Part 2

“Well, I’m glad that it’s gone,” said a quiet, sweet voice at my elbow, as Ronald and I were watching the departure of the last load of materials. And, turning, I saw before me the woman who was to be the guiding star of Ronald’s life, yes, and my own life too. She was little more than a girl then—only a few years older than Ronald himself—with a great calm truthfulness in her eyes, and the air of one who had already known sorrow, and been refined, not hardened, by the experience.

“Yes,” she repeated, “I am glad it’s gone. And now we can be friends. It has been so lonely for me at Thorpe ever since my father died, and I have so wanted to make friends with you; only that old carriage stood in the way. It was silly, no doubt, to be so much afraid, but then I am Scotch—and the Scotch you know are very superstitious,” she added with a smile. “Besides, ever since I can remember anything, I’ve been told that the old carriage meant mischief and trouble between Thorpe and Broadwater. It is true, no doubt, that an ancestor of mine did die in it, and that all sorts of ghastly rumours were current as to how he met his death. But nothing ever came of them, and it was commonly assumed that he died of heart disease; he had certainly been ailing for years before. Thank heaven! the very scene of the crime—if such it were—has been swept away at last. And it is pleasant, isn’t it? to recommence our life’s friendship here where it was wrecked. Though I fear we shan’t meet often as yet, for my husband that is to be lives abroad, till I can persuade him to give up his post and settle down with me for good in the dear old home. But you _will_ be my friends, won’t you, for always?”

She held out her hand in pledge of her friendship. And we shall be friends, I think, “for always.” I like the old-fashioned phrase.

Besides, it was her own.

On the Racecourse at Bayview

IT was Ronald’s birthday, and the day fixed for the Races at Bayview—an unlucky coincidence, for he always showed a keen spirit of enterprise on that particular morning. He was now fourteen, and looked a trifle older owing to his splendid physique. Even in the nursery visitors had christened him the “Infant Hercules.” A Viking he was in miniature, with clear blue eyes and short, crisp hair, carrying with him an atmosphere of suppressed fun that, dangerous as it might prove, was a certain guarantee against dulness or want of spirit. He had behaved himself beautifully for an entire month. But I distrusted him to-day. He had never seen the races, and had constantly signified his intention of doing so. So when his uncle said to him at breakfast, “You are not to go to the races; they are destructive of morality, especially to a boy of your age,” and Ronald winked at me across the table, I felt sure he intended to go.

“No sir,” he said respectfully—“and I suppose you won’t go either. Of course they can’t do you any harm at your age; but they can’t do you any good.”

“As it happens, Ronald, I shall go—just to make sure that you don’t. Besides, I think it a good principle that elderly people should be seen doing things which they forbid to their youngsters. Unquestioning obedience is a fine thing. It doesn’t follow that because I allow myself a cigar to quiet my nerves, therefore you should smoke who don’t know what a nerve means.”

“No sir: of course it doesn’t”—and he winked again.

For myself, I distinctly intended to go to the races, seeing that I was past the age at which my uncle feared their contagion; though neither was I old enough to plead the principle which he had so astutely paraded on his own account. And so I went.

Ronald had left the house soon after breakfast—for a ride (he said)—and, as I saw nothing of him on the racecourse, I was comfortable in the belief that for once he had obeyed orders. When the races were nearly over, a little stable boy came up to me and touched his cap:

“Hold your horse, sir?”

By Jove, it was Ronald. He had borrowed Dick the groom’s livery, and had had a fine time of it, he told me, in that unconventional attire.

Just then our uncle rode up. “Now stand away, Fred, and don’t be seen talking to me, and I’ll show you some rare sport.”

“Hold your horse, sir?”—this to our uncle.

“Well, I don’t mind if you do, and I’ll have a stroll with Fred here till it’s time to go home.”

After a lounge along the course, chatting with friends and criticising the horses, we came back to where we left Ronald. “Thanks,” said the uncle, as he re-mounted, “here’s a shilling for you. A lucky dog you are, too, for it’s got a hole in it, I see. Good-day.”

When dinner was over that evening, the uncle waxed genial over a bottle of ’75 Margaux. “We’d a capital day’s racing, Ronald. I’m almost sorry you weren’t with us. Next year, all well, my boy, I’ll take you myself.”

“Thanks, sir”—and he winked the third time. “By the way, you haven’t lost a shilling, sir, have you? I picked up this one while you were at the races. You’re a lucky dog, sir, if it does belong to you, for it’s got a hole in it?”

Verdict: _Acquitted_, _but don’t do it again_.

On the Sands

BROADWATER was fearfully dull on a Sunday, so I came over from Bayview where I was staying, that Ronald and I might help each other in getting through the day.

It was a blazing afternoon in August, and the park, shut in by hills, shimmered in a haze of heat. “I can’t stand this,” said Ronald. “Air I must get somehow, and, as it’s not to be got nearer than the sea, we’ll walk to the shore in search of it. It’s rather hard on you, to be sure, who’ve done the walk once already. But it’s better than lounging about here, where it’s too hot to speak or think; and, at any rate, we shall see the trippers.”

It happened, most unluckily, that just as we reached the pier, an open air service had begun. Of course they had chosen the hottest corner possible for it; a nook sheltered by the masonry of the pier, which carefully excluded every breath of wind that might be travelling to us from the sea. But, despite the heat, it was a temptation to mild excitement that Ronald found it impossible to resist.

“Not so good as the nigger minstrels, but better than nothing,” he said. So we joined the throng of listeners. It was the usual audience, the devotees (mainly women) forming the inner circle, in close proximity to the preacher and the harmonium. Next came the half-hearted, weaker vessels, who separated the former as by a wall from the irreverent throng of idlers who laughed and talked and smoked on the outside fringe. The preacher was a man of the ordinary type, only a little stouter, a little more flaccid and even more illiterate than usual. Where do they come from, these preachers? Are they men who think they have a call or a gift? and are they accepted for the office on their own valuation? Certainly they are not chosen for any capability that can approve itself to the impartial hearer.

The present representative of the school was enlarging, when we came up, upon the demerits of the publican. Ronald, after a few minutes, began to fume and fret. But he behaved for a while excellently well, though I could hear him muttering words in an undertone distinctly uncomplimentary to the preacher.

“And it is publicans like these—the scum and refuse of Jerusalem—that are represented in this town to-day by the inn-keepers, barmen, and pot-boys, who an hour or two hence will be serving many of their fellow creatures—many, I fear, of this audience—with drink, to the ruin of their lives here and of their hopes of salvation hereafter.”

“Nothing of the sort,” shouted Ronald, “he wasn’t an innkeeper at all; he was a tax-gatherer. Every schoolboy knows that.”

The silence that followed was awful; every eye was turned upon the boy, and it was a strain upon my loyalty to remain at his side, and not then and there renounce his acquaintance.

“Oh, he wasn’t, wasn’t he, young man?” said the preacher. “Well, as you seems to know more about the Bible than I do, perhaps you’ll step up here and take my place. Kindly tell us, if _you_ please, out of _your_ superior knowledge, what he was, and why he was called a publican if he was a tax-collector; and why a poor collector of rates, who only did his duty, is held up to our scorn and reprobation; yes, our _reprobation_.” (This word he regarded as a crushing climax.)

To my complete and indescribable confusion, Ronald, nothing loth, accepted the challenge with delight, and the next moment was standing on the platform addressing an appreciative audience. What a sermon he gave them!—lasting without a pause or break for exactly half-an-hour; every thought reasoned out, and closing with a peroration of consummate eloquence. By a clever feint he had diverted the text of the preacher to one on the Pharisee and the Publican, making a scathing attack on the Pharisaism of the day, which went to church, and gave its alms openly and never in secret; which paid its way and kept the conventional commandments, and neglected (as of little count) the weightier things of unselfishness and love. “A day is coming when it will matter nothing where we lived, nor in what occupations, nor amidst what circumstances, but only how we wrought, and in what spirit we suffered. Be the thing you say; be unselfish, in your own poor way, to your friends and to your home, and to the world about you; that is worth ten thousand sermons and a hundred thousand Articles of Religion.” A dead silence followed as he stepped down from the platform; he had left a charm upon us that it seemed sacrilege to break. Then came a word or two. “What a wonderful boy!—a second Spurgeon; with all his eloquence and none of his irreverence.”

“Summat worth hearin’, I calls it; how he did pitch into they bloomin’ aristocrats. I’ll come and hear ye, young master, whensomdever you holds forth agin.”

“Well—I never!” It was with this ungrammatical aposiopesis that I started, so soon as I could find breath to start at all. “Where on earth, Ronald, did you get it all from?” The boy had come back to me looking as cool as a cucumber, and highly delighted with the sensation he had created.

“Don’t tell, Fred,” he answered, “but it was a sermon of Vaughan’s. We are made to analyse his sermons at school, and say them afterwards for repetition lessons. So when that old donkey fell foul of the publican, I had one handy you see, on that very subject, and I thought it a pity not to fire it off.”

Surely, I thought, he’ll be satisfied now, and I tried to draw him away from the crowd, who were becoming a trifle too much interested in our name and identity. But no; not a bit of it. The excitement was full upon him still. So up he went to the harmonium (they had now started a hymn), and looking over the shoulder of the performer (she was a pretty girl of eighteen) he began to sing as lustily as the best of them. By degrees his arm, I saw, began to steal about her waist, and, fuss and fidget as she might, she was powerless to help herself. Her hands were occupied with the keyboard, and her feet with the blower, and with her voice she had to lead the singing. So he had her at his mercy, and hugged her disgracefully, while she, poor girl, was powerless to resist. The audience all thought she was his sister, and highly commended him, it was clear, for the countenance and support he was giving her.

While the last line of the last verse was being sung, the temptation became too strong for resistance, and Ronald stooped down and kissed her—an action which touched still further the sympathetic heart of the audience.

“A dear, good young feller that, as ever I see’d”—said an old lady in my immediate neighbourhood. “I only wish as how he were a son of mine; a preachin’ that fine, for all the world like the Bishop, and a’ lookin’ arter his sister so prettily—and a nice young girl she is too.”

After this exploit he slipped across the circle and joined me, and a minute later—with hot and blazing cheeks—I was thankful to find myself round the corner, and well on the way home before the throng of listeners had begun to disperse. I felt, indeed, as must that Bishop, who, to oblige a small girl younger in years than in experience, condescended to ring at a street door, and was rewarded with the advice, “Run! _run_ for yer life! they’ll knock the ’ead off yer shoulders if they catches ye.” I wonder what he elected to do? pocket his dignity and run? or rely upon his clerical attire to see him through? In any case our anxiety would be more protracted. What if the escapade should reach our uncle’s ears? However I was spared this climax. The story of it got wind in the servants’ hall, as all stories do; but the servants were far too loyal to Master Ronald to betray him, and so it never made its way up stairs to the drawing room.

* * * * *

But the career of that preacher was ended—in Bayview.

Our Rector

WE had two, if not three, celebrities in our village. The Rector is dead; the Clerk is dead; the Professor still lives. But, independently of this claim to our respect, let us give precedence to the Church.

Less than fifty years ago the services in a parish not ten miles from one of our well-known watering places were done—or left undone—by surely the queerest cleric of his time.

A grand old man he was in person—tall, and venerable as Bede himself, with the most benevolent of faces and the most silver of silver hair. Fit to be an archbishop, so far as appearances went, but most unfit to have the charge of the hundred souls—there were no more of them—committed to his trust.

To these he ministered, or (as I have said) failed to minister, on Sunday mornings; for often as not the services, stipulated for at the price of £75 per annum, were left unperformed on the shallowest of pretexts. It might be the weather; it might be that he was indisposed; often, I fear, it was from sheer disinclination.

To the hamlet that clustered close round the church it was a matter of comparative indifference. They never believed by anticipation in the service till the bell was actually sounding; and his henchman (clerk, sexton, choirmaster and gravedigger in one) had strict orders to withhold this summons till the Rector himself was actually in view. But to our party, who lived two miles away, the question of service or no service was a serious one. It meant hesitation in starting, and reluctance to risk the chance—provocation, too, even to my long-suffering father, when he found the church door barred, and a south-wester brewing, in the teeth of which we had to struggle home over a barren down, unsupported by the nutriment, mental and moral, on which we had calculated. But the service, when it did take place, was a queerer experience by far than the service foregone. The orchestra would have been the despair of Nebuchadnezzar. It consisted of a single flageolet, blown by the wheezy old sexton—one Joseph Edwards by name. We did not even boast of a serpent—instrument immortalised by Mr. Hardy for its volume of tone in supplementing deficiencies. Now the flageolet is a pet aversion of mine, and I can forgive Nebuchadnezzar many of his iniquities for having (so far as we know) excluded it from his band. Indeed, musicians themselves would seem to be ashamed of it, for they have re-christened it, I am told, by a humbler name. But I was careful not to betray my feelings to my friend Joseph, and listened patiently while he enlarged on the capabilities and melodiousness of his pet instrument. “Not but what I’m getting a bit wheezy (he’d often say to me), and can’t make the flourishes as onst I could. But ’tis may be better as it is. They quieter tunes are belike more godly. Anyhow the choir—poor souls—got right puzzled among my turns and quavers, coming in here, there and no how at the finish.”

But, praise it as he might, the flageolet is the worst instrument possible to constitute an orchestra; especially when played as Joseph played it. It gave out a series of squeaks and counter-squeaks—punctuated and accentuated by his wheezes rather than by the requirements of the tune. Indeed, a boy learning the bugle, or a Punch and Judy panpipe, would have discoursed more decorous music. To me the panpipe and the flageolet seem nearly akin; only the flageolet is the more powerful instrument of the two, and Punch is more exacting than we were in the choice of an executant.

Once, as a special favour, I was invited by Joseph to attend a choir practice. It was before his hand or, I should say, his breath had lost its cunning; and it took place on this wise. An hour before service (which on this occasion was actually realised) Joseph took his stand in the reading desk, flageolet in hand, while a group of apple-cheeked cottagers—fishermen mainly, and plough-boys—grouped themselves in my father’s pew below. In one point at any rate Joseph had anticipated the ritual of later days; he repudiated all women from his choir. “’Taint no place for ’em,” he’d say; “I wonder what ’postle Paul ’d think, if he could ha’ heard they two women at S. Matthew’s screechin’ out ‘O ’twas a joyful sound to hear’—and none of us, let alone the choir, privileged to put in a joyful sound along wi ’em. If women baint allowed to preach in Church, stands to reason that they baint allowed to sing.”

“Now boys, turn to ‘Aurelia,’ and go for to remember that we sing the whole on’t right through this time. Last time as ever we did it some on you took to skipping and one sang one verse and t’other the next, whereby I had to blow myself nigh faint to hide your discordance. And mind ye too, sing ’en slow, not as if you wanted to get shot on’t.”

All went well at the first rehearsal, for Joseph played the air distinctly and without disturbing flourishes—only with an intolerable drawl, mindful in all probability of “passon’s” injunctions; of which more anon.

“Well sung,” says he; “you be a good choir when you be so minded; and well instructed, too, though I says it as didn’t ought to. Now then, we’ll see what ye can do when I puts in the flourishes.”

This was a change for the worse, and what had been a melancholy dirge became a haphazard scramble for notes, each boy seizing on the one that he could detect among the enveloping flourishes, regardless whether it was the same note that had found favour with his neighbour. In the end the hymn became a sacrilegious fugue, devoid of time, harmony or sequence. Yet Joseph was never disquieted at the result. On the contrary, he regarded it as a tribute to his skill, addressing his choir at the finish as a general might address his discomfited troops: “You’ve done your best, and none of us can’t do no more. Better luck at church-time, and this I do say, that ’tis few players can overlay a melody as I can wi’ flourishes and expect them as sings it to pick out the tune.”

But to return to our Rector. The fun began (I write, remember, as a boy of ten) with the First Lesson. When the time for it approached, great preparations were seen to be in progress. Our benevolent Archbishop retired into the recesses of the reading desk (a high, square pew, scarcely to be differentiated from our own) and disposed his lunch in orderly array upon the sill overhanging my father’s head. And, to give time for its consumption, a boy was summoned from the congregation—usually it was his own son, a curly-pated lad of thirteen—to discourse the Lesson. Manfully he grappled with the difficulties and hard names of the Old Testament—sticking and halting at nothing, and making a record of false quantities and mispronunciations that I have never heard beaten during a twenty years’ experience of the average undergraduate. Meanwhile his father lunched peacefully, careless what havoc he made with the Kings of Israel and Judah. But woe betide the boy if ever he tried to skip a name. A guttural rebuke issued from the depths of the reading desk: “None of that, Jack; go back, my lad, and try it again.”

But his greatest delight of all was to hear Jack struggling with the genealogy in St. Luke. A series of chuckles issued from the corner where the old man lay ensconced, that gathered in volume with every fresh fall; and when the boy, hot and discomfited, retired from the fray, there was a pause in the proceedings till the old man had recovered himself sufficiently to resume his functions. His luncheon meanwhile had been progressing steadily, not without the gurgling sound of something comforting to facilitate digestion. It puzzled me for years to discover the _raison d’ être_ of this extraordinary meal, knowing as I did that an hour later he would be dining with one of his cottagers, after careful preliminary enquiry as to which house could offer the most attractive fare. Only quite lately, long after the idea of luncheon had been stereotyped upon my brain, I found out that the so-called luncheon was, after all, no luncheon at all, but only a retarded breakfast. Our Rector being a late riser, and having a five-mile walk before him, could find no opportunity of taking it in comfort till he had reached the haven of the parish reading desk.

A cigar was the indispensable accompaniment of the second Lesson, during which period its fumes could be seen ascending like “curling incense” to the blackened rafters of the roof. Indeed, the only thing that ever really shattered my father’s equanimity was the sight of its reeking end, projected over his head from the sill of the reading desk, where the Rector had reluctantly placed it while he applied himself to the requirements of the “Benedictus.”

When the flageolet sounded the key note of the first hymn, the Rector regarded it as the signal of a temporary relaxation. He was for a time off duty, and the cigar was again in requisition. But in fine and balmy weather, he found the atmosphere of the church too close for its enjoyment. It “gathered sweetness from the open air.” So, attired in surplice, stole and bands, our Rector strolled out into the churchyard—giving us pleasant little vista-views of his enjoyment as he passed and re-passed the windows of the aisles. That it might be enjoyed in perfection and unto the end, the hymns selected were inordinately long. But, if fate was against him, and the wind light, and the cigar drew slowly, he had no false shame in appearing on the chancel steps to announce with all the dignity of a formal notice that the last two verses of the hymn would be repeated. After which he disappeared into the churchyard again.

The sermon was to me, as a boy, full of the most delightful interest. It had an infinity of anticipation. No one knew what was coming—least of all the Rector himself. We felt stimulated by the chance of any and every possibility. A clergyman of the strictest sect of the Evangelicals, he always preached in a surplice. (It was in the days, remember, when the Geneva gown was the badge of that school, and the sign of a high church cleric was barely appearing above the horizon).

But I sadly fear that our Rector was influenced by no question of principle or non-principle; I cannot, I think, be wronging him if I infer that his preference for the surplice was due to sheer indifference or indolence.