Trimblerigg

ON his return from college for the summer vacation, his course almost completed, Mr. Trimblerigg found Uncle Phineas with his feet gathered up for death, though not immediately. He was confined to the house and did not go out; presently did not even come downstairs. Caroline, of course, was still with him, somewhat colourless as a companion, but efficient as a housekeeper.

It would be difficult to say whether she was also a True Believer, in the doctrinal sense, because to her doctrine meant nothing. She was one of those comfortable characters who, in matters of faith, can believe anything, and never actively disbelieve anything they are told by those whom they respect and look up to. Otherwise, in worldly affairs, she was quite sensible.

When she opened the door to Mr. Trimblerigg she showed pleasure in his arrival. He called her ‘cousin,’ and kissed her, thereby committing himself to nothing but a more open acceptance of the kinship which had existed before intimacy began. Still it prepared the ground provisionally, and the blush with which she accepted the salutation made her look almost pretty: in her large cream-coloured way, with under-edges of pink, she was personable though she lacked personality; and she was very pleasant to touch, a point which with Mr. Trimblerigg mattered on the whole more than good looks, and very much more than intellect.

In the balm of her smile she said, ‘Uncle has been expecting you.’

‘So have you,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg; ‘and I’ve been expecting myself.’ Thus, footing it easily, he came into the house of his expectations, and went up to his uncle’s room.

It was a momentous interview. The old man’s beard had whitened and was beginning to slope from the horizontal to the perpendicular: voice and hand were tremulous; but his eyes, whether he saw well or ill with them, retained their keen look: and Jonathan still felt, in a lesser degree, as he did with Davidina, that he was being examined as to his character. For in spite of submissive hours in the past, he suspected that as yet Uncle Phineas had never quite trusted him; that there was something missing which all his art and solicitude could not supply.

Indeed it was so; temperamentally Mr. Trimblerigg was not cut to the pattern of True Belief; whereas, for Uncle Phineas to be outside True Belief, was to be spiritually in chaos; and the small ugly chapel which he had built for his own ministry of the Word was to him a veritable city of light. And now he knew that he was leaving it.

‘I’m glad you’ve come, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got a preacher, only one that comes once a month; it’s only praying and reading most Sabbath days now; and there’s some that aren’t faithful. Are you willing to take the work now you’re home again?’

Mr. Trimblerigg said that he would.

‘I wonder,’ said the old man, fixing him with his gaze, ‘whether you’ll be contented to stay here after I’m gone?’

‘I shall do what the Lord tells me,’ said Jonathan.

‘Let’s ask Him now,’ said Uncle Phineas. ‘Bring me the Book.’

There was no reason why Mr. Trimblerigg should refuse; but it was a curious experience to see that the Book opened where a marker had been placed in it; to see the old man pass his hand over to the left, measure his finger up the page and lay it on an exact spot. Nor did he wonder then, when the text was read, that his future had been fixed for him in terms that he could not dispute.

‘And Laban said unto him, I pray thee if I have found favour in thine eyes, tarry; for I have learned by experience that the Lord hath blessed me for thy sake. And he said, “Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it”.’

After Heaven had thus spoken there was a pause; then Phineas said, ‘The word “Tarry” is in italics, Jonathan. That seems to point, doesn’t it? Have you any doubt left in you now, about what God means you to do?’

‘No, Uncle,’ replied Mr. Trimblerigg, ‘I have none.’ The text, in fact, had not altered by a hair’s breadth his views of the career he was to run.

‘“Appoint me thy wages and I will give it,”’ went on the old man. ‘That comes in too. But it isn’t wages exactly, is it, Jonathan? Though you may call it so for want of a better word. You know that I’ve made two wills, don’t you, Jonathan?’

Yes: Jonathan had heard it.

‘I haven’t forgotten you, Jonathan. I’ve remembered you in both; but I haven’t left you so much in the one as in the other. You see, I’d got Davidina in my mind, then: and there was Caroline, too.... I should be leaving you more, Jonathan, if it wasn’t for Caroline. But now, she’s lived with me all these last years, I’ve got to provide for her—differently to what I meant.’

He spoke slowly, picking his words a little. Mr. Trimblerigg listened to them without disappointment or dismay. He had no objection to Caroline being provided for on a generous scale; and as his own share was apparently to be increased, Davidina was now evidently the one who would have to give way.

‘And then,’ said his uncle, ‘there was the chapel to think about. Now that you’ve accepted the Lord’s word I know what to do.’

With quavering hand he drew out a key, and directed his nephew to a drawer with certain contents.

Under instruction Mr. Trimblerigg brought him the two documents. He looked them through, and separating the one from the other had it returned to the drawer and locked back into safety. He then did something which convinced Mr. Trimblerigg that at last he trusted him. He put into his hands the remaining document.

‘When you go downstairs, Jonathan, put that into the fire,’ he said, ‘and see that it burns. It’s not wanted now.’ And as he heard those words Mr. Trimblerigg felt that his future was assured (and incidentally Caroline’s also). His anxieties were all over, but curiosity remained.

When Uncle Phineas dismissed him he went downstairs with spirits quietly elated; and seeing that his future wife was then busily occupying the kitchen, he went into the parlour to consider matters. First he opened and read the discarded will; its contents were not sensational, but they would, had they outlived the testator, have disappointed him. His uncle had left him an income of a hundred pounds, and his books. The chapel went to Trustees with a small stipend for the ministry of the Word according to the tenets of True Belief. The residue of his property, real and personal, was divided in equal portions between Caroline and Davidina; Caroline’s share including the house he lived in. This meant that Caroline and Davidina would have each got an income of over two hundred a year, of rising value.

When Caroline went up aloft at the ringing of Uncle Phineas’s handbell, Mr. Trimblerigg went into the kitchen and without reluctance put the document into the fire according to his instructions. And when Caroline came down again to go on with the cooking, he proposed to her and was accepted.

This was the beginning of quite the happiest three weeks in his life, for as soon as Mr. Trimblerigg made up his mind to marry Caroline, he also made up his mind to be in love with her. He did not find any more difficulty in this swift embrace of new affections than in the equally swift embrace of new convictions as soon as they suited him. Circumstances had provided him with sufficient reasons for making Caroline his wife; and as love made the proposal so much more palatable, he bestowed upon her that extra gift with the demonstrative ardour that was his nature; and in the extended opportunities afforded by courtship he continued to find her very pleasant to the touch: a little unemotional perhaps, but good-tempered, contented, and an excellent cook; and it was clear that in her quiet, half-motherly way she very much admired him.

Uncle Phineas received the news without comment; and three weeks later, with a final gathering-up of his patriarchal feet, died in the beginning of his eighty-seventh year just about tea-time.

Mr. Trimblerigg ran for the woman who was to lay him out (since in that matter old age requires extra haste when the legs have died bent), then walked on to give instructions to the undertaker. Returning presently to a house where the womenfolk were busy at their obsequious duties, he sought and found a key which he knew by sight, and got out the will. Under it lay a sealed letter addressed to Davidina. This puzzled and slightly startled him; but for the present he laid it by as an item of comparative unimportance. What startled him much more, however, were the provisions which he found in the surviving will. His own share of it was indeed larger. He found himself owner not only of the house, the books and the furniture, but of the chapel also, with an accompanying income of a hundred and fifty pounds, to be his so long as he remained the local minister of the True Believers. This stipend was in the hands of Trustees. All the rest of the estate, amounting to an annual value of five hundred pounds went to Davidina.

Mr. Trimblerigg lost his temper; for a moment it almost seemed that his uncle had made him destroy the wrong will. But there, for himself, though tied by conditions, was the larger bequest; he could not but admit that here a modest livelihood was provided for him: enough in that retired district where all lived simply to enable him to marry and have a family. On the other hand, it bound him to the place, and bound him still more stiffly to the tenets of True Belief. There was the further bewilderment that Davidina got all the rest, the bulk of the estate; and that Caroline got nothing.

And now, of course, the letter to Davidina became important. He went upstairs, got it from the drawer, and brought it down. The seal was a purely conventional precaution, easy to get through and to replace; while as for the adhesive flap there are ways also of dealing with that which every one knows. Adopting one of them he became cognizant of the contents. It appeared then that, after all, his Uncle Phineas had not trusted him; and that, in spite of their apparent estrangement of late years, he did trust Davidina absolutely. The letter informed Davidina that while her benefit under the will was without legal condition, it was the testator’s wish and request that if fifteen years after his death her brother Jonathan was still an active minister of the True Believers she should surrender to him one-half of the estate now bequeathed to her; and that, as a necessary precaution, she should make a will securing him the same advantage under the same conditions. And following on this came a statement more startling than all: ‘I have made no special provision for Caroline, as I intend that she shall marry Jonathan.’ And with that the communication ended.

Mr. Trimblerigg looked up from it into a changed world. Just as he thought to be starting on his forward career, he had become a cypher in the hands of others. The word ‘Tarry’ stared him in the face; in italics, as his uncle had remarked. Here and now he had been left to Caroline, in order to provide her with a home; and in the future to the tender mercies of Davidina—who was not even legally bound, when the time came, to act on her instructions.

Fifteen years! The time was fatal to his prospects; it mattered nothing to his career that now, in his twenty-first year, he happened to be a member of the antiquated sect of True Believers; it would matter everything if he were bound to it for another fifteen years. He would then be nearing forty; how could he become the leader of the Free Evangelicals, foremost figure of the Free Church Union in its march toward liberal Theology, if in fifteen years’ time he was still saddled with the tenets of True Belief to the extent of having to preach them? He saw the meaning of it. His uncle had not trusted him; and was as far from trusting him as ever, at the moment when he had placed in his hands the other will to have it destroyed. It stung him to the quick that a simple and rather stupid old man should thus have got the better of him—to the extent at least of controlling the offer or withdrawal of a prospective income of four hundred a year. A hundred and fifty of it depended on his remaining in the local ministry; that did not so much matter; but the rest depended on his remaining in the connection at the very height of his powers; and that he did not for a moment intend. No; even in the shock of disappointment and all the callowness of untried youth, he knew that he was worth more. And in a moment he had decided: henceforth his career was to be a tussle between him and old Uncle Trimblerigg; they would see which would come out first.

While thus he straightened out his problem below, Uncle Phineas was being straightened out upstairs. It was the easier job of the two and would soon be over; Jonathan had no time to lose. And so collectedly, with presence of mind, he restored the letter to its envelope, licked and sealed it, and returned letter and will to the drawer from which he had taken them, leaving them to be found by others.

Three days later he prayed and preached at the funeral with great success. People flocked to hear him, for it was already known in the surrounding district, which had sampled his early efforts, that he was going to become a great orator. Within a year he was due to enter the ministry: and the True Believers swelled with a sense of triumph that once more they were going to have among them a shining light.

In the domestic privacy of the Trimblerigg family, when the funeral was over, the will was ceremonially opened and read; and Jonathan received with Christian resignation the announcement that Davidina was her uncle’s chief beneficiary.

A few days later he gave Davidina a chance to speak of the thing he knew, by inquiring:

‘Uncle Phineas left a letter for you, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Davidina, and was for saying no more. But Mr. Trimblerigg could not quite let it stop at that.

‘Anything that concerns others besides yourself?’

‘Yes,’ said Davidina again. ‘He told me that you were going to marry Caroline, and sent you his love.’

So apparently Davidina meant that he was not to know. For once he had beaten her; and even if it were to bring him nothing in the end there was satisfaction in that thought.