“A soul she had on earth.”

—Byron.

“The more I learn to know man, the better I like dogs.”

—German Philosopher.

To those, I think a lessening number, who may find themselves at variance with “my Rector’s” theology, I tender the following quotation from one of the ablest and deepest thinkers of the past century:

“If, instead of the ‘glad tidings’ that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a Being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that ‘the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving’ does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may.  But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this Being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures.”—J. S. Mill, Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Philosophy, pp. 102, 103 (Criticism of Mansel).

That the Bible is our one and only true guide, we believe; but we are nowhere instructed to make an idol and a fetish of the form in which it is presented.  It was written to suit all times; we must read it in the language of to-day.

In the controversy between the Squire and himself the Rector is by no means guiltless of plagiarism.  Ford, who knew Spain as intimately as an Englishman can ever know it, advances the self-same arguments in his comments on the national sport.

A word more and I have done.  It is reported on good authority that one of our greatest divines—the author of ‘Butler’s Analogy’—held a confident belief in the re-existence of animals.  They share our doom of suffering and death: why not our promise of happiness beyond?  They have done nothing to forfeit their reward.

A. P.

Cambridge,
         August, 1904.

Riverdale and I—to wit one Harold Stirling by name—had been close friends almost since life began, at our private school, our public school, and again at college.  And we were meeting now for the last time as undergraduates in Riverdale’s rooms at Cambridge.  For the choice that comes, once at any rate in a lifetime, to all, had come to us, and we had chosen divergent, to some it would appear antagonistic, careers.

“And now tell me, Eric,” I asked, “where are all the Cupids and Psyches and Fauns to go while you are painting dusky Venetians and the fair-haired beauties of Genoa?”

The next day we had parted; he to enjoy life and study art in all the best galleries on the continent, and I to prepare myself for Ordination in a quiet village of the West.

It was a cheerful scene on which my eye rested as I looked out upon it from the Rector’s study, while awaiting my introduction to the Rector himself.  Two large bay windows opened on a terrace, from which a short flight of steps led down to a lawn, fringed with gaily-coloured flower beds.  Through the open windows streamed into the room a veritable flood of light and air, creating an atmosphere in which sadness and depression would have been hopelessly out of place.

“Impossible,” I murmured, “to write a gloomy Calvinistic sermon in a room like this, though it’s strange, by the way, that his letters should have told me nothing of his views.”

And out past the Rectory grounds, past the cheery meadow-land beyond, where reaping was now in progress, I caught a glimpse of the far off sea and the Isle of Portland lying on the line of the horizon, with a delicate veil of summer gauze folded about its head.  The charm of it all wove a spell upon me like a dream.

“But think well and carefully before you teach an Eternity of Punishment.  The responsibility of doing so is far too grave to be carelessly incurred in the light of a wider and clearer-sighted knowledge.  Almost it seems that the guess which Charlotte Brontë hazarded in the mouth of one of her characters will before long have crystallized into doctrine: ‘No; I cannot believe that.  I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I never mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest—a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss.’

“Limitation, imperfection and (by consequence) evil, with their natural development in sin and suffering and death, were the inevitable portion of created life, but accompanied (thank heaven!) with a birthright of possibilities for good, that, rightly used here and hereafter, shall make us worthy of association, at the last perhaps of union, with the Infinite Itself.

“Of course you will dine with me to-night,” he added cheerily, “and I’ll try to make amends for the penance I have inflicted on you.  Besides, I want your opinion on the trout from the Rectory stream.”

Like his brother at the Manor House hard by, my Rector, Mr. Richardson, was a widower, having lost his wife only six months before my arrival.  His family was comprised of four children, whose ages descended by even gradations from Reginald, the eldest, a handsome lad of eighteen whose school-life had just ended, down to Aggie the youngest, a wild little maiden of twelve.

On the day after my arrival I was studying the church and the streets of the village, which radiated like a fan from the foot of the hill where I stood, when I was met by Reginald who had dined with us the evening before.  He was to start early the next day for the continent, where he was to pick up what foreign languages he could before he entered at Cambridge in the following October.

By the gate of the churchyard, through which we passed to the Rectory, stood a time-worn placard requesting visitors not to touch any of the flowers “excepting those on their own graves.”

“You go on, and don’t disturb us, Reggie,” said Agnes, a lean wiry girl, with hair much dishevelled under the excitement of composition.  “We are busy preparing verses for the Attar competition prize, the new dentifrice, you know; you may hear mine if you like.  I go in for plain and simple fact—‘beauty unadorned’ you see:

‘Carbolic, camphor, chalk are done;
Attar is all and all in one.’”

“Well, Reggie, I have tried to add a little romance to it.  But somehow or other the teeth don’t seem to lend themselves readily to the genius of poetry:

‘If Attar you had used in time,
Your teeth would have been white—like mine;
But now my love for you is dead:
Another, ’nother girl I’ll wed.’”

“Bravo, Gertie!  You’re really brilliant.  ‘Time’ rhymes admirably with ‘mine,’ and it’s a stroke of true genius to intensify grief by the simple process of prodelision.”

“I’m glad you like it, Reggie, though I haven’t the faintest notion of what ‘prodelision’ means.”

“Well, mine is rather a bold venture, Reggie.  I want, you see, to combine the allied arts of painting and poetry.  There’s to be a picture of King Attar at the top, launching thunderbolts at a crowd of flying dentists.  Off they go in the distance, with their implements of torture in their hands, and at the bottom of the picture these words are written:

‘King Attar and the dentists see;
Choose Attar—and the dentists flee!’

“Capital!  You’ve got everything cut and dried, I see.  Though, by the way, you needn’t talk bad grammar under the stimulus of composition.  Didn’t your governess teach you that ‘like Melton Prior does’ is bad grammar?  If not, she isn’t worth her salt.”

“It’s our French, Reggie, that troubles her more than our English.  At any rate, when she called us in to dinner yesterday, I said, ‘Je suis déjà,’ meaning, of course, ‘I am all ready,’ and she had just the faintest suspicion in the world that I intended it for a joke, and boxed my ears on the chance.”

“And served you jolly well right for your cheek.  But I can’t stop chattering here.  Give me half the prize if you get it, for the encouragement I’ve given you.”

“Well, you pickles,” she exclaimed, “and where’s your guardian angel Josephine gone?  Not left you to your own devices if she’s a wise woman.”

“Oh! she’s off to the garden, Cousin Marion, ‘to cut a cabbage to make an apple pie,’ as Verdant Green said.  I mean she’s gone to dig up all the weeds and dandelions that lie handy.  ‘It must be,’ she said, ‘that I have herbs—savage herbs—to aid the digestion.’  Only the other day she half poisoned herself with celandine roots, which she thought looked promising for the composition of a salad.”

“What I, my child?  Why, I never made a line of poetry in my life, and hardly ever remembered one.  See how the very thought of it has made me fly.”  At the door she looked back laughing:

“‘Reggie, you kissed me just outside the door;
Use Attar, or don’t kiss me any more!’”

And, laughing still, she fled—fortunately without seeing me, who had watched the proceedings unobtrusively from the shelter of a friendly clematis.

I had found lodgings with one Peggy Ransom, whom I soon discovered to be one of the chief characters in the village, as the Rector had reported her.  A tiny old lady she was, with a small and shrivelled face, like a Ribston pippin that had survived well on into April, and bright beady eyes that always reminded me of a squirrel’s.  She had, too, something of the same small creature’s animal vivacity, and talked in a queer little chirpy strain that suggested its note of satisfaction when it has lighted upon a particularly fine nut or acorn.

On Sundays and holidays she appeared resplendent in a black silk gown, which, she told me with pride, could “stand of itself in the days when the Rector gave it her”—how many years before I had never had the rudeness to enquire.  But it was still a fine article of raiment, and had been preserved with such scrupulous care that even in its old age it still retained its dignity.

She had lost her husband and all her family one by one, and found the joy of her life in the Rector and the Rectory children, who were always in and out of the kitchen, worrying her and hindering her work, it seemed to me, though she would never hear a word from anyone against them.  “Bless their hearts,” she would say, “I’d be a lone and dreary old body without them, though I do wish that child Aggie would come up the garden path like a Christian, instead of jumping over the flower-beds and tempting the cats to play hide-and-seek among my lilies of the valley.”

But on the whole Peggy and I got on capitally together, and she was in most respects an ideal landlady for a curate who was new and strange to his surroundings.  She had lived her life in the parish, and knew its landmarks as no one else knew them.  Besides, she amused me with her gossip, especially when I could draw her on the subject of the Rector and his theories, which she was never weary of discussing.

There was something else by the way that gave Peggy Ransom a special interest in my eyes.  She had been housekeeper at the Manor House in the days of Marion’s youth, but had left it fifteen years before to form her own ill-fated marriage.

There were to be only four of us at dinner that evening.  In the ignorance of my heart I rejoiced at Reggie’s absence, little thinking that, before the evening was over, I should have been glad to welcome his cousinly attentions to Marion as a far less dangerous rivalry than the one which was suddenly to burst upon me from a quarter wholly beyond the range of my vision.

The old Manor House was looking its best, as half an hour later I walked up through the avenue by which it was approached.

Our party, as I have said, was limited to four, and as the Rector and his brother at once paired off for the evening, Marion was left to my care, and our acquaintance progressed rapidly.

Squire Richardson was, in character and even in appearance, a replica of his brother—a replica with a single difference.  The Squire loved foxhunting with all the devotion of a country gentleman, while to the Rector it was the one sport above all others of which he was intolerant.  They had hardly sat down to dinner when the question turned up, and it was nearly over before they had threshed it out without the smallest advantage to either side.  The Rector was the assailant.

“Butchered to make a British holiday!” shouted the Rector.

“Rather to give mettle to our horses and manliness to our men!” shouted back the Squire.

With a smile of despair, and a nod in my direction that answered my unspoken query for permission to accompany her, Marion slipt quietly through the open window out on to the terrace, and I followed her.

“They’ll go on like that,” she said, “till they’ve finished their wine.  And the best of it is they never lose their temper, but end as amicably as they began.  It’s a really pretty object-lesson in Christian forbearance.”

“I wonder which side of the question you took at dinner?” I asked, anxious to find whether the advanced theories of the Rector had found an echo in herself.

“But what about the side-issues,” I slyly asked her, “arising from the possibility that all these animals will live again?  How shall we meet in the next world the reproachful glances of the creatures we have slain in this?”

And so we strolled among the dimly-lighted shrubberies, chatting on less impracticable subjects, till the light faded out of the sky, and the shadows fell, and the Squire shouted a summons to us to join them in the drawing-room.

The ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ for and against foxhunting having been exhausted over their wine, the Squire and the Rector were now deep in discussion over matters affecting the village.  Now and again I heard references to a certain mysterious council, to a meeting of which my attendance had been requested for the following day.  The Rector had only smiled when he gave me the message, advising me to attend, and adding a promise of amusement.

“It’s just because it is old, Edgar, that I tolerate it—and also absolutely harmless.  The fact is I’m fearfully conservative, and never meddle with old institutions if I can possibly avoid it.  Besides, the members are all of them very old men, who would be sadly at a loss if they missed their weekly reunion.  But they are to elect no new members, and, as it is, I revise and reverse their resolutions, when necessary.  So it only means they have the pleasure of passing them.”

Something like the above I heard from time to time in the intervals of Marion’s singing.  But I had little thought to spare on it.  My whole attention was absorbed in a voice and execution that would have held their own in any London concert-room.

The following evening, punctually at eight o’clock, I presented myself at the door of the Council Chamber.  But the comedy which I had been promised was not forthcoming.  To the surprise of all of us, a tragedy was represented in its place.

“’Twill be a privilege for ye, Master Stirling, to mix for onst wi’ men as be so much older an’ wiser nor yerself.  For wi’ all the book-learnin’ that has been yours at school and college, ’tis nowt but age an’ experience as gi’es the true wisdom.  Life must be well nigh ended afore as ever we begins to see the drift an’ bearin’ on’t.  An’ so the young can’t never be wise, though, ’tis true, the aged may sometimes be foolish.”

You will gather from the above that Joseph Weyman did not begin by flattering me.

Of course the Council could not deliberate without the sustenance of beer and tobacco.  And the smoke of continuous churchwardens (I include both the man and his pipe) had toned the colouring of the panels into a rich and tawny brown, from which the quivering firelight was reflected as from the ebon mirror favoured by Egyptian palmists.

The proceedings were opened by our drinking the health of the King with solemn enthusiasm.  And then, before the business of the sitting was begun, a few words of general conversation were held to be admissible.  It was a former Rector who formed the key-note of it, and a strange character he must have been if all the stories were true that I heard of him.

“Aye, ’twas that indeed, Mr. Higgins.  You see, our old Rector was gettin’ aged an’ hard o’ hearin’, an’ when Lucy Stone handed ’n the child, he said in his easy-goin’ pleasant way, ‘An’ what be we to call ’n, Lucy?’

“‘Lucy, Sir,’ she whispered—for ’twas her first, ye see, an’ a terrible shy young ’ooman she were—‘Lucy, Sir—same as me.’

“‘Lucifer!’ he cried, ‘’twill never do; ’tis heathenish, an’ wus than heathenish.’

“An’ I had to shout in his ear, while they was a-titterin’ all round, till I hadn’t no voice left in me to lead the hymn.”

All had been peace and amity so far, but the discussion that followed on the choice of the hymns threatened to be acrimonious.

“There be seasons,” said the Chairman reflectively, “when marriage bain’t that satisfaction as it ought to be.  ’Twas only just afore I came along that I said to my wife, ‘Mary Ann,’ says I, ‘I be that downhearted an’ low-sperrit’d in my mind, for all the world as if I’d met a buryin’.  An’ I see’d a magpie by hisself to-day, an’ I took off my hat to ’n, I did.’

“An’ right she be, to my way o’ thinkin’,” said Ebenezer Higgins.  “’Tis nowt we hear now a long but o’ the marcy of the Lord—not a word of His judgments, an’ o’ the fire and brimston’ what’s in store for the wicked.  Where be the sense, I axes, o’ strainin’ an’ strivin’ after the narrer gate an’ takin’ no part in the sins an’ wickedness o’ this wurld, if ’tis all one at the end, whether ye’ve been on the Lord’s side or on Satan’s?”

It was at this point, when feeling began to run high, that the situation was saved by a remark from the Chairman.

“Seems queer an’ strange,” said our Chairman, “why he don’t stop an’ talk wi’ us, when we’ve been old friends and neighbours time out o’ memory.  An’ ’tis fast he travels for an aged man like he.  I be out o’ breath, I be, wi’ follerin’ ’n, an’ seems as how we don’t get no nigher to ’n for all our hurry-in’.  An’ where on earth be he bound for?  One’d fancy he were makin’ for the shore, unless so be he intends to stop at Widder Russell’s, for there bain’t no other buildin’ along the road, ’cept the old church, an’ ’tain’t likely as how he be makin’ for that.”

But no; it wasn’t Widow Russell’s he was bound for.  Past the house he went, still onwards to the shore, ever and again turning to see that we still followed him, until he had reached the gate of the old churchyard.

“Sakes alive,” said old Weyman, “if he bain’t standin’ nigh the very bit o’ ground as I’d mapped out in my mind’s eye for our next buryin’.  I’m well nigh scared, I be, by the thought that what we’ve been a-follerin’ ain’t flesh an’ blood at all, but a sperrit.  Else why don’t he say a word to I, when he sees I be spent an’ weary wi’ all this traipsin’ after ’n?  ’Stead of which ’tis speerin’ an’ pointin’ he be to that plot o’ ground as if to show us ’tis there he be choosin’ a spot for his last restin’ place.”

Yes; the mystery was solved at last—the quest on which he had led us was ended and explained.  For there, in only two feet of water, lay his body, encumbered as we had seen it with its heavy load of timber, collected, it must have been, with infinite toil and, as we now realised, at the cost of his life.

In default of all certainty, the theory was accepted that he had lost his life a fortnight previously, but where and how there was no evidence to show.  Probably he had over-balanced himself in reaching for a baulk of floating timber, and had been drifted by the ebb and flow of each recurring tide from the place of his death—no one knew where—to the home of his birth where he had chosen his grave.