Public-domain ebook
Language: en418 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Romance·Novels·British Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #63310.
The opening · free to read
IT was a cheerful scene on which my eye rested as I looked out upon it from the Rector’s study, while awaiting my introduction to the Rector himself. Two large bay windows opened on a terrace, from which a short flight of steps led down to a lawn, fringed with gaily-coloured flower beds. Through the open windows streamed into the room a veritable flood of light and air, creating an atmosphere in which sadness and depression would have been hopelessly out of place.
“Impossible,” I murmured, “to write a gloomy Calvinistic sermon in a room like this, though it’s strange, by the way, that his letters should have told me nothing of his views.”
The emerald lawn in the foreground contrasted pleasantly with the violet haze that rested on the far horizon, and the very air itself seemed steeped in quiet and repose. Only the song of birds and the mysterious hum of insect-life broke the stillness of the summer day, to which the chafing of a trout stream, as it murmured over its rocky bed at the foot of the Rectory garden, sounded a soft accompaniment.
And out past the Rectory grounds, past the cheery meadow-land beyond, where reaping was now in progress, I caught a glimpse of the far off sea and the Isle of Portland lying on the line of the horizon, with a delicate veil of summer gauze folded about its head. The charm of it all wove a spell upon me like a dream.
“If the Rector is as nice as his Rectory, I shall have a pleasant time of it,” I said to myself. And the next moment the unspoken thought was answered in the affirmative, for I felt my hand warmly grasped by the gentlest-looking and most benevolent of men. And my heart went out to him on the instant, as to one whose help and guidance I knew would never fail me, even when my work under him should be ended, and, whether for good or evil, laid behind me among the retrospects of life.
“Yes, you’ll do,” he said, after studying me keenly for half-a-minute with eyes that pierced me through and through. “You look as if you’d work hard in the right way, and make friends with my villagers and parishioners. They are a queer lot—to be led, not driven. Above all, you look as if you had no foolish fads or fancies—the only things I can’t tolerate when there is so much real work to be done. And you’ll be content to do it closely on the lines laid down for us all in the Sermon on the Mount, before Christianity, as Christ left it, had lost its identity among a crowd of sects and superstitions. By the way, you must have been surprised, I imagine, that I asked no questions in my letters as to your opinions, and gave you no hints about my own.
“The fact is,” he continued, “I care more for what a man does than for what he thinks, and if you will look after my cottagers, soul and body—beginning with the body first—you and I will get on well together, no matter what opinions you hold on all the open questions of the day. Of course I don’t use the term ‘open’ of anything plainly taught us in the Gospel narrative and the precepts of our Church. Though even the latter, as it seems to me, might have been conceived in a somewhat wider spirit without being wide enough to embrace the Christianity of Christ. And for this reason I am altogether opposed to commissions and enquiries of any kind that might impose still further limits and restrictions where He Himself has made none. What are wanted for the Church are active energetic workmen, and the wider the doors are thrown open the more of them we shall get for the work. Think what missionary effort itself could accomplish if all its labourers were content to waive, one and all of them, their private specifics, and preach only the clear unquestioned truths which the Master Himself has sanctioned.
“On all questions but these you may hold what theories you will—that the world was created in six days or in six times as many millions of years; that the Old Testament miracles were literal facts, or allegories for the suggestion of much-needed truths. And you may hold, if you will, that no creature that has life will perish. We are told, are we not? that He ‘will save both man and beast,’ which means, if its means anything, that other creatures besides man will have a portion in the future state.
“But think well and carefully before you teach an Eternity of Punishment. The responsibility of doing so is far too grave to be carelessly incurred in the light of a wider and clearer-sighted knowledge. Almost it seems that the guess which Charlotte Brontë hazarded in the mouth of one of her characters will before long have crystallized into doctrine: ‘No; I cannot believe that. I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I never mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest—a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss.’
“Above all things, do not confuse your mind and paralyse your energies with the question, so all-engrossing now-a-days, of the co-existence of good and evil, of joy and sorrow, in the world, which is after all no mystery at all. Or, if there be a mystery, surely it lies in the fact that anyone should have thought a world of infinite perfection possible. Why, the fallacy was refuted by Plato himself, to whom it was a self-evident truth that the creations of The Infinite must needs be finite and imperfect: in other words, not ‘infinitely’ but only ‘very’ good.
“Limitation, imperfection and (by consequence) evil, with their natural development in sin and suffering and death, were the inevitable portion of created life, but accompanied (thank heaven!) with a birthright of possibilities for good, that, rightly used here and hereafter, shall make us worthy of association, at the last perhaps of union, with the Infinite Itself.
“Forgive me if my sermon has wearied you. I can at any rate summarise it in brief. Teach mainly what has come to us directly from our Master’s lips—first and foremost, the paramount duty of unselfishness; it embodies the whole duty of man to man, and a part at least of his duty to his Creator. And remember that those who came after Him were after all but men, not exempt from the bias of inclination and judgment, who sometimes (it is quite possible) may have obscured where they thought to enlighten. To be followed therefore with all care and caution whenever they defined or limited what He left wide enough to embrace the world.
“Of course you will dine with me to-night,” he added cheerily, “and I’ll try to make amends for the penance I have inflicted on you. Besides, I want your opinion on the trout from the Rectory stream.”
LIKE his brother at the Manor House hard by, my Rector, Mr. Richardson, was a widower, having lost his wife only six months before my arrival. His family was comprised of four children, whose ages descended by even gradations from Reginald, the eldest, a handsome lad of eighteen whose school-life had just ended, down to Aggie the youngest, a wild little maiden of twelve.
As yet their characters were still unformed, and had been entrusted for their development to a clever little Belgian, Josephine Armand by name, who, in addition to the superintendence of their education, managed the Rector’s household for him, and ruled the domestics with a rod of iron.
On the day after my arrival I was studying the church and the streets of the village, which radiated like a fan from the foot of the hill where I stood, when I was met by Reginald who had dined with us the evening before. He was to start early the next day for the continent, where he was to pick up what foreign languages he could before he entered at Cambridge in the following October.
By the gate of the churchyard, through which we passed to the Rectory, stood a time-worn placard requesting visitors not to touch any of the flowers “excepting those on their own graves.”
“A remarkable instance of realistic prevision,” said Reggie, “and far too good to be improved away. Fortunately our villagers are not keenly appreciative of humour, else the best joke in the county would have been lost to us long ago. And what are you up to, my children?” he added, looking in at the window of the Rectory schoolroom, where his sisters were busily writing at the untidiest of tables, forgetful for once of the glorious sunshine that blazed down upon the world outside. “Some mischief, I’ll be bound, else you’d never be so abnormally quiet.”
“You go on, and don’t disturb us, Reggie,” said Agnes, a lean wiry girl, with hair much dishevelled under the excitement of composition. “We are busy preparing verses for the Attar competition prize, the new dentifrice, you know; you may hear mine if you like. I go in for plain and simple fact—‘beauty unadorned’ you see:
‘Carbolic, camphor, chalk are done; Attar is all and all in one.’”
“Admirable, Aggie. Good solid sense, and no foolish striving after the artistic. And now for yours, Gertie. Being the poetess of the family, you won’t be content with stern simplicity like that. There’s love and lovemaking in yours, I’ll be bound.”
“Well, Reggie, I have tried to add a little romance to it. But somehow or other the teeth don’t seem to lend themselves readily to the genius of poetry:
‘If Attar you had used in time, Your teeth would have been white—like mine; But now my love for you is dead: Another, ’nother girl I’ll wed.’”
“Bravo, Gertie! You’re really brilliant. ‘Time’ rhymes admirably with ‘mine,’ and it’s a stroke of true genius to intensify grief by the simple process of prodelision.”
“I’m glad you like it, Reggie, though I haven’t the faintest notion of what ‘prodelision’ means.”
“And now, Nellie, for yours. I’ve a rooted belief that yours will be the prize-winner. You’ve a clever head on your shoulders, and can make a good guess at what will pay.”
“Well, mine is rather a bold venture, Reggie. I want, you see, to combine the allied arts of painting and poetry. There’s to be a picture of King Attar at the top, launching thunderbolts at a crowd of flying dentists. Off they go in the distance, with their implements of torture in their hands, and at the bottom of the picture these words are written:
‘King Attar and the dentists see; Choose Attar—and the dentists flee!’
But I wish I were handier at drawing. King Attar in his chair of state is all out of perspective. And the flying dentists look like a lot of daddy-longlegs; while as for their implements, they might be anything you please. However, I can easily remedy that by drawing lines to the margin with an explanation of each particular instrument—‘these are tweezers,’ ‘this is a file’—like Melton Prior does in his war pictures, you know.”
“Capital! You’ve got everything cut and dried, I see. Though, by the way, you needn’t talk bad grammar under the stimulus of composition. Didn’t your governess teach you that ‘like Melton Prior does’ is bad grammar? If not, she isn’t worth her salt.”
“It’s our French, Reggie, that troubles her more than our English. At any rate, when she called us in to dinner yesterday, I said, ‘_Je suis déjà_,’ meaning, of course, ‘I am all ready,’ and she had just the faintest suspicion in the world that I intended it for a joke, and boxed my ears on the chance.”
The book keeps going
Reading is free forever. Sign up and watch scenes appear while you read.
Scenes Storieta drew for other classics.
New illustrated classics
Once or twice a month: the latest books to get full character casts, scene art, and free comic editions. No account needed.
