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

drowsed in the old days, and very much as it would always do even if London and Paris were consumed by unsuspected volcanoes. The memory of the first ‘old Squire,’—who died peacefully in his bed all alone, his wife having passed away two years before him, and his two living twin sons being absent,—was frequently mixed with stories of the other ‘old Squire’ Robert, the elder twin, who was killed in the hunting field,—and indeed it often happened that some of the more ancient and garrulous villagers were not at all sure as to which was which. The Manor had been shut up for ten years,—the Manor ‘family’ had not been heard of during all that period, and the tenantry’s recollection of their late landlord, as well as of his one daughter, was more vague and confused than authentic. The place had been ‘managed’ and the cottage rents collected by the detested agent Oliver Leach, a fact which did not sweeten such remembrance of the Vancourts as still existed in the minds of the people.

However, nothing in the general aspect and mental attitude of the village had altered very much since the early thirties, except the church. That from a mere ruin, had under John Walden’s incumbency become a gem of architecture, so unique and perfect as to be the wonder and admiration of all who beheld it, and whereas in the early Victorian reign a few people stopped at Riversford because it was a county town and because there was an inn there where they could put up their horses, so a few people now went to St. Rest, because there was a church there worth looking at. They came by train to Riversford, where the railway line stopped, and then took carriage or cycled the seven miles between that town and St. Rest to see the church; and having seen it, promptly went back again. For one of the great charms of the little village hidden under the hills was that no tourist could stay a night in it, unless he or she took one spare room—there was only one—at the small public-house which sneaked away up round a corner of the street under an archway of ivy, and pushed its old gables through the dark enshrouding leaves with a half-surprised, half-propitiatory air, as though somewhat ashamed of its own existence. With the exception of this one room in this one public-house, there was no accommodation for visitors. Never will the rash cyclist who ventured once to appeal to the sexton’s wife for rooms in her cottage, forget the brusqueness of his reception:

“Rooms!” And Mrs. Frost, setting her arms well akimbo, surveyed the enquirer scornfully through an open doorway, rendered doubly inviting by the wealth of roses clambering round it. “Be off, young man! Where was you a-comin’ to? D’ye think a woman wi’ fifteen great boys and girls in an’ out of the ‘ouse all day, ‘as rooms for payin’ guests!” And here Mrs. Frost, snorting at the air in irrepressible disdain, actually snapped her fingers in her would-be lodger’s face. “Rooms indeed! Go to Brighting!”

Whereupon the abashed wheelman went,—whether to Brighton, as the irate lady suggested, or to a warmer place unmentionable history sayeth not. But St. Rest remained, as its name implied, restful,— and the barbaric yell of the cheap tripper, together with the equally barbaric scream of the cheap tripper’s ‘young lady’ echoed chiefly through modernised and vulgarised Riversford, where there were tea-rooms and stuffy eating-houses and bad open-air concerts, such as trippers and their ‘ladies’ delight in,—and seldom disturbed the tranquil charm of the tiny mediaeval village dear to a certain few scholars, poets and antiquarians who, through John Walden, had gradually become acquainted with this ‘priceless bit’ as they termed it, of real ‘old’ England and who almost feared to mention its existence even in a whisper, lest it should be ‘swarmed over’ by enquiring Yankees, searching for those everlasting ancestors who all managed so cleverly to cross the sea together in one boat, the Mayflower.

There is something truly pathetic as well as droll in the anxiety of every true American to prove himself or herself an offshoot from some old British root of honour or nobility. It would be cruel to laugh at this instinct, for after all it is only the passionate longing of the Prodigal Son who, having eaten of the husks that the swine did eat, experienced such an indigestion at last, that he said ‘I will arise and go to my father.’ And it is quite possible that an aspiring Trans-Atlantic millionaire yearning for descent more than dollars, would have managed to find tracks of a Mayflower pedigree in St. Rest, a place of such antiquity as to be able to boast a chivalric ‘roll of honour’ once kept in the private museum at Badsworth Hall before the Badsworth family became extinct, but now, thanks to Walden, rescued from the modern clutch of the Hall’s present proprietor, Sir Morton Pippitt, and carefully preserved in an iron box locked up in the church, along with other documents of value belonging to the neighbourhood. On this were inscribed the names of such English gentlemen once resident in the district, who had held certain possessions in France at the accession of Henry II. in 1154. Besides the ‘roll of honour’ there were other valuable records having to do with the Anglo-French campaigns in the time of King John, and much concerning those persons of St. Rest and Riversford who took part in the Wars of the Barons.

Whatever there was of curious or interesting matter respecting the village and its surroundings had been patiently ferreted out by John Walden, who had purchased the living partly because he knew it to be a veritable mine for antiquarian research, and one likely to afford him inexhaustible occupation and delight. But there were, of course, other reasons for his settling down in so remote a spot far from the busy haunts of men,—reasons which, to his own mind, were perfectly natural and simple, though on account of his innate habit of reticence, and disinclination to explain his motives to others, they were by some supposed to be mysterious. In his youth he had been one of the most brilliant and promising of University scholars, and all those who had assisted to fit him for his career in the Church, had expected great things of him. Some said he would be a Bishop before he was thirty; others considered that he would probably content himself with being the most intellectual and incisive preacher of his time. But he turned out to be neither one nor the other. A certain Henry Arthur Brent, his fellow student at College and five years his senior, had, with apparent ease, outstripped him in the race for honour, though lacking in all such exceptional slowly off towards the vegetable garden where his ‘under gardeners’ as he called three or four sturdy village lads employed to dig and hoe, constantly required his supervision.

Meanwhile Walden, leaving his own grounds, entered the churchyard, walking with softly reverent step among the little green mounds of earth, under which kind eyes were closed, and warm hearts lay cold, till, reaching the porched entrance of the church itself, he paused, brought to a halt by the sound of voices which were pitched rather too loud for propriety, considering the sacredness of the surroundings.

“That eastern window is crude—very crude!” said a growlingly robust baritone; “I suppose the reverend gentleman could not secure sufficient subscriptions to meet the expense of suitable stained glass?”

“Unfortunately Mr. Walden is a very self-opinionated man,” replied a smooth and oily tenor, whose particular tone of speech Walden recognised as that of the Reverend ‘Putty’ Leveson, the minister of Badsworth, a small scattered village some five or six miles ‘on the wrong side of Badsworth Hall,’ as the locality was called, owing to its removed position from the county town of Riversford. “He would not accept outside advice. Of course these columns and capitals are all wrong,—they are quite incongruous with early Norman walls,—but when ignorance is allowed to have its own way, the effect is always disastrous.”

“Always—always,—my dear sir—always!” And the voice or Sir Morton Pippitt, high pitched and resonant, trolled out on the peaceful air; “The fact is, the church could have been much better done, had I been consulted! The whole thing was carried out in the most brazen manner, under my very nose, sir, under my very nose!—without so much as a ‘by your leave’! Shocking, shocking! I complained to the Bishop, but it was no use, for it seems that he has a perfect infatuation for this man Walden—they were college friends or something of that kind. As for the sarcophagus here, of course it ought in the merest common decency to have been transferred to the Cathedral of the diocese. But you see the present incumbent bought the place;—the purchase of advowsons is a scandal, in my opinion— however this man got it all his own way, more’s the pity!—he bought it through some friend or other—and so—”

“So he could do as he liked with it!” said a mild, piping falsetto; “And so far, he has made it beau-ti-ful!—beau-ti-ful!” carved with traceries of natural fruit and foliage, which were scarcely injured by the devastating mark of time. But rough and sacrilegious hands had been at work to spoil and deface the classic remains of the time-worn edifice, and some of the lancet windows had been actually hewn out and widened to admit of the insertion of modern timber props which awkwardly supported a hideous galvanised iron roof, on the top of which was erected a kind of tin hen-coop in which a sharp bell clanged with irritating rapidity for Sunday service. Outside, the building was thus rendered grotesquely incongruous,—inside it was almost blasphemous in its rank ugliness. There were several rows of narrow pews made of common painted deal,—there was a brown stone font and a light pine-wood pulpit—a small harmonium stood in one corner, festooned by a faded red woollen curtain, and a general air of the cheap upholsterer and jerry-builder hovered over the whole concern. And the new incumbent, gazing aghast at the scene, was triumphantly informed that “Sir Morton Pippitt had been generous enough to roof and ‘restore’ the church in this artistic manner out of his own pocket, for the comfort of the villagers,” and moreover that he actually condescended to attend Divine service under the galvanised iron roof which he had so liberally erected. Nay, it had been even known that Sir Morton had on one or two occasions himself read the Lessons in the absence of the late rector, who was subject to sore throats and was constantly compelled to call in outside assistance.

To all this information John Walden said nothing. He was not concerned with Sir Morton Pippitt or any other county magnate in the management of his own affairs. A fortnight after his arrival he quietly announced to his congregation that the church was about to be entirely restored according to its original lines of architecture, and that a temporary building would be erected on his, Walden’s, own land for the accommodation of the people during such time as the restoration should be in progress. This announcement brought about Walden’s first acquaintance with his richest neighbour, Sir Morton Pippitt. That gentleman having been accustomed to have his own way in everything concerning St. Rest, for a considerable time, straightway wrote, expressing his ‘surprise and indignation’ at the mere assumption that any restoration was required for the church beyond what he, Sir Morton, had effected at his own expense. The number of parishioners was exceedingly small,— too small to warrant any further expenditure for enlarging a place of worship which mental ability as he possessed, and was now Bishop of the very diocese in which he