The Seaboard Parish, Complete

“I think I know what you mean,” was all Turner’s reply.

“No doubt,” I resumed, “the apprehension of this truth has, in otherwise ill-ordered minds, given rise to all sorts of fierce and grotesque fanaticism. But the minds which have thus conceived the truth, would have been immeasurably worse without it; nay, this truth affords at last the only possible door out of the miseries of their own chaos, whether inherited or the result of their own misconduct.”

“What’s that in the grass?” cried Wynnie, in a tone of alarm.

I looked where she indicated, and saw a slow-worm, or blind-worm, lying basking in the sun. I rose and went towards it.

“Here’s your stick,” said Turner.

“What for?” I asked. “Why should I kill it? It is perfectly harmless, and, to my mind, beautiful.”

I took it in my hands, and brought it to my wife. She gave an involuntary shudder as it came near her.

“I assure you it is harmless,” I said, “though it has a forked tongue.” And I opened its mouth as I spoke. “I do not think the serpent form is essentially ugly.”

“It makes me feel ugly,” said Wynnie.

“I allow I do not quite understand the mystery of it,” I said. “But you never saw lovelier ornamentation than these silvery scales, with all the neatness of what you ladies call a set pattern, and none of the stiffness, for there are not two of them the same in form. And you never saw lovelier curves than this little patient creature, which does not even try to get away from me, makes with the queer long thin body of him.”

“I wonder how it can look after its tail, it is so far off,” said Wynnie.

“It does though—better than you ladies look after your long dresses. I wonder whether it is descended from creatures that once had feet, and did not make a good use of them. Perhaps they had wings even, and would not use them at all, and so lost them. Its ancestors may have had poison-fangs; it is innocent enough. But it is a terrible thing to be all feet, is it not? There is an awful significance in the condemnation of the serpent—‘On thy belly shalt thou go, and eat dust.’ But it is better to talk of beautiful things. My soul at least has dropped from its world apex. Let us go on. Come, wife. Come, Turner.”

They did not seem willing to rise. But the glen drew me. I rose, and my wife followed my example with the help of my hand. She returned to the subject, however, as we descended the slope.

“Is it possible that in the course of ever so many ages wings and feet should be both lost?” she said.

“The most presumptuous thing in the world is to pronounce on the possible and the impossible. I do not know what is possible and what is impossible. I can only tell a little of what is true and what is untrue. But I do say this, that between the condition of many decent members of society and that for the sake of which God made them, there is a gulf quite as vast as that between a serpent and a bird. I get peeps now and then into the condition of my own heart, which, for the moment, make it seem impossible that I should ever rise into a true state of nature—that is, into the simplicity of God’s will concerning me. The only hope for ourselves and for others lies in him—in the power the creating spirit has over the spirits he has made.”

By this time the descent on the grass was getting too steep and slippery to admit of our continuing to advance in that direction. We turned, therefore, down the valley in the direction of the sea. It was but a narrow cleft, and narrowed much towards a deeper cleft, in which we now saw the tops of trees, and from which we heard the rush of water. Nor had we gone far in this direction before we came upon a gate in a stone wall, which led into what seemed a neglected garden. We entered, and found a path turning and winding, among small trees, and luxuriant ferns, and great stones, and fragments of ruins down towards the bottom of the chasm. The noise of falling water increased as we went on, and at length, after some scrambling and several sharp turns, we found ourselves with a nearly precipitous wall on each side, clothed with shrubs and ivy, and creeping things of the vegetable world. Up this cleft there was no advance. The head of it was a precipice down which shot the stream from the vale above, pouring out of a deep slit it had itself cut in the rock as with a knife. Halfway down, it tumbled into a great basin of hollowed stone, and flowing from a chasm in its side, which left part of the lip of the basin standing like the arch of a vanished bridge, it fell into a black pool below, whence it crept as if half-stunned or weary down the gentle decline of the ravine. It was a perfect little picture. I, for my part, had never seen such a picturesque fall. It was a little gem of nature, complete in effect. The ladies were full of pleasure. Wynnie, forgetting her usual reserve, broke out in frantic exclamations of delight.

We stood for a while regarding the ceaseless pour of the water down the precipice, here shot slanting in a little trough of the rock, full of force and purpose, here falling in great curls of green and gray, with an expression of absolute helplessness and conscious perdition, as if sheer to the centre, but rejoicing the next moment to find itself brought up boiling and bubbling in the basin, to issue in the gathered hope of experience. Then we turned down the stream a little way, crossed it by a plank, and stood again to regard it from the opposite side. Small as the whole affair was—not more than about a hundred and fifty feet in height—it was so full of variety that I saw it was all my memory could do, if it carried away anything like a correct picture of its aspect. I was contemplating it fixedly, when a little stifled cry from Wynnie made me start and look round. Her face was flushed, yet she was trying to look unconcerned.

“I thought we were quite alone, papa,” she said; “but I see a gentleman sketching.”

I looked whither she indicated. A little way down, the bed of the ravine widened considerably, and was no doubt filled with water in rainy weather. Now it was swampy—full of reeds and willow bushes. But on the opposite side of the stream, with a little canal from it going all around it, lay a great flat rectangular stone, not more than a foot above the level of the water, and upon a camp-stool in the centre of this stone sat a gentleman sketching. I had no doubt that Wynnie had recognised him at once. And I was annoyed, and indeed angry, to think that Mr. Percivale had followed us here. But while I regarded him, he looked up, rose very quietly, and, with his pencil in his hand, came towards us. With no nearer approach to familiarity than a bow, and no expression of either much pleasure or any surprise, he said—

“I have seen your party for some time, Mr. Walton—since you crossed the stream; but I would not break in upon your enjoyment with the surprise which my presence here must cause you.”

I suppose I answered with a bow of some sort; for I could not say with truth that I was glad to see him. He resumed, doubtless penetrating my suspicion—

“I have been here almost a week. I certainly had no expectation of the pleasure of seeing you.”

This he said lightly, though no doubt with the object of clearing himself. And I was, if not reassured, yet disarmed, by his statement; for I could not believe, from what I knew of him, that he would be guilty of such a white lie as many a gentleman would have thought justifiable on the occasion. Still, I suppose he found me a little stiff, for presently he said—

“If you will excuse me, I will return to my work.”

Then I felt as if I must say something, for I had shown him no courtesy during the interview.

“It must be a great pleasure to carry away such talismans with you—capable of bringing the place back to your mental vision at any moment.”

“To tell the truth,” he answered, “I am a little ashamed of being found sketching here. Such bits of scenery are not of my favourite studies. But it is a change.”

“It is very beautiful here,” I said, in a tone of contravention.

“It is very pretty,” he answered—“very lovely, if you will—not very beautiful, I think. I would keep that word for things of larger regard. Beauty requires width, and here is none. I had almost said this place was fanciful—the work of imagination in her play-hours, not in her large serious moods. It affects me like the face of a woman only pretty, about which boys and guardsmen will rave—to me not very interesting, save for its single lines.”

“Why, then, do you sketch the place?”

“A very fair question,” he returned, with a smile. “Just because it is soothing from the very absence of beauty. I would far rather, however, if I were only following my taste, take the barest bit of the moor above, with a streak of the cold sky over it. That gives room.”

“You would like to put a skylark in it, wouldn’t you?”

“That I would if I knew how. I see you know what I mean. But the mere romantic I never had much taste for; though if you saw the kind of pictures I try to paint, you would not wonder that I take sketches of places like this, while in my heart of hearts I do not care much for them. They are so different, and just therefore they are good for me. I am not working now; I am only playing.”

“With a view to working better afterwards, I have no doubt,” I answered.

“You are right there, I hope,” was his quiet reply, as he turned and walked back to the island.

He had not made a step towards joining us. He had only taken his hat off to the ladies. He was gaining ground upon me rapidly.

“Have you quarrelled with our new friend, Harry?” said my wife, as I came up to her.

She was sitting on a stone. Turner and Wynnie were farther off towards the foot of the fall.

“Not in the least,” I answered, slightly outraged—I did not at first know why—by the question. “He is only gone to his work, which is a duty belonging both to the first and second tables of the law.”

“I hope you have asked him to come home to our early dinner, then,” she rejoined.

“I have not. That remains for you to do. Come, I will take you to him.”

Ethelwyn rose at once, put her hand in mine, and with a little help soon reached the table-rock. When Percivale saw that she was really on a visit to him on his island-perch, he rose, and when she came near enough, held out his hand. It was but a step, and she was beside him in a moment. After the usual greetings, which on her part, although very quiet, like every motion and word of hers, were yet indubitably cordial and kind, she said, “When you get back to London, Mr. Percivale, might I ask you to allow some friends of mine to call at your studio, and see your paintings?”

“With all my heart,” answered Percivale. “I must warn you, however, that I have not much they will care to see. They will perhaps go away less happy than they entered. Not many people care to see my pictures twice.”

“I would not send you anyone I thought unworthy of the honour,” answered my wife.

Percivale bowed—one of his stately, old-world bows, which I greatly liked.

“Any friend of yours—that is guarantee sufficient,” he answered.

There was this peculiarity about any compliment that Percivale paid, that you had not a doubt of its being genuine.

“Will you come and take an early dinner with us?” said my wife. “My invalid daughter will be very pleased to see you.”

“I will with pleasure,” he answered, but in a tone of some hesitation, as he glanced from Ethelwyn to me.

“My wife speaks for us all,” I said. “It will give us all pleasure.”

“I am only afraid it will break in upon your morning’s work,” remarked Ethelwyn.

“O, that is not of the least consequence,” he rejoined. “In fact, as I have just been saying to Mr. Walton, I am not working at all at present. This is pure recreation.”

As he spoke he turned towards his easel, and began hastily to bundle up his things.

“We’re not quite ready to go yet,” said my wife, loath to leave the lovely spot. “What a curious flat stone this is!” she added.

“It is,” said Percivale. “The man to whom the place belongs, a worthy yeoman of the old school, says that this wider part of the channel must have been the fish-pond, and that the portly monks stood on this stone and fished in the pond.”

“Then was there a monastery here?” I asked.

“Certainly. The ruins of the chapel, one of the smallest, are on the top, just above the fall—rather a fearful place to look down from. I wonder you did not observe them as you came. They say it had a silver bell in the days of its glory, which now lies in a deep hole under the basin, half-way between the top and bottom of the fall. But the old man says that nothing will make him look, or let anyone else lift the huge stone; for he is much better pleased to believe that it may be there, than he would be to know it was not there; for certainly, if it were found, it would not be left there long.”

As he spoke Percivale had continued packing his gear. He now led our party up to the chapel, and thence down a few yards to the edge of the chasm, where the water fell headlong. I turned away with that fear of high places which is one of my many weaknesses; and when I turned again towards the spot, there was Wynnie on the very edge, looking over into the flash and tumult of the water below, but with a nervous grasp of the hand of Percivale, who stood a little farther back.

In going home, the painter led us by an easier way out of the valley, left his little easel and other things at a cottage, and then walked on in front between my wife and daughter, while Turner and I followed. He seemed quite at his ease with them, and plenty of talk and laughter rose on the way. I, however, was chiefly occupied with finding out Turner’s impression of Connie’s condition.

“She is certainly better,” he said. “I wonder you do not see it as plainly as I do. The pain is nearly gone from her spine, and she can move herself a good deal more, I am certain, than she could when she left. She asked me yesterday if she might not turn upon one side. ‘Do you think you could?’ I asked.—‘I think so,’ she answered. ‘At any rate, I have often a great inclination to try; only papa said I had better wait till you came.’ I do think she might be allowed a little more change of posture now.”

“Then you have really some hope of her final recovery?”

“I have hope most certainly. But what is hope in me, you must not allow to become certainty in you. I am nearly sure, though, that she can never be other than an invalid; that is, if I am to judge by what I know of such cases.”

“I am thankful for the hope,” I answered. “You need not be afraid of my turning upon you, should the hope never pass into sight. I should do so only if I found that you had been treating me irrationally—inspiring me with hope which you knew to be false. The element of uncertainty is essential to hope, and for all true hope, even as hope, man has to be unspeakably thankful.”

CHAPTER IX. THE WALK TO CHURCH

I was glad to be able to arrange with a young clergyman who was on a visit to Kilkhaven, that he should take my duty for me the next Sunday, for that was the only one Turner could spend with us. He and I and Wynnie walked together two miles to church. It was a lovely morning, with just a tint of autumn in the air. But even that tint, though all else was of the summer, brought a shadow, I could see, on Wynnie’s face.

“You said you would show me a poem of—Vaughan, I think you said, was the name of the writer. I am too ignorant of our older literature,” said Turner.

“I have only just made acquaintance with him,” I answered. “But I think I can repeat the poem. You shall judge whether it is not like Wordsworth’s Ode.

  ‘Happy those early days, when I  Shined in my angel infancy;  Before I understood the place  Appointed for my second race,  Or taught my soul to fancy ought  But a white, celestial thought;  When yet I had not walked above  A mile or two from my first love,  And looking back, at that short space,  Could see a glimpse of his bright face;  When on some gilded cloud or flower  My gazing soul would dwell an hour,  And in those weaker glories spy  Some shadows of eternity;  Before I taught my tongue to wound  My conscience with a sinful sound,  But felt through all this fleshly dress  Bright shoots of everlastingness.  O how I long to travel back–‘”

But here I broke down, for I could not remember the rest with even approximate accuracy.

“When did this Vaughan live?” asked Turner.

“He was born, I find, in 1621—five years, that is, after Shakspere’s death, and when Milton was about thirteen years old. He lived to the age of seventy-three, but seems to have been little known. In politics he was on the Cavalier side. By the way, he was a medical man, like you, Turner—an M.D. We’ll have a glance at the little book when we go back. Don’t let me forget to show it you. A good many of your profession have distinguished themselves in literature, and as profound believers too.”

“I should have thought the profession had been chiefly remarkable for such as believe only in the evidence of the senses.”

“As if having searched into the innermost recesses of the body, and not having found a soul, they considered themselves justified in declaring there was none.”

“Just so.”

“Well, that is true of the commonplace amongst them, I do believe. You will find the exceptions have been men of fine minds and characters—not such as he of whom Chaucer says,

  ‘His study was but little on the Bible;’

for if you look at the rest of the description of the man, you will find that he was in alliance with his apothecary for their mutual advantage, that he was a money-loving man, and that some of Chaucer’s keenest irony is spent on him in an off-hand, quiet manner. Compare the tone in which he writes of the doctor of physic, with the profound reverence wherewith he bows himself before the poor country-parson.”

Here Wynnie spoke, though with some tremor in her voice.

“I never know, papa, what people mean by talking about childhood in that way. I never seem to have been a bit younger and more innocent than I am.”

“Don’t you remember a time, Wynnie, when the things about you—the sky and the earth, say—seemed to you much grander than they seem now? You are old enough to have lost something.”

She thought for a little while before she answered.

“My dreams were, I know. I cannot say so of anything else.”

I in my turn had to be silent, for I did not see the true answer, though I was sure there was one somewhere, if I could only find it. All I could reply, however, even after I had meditated a good while, was—and perhaps, after all, it was the best thing I could have said:

“Then you must make a good use of your dreams, my child.”

“Why, papa?”

“Because they are the only memorials of childhood you have left.”

“How am I to make a good use of them? I don’t know what to do with my silly old dreams.”

But she gave a sigh as she spoke that testified her silly old dreams had a charm for her still.

“If your dreams, my child, have ever testified to you of a condition of things beyond that which you see around you, if they have been to you the hints of a wonder and glory beyond what visits you now, you must not call them silly, for they are just what the scents of Paradise borne on the air were to Adam and Eve as they delved and spun, reminding them that they must aspire yet again through labour into that childhood of obedience which is the only paradise of humanity—into that oneness with the will of the Father, which our race, our individual selves, need just as much as if we had personally fallen with Adam, and from which we fall every time we are disobedient to the voice of the Father within our souls—to the conscience which is his making and his witness. If you have had no childhood, my Wynnie, yet permit your old father to say that everything I see in you indicates more strongly in you than in most people that it is this childhood after which you are blindly longing, without which you find that life is hardly to be endured. Thank God for your dreams, my child. In him you will find that the essence of those dreams is fulfilled. We are saved by hope, Turner. Never man hoped too much, or repented that he had hoped. The plague is that we don’t hope in God half enough. The very fact that hope is strength, and strength the outcome, the body of life, shows that hope is at one with life, with the very essence of what says ‘I am’—yea, of what doubts and says ‘Am I?’ and therefore is reasonable to creatures who cannot even doubt save in that they live.”

By this time, for I have, of course, only given the outlines, or rather salient points, of our conversation, we had reached the church, where, if I found the sermon neither healing nor inspiring, I found the prayers full of hope and consolation. They at least are safe beyond human caprice, conceit, or incapacity. Upon them, too, the man who is distressed at the thought of how little of the needful food he had been able to provide for his people, may fall back for comfort, in the thought that there at least was what ought to have done them good, what it was well worth their while to go to church for. But I did think they were too long for any individual Christian soul, to sympathise with from beginning to end, that is, to respond to, like organ-tube to the fingered key, in every touch of the utterance of the general Christian soul. For my reader must remember that it is one thing to read prayers and another to respond; and that I had had very few opportunities of being in the position of the latter duty. I had had suspicions before, and now they were confirmed—that the present crowding of services was most inexpedient. And as I pondered on the matter, instead of trying to go on praying after I had already uttered my soul, which is but a heathenish attempt after much speaking, I thought how our Lord had given us such a short prayer to pray, and I began to wonder when or how the services came to be so heaped the one on the back of the other as they now were. No doubt many people defended them; no doubt many people could sit them out; but how many people could pray from beginning to end of them I On this point we had some talk as we went home. Wynnie was opposed to any change of the present use on the ground that we should only have the longer sermons.

“Still,” I said, “I do not think even that so great an evil. A sensitive conscience will not reproach itself so much for not listening to the whole of a sermon, as for kneeling in prayer and not praying. I think myself, however, that after the prayers are over, everyone should be at liberty to go out and leave the sermon unheard, if he pleases. I think the result would be in the end a good one both for parson and people. It would break through the deadness of this custom, this use and wont. Many a young mind is turned for life against the influences of church-going—one of the most sacred influences when pure, that is, un-mingled with non-essentials—just by the feeling that he must do so and so, that he must go through a certain round of duty. It is a willing service that the Lord wants; no forced devotions are either acceptable to him, or other than injurious to the worshipper, if such he can be called.”

After an early dinner, I said to Turner—“Come out with me, and we will read that poem of Vaughan’s in which I broke down today.”

“O, papa!” said Connie, in a tone of injury, from the sofa.

“What is it, my dear?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t it be as good for us as for Mr. Turner?”

“Quite, my dear. Well, I will keep it for the evening, and meantime Mr. Turner and I will go and see if we can find out anything about the change in the church-service.”

For I had thrown into my bag as I left the rectory a copy of The Clergyman’s Vade Mecum—a treatise occupied with the externals of the churchman’s relations—in which I soon came upon the following passage:

“So then it appears that the common practice of reading all three together, is an innovation, and if an ancient or infirm clergyman do read them at two or three several times, he is more strictly conformable; however, this is much better than to omit any part of the liturgy, or to read all three offices into one, as is now commonly done, without any pause or distinction.”

“On the part of the clergyman, you see, Turner,” I said, when I had finished reading the whole passage to him. “There is no care taken of the delicate women of the congregation, but only of the ancient or infirm clergyman. And the logic, to say the least, is rather queer: is it only in virtue of his antiquity and infirmity that he is to be upheld in being more strictly conformable? The writer’s honesty has its heels trodden upon by the fear of giving offence. Nevertheless there should perhaps be a certain slowness to admit change, even back to a more ancient form.”