Paul Faber, Surgeon. George MacDonald
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never took his eyes off the preacher, but the preacher never saw him. The reason was that he dared not let his eyes wander in the direction of Mrs. Ramshorn; he was not yet so near perfection but that the sight of her supercilious, unbelieving face, was a reviving cordial to the old Adam, whom he was so anxious to poison with love and prayer. Church over, the rector walked in silence, between the two ladies, to the Manor House. He courted no greetings from the sheep of his neglected flock as he went, and returned those offered with a constrained solemnity. The moment they stood in the hall together, and before the servant who had opened the door to them had quite disappeared, Mrs. Ramshorn, to the indignant consternation of Mrs. Bevis, who was utterly forgotten by both in the colloquy that ensued, turned sharp on the rector, and said,
"There! what do you say to your curate now?"
"He is enough to set the whole parish by the ears," he answered.
"I told you so, Mr. Bevis!"
"Only it does not follow that therefore he is in the wrong. Our Lord Himself came not to send peace on earth but a sword."
"Irreverence ill becomes a beneficed clergyman, Mr. Bevis," said Mrs. Ramshorn—who very consistently regarded any practical reference to our Lord as irrelevant, thence naturally as irreverent.
"And, by Jove!" added the rector, heedless of her remark, and tumbling back into an old college-habit, "I fear he is in the right; and if he is, it will go hard with you and me at the last day, Mrs. Ramshorn."
"Do you mean to say you are going to let that man turn every thing topsy-turvy, and the congregation out of the church, John Bevis?"
"I never saw such a congregation in it before, Mrs. Ramshorn."
"It's little better than a low-bred conventicle now, and what it will come to, if things go on like this, God knows."
"That ought to be a comfort," said the rector. "But I hardly know yet where I am. The fellow has knocked the wind out of me with his personalities, and I haven't got my breath yet. Have you a bottle of sherry open?"
Mrs. Ramshorn led the way to the dining-room, where the early Sunday dinner was already laid, and the decanters stood on the sideboard. The rector poured himself out a large glass of sherry, and drank it off in three mouthfuls.
"Such buffoonery! such coarseness! such vulgarity! such indelicacy!" cried Mrs. Ramshorn, while the parson was still occupied with the sherry. "Not content with talking about himself in the pulpit, he must even talk about his wife! What's he or his wife in the house of God? When his gown is on, a clergyman is neither Mr. This nor Mr. That any longer, but a priest of the Church of England, as by law established. My poor Helen! She has thrown herself away upon a charlatan! And what will become of her money in the hands of a man with such leveling notions, I dread to think."
"He said something about buying friends with it," said the rector.
"Bribery and corruption must come natural to a fellow who could preach a sermon like that after marrying money!"
"Why, my good madam, would you have a man turn his back on a girl because she has a purse in her pocket?"
"But to pretend to despise it! And then, worst of all! I don't know whether the indelicacy or the profanity was the greater!—when I think of it now, I can scarcely believe I really heard it!—to offer to show his books to every inquisitive fool itching to know my niece's fortune! Well, she shan't see a penny of mine—that I'm determined on."
"You need not be uneasy about the books, Mrs. Ramshorn. You remember the condition annexed?"
"Stuff and hypocrisy! He's played his game well! But time will show."
Mr. Bevis checked his answer. He was beginning to get disgusted with the old cat, as he called her to himself.
He too had made a good speculation in the hymeneo-money-market, otherwise he could hardly have afforded to give up the exercise of his profession. Mrs. Bevis had brought him the nice little property at Owlkirk, where, if he worshiped mammon—and after his curate's sermon he was not at all sure he did not—he worshiped him in a very moderate and gentlemanly fashion. Every body liked the rector, and two or three loved him a little. If it would be a stretch of the truth to call a man a Christian who never yet in his life had consciously done a thing because it was commanded by Christ, he was not therefore a godless man; while, through the age-long process of spiritual infiltration, he had received and retained much that was Christian.
The ladies went to take off their bonnets, and their departure was a relief to the rector. He helped himself to another glass of sherry, and seated himself in the great easy chair formerly approved of the dean, long promoted. But what are easy chairs to uneasy men? Dinner, however, was at hand, and that would make a diversion in favor of less disquieting thought.
Mrs. Ramshorn, also, was uncomfortable—too much so to be relieved by taking off her bonnet. She felt, with no little soreness, that the rector was not with her in her depreciation of Wingfold. She did her best to play the hostess, but the rector, while enjoying his dinner despite discomfort in the inward parts, was in a mood of silence altogether new both to himself and his companions. Mrs. Bevis, however, talked away in a soft, continuous murmur. She was a good-natured, gentle soul, without whose sort the world would be harder for many. She did not contribute much to its positive enjoyment, but for my part, I can not help being grateful even to a cat that will condescend to purr to me. But she had not much mollifying influence on her hostess, who snarled, and judged, and condemned, nor seemed to enjoy her dinner the less. When it was over, the ladies went to the drawing-room; and the rector, finding his company unpleasant, drank but a week-day's allowance of wine, and went to have a look at his horses.
They neighed a welcome the moment his boot struck the stones of the yard, for they loved their master with all the love their strong, timid, patient hearts were as yet capable of. Satisfied that they were comfortable, for he found them busy with a large feed of oats and chaff and Indian corn, he threw his arm over the back of his favorite, and stood, leaning against her for minutes, half dreaming, half thinking. As long as they were busy, their munching and grinding soothed him—held him at least in quiescent mood; the moment it ceased, he seemed to himself to wake up out of a dream. In that dream, however, he had been more awake than any hour for long years, and had heard and seen many things. He patted his mare lovingly, then, with a faint sense of rebuked injustice, went into the horse's stall, and patted and stroked him as he had never done before.
He went into the inn, and asked for a cup of tea. He would have had a sleep on Mrs. Pinks's sofa, as was his custom in his study—little study, alas, went on there!—but he had a call to make, and must rouse himself, and that was partly why he had sought the inn. For Mrs. Ramshorn's household was so well ordered that nothing was to be had out of the usual routine. It was like an American country inn, where, if you arrive after supper, you will most likely have to starve till next morning. Her servants, in fact, were her masters, and she dared not go into her own kitchen for a jug of hot water. Possibly it was her dethronement in her own house that made her, with a futile clutching after lost respect, so anxious to rule in the abbey church. As it was, although John Bevis and she had known each other long, and in some poor sense intimately, he would never in her house have dared ask for a cup of tea except it were on the table. But here was the ease of his inn, where the landlady herself was proud to get him what he wanted. She made the tea from her own caddy; and when he had drunk three cups of it, washed his red face, and re-tied his white neck-cloth, he set out to make his call.
CHAPTER IX
The call was upon his curate. It was years since he had entered the rectory. The people who last occupied it, he had scarcely known, and even during its preparation for Wingfold he had not gone near the place. Yet of that house had been his dream as he stood in his mare's stall, and it was with a strange feeling he now approached it. Friends generally took the pleasanter way to the garden door, opening on the churchyard, but Mr. Bevis went round by the lane to the more public entrance.
All his years with his first wife had been spent in that house. She was delicate when he married her, and soon grew sickly and suffering. One after another her children died as babies. At last came one who lived, and then the mother began to die. She was one of those lowly women