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

And I met the parson, Mr. Walden, and had a talk with him. Then I started home across the fields, and found this man”—and she indicated Adderley with a careless nod of her head—“asleep in a wood. I almost promised him some lunch—I didn’t QUITE---”

“My dear Miss Vancourt,”—protested Adderley—“Pray do not think of such a thing!—I would not intrude upon you in this unceremonious way for the world!”

“Why not?” said Maryllia, smiling graciously—“It will be a pleasure if you will stay to luncheon with us. Cicely has carte blanche here you know—genius must have its way!”

“Of course it must!”—agreed Cicely—“If genius wants to etand on its head, it must be allowed to make that exhibition of itself lest it should explode. If genius asks the lame, halt, blind and idiotic into the ancestral halls of Abbot’s Manor, then the lame, halt, blind and idiotic are bound to come. If genius summons the god Pan to pipe a roundelay, pipings there shall be! Shall there not, Mr. Pan Adderley?”

Her eyes danced with mirth and mischief, as they flashed from his face to Maryllia’s. “Genius,”—she continued—“can even call forth a parson from the vasty deep if it chooses to do so,—Mr. Walden is coming to tea this afternoon.”

“Indeed!” And Maryllia’s sweet voice was a trifle cold. “Did you invite him, Cicely?”

“Yes. I told him that you thought it rather rude of him not to have come before---”

“Oh Cicely!” said Maryllia reproachfully—“You should not have said that!”

“Why not? You did think him rude,—and so did I,—to refuse two kind invitations from you. Anyhow he seemed sorry, and said he’d make up for it this afternoon. He’s really quite good-looking.”

“Quite—quite!” agreed Julian Adderley—“I considered him exceptionally so when I first saw him in his own church, opposing a calm front to the intrusive pomposity and appalling ignorance of our venerable acquaintance, Sir Morton Pippitt. I decided that I had found a Man. So new!—so fresh! That is why I took a cottage for the summer close by, that I might be near the rare specimen!”

Maryllia laughed.

“Are you not a man yourself?” she said.

“Not altogether!” he admitted,—“I am but half-grown. I am a raw and impleasing fruit even to my own palate. John Walden is a ripe and mellow creature,—moreover, he seems still ripening in constant sunshine. I go every Sunday to hear him preach, because he reminds me of so much that I had forgotten.”

Here they went into luncheon. Maryllia threw off her hat as she seated herself at the head of the table, ruffling her hair with the action into prettier waves of brown-gold. Her cheeks were softly flushed,—her blue eyes radiant.

“You are a better parishioner than I am, Mr. Adderley!”—she said— “I have not been to church once since I came home. I never go to church.”

“Naturally! I quite understand! Few people of any education or intelligence can stand it nowadays,” he replied—“The Christian myth is well-nigh exploded. Yet one cannot help having a certain sympathy and interest in men, who, like Mr. Walden, appear to still honestly believe in it.”

“The Christian myth!” echoed Cicely—“My word! You do lay down the law! Where should we be without the ‘myth’ I wonder?”

“Pretty much where we are now,”—said Julian—“Two thousand years of the Christian dispensation leaves the world still pagan. Self- indulgence is still paramount. Wealth still governs both classes and masses. Politics are still corrupt. Trade still plays its old game of ‘beggar my neighbour.’ What would you! And in this day there is no restraining influence on the laxity of social morals. Literature is decadent,—likewise Painting;—Sculpture and Poetry are moribund. Man’s inborn monkeyishness is obtaining the upper hand and bearing him back to his natural filth,—and the glimmerings of the Ideal as shown forth in a few examples of heroic and noble living are like the flash of the rainbow-arch spanning a storm-cloud,—beautiful, but alas!—evanescent.”

“I’m afraid you are right”—said Maryllia, with a little sigh; “It is very sad and discouraging, but I fear very true.”

“It’s nothing of the kind!”—declared Cicely, with quick vehemence— “It’s just absolute nonsense! It is! Ah, ‘never shake thy gory locks at me,’ Sir Moon-Calf!” and she made a little grimace across the table at Julian, who responded to it with a complacent smile—“You can talk, talk, talk—of course! every man that ever sat in clubs, smoking and drinking, can talk one’s head off—but you’ve got to LIVE, as well as talk! What do you know about self-indulgence being ‘paramount,’ except in your own case, eh? Do you think at all of the thousands and thousands of poor creatures everywhere, who completely sacrifice their lives to the needs of others?”

“Of course there are such—” admitted Adderley; “But---”

“No ‘buts’ come into the case,” went on the young girl, her eyes darkening with the earnestness of her thoughts—“I have seen quite enough even in my time to know how good and kind to one another even the poorest people can be. And I have had plenty of hardships to endure, too! But I can tell you one thing—and that is, that the Christian ‘myth’ as you call it, is just the one thing that makes MY life worth living! I don’t want to talk about religion—I never do,- I only just say this-that the great lesson of Christianity is exactly what we most need to learn.”

“In what way?” asked Julian, smiling indulgently.

“Why,—merely that if one is honest and true, one MUST be crucified. Therefore one is prepared,—and there’s no need to cry out when the nails are driven in. The Christian ‘myth’ teaches us what to expect, how to endure, and how at last to triumph!”

A lovely light illuminated her face, and Maryllia looked at her very tenderly. Adderley was silent.

“Nothing does one so much good as to be hurt,”—went on Cicely in a lighter tone—“You then become aware that you are a somebody whom other bodies envy. You never know how high you have climbed till you feel a few dirty hands behind you trying to pull you down! When I start my career as a singer, I shall not be satisfied till I get anonymous letters every morning, telling me what a fraud and failure I am. Then I shall realise that I am famous!”

“Alas!” said Julian with a comically resigned air—“I shall never be of sufficient importance for that! No one would waste a penny stamp on me! All I can ever hope to win is the unanimous abuse of the press. That will at least give me an interested public!”

They laughed.

“Is Mr. Marius Longford a great friend of yours?” enquired Maryllia.

“Ah, that I cannot tell!” replied Julian—“He may be friend, or he may be foe. He writes for a great literary paper—and is a member of many literary clubs. He has produced three books—all monstrously dull. But he has a Clique. Its members are sworn to praise Longford, or die. Indeed, if they do not praise Longford, they become mysteriously exterminated, like rats or beetles. I myself have praised Longford, lest I also get a dose of his unfailing poison. He will not praise me—but no matter for that. If he would only abuse me!—but he won’t! His blame is far more valuable than his eulogy. At present he stands like a kind of neutral whipping-post—very much in my way!”

“He knows Lord Roxmouth, he tells me,”—went on Maryllia; whereat Cicely’s sharp glance flashed at her inquisitively—“Lord Roxmouth is by way of being a patron of the arts.”

The tone of her voice, slightly contemptuous, was not lost on Adderley. He fancied he was on dangerous ground.

“I have never met Lord Roxmouth myself”—he said—“But I have heard Longford speak of him. Longford however rather ‘makes’ for society. I do not. Longford is quite at home with dukes and duchesses---”

“Or professes to be—” put in Maryllia, with a slight smile.

“Or professes to be,—I accept the correction!” agreed Adderley.

“Personally, I know nothing of him,”—said Maryllia—“I have never seen him at any of the functions in London, and I should imagine him to be a man who rather over-estimated himself. So many literary men do. That is why most of them are such terrible social bores.”

“To the crime of being a literary man I plead not guilty!” and Julian folded his hands in a kind of mock-solemn appeal—“Moreover, I swear never to become one!”

“Good boy!” smiled Cicely—“Be a modern Pan, and run away from all the literary cliques, kicking up the dust behind you in their faces as you go! Roam the woods in solitude and sing!

“‘The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees on the bells of thyme, The birds on the myrtle bushes, The cicale above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were as silent as ever old Tinolus was, Listening to my sweet pipings!’”

“Ah, Shelley!” cried Adderley—“Shelley the divine! And how divinely you utter his lines! Do you know the last verse of that poem:—‘I sang of the dancing stars’?”

Cicely raised her hand, commanding attention, and went on:

“‘I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth, And of Heaven,—and the giant wars, And Love and Death and Birth. And then I changed my pipings,— Singing, how down the vale of Menalus, I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed, Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed; All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings!’”

“Beau-tiful!—beau-tiful!” sighed Adderley—“But so remote!—so very remote! Alas!—who reads Shelley now!”

“I do”—said Cicely—“Maryllia does. You do. And many more. Shelley didn’t write for free-libraries and public-houses. He wrote for the love of Art,—and he was drowned. You do the same, and perhaps you’ll be hung! It doesn’t much matter how you end, so long as you begin to be something no one else can be.”

“You have certainly begun in that direction!” said Julian.

Cicely shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t know! I am myself. Most people try to be what they’re not. Such a waste of time and effort! That’s why I’ve taken a fancy to the parson I met this morning, Mr. Walden. He is himself and no other. He is as much himself as old Josey Letherbarrow is. Josey is an individuality. So is Mr. Walden. So is Maryllia. So am I. And”— here she pointed a witch-like finger at Adderley—“so would you bes if you didn’t ‘pose’ as much as you do!”

“Cicely!” murmured Maryllia, warningly, though she smiled.

A slight flush swept over Adderley’s face. But he took the remark without offence, thereby showing himself to be of better mettle than the little affectations of his outward appearance indicated.

“You think so?” he said, placidly—“That is very dear of you!—very young! You may be right—you may be wrong,—but from one so unsophisticated as yourself it is a proposition worth considering— to pose, or not to pose! It is so new—so fresh!”

XVI

Walden kept his promise and