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

of a lass with a fair Madonna-like face, long chestnut curls and great, dark, soft eyes like pansies filled with dew. Susie had a decided talent for music,—she sang very prettily, and led the village choir, under the guidance of Miss Janet Eden, the schoolmistress. This morning, however, she was risking the duties of conductorship on her own account, and very sweet she looked in her cheap white nuns-veiling gown, wearing a bunch of narcissi carelessly set in her hair and carrying a flowering hazel-wand in her hand, with which she beat time for her companions as they followed her bird-like carolling in the ‘Mayers’ Song.’ But just now all singing had ceased,—and every one of the children had their round eyes fixed on John Walden with a mingling of timidity, affection and awe that was very winning and pretty to behold.

Taking in the whole picture of nature, youth and beauty, as it was set against the pure background of the sky, Walden realised that he was expected to say something,—in fact, he had been called upon to say something every year at this time, but he had never been able to conquer the singular nervousness which always overcame him on such occasions. It is one thing to preach from a pulpit to an assembled congregation who are prepared for orthodoxy and who are ready to listen with more or less patience to the expounding of the same,— but it is quite another to speak to a number of girls and boys all full of mirth and mischief, and as ready for a frolic as a herd of young colts in a meadow. Especially when it happens that most of the girls are pretty, and when, as a clergyman and director of souls, one is conscious that the boys are more or less all in love with the girls,—that one is a bachelor,—getting on in years too;—and that- chiefest of all-it is May-morning! One may perhaps be conscious of a contraction at the heart,—a tightening of the throat,—even a slight mist before the eyes may tease and perplex such an one—who knows? A flash of lost youth may sting the memory,—a boyish craving for love and sympathy may stir the blood, and may make the gravest parson’s speech incoherent,—for after all, even a minister of the Divine is but a man.

At any rate the Reverend John found it difficult to begin. The round forget-me-not eyes of Baby Hippolyta stared into his face with relentless persistency,—the velvet pansy-coloured ones of Susie Prescott smiled confidingly up at him with a bewildering youthfulness and unconsciousness of charm; and the mischief-loving small boys and village yokels who stood grouped against the Maypole like rough fairy foresters guarding magic timber, were, with all the rest of the children, hushed into a breathless expectancy, waiting eagerly for ‘Passon’ to speak. And ‘Passon’ thereupon began,—in the lamest, feeblest, most paternally orthodox manner:

“My dear children—”

“Hooray! Hooray! Three cheers for ‘Passon’! Hooray!”

Wild whooping followed, and the Maypole rocked uneasily, and began to slant downward in a drunken fashion, like a convivial giant whom strong wine has made doubtful of his footing.

“Take care, you young rascals!” cried Walden, letting sentiment, orthodoxy and eloquence go to the winds,—“You will have the whole thing down!”

Peals of gay laughter responded, and the nodding mass of bloom was swiftly pulled up and assisted to support its necessary horizontal dignity. But here Baby Hippolyta suddenly created a diversion. Moved perhaps by the consciousness of her own beauty, or by the general excitement around her, she suddenly waved a miniature branch of hawthorn and emitted a piercing yell.

“Passon! Tum ‘ere! Passon! Tum ‘ere!”

There was no possibility of ‘holding forth’ after this. A. short address on the brevity of life, as being co-equal with the evanescent joys of a Maypole, would hardly serve,—and a fatherly ambition as to the unbecoming attitude of mendi-cancy assumed by independent young villagers carrying a great crown of flowers round to every house in the neighbourhood, and demanding pence for the show, would scarcely be popular. Because what did the ‘Mayers’ Song say:

“The Heavenly gates are opened wide, Our paths are beaten plain; And if a man be not too far gone, He may return again.”

And the ‘Heavenly gates’ of Spring being wide open, the Reverend John, thought his special path was ‘beaten plain’ for the occasion; and not being ‘too far gone’ either in bigotry or lack of heart, John did what he reverently imagined the Divine Master might have done when He ‘took a little child and set it in the midst.” He obeyed Baby Hippolyta’s imperious command, and to her again loudly reiterated “Passon! Tum ‘ere!” he sprang forward and caught her up in his arms, kissing her rosy cheeks heartily as he did so. Seated in ‘high exalted state’ upon his shoulder. ‘Ipsie’ became Hippolyta in good earnest, so thoroughly aware was she of her dignity, while, holding her as lightly and buoyantly as he would have held a bird, the Reverend John turned his smiling face on his young parishioners.

“Come along, boys and girls!” he exclaimed,—“Come and plant the Maypole in the big meadow yonder, as you did last year! It is a holiday for us all to-day,—for me as well as for you! It has always been a holiday even before the days when great Elizabeth was Queen of England, and though many dear old customs have fallen into disuse with the changing world, St. Rest has never yet been robbed of its May-day festival! Be thankful for that, children!—and come along;— but move carefully!—keep order,—and sing as you come!”

Whereupon Susie Prescott lifted up her pretty voice again and her hazel wand baton at the same moment, and started the chorus with the verse:

“We have been rambling all this night, And almost all this day; And now returning back again, We bring you in the May!”

And thus carolling, they passed through the garden moving meadow- wards, Walden at the head of the procession,—and Baby Hippolyta seated on his shoulder, was so elated with the gladsome sights and sounds, that she clasped her chubby arms round ‘Passon’s’ neck and kissed him with a fervour that was as fresh and delightful as it was irresistibly comic.

Bainton, making his way along the southern wall of the orchard, to take a ‘glance round’ as he termed it, at the condition of the wall fruit-trees before his master joined him on the usual morning tour of inspection, stopped and drew aside to watch the merry procession winding along under the brown stems dotted with thousands of red buds splitting into pink-and-white bloom; and a slow smile moved the furrows of his face upward in various pleasant lines as he saw the ‘Passon’ leading it with a light step, carrying the laughing ‘Ipsie’ on his shoulder, and now and again joining in the ‘Mayers’ Song’ with a mellow baritone voice that warmed and sustained the whole chorus.

“There ‘e goes!” he said half aloud—“Jes’ like a boy!—for all the wurrld like a boy! I reckon ‘e’s got the secret o’ never growin’ old, for all that ‘is ‘air’s turnin’ a bit grey. ‘Ow many passons in this ‘ere neighbrood would carry the children like that, I wonder? Not one on ‘em!—though there’s a many to pick an’ choose from—a darned sight too many if you axes my opinion! Old Putty Leveson, wi’s bobbin’ an’ ‘is bowin’s to the east—hor!—hor!—hor!—a fine east ‘e’s got in ‘is mouldy preachin’ barn, wi’ a whitewashed wall an’ a dirty bit o’ tinsel fixed up agin it—he wouldn’t touch a child o’ ourn, to save ‘is life—though ‘e’s got three or four mean, lyin’ pryin’ brats of ‘is own runnin’ wild about the place as might jest as well ‘ave never been born. And as for Francis Anthony, the ‘igh pontiff o’ Riversford, wi’s big altar-cloak embrided for ‘im by all the poor skinny spinsters wot ain’t never ‘ad no chance to marry—‘e’d see all the children blowed to bits under the walls of Jericho to the sound o’ the trumpets afore ‘e’d touch ‘em! Talk o’ saints!—I’m not very good at unnerstannin’ that kind o’ folk, not seein’ myself ‘owever a saint could manage to get on in this mortal wurrld; but I reckon to think there’s a tollable imitation o’ the real article in Passon Walden—the jolly sort o’ saint, o’ coorse,— not the prayin’, whinin’, snuffin’ kind. ‘E’s been doin’ nothin’ but good ever since ‘e came ‘ere, which m’appen partly from ‘is not bein’ married. If ‘e’d gotten a wife, the place would a’ been awsome different. Not but wot ‘e ain’t a bit cranky over ‘is, flowers ‘isself. But I’d rather ‘ave ‘im fussin’ round than a petticut arter me. A petticut at ‘ome’s enough, an’ I ain’t complainin’ on it, though it’s a bit breezy sometimes,—but a petticut in the gard’nin’ line would drive me main wild—it would reely now!”

And still smiling with perfect complacency, he watched the Maypole being carried carefully along the space of grass left open between the fruit trees on either side of the orchard, and followed its bright patch of colour and the children’s faces and forms around it, till it entirely disappeared among the thicker green of a clump of elms that bordered the ‘big meadow,’ which Walden generally kept clear of both crops and cattle for the benefit of the village sports and pastimes.

He was indeed the only land-owner in the district who gave any consideration of this kind to the needs of the people. St. Rest was surrounded on all sides by several large private properties, richly wooded, and possessing many acres of ploughed and pasture land, but there was no public right-of-way across any single one of them, and every field, every woodland path, every tempting dell was rigidly fenced and guarded from ‘vulgar’ intrusion. None of the proprietors of these estates, however, appeared to take the least personal joy or pride in their possessions. They were for the most part away in London for ‘the season’ or abroad ‘out’ of the season,—and their extensive woods appeared to exist chiefly for the preservation of game, reared solely to be shot by a few idle louts of fashion during September and October, and also for the convenience and support of a certain land agent, one Oliver Leach, who cut down fine old timber whenever he needed money, and thought it advisable to pocket the proceeds of such devastation.

Scarcely in one instance out of a hundred did the actual owners of property miss the trees sufficiently to ask what had become of them. So long as the game was all right, they paid little heed to the rest. The partridges and the pheasants thrived, and so did Mr. Oliver Leach. He enjoyed, however, the greatest unpopularity of any man in the neighbourhood, which was some small comfort to those who believed in the laws of compensation and justice. Bainton was his particular enemy for one, and Bainton’s master, John Walden, for another. His long-practised ‘knavish tricks’ and the malicious delight he took in trying to destroy or disfigure the sylvan beauty of the landscape by his brutish ignorance of the art of forestry, combined with his own personal greed, were beginning to be well- known in St. Rest, and it is very certain that on May-morning when the youngsters of the village were abroad and, to a great extent, had it all their own way, (aided and abetted in that way by the recognised authority of the place, the minister himself,) he would never have dared to show his hard face and stiffly upright figure anywhere, lest he should be unmercifully ‘guyed’ without a chance of rescue or appeal.

With the disappearance of the Maypole into the further meadow, Bainton likewise disappeared on his round of