CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW RECTOR
THE news which so much disturbed the inhabitants of the rectory at Brentburn was already old news in Oxford, where indeed it was known and decided who Mr. Chester’s successor was to be. The august body in whose hands the appointment lay was absolutely unconscious of the existence of Mr. St. John. Several members of it, it is true, were his own contemporaries, and had been his acquaintances in the old days when these very dons themselves traversed their quadrangles with such hopes and fears in respect to the issue of an examination, as the destruction of the world or its salvation would scarcely rouse in them now; but what was it likely they could know about a man who at sixty-five was only a curate, who had never asked for anything, never tried for anything; but had kept himself out of sight and knowledge for a lifetime? Those of them who had a dim recollection that “old St. John” was Chester’s curate in charge, naturally thought that he held that precarious and unprofitable place for so long, because of some personal connection with the locality, or preference for it, which he was well off enough to be able to indulge. He had been poor in his youth, but probably his wife had had money, or something had fallen to him. What so likely as that something good should fall by inheritance to a man with such a patrician name? Therefore let nobody blame the dons. They might have been capable (though I don’t know whether they would have had any right to exercise their patronage so) of a great act of poetic justice, and might have given to the undistinguished but old member of their college the reward of his long exertions, had they known. But as they did not know, what could these good men do but allot it to the excellent young Fellow – already the winner of all kinds of honours – who condescended to be willing to accept the humble rectory? Everybody said it was not worth Mildmay’s while to shelve himself in an obscure place like Brentburn; that it was a strange thing for him to do; that he would hate it as poor Chester – also an extremely accomplished man and fellow of his college – had done. Gossips – and such beings exist in the most classical places – feared that he must want the money; though some thought he was merely disinclined to let a tolerable small living, not far from town, and in a good county, where there were many “nice families,” pass him; but very few people so far as I am aware, thought of any higher motive which a popular young don could have for such a fancy.
Mr. Mildmay was quite one of the advanced rank of young Oxford men. I have never been able to understand how it was that he continued more or less orthodox, but he had done so by special constitution of mind, I suppose, which in some tends to belief as much as in some others it tends to unbelief. He was not one of those uncomfortable people who are always following out “truth” to some bitter end or other, and refusing all compromise. Perhaps he was not so profound as are those troublesome spirits, but he was a great deal happier, and a great deal more agreeable. It is quite possible that some young reader may object to this as a shameful begging of the question whether it is not best to follow “truth” with bosom bare into whatsoever wintry lands that oft-bewildered power may lead. I don’t know; some minds have little inclination towards the sombre guesses of science, new or old; and perhaps some may prefer Roger Mildmay for the mere fact that he did not feel himself to have outgrown Christianity; which, I confess, is my own feeling on the subject. However, if it is any satisfaction to the said young reader, I may as well avow that though nature kept him from being sceptical, that kindly nurse did not hinder him from throwing himself into much semi-intellectual foolishness in other ways. To hear him talk of art was enough to make all the Academy dance with fury, and drive the ordinary learner, however little attached to the Academy, into absolute imbecility; and his rooms were as good as a show, with all the last fantastical delights of the day – more like a museum of china and knick-knacks than rooms to live in. His floors were littered with rugs, over which, in the æsthetic dimness, unwary visitors tumbled; his walls were toned into olive greens or peacock blues, dark enough to have defied all the sunshine of the Indies to light them up. He had few pictures; but his rooms were hung with photographs “taken direct,” and a collection of old china plates, which perhaps, in their primitive colours and broad effect, “came” better than pictures in the subdued and melancholy light. But why insist upon these details? A great many highly-cultured persons have the same kind of rooms, and Mildmay was something more than a highly-cultured person. All this amused and occupied him very much – for indeed collecting is a very amusing occupation; and when he had found something “really good” in an old curiosity shop, it exhilarated him greatly to bring it home, and find a place for it among his precious stores, and to make it “compose” with the other curiosities around it. As sheer play, I don’t know any play more pleasant; and when he looked round upon the dim world of objets d’art that covered all his walls, shelves, and tables, and marked the fine pictorial effect of the one brilliant spot of light which the green shade of his reading-lamp prevented from too great diffusion – when, I say, looking up from his studies, Mr. Mildmay looked round upon all this, and felt that only very fine taste, and much patient labour, supported by a tolerably well-filled purse, could have brought it all together, and arranged everything into one harmonious whole, there came a glow of gentle satisfaction to the heart of the young don.
But then he sighed. All perfection is melancholy. When you have finally arranged your last acquisition, and look round upon a completeness which, even for the introduction of additional beauty, it seems wicked to disturb, what can you do but sigh? And there was more than this in the breath of melancholy – the long-drawn utterance of an unsatisfied soul in Mildmay’s sigh. After all, a man cannot live for china, for æsthetic arrangement, for furniture, however exquisite; or even for art, when he is merely a critic, commentator, and amateur – not a worker in the same. You may suppose that he was weary of his loneliness; that he wanted a companion, or those domestic joys which are supposed to be so infinitely prized in England. I am sorry to say this was not the case. The class to which Mildmay belongs are rather in the way of scouting domestic joys. A man who makes a goddess of his room, who adores china, and decks his mantleshelf with lace, seldom (in theory) wants a wife, or sighs for a companion of his joys and sorrows. For why? He does not deal much in sorrows or in joys. The deepest delight which can thrill the soul in the discovery of old Worcester or royal Dresden, scarcely reaches to the height of passion; and even if a matchless cup of Henri Deux were to be shivered to pieces in your hand, your despair would not appeal to human sympathy as would the loss of a very much commoner piece of flesh and blood. And then young ladies as a class are not, I fear, great in the marks of china, and even in the feminine speciality of lace require years to mellow them into admiration of those archæological morsels which cannot be worn. Besides, the very aspect of such rooms as those I have indicated (not being bold enough to attempt to describe them) is inimical to all conjoint and common existence. Solitude is taken for granted in all those dainty arrangements; in the dim air, the dusky walls, the subdued tone. A child in the place, ye heavens! imagination shivers, and dares not contemplate what might follow.
And then Mr. Mildmay had exhausted this delight. I believe his rooms were papered with three different kinds of the choicest paper that ever came out of Mr. Morris’s hands. His curtains had been embroidered in the art school of needlework on cloth woven and dyed expressly for him. An ancient piece of lovely Italian tapestry hung over one door, and another was veiled by a glorious bit of eastern work from Damascus or Constantinople. His Italian cabinets were enough to make you faint with envy; his Venice glass – but why should I go on? The rugs which tripped you up as you threaded your way through the delicate artificial twilight were as valuable as had they been woven in gold; and no sooner was it known that Mildmay had accepted a living than all the superior classes in the southern half of England pricked up their ears. Would there be a sale? About a thousand connoisseurs from all parts of the country balanced themselves metaphorically on one foot like Raphael’s St. Michael, ready to swoop down at the first note of warning. I am not sure that among railway authorities there were not preparations for a special train.
Mr. Mildmay had got tired of it all. Suddenly in that dainty dimness of high culture it had occurred to him that studies of old art and accumulations of the loveliest furniture were not life. What was life? There are so many that ask that question, and the replies are so feeble. The commonest rendering is that which Faust in sheer disgust of intellectualism plunged into – pleasure; with what results the reader knows. Pleasure in its coarser meaning, in the Faust sense, and in the vulgar sensual sense, was only a disgust to such a man as Roger Mildmay. What could he have done with his fine tastes and pure habits in the coulisses or the casinos? He would only have recoiled with the sickening sensations of physical loathing as well as mental. What then? Should he marry and have a family, which is the virtuous and respectable answer to his question? He had no inclination that way. The woman whom he was to marry had not yet risen on his firmament, and he was not the kind of man to determine on marriage in the abstract, dissociated from any individual. How then was he to know life, and have it? Should he go off into the distant world and travel, and discover new treasures of art in unsuspected places, and bring home his trophies from all quarters of the world? But he had done this so often already that even the idea almost fatigued him. Besides, all these expedients, pleasure, domesticity, travel, would all have been ways of pleasing himself only, and he had already done a great deal to please himself. Life must have something in it surely of sharper, more pungent flavour. It could not be a mere course of ordinary days one succeeding another, marked out by dinners, books, conversations, the same thing over again, never more than an hour of it at a time in a man’s possession, nothing in it that could not be foreseen and mapped out. This could not be life. How was he to get at life? He sat and wondered over this problem among his beautiful collections. He had nothing to do, you will say; and yet you can’t imagine how busy he was. In short, he was never without something to do. He had edited a Greek play, he had written magazine articles, he had read papers before literary societies, he had delivered lectures. Few, very few, were his unoccupied moments. He knew a great many people in the highest classes of society, and kept up a lively intercourse with the most intelligent, the most cultivated minds of his time. He was, indeed, himself one of the most highly cultured persons of his standing; yet here he sat in the most delightful rooms in his college, sighing for life, life!
What is life? Digging, ploughing, one can understand that; but unfortunately one cannot dig, and “to beg I am ashamed.” These familiar words suggested themselves by the merest trick of the ear to his mind unawares. To beg, the Franciscans he had seen in old Italy had not been at all ashamed; neither were the people who now and then penetrated into college rooms with – if not the Franciscan’s wallet, or the penitent’s rattling money-box – lists of subscriptions with which to beguile the unwary. For what? For hospitals, schools, missions, churches; the grand deduction to be drawn from all this being that there were a great many people in the world, by their own fault or that of others, miserable, sick, ignorant, wicked; and that a great many more people, from good or indifferent motives, on true or on false pretences, were making a great fuss about helping them. This fuss was in a general way annoying, and even revolting to the dilettanti, whose object is to see and hear only things that are beautiful, to encourage in themselves and others delightful sensations; but yet when you came to think of it, it could not be denied that the whole system of public charity had a meaning. In some cases a false, foolish, wrong meaning, no doubt; but yet —
If I were to tell you all the fancies that passed through Roger Mildmay’s head on the subject, it would require volumes; and many of his thoughts were fantastic enough. The fact that he had taken orders and was the man he was, made it his proper business to teach others; but he would much rather, he thought, have reclaimed waste land, or something of that practical sort. Yes, to reclaim a bit of useless moorland and make it grow oats or even potatoes – that would be something; but then unfortunately the ludicrous side of the matter would come over him. What could he do on his bit of moorland with those white hands of his? Would it not be much more sensible to pay honest wages to some poor honest man out of work, and let him do the digging? and then where was Roger Mildmay? still left, stranded, high and dry, upon the useless ground of his present existence. Such a man in such a self-discussion is as many women are. If he works, what is the good of it? It is to occupy, to please himself, not because the work is necessary to others; indeed, it is taking bread out of the mouths of others to do badly himself that which another man, probably lounging sadly, out of work, and seeing his children starve, would do well. Let him, then, go back to his own profession; and what was he to do? A clergyman must preach, and he did not feel at all at his ease in the pulpit. A clergyman must teach, and his prevailing mood was a desire to learn. A clergyman must care for the poor, and he knew nothing about the poor. The result of all these confused and unsatisfactory reasonings with himself was that when the living of Brentburn was offered to him half in joke, he made a plunge at it, and accepted. “Let us try!” he said to himself. Anything was better than this perplexity. At the worst he could but fail.
Now, Mr. St. John, as I have said, was a member of the same college, and had served the parish of Brentburn for twenty years, and what was to Roger Mildmay an adventure, a very doubtful experiment, would have been to him life and living; and next on the list of eligible persons after Mr. Mildmay was the Rev. John Ruffhead, who was very anxious to marry and settle, and was a clergyman’s son well trained to his work. Such injustices are everywhere around us; they are nobody’s fault, we say – they are the fault of the system; but what system would mend them it is hard to tell. And, on the other hand, perhaps neither Mr. St. John nor Mr. Ruffhead had the same high object before them as Roger had. The old man would have gone on in his gentle routine just as he had done all those years, always kind, soothing the poor folk more than he taught them; the young man would, though sure to do his duty, have thought perhaps more of the future Mrs. Ruffhead, and the settling down, than of any kind of heroic effort to realize life and serve the world. So that on the whole, ideally, my dilettante had the highest ideal; though the practical effect of him no one could venture to foretell.
He had decided to accept the living of Brentburn at once, feeling the offer to be a kind of answer of the oracle – for there was a certain heathenism mingling with his Christianity – to his long-smouldering and unexpressed desires; but before concluding formally he went, by the advice of one of his friends, to look at the place, “to see how he would like it.” “Like it! do I want to like it?” he said to himself. Must this always be the first question? Was it not rather the first possibility held out to him in the world – of duty, and a real, necessary, and certain work which should not be to please himself? He did not want to like it. Now, men of Mildmay’s turn of mind are seldom deeply devoted to nature. They admire a fine landscape or fine sunset, no doubt, but it is chiefly for the composition, the effects of light and shade, the combination of colours. In the loveliest country they sigh for picture galleries and fine architecture, and cannot please themselves with the mists and the clouds, the woods and the waters, the warm, sweet, boundless atmosphere itself, in which others find beauty and mystery unceasing. Yet on this occasion a different result took place; although it was contrary to his own principles, when he first came out of the prosaic little railway at Brentburn and saw at his right hand, one rich cloud of foliage rounding upon another, and all the wealth of princely trees standing up in their battalions under the full warm August sky; and on the other the sweet wild common bursting forth in a purple blaze of heather, all belted and broken with the monastic gloom of the pine-woods and ineffable blue distances of the wilder country – there suddenly fell upon him a love at first sight for this insignificant rural place, which I cannot account for any more than he could. I should be disposed to say that the scent of the fir-trees went to his head, as it does to mine; but then the very soul within him melted to the great, broad, delicious greenness of shadows in the forest; and the two between them held him in an ecstasy, in that sweet lapse of all sense and thought into which nature sometimes surprises us, when all at once, without any suspicion on our part of what she is about, she throws herself open to us, and holds out her tender arms. Mildmay stood in this partial trance, not knowing what he was doing, for – two full minutes, then he picked himself up, slightly ashamed of his ecstasy, and asked his way to the church, and said to himself (as I think Mr. Ruskin says somewhere) that mere nature without art to back her up is little, but that he might indeed permit himself to feel those indescribable sensations if he could look at all this as a background to a beautiful piece of ancient architecture in the shape of a church. Alas, poor Mr. Mildmay! I don’t know why it had never been broken to him. Ignorant persons had said “a very nice church,” perhaps out of sheer ignorance, perhaps from the commercial point of view that a new church in perfect repair is much more delightful, to a young rector’s pocket at least, than the most picturesque old one in perpetual need of restorations. But anyhow, when the church of Brentburn did burst upon him in all its newness, poor Roger put out his hand to the first support he could find, and felt disposed to swoon. The support which he found to lean on was the wooden rail, round a rather nasty duck-pond which lay between two cottages, skirting the garden hedge of one of them. Perhaps it was the odour of this very undelightful feature in the scene that made him feel like fainting, rather than the sight of the church; but he did not think so in the horror of the moment. He who had hoped to see the distant landscape all enhanced and glorified, by looking at it from among the ancestral elms or solemn yew-trees about a venerable village spire, and old grey, mossy Saxon walls – or beside the lovely tracery of some decorated window with perhaps broken pieces of old glass glimmering out like emeralds and rubies! The church, I have already said, was painfully new; it was in the most perfect good order; the stones might have been scrubbed with scrubbing-brushes that very morning; and, worse than all, it was good Gothic, quite correct and unobjectionable. The poor young don’s head drooped upon his breast, his foot slipped on the edge of the duck-pond. Never was a more delicate distress; and yet but for the despairing grasp he gave to the paling, the result might have been grotesque enough.
“Be you poorly, sir?” said old Mrs. Joel, who was standing, as she generally was, at her cottage door.
“No, no, I thank you,” said the new rector faintly; “I suppose it is the sun.”
“Come in a bit and rest, bless you,” said Mrs. Joel; “you do look overcome. It is a bit strong is that water of hot days. Many a one comes to look at our cheuch. There’s a power of old cheuches about, and ours is the only one I know of as is new, sir, and sweet and clean – though I says it as shouldn’t,” said the old woman, smoothing her apron and curtsying with a conscious smile.
“You are the sexton’s wife? you have the charge of it?” said Mr. Mildmay.
“Thank my stars! I ain’t no man’s wife,” said Mrs. Joel. “I be old John Joel’s widow – and a queer one he was; and the curate he say as I was to keep the place, though there’s a deal of jealousy about. I never see in all my born days a jealouser place than Brentburn.”
“Who is the curate?” asked Mr. Mildmay.
“Bless your soul, sir, he’ll be as pleased as Punch to see you. You go up bold to the big door and ask for Mr. St. John; he would always have the hartis-gentlemen and that sort in, to take a cup of tea with him. The Missis didn’t hold with it in her time. She had a deal of pride, though you wouldn’t have thought it at first. But since she’s dead and gone, Mr. St. John he do have his way; and two pretty young ladies just come from school,” said Mrs. Joel with a smirk. She was herself very curious about the stranger, who was evidently not a “hartis-gentleman.” “Maybe you was looking for lodgings, like?” she said, after a pause.
“No, no,” said Mildmay, with unnecessary explanatoriness; “I was only struck by the church, in passing, and wished to know who was the clergyman – ”
“Between ourselves, sir,” said Mrs. Joel, approaching closer than was pleasant, for her dinner had been highly seasoned, “I don’t know as Mr. St. John is what you call the clergyman. He ain’t but the curate, and I do hear as there is a real right clergyman a-coming. But you won’t name it, not as coming from me? for I can’t say but he’s always been a good friend.”
“Oh no, I shall not name it. Good morning,” cried Mildmay hurriedly. A new church, a horrible duck-pond, an old woman who smelt of onions. He hurried along, scarcely aware in his haste until he arrived in front of it that the house beyond the church was the rectory, his future home.