God's Good Man, Marie Corelli [me reader .txt] 📗

a snuffler, Passon!—and you ain’t never been up at the ‘All, nor wouldn’t go if you was axed to, and that’s one of the many things what makes you a gineral favourite,—it do reely now!”

Walden smiled, but forbore to continue conversation on this somewhat personal theme. He retired into his own study, there to concoct the stiffest, most clerical, and most formal note to Miss Vancourt that he could possibly devise. He had the very greatest reluctance to attempt such a task, and sat with a sheet of notepaper before him for some time, staring at it without formulating any commencement. Then he began: “The Rev. John Walden presents his compliments to Miss Vancourt, and begs to inform her—”

No, that would never do! ‘Begs to inform her’ sounded almost threatening. The Rev. John Walden might ‘beg to inform her’ that she had no business to wear pink shoes with high heels, for example. He destroyed one half sheet of paper, put the other half economically aside to serve as a stray leaflet for ‘church memoranda,’ and commenced in a different strain.

“Dear Madam,”

“Dear Madam!” He looked at the two words in some annoyance. They were very ugly. Addressed to a person who wore pink shoes, they seemed singularly abrupt. And if Miss Vancourt should chance to resemble in the least her ancestress, Mary Elia Adelgisa de Vaignecourt, they were wholly unsuitable. A creditor might write ‘Dear Madam’ to a customer in application for an outstanding bill,— but to Mary Elia Adelgisa one would surely begin,—Ah!—now how would one begin? He paused, biting the end of his penholder. Another half sheet of notepaper was wasted, and equally another half sheet devoted to ‘church memoranda.’ Then he began:

“Dear Miss Vancourt,”

At this, he threw down his pen altogether. Too familiar! By all the gods of Greece, whom he had almost believed in even while studying Divinity at Oxford, a great deal too familiar!

“It is just as if I knew her!” he said to himself in vexation. “And I don’t know her! And what’s more, I don’t want to know her! If it were not for this business of the Five Sisters, I wouldn’t go near her. Positively I wouldn’t!”

A mellow chime from the old eight-day clock in the outer hall struck on the silence. Three o’clock! The train by which Miss Vancourt would arrive, was timed to reach Riversford station at three,—if it was not late, which it generally was. Nebbie, who had been snoozing peacefully near the study window in a patch of sunlight, suddenly rose, shook himself, and trotted out on to the lawn, sniffing the air with ears and tail erect. Walden watched him abstractedly.

“Perhaps he scents a future enemy in Miss Vancourt’s dog, Plato!” And this whimsical idea made him smile. “He is quite intelligent enough. He is certainly more intelligent than I am this afternoon, for I cannot write even a commonplace ordinary note to a commonplace ordinary woman!” Here a sly brain-devil whispered that Miss Vancourt might possibly be neither commonplace nor ordinary,—but he put the suggestion aside with a ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ inflexibility. “The fact is, I had better not write to her at all. I’ll send Bainton with a verbal message; he is sure to give a quaint and pleasant turn to it,—he knew her father, and I didn’t;—it will be much better to send Bainton.”

Having made this resolve, his brow cleared, and he was more satisfied. Tearing up the last half sheet of wasted note-paper he had spoilt in futile attempts to address the lady of the Manor, he laughed at his failures.

“Even if it were etiquette to use the old Roman form of correspondence, which some people think ought to be revived, it wouldn’t do in this case,” he said. “Imagine it! ‘John Walden to Maryllia Vancourt,—Greeting!’ How unutterably, how stupendously ridiculous it would look!”

He shut all his writing materials in his desk, and following Nebbie out to the lawn, seated himself with a volume of Owen Meredith in his hand. He was soon absorbed. Yet every now and again his thoughts strayed to the Five Sisters, and with persistent fidelity of detail his mind’s eye showed him the grassy knoll so soft to the tread, where the doomed trees stood proudly and gracefully, clad just at this season all in a glorious panoply of young green,—where, as the poet whose tender word melodies he was reading might have said of the surroundings:

“For moisture of sweet showers, All the grass is thick with flowers.”

“Yes, I shall send Bainton up to the Manor with a civil message,” he mused—“and he can—and certainly will—add anything else to it he likes. Of course the lady may be offended,—some women take offence at anything—but I don’t much care if she is. My conscience will not reproach me for having warned her of the impending destruction of one of the most picturesque portions of her property. But personally, I shall not write to her, nor will I go to see her. I shall have to pay a formal call, of course, in a week or two,—but I need not go inside the Manor for that. To leave my card, as minister of the parish, will be quite sufficient.”

He turned again to the volume in his hand. His eyes fell casually on a verse in the poem of ‘Resurrection’:

“The world is filled with folly and sin; And Love must cling where it can, I say,—For Beauty is easy enough to win, But one isn’t loved every day.”

He sighed involuntarily. Then to banish an unacknowledged regret, he began to criticise his author.

“If the world and the ambitions of diplomatic service had not stepped in between Lord Lytton and his muse, he would have been a fine poet,” he said half aloud;—“A pity he was not born obscurely and in poverty—he would have been wholly great, instead of as now, merely greatly gifted. He missed his true vocation. So many of us do likewise. I often wonder whether I have missed mine?”

But this idea brooked no consideration. He knew he had not mistaken his calling. He was the very man for it. Many of his ‘cloth’ might have taken a lesson from him in the whole art of unselfish ministration to the needs of others. But with all his high spiritual aim, he was essentially human, and pleasantly conscious of his own failings and obstinacies. He did not hold himself as above the weaker brethren, but as one with them, and of them. And through the steady maintenance of this mental attitude, he found himself able to participate in ordinary emotions, ordinary interests and ordinary lives with small and outlying parishes in the concerns of the people committed to their charge. It is not too much to say that though he was in himself distinctly reserved and apart from the average majority of men, the quiet exercise of his influence over the village of St. Rest had resulted in so attracting and fastening the fibres of love and confidence in all the hearts about him to his own, that anything of serious harm occurring to himself, would have been considered in the light of real fatality and ruin to the whole community. When a clergyman can succeed in establishing such complete trust and sympathy between himself and his parishioners, there can be no question of his fitness for the high vocation to which he has been ordained. When, on the contrary, one finds a village or town where the inhabitants are split up into small and quarrelsome sects, and are more or less in a state of objective ferment against the minister who should be their ruling head, the blame is presumably more with the minister than with those who dispute his teaching, inasmuch as he must have fallen far below the expected standard in some way or other, to have thus incurred general animosity.

“If all fails,” mused Walden presently, his thoughts again reverting to the Five Sisters’ question,—“If Bainton does his errand awkwardly,—if the lady will not see him,—if any one of the thousand things do happen that are quite likely to happen, and so spoil all chance of interceding with Miss Vancourt to spare the trees,—why then I will go myself to-morrow morning to the scene of intended massacre before six o’clock. I will be there before an axe is lifted! And if Bainton meant anything at all by his hint, others will be there too! Yes!—I shall go,—in fact it will be my duty to go in case of a row.”

A smile showed itself under his silver-brown moustache. The idea of a row seemed not altogether unpleasant to him. He stooped and patted his dog playfully.

“Nebuchadnezzar!” he said, with mock solemnity; whereat Nebbie, lying at his feet, opened one eye, blinked it lazily and wagged his tail—“Nebuchadnezzar, I think our presence will be needed to-morrow morning at an early hour, in attendance on the Five Sisters! Do you hear me, Nebuchadnezzar?” Again Nebbie blinked. “Good! That wink expresses understanding. We shall have to be there, in case of a row.”

Nebbie yawned, stretched out his paws, and closed both eyes in peaceful slumber. It was a beautiful afternoon;—‘sufficient for the day was the evil thereof’ according to Nebbie. The Reverend John turned over a few more pages of Owen Meredith, and presently came to the conclusion that he would go punting. The decision was no sooner arrived at than he prepared to carry it out. Nebbie awoke with a start from his doze to see his master on the move, and quickly trotted after him across the lawn to the river. Here, the sole occupant of the shining stream was a maternal swan, white as a cloud on the summit of Mont Blanc, floating in stately ease up and down the water, carrying her young brood of cygnets on her back, under the snowy curve of her arching wings. Walden unchained the punt and sprang into it,—Nebbie dutifully following,—and then divested himself of his coat. He was just about to take the punting pole in hand, when Bainton’s figure suddenly emerged from the shrubbery.

“Off on the wild wave, Passon, are ye?” he observed,—“Well, it’s a fine day for it! M’appen you ain’t seen the corpses of four rats anywhere around? No? Then I ‘spect their lovin’ relations must ha’ been an’ ate ‘em up, which may be their pertikler way of doin’ funerals. I nabbed ‘em all last night in the new traps of my own invention. mebbe the lilies will be all the better for their loss. I’ll be catchin’ some more this evenin’. Lord; Passon, if you was to ‘old out offers of a shillin’ a head, the rats ‘ud be gone in no time,—an’ the lilies too!”

Walden absorbed in getting his punt out, only smiled and nodded acquiescingly.

“The train must ha’ been poonctual,” went on Bainton, staring stolidly at the shining water. “Amazin’ poonctual for once in its life. For a one ‘oss fly, goin’ at a one ‘oss fly pace, ‘as jes’ passed through the village, and is jiggitin’ up to the Manor this very minute. I s’pose Miss Vancourt’s inside it.”

Walden paused,—punt-pole in hand.

“Yes, I suppose she is,” he rejoined. “Come to me at six o’clock, Bainton. I shall want you.”

“Very good, sir!”

The pole splashed in the water,—the punt shot out into the clear stream,—Nebbie gave two short barks, as was his custom when he found himself being helplessly borne away from dry land,—and in a few seconds Walden had disappeared round one of the bends of the river. Bainton stood ruminating for a minute.

“Jest a one ‘oss fly, goin’ at a one ‘oss fly pace!” he repeated, slowly;—“It’s a cheap way of comin’ ‘ome