be sure, there were occasional dinner-parties at private houses of the more pretentious of thenouveaux richesof the neighbourhood, fixed for seven o’clock, at which the gentlemen were expected to appear arrayed in the correct glories of evening-dress, but Edward had always complied with an ill-grace to this sacrifice to middle-class snobbishness. He thought it ridiculous that people who, on three hundred and sixty days of the year, sat down at noon with healthy appetites to their Yorkshire pudding and roast beef, with pickled cabbage and apple-pie and cheese, and a glass of Burton to wash it down, should, on festive days, don a garb they were not used to, and in which they felt ill at ease, dine off kickshaws they did not care for, drink wines of which they hardly knew the names, and which they did not honestly like—all because, instead of dining, they were giving a dinner. However, he had brought a dress suit with him in—utrurmque sortem paratus, as he reflected with satisfaction. The library at the Vicarage was a capacious room, furnished in oak, and did service also as a smoke-room. It was a very choice Havana that the Archdeacon handed to his guest, as the latter joined him in the pleasant room, and stood to admire the prospect from the long French window giving upon the trim lawn.
“I’m afraid you won’t find many books here much to your taste; but my daughter will perhaps be able to find you some literature of a lighter sort.”
“I confess, Archdeacon, to a weakness for fiction. The mistress of my choice is, of course, law; but I flirt with divinity, or, should I say, apologetics, and I am afraid to think how many novels I read in the year.”
“Ah! well,dulce est desipere. Unhappily I neglect my books too much in these latter days. And for some time now I have been unable to concentrate my mind even on my sermons, I suppose it is a just judgment on me. I preach to my poor flock on the sin of covetousness and the blessedness of contentment, and yet I have myself, though blessed by Providence with stores above my every need, have not known to be content, and have sought to add to my sufficiency. I saymea culpawith all my heart, and I promise you, Mr. Beaumont, if you can help me out of this coil, never again to entangle myself with concerns I do not understand, and which have brought me hitherto only anxious days and sleepless nights.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Edward, “’t were as well that you should give me an outline of the matter on which you desire my assistance. I can afterwards consider the papers in detail, for I understand the affair is one of complexity.”
“A perfect maze, I assure you, my dear sir. I was tenth wrangler of my year, and one would have thought I should know something about figures. But when I try to understand the books and accounts of the Skerne Iron Works Company, of which I am a director, I am as utterly befogged as if I had never heard of Todhunter or Colenso.”
“Ah, well! happily I know something of book-keeping, so we may be able to unravel the skein. Now tell me all about it.”
“What do you say to a little whisky and seltzer to your cigar—unless you prefer a dry smoke?”
“If you will join me, Archdeacon.”
“With all my heart. We have a couple of hours before the dressing-bell sounds. If whisky and rheumatism had been known to St. Paul, and Timothy’s complaint had not apparently been simply stomachic, no doubt the Pauline injunction would have been more comprehensive. But I am not for literal interpretation, Mr. Beaumont, are you?”
“Assuredly not! We will apply thecy presdoctrine. ’tis merest equity.”
The Archdeacon looked puzzled, but passed the decanter.
“It is some five years since I acquired my shares in the Skerne Iron Works. The concern had, according to all seeming, been a prosperous one for years. The three brothers who owned it were most respectable men, good churchmen, justices for the borough of G——, and, in a word, most respectable men. When they turned their business into a company, and sold out the greater part of their interest, I was easily persuaded to adventure a large part of my savings in the shares of the company. I was only getting a beggarly 4 per cent. on mortgage securities, and had often as much difficulty and delay in getting my interest as I still have in getting my tithes. But the Skerne shares showed 7 per cent., and the interest was to come as punctually as quarter-day itself. So it did for a year or so, and I congratulated myself on my prescience in making so excellent an investment. I assured myself that my dear daughter’s welfare was now secured, die when I might. Of course, as you know, my income with this living dies with me. My poor wife had some three thousand pounds of her own, which, by her will, she left to our child, and as I was sole trustee of it, I thought I could not do better than invest it along with my own money, and my daughter, of course, assented to my proposal.”
“Was she of age?” asked Edward.
“H’m, well, no; not at the time.”
“Was the Skerne investment authorised by the terms of the will?”
“Really I cannot say, and I don’t see that it matters. Of course, whatever I have is, or will be, my daughter’s some day.”
“Quite so,” assented Beaumont. “Well?”
“The shareholders made me a director,” continued the Archdeacon, “and for a time I took quite an eager interest in the work of the concern. It was quite delightful to drive over—it is but ten miles from here—and see the various processes. But after the first twelve months or so, instead of dividend warrants, I got calls, and that was not so pleasant, you know.”
“Naturally,” agreed Edward. “What became of the three most respectable brothers?”
“Two of them retired on the formation of the company. The elder continued for a time as managing director; but gradually, as I have ascertained, he, too, has almost entirely severed his connection, and his financial interest in the works is very slender. In fact, whilst I was eagerly acquiring more and more of the shares, Allcroft, that’s his name, was quietly but steadily getting rid of his.”
“‘Unloading,’ I think it is called,” said Edward.
“And a very good term, too. The worst of it is, in a sense, I not only put my own and my daughter’s money into the company, but persuaded a number of my brother clergymen to do the same. You see, Mr. Beaumont, an archdeacon has naturally a great deal of confidence reposed in him, and, I’m sure I can’t tell why, my brethren credited me with an amount of business capacity and astuteness, which it is quite clear I don’t possess.”
“You ought to have smelt a rat when the Allcrofts unloaded. Depend upon it, they knew what they were about.”
“Oh! they had very good reasons to give—family settlements, the desire to retire from business, and so on.”
“You went into this thing, I suppose, largely on the advice of these Allcrofts?”
“Entirely.”
“Well, if I had thought their advice good enough to lead me into it, I think I should have considered their example still better to lead me out. However, you aren’t out, so it’s no use talking about that. But perhaps it’s not too late now. The shares will have fallen, but you might clear at a trifling loss.”
“Rat, you mean?”
“If you like, yes. A sinking ship’s not the best quarters.”
“You forget, Mr. Beaumont, I told you many of my brother clergymen have invested in the Skerne Iron Works through my advice and influence, and, indeed, not a few others, widowed ladies chiefly of small means. And I cannot leave them in the lurch. I wish you to investigate the affairs of the Company, and to take such steps as may get me clear of it with honour and with as little loss as may be.”
“I understand thoroughly, Archdeacon, and I shall have pleasure in doing my best to protect both your interest and your honour.”
“And now, Mr. Beaumont, enough of business for to-day. It is time to dress, and we shall, no doubt, find my daughter expecting us in the drawing-room. Our neighbour, Squire Wright, is to dine with us to-day, I think.”
Whilst the Vicar and his lawyer were in serious conference in the library. Miss Eleanor St. Clair was whiling away the tedious quarter of an hour before the dinner-bell with the only other guest of the evening. She was the Archdeacon’s only child, and he a widower for some years, and, since her mother’s death, the charge of the household had devolved upon daughter. Perhaps that fact had given to Eleanor a thoughtfulness and an air of authority beyond her years. Tall, raven of hair, of pure, pale the complexion, with dark orbs, full of life and intelligence, Eleanor moved with the easy grace of accustomed dignity.Incessit regina. Related on her mother’s side to the noble house of Yarborough, she did not forget that her grandfather was an earl, and it is possible she was equally well aware that the coronet of a countess would sit becomingly upon the smooth, white brow borne so proudly above her long but rounded neck, and the white smooth shoulders her simple costume of to-night rather hinted than revealed.
Her companion, Squire Wright, was the largest landowner, except perhaps the noble family aforesaid, for miles around. He said, and believed, that when Norman William came to the fens, a Wright was a Saxon Thane, and lord of many a wide-spreading demense, and that, from that day to this, Thoresby Manor had never been without a squire of his family sprung in direct line from the stout old Thane, who had dealt his shrewd knocks against the mailed warriors on Senlac’s fatal field. One felt little disposed to question the genealogy, looking at the present representative of the ancient line. George Wright was a well-set, stalwart man, of some thirty summers. His hair was flaxen, and curled closely to his head, his short beard and moustache were of flax, rudded by the sun, his shoulders were broad, his chest deep, his cheeks full, his eye of pale blue—a healthy, manly young Saxon, and good to look upon. For the rest, was he not in the commission of the peace, had a troop in the Yeomanry, riding to the annual inspection at the head of his own tenantry, could give a good account of himself among the partridges, and was so good a judge of a horse or a bullock that he was one of the judges at the County Cattle Show, and if not especially brilliant, was also not especially stupid; and if he had sowed any wild oats had sowed them discreetly and without scandal; was regular in his church-going, a steady supporter of the Crown, the Church, and the finest constitution in the world, and had no silly fads. He was an easy landlord, and, therefore, popular; his estate was unencumbered, and there were no sisters or younger brothers to provide for, and as it was now full time in everybody’s opinion, his own included, that he should marry and settle down, he told himself to-night for the thousandth time, that the country for once was right when it declared that no more gracious nor more beautiful nor more worthy a mistress for Thoresby Grange could be found, search where he might, than the Archdeacon’s queenly daughter.
“We have a visitor, George, from Yorkshire. Papa thought he could not very well do otherwise than ask him to stay at the Vicarage; though, I’m sure, if he’s at all like that horrid Mr. Shaw, he would have been much more at home at the ‘Marquis of Granby’ than with us.”
“And why should he be like ‘that horrid Shaw,’ Eleanor? Though Shaw is right enough for anything I can see. What’s the matter with Shaw, and why should your visitor be like him?”
“Mr. Shaw always smells of gin and tobacco, and our visitor, like him, is a solicitor.”
“Phew! a solicitor, and from Yorkshire? But, then, there are no doubt solicitors and solicitors; though I confess I don’t like the breed. No trouble of the Archdeacon’s, I hope.”
“Something to do with the Iron Works, I fancy. Papa, I know, has been very much troubled about them. You know I hate business, and understand it as little as I dislike it much. Whatever could have induced papa to meddle with those dirty works I can’t conceive.”
“Well come to that I’ve got a few shares in the Iron Works myself, Eleanor. The Archdeacon said it would be a good thing. I’m not in very deep, but I’m afraid your father has invested pretty considerably in the shares. Indeed, I know he has taken over shares from people who bought on his recommendation, and very foolishly insisted on giving them the price they gave, though the shares are down in the market.”
“Well, I only hope this Mr. Beaumont, I think they call him, will take some of the creases out of papa’s brow. He may smell of gin and tobacco as much as he likes, and I’ll be monstrous civil to him, if he’ll do that, and I expect you to be the same, sir. But here they come.”
If either Eleanor St. Clair or Squire Wright had any idea of being condescendingly polite to the lawyer from Yorkshire, the idea was banished as Edward Beaumont acknowledged the Archdeacon’s introduction to his daughter, and made his bow before his hostess. If Edward had not mixed much in polite society—as the world counts polite society—he knew its usages. Without being conceited, he knew himself to be as well educated, in the broad sense of the word, as most men, and he was very far from feeling disposed to cringe before either Church dignitary or landed magnate. The Archdeacon, indeed, accustomed to the smooth deference of the suave attorneys of the cathedral town who did the business of the clergy of the county, had been surprised and pleased to find in his guest not only a shrewd, well-informed lawyer, but a scholar and a gentleman, who took it for granted that he would be received in the Archdeacon’s house on the footing of any other guest.
The dinner-gong sounded as the introductions ended, and Edward with Miss St. Clair on his arm, followed his host and the Squire into the dining-room.
“You’ve not seen enough of our county, yet, to tell us how it impresses you, Mr. Beaumont, and I don’t know anything of Yorkshire, except that it is mostly moors and mills. Huddersfield, I suppose, is all smoke and mills?”
“We’ve mills enough in and about the town, but we haven’t much to complain about in the matter of smoke. For one thing, the surrounding hills are so lofty, and the moors on their summits so extensive, that the breezes sweep down the valleys or over our heads, and of a summer day you can stand in the main street of the town and see above your head sky as blue and as little obscured by smoke as looks down upon your fat pastures and rustling cornfields. You must go to Sheffield for smoke, not Huddersfield.”
“But your people,” said the Squire. “They’re a rascally set of malcontents, I have always understood—Chartists, atheists, and Communists.”
Edward laughed pleasantly.
“I am by way of telling our people they are the most intelligent and the most independent in the world. I’ve no doubt, though, there are some Chartists among them, or those who were Chartists in their youth. As for Republicans, well, you know, we go in for practical measures up our way and leave Utopias to the dreamers. As Pat at Donnybrook Fair, if he sees a head he hits it; so we just hit the abuses we see.”
“But aren’t the mill-hands, generally speaking, a very godless set of men?” asked the Archdeacon. “I have always looked on my brother clergymen who accept livings or curacies in the West Riding more as missionaries than incumbents, and, indeed, they tell fearful tales of the irreverence and slackness of the common people in the manufacturing towns. Dissent, we know, is simply rampant in the West Riding.”
“I should scarcely have regarded dissent as a sign of want of spirituality,” said Edward, with a quiet smile. “I have always regarded it as a rather disagreeable sign of excessive spirituality—religion run mad.”
“But the mills, Mr. Beaumont,” interposed Miss St. Clair, who, perhaps, thought the conversation was tending in a direction best avoided. “One reads stories of the awful lives of the factories. It must be so wretched to live all the weary days amid the din of the wheels and the fluff and dirt and grease of the wool.”
“If you were to stand, Miss St. Clair, as I have often stood, of a dark and wintry night on the ridge of one of our valleys, and looked down upon the great mills, their windows all glowing with light, and heard from within the deep voices of the men, and the sweet, pure, trained notes of the women and the girls, blended in some well-known hymn, or even taking their parts in some familiar and more complex song, you would not think the weaver’s lot a very wretched one. Depend upon it, there’s a lot of poetry in a mill, only we haven’t yet been happy enough to produce a poet. But I profess it is strange to find you commiserating our mill-hands. We in the West Riding have always thought it was the poor hinds of the country who called for commiseration. I don’t know that we regard Huddersfield as an Athens of the North, but we certainly have thought of parts of Lincolnshire as a sort of Baotia. I’m afraid we have been wasting a lot of very genuine sympathy. Perhaps I don’t know much about Hodge. I hope to know more before I leave Lincolnshire. May I hope Miss St. Clair will be my instructress?”
“Confound his impudence!” thought the Squire. “Do you hunt, Mr. Beaumont?”
“No! our’s is not a hunting district. Besides, I haven’t the time for it.”
“You shoot, of course?”
“Oh! I’ve knocked over a grouse or a hare or two. But, to tell the truth, I am no sportsman. When I go on the moors I’d rather lie down in the sun and admire the view than blaze away at the birds. And as for sport, rather badger a witness than hunt a fox, any day.”
“We can’t all badger a witness,” suggested Eleanor.
“Besides, a fox likes the run as much as the hounds do.”
“So I’ve heard,” conceded Edward; “but never from the lips of Monsieur Reynard. I never heard of a witness enjoying badgering. But, there, I’m no sportsman, only because I can’t get sport conveniently—I’m no sentimentalist.”
“It’s marvellous,” said the Archdeacon, “what a lot of ‘anti-everything’ people there are. You have nothing to do nowadays but declare you like something, and a society is sure to be formed to put it down. There are people who won’t smoke, or drink a glass of good wine, or honest beer, or eat flesh meat, or play a hand at whist, or go near a racecourse, or handle a gun, or touch a cue. It is Puritanism run mad.”
“They’re generally a set of low Radical Methodists,” opined the Squire. “You never find such absurd fads among Church people.”
“Of course not,” agreed the Archdeacon. “All the same,” demurred Edward, “I don’t see the connection between sound doctrine and roast beef, or between Church polity and a hand at whist.”
“It’s a mental habit, my dear sir,” explained the cleric. “A man begins by dissenting from the Church of his fathers, and by a natural process begins to question their diet.”
“Depend upon it,” said Wright, with conviction, the battles of Old England were never fought, nor its empire built, on carrots and cold water. Look at your Frenchman.”
“I’ve known some very charming French-women,” protested Edward.
“We spent a month in Paris last autumn,” said the Archdeacon, “and I hadn’t a decent meal all the time I was there.”
“Oh! Papa!” protested Eleanor. “The cooking is exquisite.”
“A woman doesn’t understand cooking,” declared her father. “It is well known that if the matter had been left to Eve, we should never have progressed beyond tea and bread and butter.”
“At any rate, Eve invented costumes,” suggested Edward. “The Palais-Royal was founded in Eden.”
“Don’t speak disrespectfully of Eden,” said the Archdeacon.
“I don’t. ’tis there we meet the first lawyer.”
“You mean the serpent.”
“TesteColeridge,” said Beaumont. “You remember the lines, Miss St. Clair?—
‘Cain and his brother Abel.’”
‘Cain and his brother Abel.’”
‘Cain and his brother Abel.’”
“I never knew before how much we have to reproach you with, Mr. Beaumont.”
“But if there had been no lawyers there would have been no—Archdeacons, shall we say?”
“Oh, then, we’ll forgive them for the sake of the Archdeacons. You won’t keep me sitting by myself in the drawing-room too long, papa,” and Miss St. Clair swept through the door which Beaumont opened. “I declare we women have always to leave the table by the time men find their tongues.”
“’Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance,” quoted Edward, as he bowed before her.
“Fill up your glass, Wright,” said the Archdeacon. “That Burgundy’s all right, if you prefer it. But I’m for the vintage—what does our Lincolnshire bard sing?—
‘Whose father grape grew fatIn Lusitanian summers.’
‘Whose father grape grew fatIn Lusitanian summers.’
‘Whose father grape grew fat
In Lusitanian summers.’
Did you see theStandardthis morning, Mr. Beaumont? I see the rumour grows more persistent that Gladstone may dissolve any day. He will go to the country, of course, on the Extension of the Franchise?”
“And Parish Councils,” added Beaumont.
“Cursed rot,” muttered the Squire. “That man will ruin the country. See if he don’t disestablish and disendow you, Archdeacon, before he dies.”
“Mr. Gladstone’s a good Churchman, I always understood,” demurred Edward.
“He’d rob his grandmother for power,” vowed the Squire.
“Perhaps Mr. Beaumont is an admirer of his?” queried his host.
“My grandfather was a Whig, my father a Liberal, and you may write me down a——”
“‘Not an ass,’ that’s the correct quotation, I believe.”
“No! a Radical.”
“That’s worse!” said the Squire, with emphasis.
“Radical lawyers areraræavesare they not, Mr. Beaumont?” asked the Archdeacon.
“Black swans. Black enough, I suppose, Mr. Wright thinks. Well, yes, in the country, men of my branch of the profession are generally Conservative. I don’t know why, except it be that they have the sense to know on which side their bread is buttered.”
“Of course,” said the Squire; “the law and the land.”
“But in my town,” said Edward, “there’s only one landlord and we can’t all live on him. But we manage to butter our bread pretty well all the same.”
“No more wine, Mr. Beaumont? Then we’ll see if Miss St. Clair can give us a cup of tea.”
CHAPTER IV.
The time passed very pleasantly at Caistorholm Vicarage. Edward rose betimes each morning, and was often deep immersed in the intricacies of the Skerne Iron Works Company’s accounts long before his host had quitted his downy bed, and could with clear conscience enter into those delights of country-life that were to him all the sweeter because unaccustomed. The glories of the Vicarage garden were on the wane, but its orchard was prepared to yield its juicy fruits. The fields were fast ripening for the sickle. The great calm and hush of those pastoral scenes stole over his senses like a young child’s sleep. There were no revelries, but there was constant interest. The Archdeacon had suggested a dinner-party, but Edward had been so emphatic in his declarations of preference for quiet, the project had been abandoned. A neighbouring vicar or rector dropped in occasionally for luncheon, and was easily persuaded to stay for dinner. Edward had, at first, spoken rarely and with reserve about matters social and political—doctrine was avoided by common consent. Strange, one may pass a month in a clergyman’s house and never hear religion discussed. Presumably the household has so long taken fundamental dogma for granted that the possibilities of wide divergence amounting to repudiation is not so much as thought of. Edward saw with amaze men of unquestioned scholarship and intelligence equally indisputably above the average grow warm and excited in discussing the Eastward position, incense, lights, stoles, birettas, man millinery generally. He itched to tell them that the vast bulk of those who should be their flock didn’t care a brass farthing about genuflexions or ecclesiastical trappings. What the human soul yearns to understand is the Divine rule and ordinance, if rule and ordnance there be and not blind chaos; to know if man be indeedImaginis Imago, or but the last if not the final link of a chain long drawn out with a protoplasm at one end of it; if there is indeed and in very sooth a God our Father, who sees and loves and can be moved by prayer, if man have in truth an immortal spirit or is like unto the beasts that perish; if it be true that after death comes the judgement, when the gross inequalities of this world shall be made right and virtue shall indeed reign. Edward knew, as any man with ears to hear may know, that the avowed scepticism of mankind is a mere speck of dust compared with the huge mass of practical perhaps unconscious, infidelity that pervades society. It filled him with impatient scorn that men who should be leaders of thought, able to give counsel and enlightenment to those who grope in darkness, should spend the priceless years in mumbling twaddling homilies and in agitated harassment about stage effects. He could not interest himself in the question how far a beneficed incumbent may go on the road to Rome without jeopardising his living. He longed to tell these clerical traitors who let “I dare not wait upon I would,” that in this country any man worth his salt, who had a message to give, need not be uneasy about the forthcoming of the salt. He could go back to Yorkshire, he reflected sardonically, and find a score of half-educated weavers who had borne hunger and thirst, imprisonment, and stripes for conscience sake, and were ready to do it again and glory in the doing. But, then, hunger and thirst and imprisonment and stripes are one thing to a man to whom hunger and thirst and oppression are the daily lot, and quite another to a sleek, soft man who basks in the sunshine all his days and counts himself piteously poor and an object of commiseration on five hundred a year.
“Why, don’t you all turn dissenters?” he asked of a clerical party one evening, as they lingered over the desert. “You all find fault with your Bishop. The poor man can apparently do nothing right. If you were dissenting ministers you would be your own bishops.”
“I fancy, my dear Beaumont, the dissenters have their Trust deeds.”
“Oh, Trust deeds—a fico for your Trust deeds. They talk about driving a coach and six through an Act of Parliament—why, a regiment of soldiers could walk through a Trust deed. ’Tis an instrument as little resorted to for the purpose of torture in a Nonconformist church as the thumbscrew in the Tower of London. Besides a man isn’t a fixture in a Dissenting Church. When he has talked himself dry, or made more enemies than friends, he can always change pulpits with another fellow who has talked himself dry or made more enemies than friends.”
“There are our social status and influence to be considered,” said a sucking young curate just emerged from the Bishop’s Hostel. “Our mere position invests us with a sacred authority never wielded by a mere dissenter.”
“Your social position is largely the result of social factors. The Established Church draws its ministers mainly from families socially established, and they receive not only the education and culture, but also the social stamp of Oxford or Cambridge. The dissenting parson is often the son of a grocer or a shoemaker, and receives a surface polish and a surfeit of theology at a training college, but seldom loses the smell of the ancestral shop. Your clergyman is a gentleman first, a clergyman afterwards. Turn all your well-born scholars into Methodists, and your half-educated social inferiors into the Church, and you would reverse the present social positions of the established and the nonconforming divines.”
“Then you think our present social superiority, and therefore our greater influence for good, for, of course, it is only to be valued for that, is a matter of birth and education.”
“Largely, but not entirely. You see, your present status is official. You owe your posts directly or indirectly to the Crown. You are part of the machinery of the State. And it is surprising how mere officialism and the possession of authorised and acknowledged titles impress the popular imagination in this country. You see it all through. Dub a man M.A. or LL.D., and the general man will persist in thinking him a better scholar than another who far surpasses him, but has not received the hall-mark of a University. So put a man in uniform with epaulettes and dub him an officer. He bears a social cachet, though he may be a poltroon and a blackguard. It is largely an affair of clothes and names and State-connection. You clergymen, if you really care about retaining your social importance, would commit social suicide if you got yourselves disestablished, even if you retain those endowments and other fleshpots you are so concerned about, but which appear to me the element you could most easily compensate under a system of voluntaryism.”
“Then you think, Mr. Beaumont,” asked the Rector of Fillingham, “our policy is to let well alone?”
“Yes, if you’re let. I think if I were an incumbent with a fat living I could swallow my bishop and make no bones about it. Remember the dissenting parsons have their deacons, and I can conceive of nothing more galling than for a man of principle and education to have to trim his sails to suit the views of a coarse, uneducated deacon with all the soul of a village tyrant, just because he happens to have more money than some of the humbler worshippers. I should preach either him or myself out of the conventicle.”
“Ah! he would be your bishop,” laughed the Archdeacon.
“Those dissenters are just the plague of my life,” confided one of the country vicars from a neighbouring parish. “Just fancy, Mr. Beaumont, there aren’t five hundred families in all my parish, and yet there is besides mother church, a Wesleyan chapel, a Congregational and a Baptist. It turns my modest glass of wine and my crust to gall and ashes when I think of it.”
“Oh! I know something of the feeling, Vicar. You don’t suppose I like to see people taking their cases to the man next door, who, I am persuaded is not half so fine a fellow as I am. But you can’t go begging for communicants, any more than I can go touting for clients. Besides, what does it matter in which church a man saves his soul alive, so long as it is saved.Ut palata, sic judiciais of universal application.”
“Ah! but can a man be saved outside the true Church?” asked the young curate from the Bishop’s Hostel.
“That’s a question the next Roman Catholic parish priest might have something to say about,” rejoined Edward. “Anyway, people seem willing to risk it. Don’t you think, Archdeacon, instead of trying to filch flocks from the folds, the shepherds of the Church could find quite enough to do in casting their crooks about those wandering sheep that are utterly lost in the wilderness?”
“Pray condescend to particularise, Mr. Beaumont,” begged his host.
“Well, a day or two before I came down here a vulgar case, of which I need not trouble you with the details, gave me a glimpse of the workings of the Salvation Army.”
“A most valuable institution, no doubt,” said the Archdeacon.
“Yes,” said Edward, “but you will pardon my saying—why a Salvation Army at all? Here are more than half our churches and chapels with yawning pews, and out in the street are crowds of earnest enthusiasts following a dancing Dervish and a big drum.”
“You wouldn’t have me dancing in my cassock through Caisterholm, and the parish clerk or verger tinkling a tambourine?”
“Well, no. But, after all, if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain. And that’s just General Booth’s secret.”
“A very latitudinarian young man,” commented one vicar to another, as they jogged home together in the still autumnal evening through the fragrant hedgerows. “Whatever did St. Clair mean by taking advice from a man like him. But the man may be a good lawyer for all that, and I won’t look too closely at his Church principles if he’ll pull my good sovereigns out of those infernal Skerne blasts.”
The Archdeacon himself, before Beaumont had been a week under his roof, had conceived not only a high opinion of his guests’ acumen and legal attainments, but also a warm regard for himself personally. Their very points of difference seemed to enhance the pleasure the cleric found in the lawyer’s society and conversation. It is true they approached almost every subject from an entirely different point of view, and therein lay constant danger of friction or collision. But Edward had ever a seemly consideration for his senior in years and a ready concession of whatever deference the Archdeacon’s ecclesiastical dignity reasonably demanded. There is, perhaps, nothing so well designed as practice in the Courts to develop in a man a happy blending of due submission to authority with the respectful but unflinching assertion of one’s own opinions. The Archdeacon declared in later years that it was as great a pleasure to be routed in argument by Beaumont as to prevail, for the fellow had a sweet reasonableness about him that took away the sting of defeat, and almost persuaded the vanquished that he himself was victor. The elder man was fond of controversy if it were not pushed too far, of debate if it were conducted decently. It was an intellectual treat to meet a man with the generous enthusiasm of youth and with ideas outside the narrow range with which a country clergyman, whose only associates are clergymen like unto himself, must, almost perforce, be content. Though not so disputative as the man who repined because the very wife of his bosom was ceasing to contradict him, the Archdeacon wearied at times of speakingex cathedraMoreover, in a society drawn almost exclusively from one’s fellows controversy lacked not only variety of interest but variety of treatment. No doubt the smooth serenity of a soundly Conservative orthodoxy was an excellent thing, but the Vicar of Caistorholm confessed to himself that Beaumont’s radical heterodoxy, if a disturbance, was one that acted as a mental tonic and wholesome fillip. Exercise is a disturbance; but it is recommended for the liver. Mr. St. Clair acknowledged with a sigh that, intellectually and spiritually, life at Caistorholm might be serene, but it was unquestionably sluggish.
“We touched on Disestablishment the other evening,” he said one day to Edward, as they walked together in the peaceful afternoon of a mellow autumn day about the Vicarage gardens; “I did not encourage you to pursue the subject, because some of our friends are very sensitive on that topic. To us clergymen, you know, the Church is as the Ark to the Levites, not to be touched by unholy hands.”
“Well,” said Edward, smiling, “I’ve no mind to bring upon myself the fate of Uzzah—at all events, I must avoid it whilst I am at the Vicarage. Percz-Uzzah is not near so pretty a name as Caistorholm.”
“But though I did not think it desirable to discuss the question when some of my friends were present who are, I fear, too apt to confound persons and principles and to think suspiciously, if not evilly, of a man who differs from them as widely as I know you do, I hope you will not conclude I shrink from discussing it. Nay, I confess, I should like to know your views on the question more at large, for then we of the Order should at least know how we appear to the outer world and learn the worst we have to expect.”
“To tell the truth, Mr. St. Clair, it is a question I have little at heart. It has always seemed to me more an affair between Church and Chapel than one that concerns the masses very largely. And, you see, if I’m but an indifferent Churchman I’m just as bad a Chapel man. Indeed, so far as I can see, a Chapel man is only an average Trinitarian, plus envy, indocility, and cant. In the abstract, of course, I certainly think the Establishment cannot be justified to-day whatever might have been said for it, at the reformation, say. As for your endowments, I think the nonconforming envy of them simply contemptible, and the claim that they ought to be applied to national education, free libraries, art galleries, etc., a mere pretence. If John Bull wants art galleries he can afford to pay for them without taking the coat off your back. No! I don’t feel like slapping you in the face, Archdeacon, just to pleasure the Rev. Josiah Boanerges, who would have no objection to be snugly endowed himself. Frankly, I don’t think the Church will fall from any blows that may be dealt from without. Its danger lies in the dry-rot that is silently but surely Consuming the inner rafters and supports.”
“Dry rot, my dear Beaumont!”
“Yes, dry-rot. If I speak at all you must let me speak frankly, and you know I do not want to wound your sensibilities. Burns, after all, was foolish to sigh for the gift to see ourselves as others see us. It might from ‘mony a faultie free us and sair mistake’; but it would so rudely and so constantly shake our serenity that life would not be worth the living. Let us change the subject, Archdeacon.”
“Well, I’ll tell you frankly enough the great danger of the Church. You know it is a common lament that your services, in the towns, I mean, attract the women, not the men?”
The Vicar bowed a silent assent.
“Now, how do you account for it, Mr. St. Clair?”
“I can only suggest spiritual indifference.”
“Nay, I cannot subscribe to that. Take my town. Let a good speaker be announced to deliver an address on political or social questions he can fill the Town Hall with men and women, mostly men, of every grade—clergy men, dissenting ministers, lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, merchants, shop-keepers; and working-men.”
“Yes, but that is to hear about worldly affairs, Beaumont, not heavenly. Your lecturers deal with to-day and here. I speak of to-morrow and there.”
“Ah! well, Archdeacon, I think you will find if a man is anxious about setting matters right to-day and here he will not be indifferent about to-morrow and there. But you must satisfy him there is a to-morrow and there.”
“But that is of course.”
“To you, yes. But to how many? I don’t judge men by their professions or their creeds. I judge them by their acts. And so judged I conclude that for most men to-day and here are very real, to-morrow and there are very visionary, very problematical; so distant, so uncertain, as to be a negligible quantity.”
“Then you would have us?”
“I would have the Church remember that we live in a questioning age, an age when the fact of an institution or an opinion being hoary with age, so far from rendering it secure from investigation rather makes it an object of suspicion. We have found our forefathers wrong in so many things, and we have improved on them so much, that we have lost our confidence in their judgment. The Church drones about things nobody questions I mean what Matthew Arnold calls ‘right conduct,’ what you call ‘righteousness’; it dogmatises, I mean asserts positively or takes for granted things which an increasing number of intelligent men are very far indeed from taking for granted. Men will no more endure being droned to about right conduct than they will submit to having it eternally dinned into their ears that twice two makes four. They cry you ‘granted.’ They go to Church for bread and you give them a stone. They seek for guidance and assurance, if guidance and assurance there may be, on matters you have made a special study, and instead of showing them how to be sure, you only tell them that you are sure.”
“What more can we do? People don’t believe, because their hearts are corrupt, and they don’t want to believe. If anyone wish to know the truth let him seek it on his knees. ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whither it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’”
“Possibly,” said Edward, dryly. “We quote authorities in the Law Courts, Mr. St. Clair; but, you see, they are of acknowledged validity there. The suitors in our Courts are bound by the law they seek to invoke, and submit themselves to the jurisdiction when they enter their plaints. You see, the whole point is that, to-day, you have to deal with honest doubters who deny the authority of your authority, and your only answer is apetitio principis. But I see Miss St. Clair is ready for her expedition to the village, and I am to have the honour of accompanying her.”
The Archdeacon looked thoughtfully at the figures of his daughter and guest, as, side by side, apparently in gay converse, they passed down the Vicar’s Walk that led through orchard and paddock, past the hoary church and mouldering churchyard into the road that led to the straggling rows of peasants’ and small farmers’ houses, with here and there a shop, that constitute the village of Caistorholm. He could not fail to observe that Eleanor took pleasure in the lawyer’s company, that her glance had been brighter, her face happier of late. Mr. St. Clair was glad that Edward’s stay at the Vicarage should be made pleasant to him, and that his daughter should find a visit that might have developed into a visitation an agreeable break in the monotony of rural life. It was, of course, eminently satisfactory that the stranger whom he had been advised to consult and to trust in a matter of the very gravest importance should turn out to be not only a sound and reliable lawyer and a shrewd business man, but also a well-educated, well-read man, with the manners of a gentleman. Mr. St. Clair’s acquaintance with solicitors was chiefly confined to the urbane practitioners who dealt in advowsons or were learned in dilapidations, and with them he had permitted himself rather a condescending affability. From the first he had recognised that he could not patronise Beaumont, and had enjoyed the discomfiture and amazement with which Squire Wright had retired from his attempt in that direction, and which had so affected him that he had given the Vicarage a wide berth ever since. But Mr. St. Clair told himself that, after all, he knew very little about Beaumont. His old college friend, Fortescue, had told him that he had heard the best accounts of Beaumont’s successful conduct of a difficult and delicate matter, in which a mutual friend had been embroiled, and on his recommendation, and not without some natural hesitation, he had invited Edward to his home, feeling that he would rather confide to a stranger living at a distance than to a Lincoln lawyer the whole story of what he was now fully persuaded had been his very foolish, nay, reckless speculations in the Skerne shares. With Edward as a legal adviser he felt that he had more than reason to be satisfied, and he had enjoyed his conversation and the interchange of thought not a little. But he noticed with anything but satisfaction that Edward had made his conversation very acceptable to the stately Eleanor, who was not easily pleased. Not one afternoon passed but the young people found some occasion for being together—a round of parochial visits in which Edward carried the basket, and supplemented Eleanor’s tracts with covert half-crowns to rheumatic and asthmatical pensioners; a drive in Eleanor’s pony-carriage to some object of antiquarian interest, an ancient tower or a ruined church—who does not know the devices by which the tedium of the country is enlivened for the visitor from the towns?
On these excursions the Archdeacon felt he could not, even privately to his daughter, put an embargo, without giving them an importance which they might not deserve, and even suggesting to his daughter’s mind ideas that might never lodge there unless suggested. To be sure, the Archdeacon might accompany the young folk on these jaunts; but the archdeacon, like many less exalted individuals, liked to take his ease of an afternoon, and found himself on all the better terms with himself and mankind in general for forty winks in the armchair of his study, after luncheon of an afternoon, when it was a matter of faith in the household that he was meditating his next Sunday sermon, and must on no account be disturbed.
And so it came about that if Edward spent many a long hour with the father over the wearying and irritating concerns of the Iron Works, or holding forth, as was his wont, upon topics of more general interest, sometimes startling, sometimes alarming, but always interesting the Vicar, he spent also hours that seemed neither long, tedious, nor irritating with Eleanor St. Clair, when we may be sure the subjects of conversation were neither law nor theology nor commerce.
“This kind of thing, Miss St. Clair, is idyllic,” said Beaumont. “I have always had my mental picture of the Lady Bountiful of a village. She must, of course, be beautiful, with a soft, musical, tender voice, a heart quick to feel, and a soft and lily-white hand quick to help. Her path is strewn beneath her feet with the heartfelt blessings of the poor and afflicted. She moves a ministering angel among the hovels of the destitute.”
“Ah! now, Mr. Beaumont, you are laughing at me. Surely you would have me help the sick and needy.”
“It is the most priceless prerogative of the rich, and if I seem to mock I hasten to crypeccavi. But, seriously, this kind of parochial charity is but a dainty dilettantism, and you engage in it, Miss St. Clair, I beg you to confess, partly because it grieves you to see suffering without trying to relieve it and partly because it is picturesque.”
“Then I shall confess nothing of the kind, Mr. Beaumont. It is my simple duty to visit the sick and to do what little I can to ease their pains.”
“There’s Stokes the cobbler laid up with the lumbago, I am told. I went into his little shop the other day to get a trifling repair done, and the poor old fellow was nearly doubled up with pain, and, if I’m not very much mistaken, slowly dying of hunger. Shall we take Stokes the cobbler on our round?”
“Stokes does not belong to us, Mr. Beaumont. Papa would not like me to visit him. And I’m not sure that Stokes would be over civil to me.”
“He seemed a surly sort of customer, truly. I was chatting away quite comfortably with him when I mentioned casually that I was staying at the Vicarage. Then he seemed to shut himself up as I’ve seen a flower do in an east wind. Is there war between him and the Vicarage?”
“As if there could be! Papa would not condescend to notice anything such a man could say or do. All the same, it isn’t nice to be called a whited sepulchre, and I believe that is Stokes’ mildest epithet for papa.”
“Then he’s a dissenter, I suppose. He did not appear unctuous enough for that. But religion may have disagreed with him. I have observed that with some people it acts like whey in a curd.”
“They say,” spoke Eleanor, with bated breath, “he’s a Bradlaughite, an atheist. He talks about Tom Paine and the rights of man.”
“And how does he live?”
“As you know, he is a cobbler. But I don’t suppose he gets much work. It is very inconvenient. Of course, we cannot send our repairs to him, and his being here prevents another setting up in the village.”
“It’s most inconsiderate of him,” said Beaumont, gravely. “He ought to be made to see that he is inconveniencing the servants of the Vicarage. No doubt, if he were told, he would go away, and make room for a better man. Then he doesn’t get much work?”
“Very little. He seems to spend most of his time, in the summer, in the fields; and I have heard he has a curious gift of taming birds and animals. I fancy he ekes out a scanty livelihood that way.”
“Perhaps he has taken to birds and animals because he can’t get men and women to have anything to do with him. A man must love something or other.”
“What! all men?”
“Yes, I suppose so—all men. Even lawyers.”
“I know one lawyer who is very fond of something.”
“And of someone?”
“I said something, sir!”
“And that is?”
“Lecturing other people.”
“A hit, a most palpable hit, Miss St. Clair. I own my fault. But confess I don’t pretend to be a bit better than my neighbours. But about this Stokes, now. He interests me.”
“Of course.”
“Why of course?”
“Well, you see, Stokes would be all right if he would only take things as he finds them. Why can’t he come to church like other people, and be a decent member of society? Instead of that he goes on Saturday night to the public-house and talks—oh! horrid things—blasphemy and high treason, to the labourers. Papa says if his ricks are burned he shall have Stokes arrested as an accessory before the fact.”
“I don’t suppose Mr. St. Clair will entrust me with the brief for the prosecution.”
“Oh, no! If you don’t take care, sir, you’ll have enough to do to defend yourself some fine day. But I’ve done Stokes an injustice. I said he went to the public-house. He used to; but the Publican refused to serve him any more.”
“Got too much to drink, I suppose. I always knew tailors were a guzzling lot. Tailoring runs to drink, as naturally as cobbling to atheism. I don’t know why, but cobblers are all free-thinkers and tailors and lawyers’ clerks born tosspots.”
“Well, you’re out this time, Mr. Beaumont. The landlord—he’s people’s warden, you know, at the church and a most respectable man—turned Stokes out because, whenever he went of a Saturday night, he drank only one mug of small beer in a matter of three hours, and all the time discoursed of nothing but the evils of strong drink. He so frightened our undergardener, who was of the company, that he turned teetotaller, and got my maid to stitch him a piece of blue ribbon in the lapel of his Sunday coat.”
“That was carrying the war into the enemy’s camp with a vengeance. Well, he won’t be able to corrupt the farm labourers any longer of a Saturday night now he’s ejected from the ‘Blue Boar.’”
“Oh! they’ve started a club, and Joseph Arch came to open it. Papa was so upset he fled to Lincoln, and stopped a whole week at the Palace, though he does nothing but quarrel with the dear bishop.”
“And I suppose the Vicarage set the fashion in tabooing this poor son of St. Crispin?”
“Of course, papa cannot countenance atheism and arson”
“Clearly. But if the man’s ill, the man’s ill, and atheist or no atheist the man’s a man. I’m sorry I didn’t know more about him when I went to have my boot stretched. However, the other boot isn’t very comfortable, that’s one consolation.”
They walked on in silence for a time. Then, apropos of nothing, Eleanor said, very quietly: “The man must have some good about him or he wouldn’t be so fond of birds and animals. I think my boot is not very comfortable, Mr. Beaumont.”
Edward laughed gaily. “What will the Archdeacon say?”
“Oh! papa won’t mind. He’ll probably tell me I’m a goose for my pains.”
“Ah! well; I don’t know. I think the Church makes a mistake in being so discriminating in its charity.”
“You are a universal fault-finder, Mr. Beaumont. But I suppose that is what makes you a Radical. It must be a very unhappy state of mind—to be always seeing the imperfections of things.”
“Somebody must do it, Miss St. Clair. Even critics have their uses. But when you announced so unexpectedly that your shoe pinched you, I was wondering how Sister Gertrude would have dealt with old Stokes.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister. Do tell me about her.”
“Well you see, I haven’t, except in a very broad sense. Sister Gertrude is the name of a young lady I met under rather interesting circumstances. Shall I tell you about her?”
Then Edward narrated the story of the troubles of Patrick Sullivan.
“Was she very beautiful?”
“Very. It was a sort of awful beauty. You forgot the artistic delight inspired by her perfection of form, colour, and expression, in the sense that you gazed upon one who was superior to mere charm of person. There seemed something like sacrilege in thinking of her as beautiful. I suppose a devout Catholic does not let his thoughts dwell upon the physical charms of the Madonna.”
“You cease to be critical, Mr. Beaumont, sometimes I see. And she was a lady, you say?”
“Unquestionably, or I’m no judge.”
“But, after all, this lady only does ostentatiously and to the sound of the drum and the tambourine what I, what we, try to do quietly and unostentatiously. You sneer at my tracts; but as I have no gifts for sermon-making, what can I do but take a tract?”
“Oh! I don’t find fault with the tracts, Miss St. Clair, though they’re twaddly things.”
Miss St. Clair smiled.
“I fear they’re very goody-goody. But I don’t write them, you know. Why don’t you write a tract yourself, Mr. Beaumont, and show the world how it should be done?”
“Again a hit, a most palpable hit. But you see, that isn’t my line.”
“No; your line is fault-finding. What’s that Latin papa always quotes—si possis, ernenda. I forget the rest.”
“Si non, his utere mecum,” completed Edward. “Well, I won’t amend your tracts, still less use them. A Radical has greater work cut out for him. You see that hind labouring in the field yonder, Miss St. Clair? Now, I think I know the kind of life that man leads. He toils like a slave year in and year out for a wretched twelve shillings a week. He lives on fat bacon and cabbage and coarse bread. His thatched cottage is small, dark, unwholesome. There is a cesspool at his very door and a dunghill under his window. His great dissipation is a quart of beer and a big drunk at harvest time. He can scarcely read, and if he could read he has no literature but a Bible, of which only very small portions are intelligible to him for want of other knowledge, and, of course, your tracts. When he is old, and rheumatism wracks his bones, and he is past work, he and his dame must either be burdens on their children, who will be no better off than he is now, or go to the Union Workhouse. And this kind of thing has been going on for generation after generation, and all the suggestion the Church, or Sister Gertrude I suppose for that matter, has to make, takes the form of a bottle of medicine, a roll of flannel, and a tract or a sermon.”
Edward spoke warmly indignantly.
“And you?” said Miss St. Clair.
“I—nay, not I. Say We. We, Radicals I mean, would tell that man he is a fool to be content to till the land all his life for another to reap the harvest. We don’t think that it is one of the divinely ordained laws of nature that there should be a Squire Wright and a Hodge.”
“There always has been, there always will be, just as there have always been horses and riders.”
“And hammers and anvils? Well, we Radicals think otherwise. We say that it is better that all men should walk on their own legs than that one should be borne in a palanquin. Some day the people will examine the title deeds of your Squire Wrights.”
“That will be a fat day for the lawyers, Mr. Beaumont,” suggested Eleanor mischievously.
“Nay, in the ideal state there’ll be no lawyers.”
“And clearly there’ll be no critics; there’ll be nothing to criticise. Poor Mr. Beaumont. How unhappy you’ll be.Quelle triste veillesse vous vous preparez.”
“Oh, well, imperfection will last my time, Miss St. Clair. And if I cannot find perfection in this sweet Arcadia of yours, why I deserve to. . . .”
“Get Sister Gertrude to find it for you in the slums. How provoking there’s the bell, and only just time to dress for dinner.”
CHAPTER V.
The business that had taken Edward Beaumont to Caistorholm was progressing satisfactorily, and the Archdeacon and the other shareholders had every reason to congratulate themselves on having invited his assistance. It had been the usual story, a large industrial concern successfully and prosperously conducted so long as its founders had been young, energetic, and single-eyed. When they had made their fortunes and courted ease they had converted the business into a company, retaining a connection with it as salaried directors. They had put their own price on what they had to sell to the company and had not felt called upon exactly to kill themselves by working too hard as directors.
With a concern much over-capitalised and lax management, the natural result had ensued; but Beaumont had seen that with some reduction of sharemoney and better management, the situation might be saved. He had impressed his views on the general body of shareholders without any difficulty, and had cared not a rap for the black looks of the directors compulsorily retired.
All this had kept him busy enough, and every post brought him letters, copies of accounts, drafts of legal documents, and such like. One morning, as the Vicarage party were at breakfast, and the Archdeacon had opened the letter-bag and distributed its contents, Edward was smiling over a petulant letter from Storth, who wanted to know if he intended to spend the whole of the Long Vacation at Caistorholm, and if he expected his long-suffering partner to submit to being cooped up in the office when all the rest of the legal world was on the moors or drinking the waters or sniffling the salt sea air.
“Poor Sam! it’s too bad, after he’d rigged himself out for the moors. Ah, well! he must spell patience for another week anyhow,” he reflected.