God's Good Man Part 63

"I don't believe a word of it!" declared the eldest Miss Ittlethwaite,--"I do not attend Mr. Walden's services myself, but I am quite sure he is an excellent man--and a perfect gentleman.

Nothing that Tabitha Pippitt can ever say, will move me on that point!"

"I always had my suspicions!"--said Mrs. Mandeville Poreham, severely, when she in her turn heard the news--"I heard that Miss Vancourt had insisted--positively INSISTED on Mr. Walden's visiting her nearly every day, and I trembled for him! MY girls have gone quite crazy about Miss Vancourt ever since they met her at Sir Morton Pippitt's garden-party, but _I_ have NEVER changed my opinion. MY poor mother always taught me to be firm in my convictions. And Miss Vancourt is a designing person. There's no doubt of it. She affects the innocence of a child--but I doubt whether I have ever met anyone QUITE so worldly and artful!"

So the drops of petty gossip began to trickle,--very slowly at first, and then faster and faster, as is their habitude in the effort to wear away the sparkling adamant of a good name and unblemished reputation. The Reverend Putwood Leveson, vengefully brooding over the wrongs which he considered he had sustained at the hands of Walden, as well as Julian Adderley, rode to and fro on his bicycle from morn till dewy eye, perspiring profusely, and shedding poisonous slanders almost as freely as he exuded melted tallow from his mountainous flesh, aware that by so doing he was not only ingratiating himself with the Pippitts, but also with Lord Roxmouth, through whose influence he presently hoped to 'get a thing or two.'

Mordaunt Appleby, the Riversford brewer, and his insignificant spouse, irritated at never having had the chance to 'receive' Lord Roxmouth, were readily pressed into the same service and did their part of scandal-mongering with right good-will and malignant satisfaction. And in less than forty-eight hours' time there was no name too bad for the absent Maryllia; she was 'mixed up' with John Walden,--she had 'tried to entangle him'--there had been 'a scene with him at the Manor,'--she was 'forward,' 'conceited'--and utterly lost to any sense of propriety. Why did she not marry Lord Roxmouth?

Why, indeed! Many people could tell if they chose! Ah yes!--and with this, there were sundry shakings of the head and shruggings of the shoulders which implied more than whole volumes of libel.

But while the county talked, the village listened, sagaciously incredulous of mere rumour, quiescent in itself and perfectly satisfied that whoever else was wrong, 'Pa.s.son Walden' in everything he did, said, or thought, was sure to be right. Wherefore, until they heard their 'man o' G.o.d's' version of the stories that were being so briskly circulated, they reserved their own opinions. The infallibility of the Supreme Pontiff was not more securely founded in the Roman Catholic Ritual than the faith of St. Rest in the 'gospel according to John.'

XXVII

Meanwhile Walden himself, ignorant of all the 'local' excitement so suddenly stirred up in his tiny kingdom, had arrived on a three days' visit at the house, or to put it more correctly, at the palace, of his friend Bishop Brent. It was, in strict reality a palace, having been in the old days one of the residences of Henry VII. Much of the building had been injured during the Cromwellian period, and certain modern repairs to its walls had been somewhat clumsily executed, but it still retained numerous fine old mullioned windows, and a cloistered court of many sculptured arches still eminently beautiful, though grey and crumbling under the touch of the melancholy vandal, Time. The Bishop's study had formerly been King Henry's audience chamber, and possessed a richly-wrought ceiling of interlaced oak rafters, and projecting beams smoothly polished at the ends and painted with royal emblems, from which projections no doubt, in early periods, many a banner of triumph had floated and many a knightly pennon. Bishop Brent was fond of this room, and carefully maintained its ancient character in the style of its furniture and general surroundings. The wide angle-nook and high carved chimney-piece, supported by two sculptured angel-figures of heroic size, was left unmodernised, and in winter the gaping recess was filled with great logs blazing cheerily as in olden times, but in summer, as now, it served as a picturesque setting for ma.s.ses of rare flowers which, growing in pots, or cut freshly and set in crystal vases, were grouped together with the greatest taste and artistic selection of delicate colouring, forming, as it seemed, a kind of blossom-wreathed shrine, above which, against the carved chimney itself, hung a wonderfully impressive picture of the Virgin and Child. Placed below this, and slightly towarde the centre of the room, was the Bishop's table-desk and chair, arranged so that whenever he raised his head from his work, the serene soft eyes of Mary, Blessed among Women, should mystically meet his own. And here just now he sat at evening, deep in conversation with John Walden, who with the perfect unselfishness which was an ingrained part of his own nature, had for the time put aside or forgotten all his own little troubles, in order to listen to the greater ones of his friend. He had been shocked at the change wrought in seven years on Brent's form and features. Always thin, he had now become so attenuated as to have reached almost a point of emaciation,--his dark eyes, sunk far back under his shelving brows, blazed with a feverish brilliancy which gave an almost unearthly expression to his pale drawn features, and his hand, thin, long, and delicate as a woman's, clenched and unclenched itself nervously when he spoke, with an involuntary force of which he was himself unconscious.

"You have not aged much, Walden!" he said, thoughtfully regarding his old college chum's clear and open countenance with a somewhat sad smile--"Your eyes are the same blue eyes of the boy that linked his arm through mine so long ago and walked with me through the sleepy old streets of 'Alma Mater!' That time seems quite close to me sometimes--and again sometimes far away--dismally, appallingly, far away!"

He sighed. Walden looked at him a little anxiously, but for the moment said nothing.

"You give me no response,"--continued Brent, with sudden querulousness--"Since you arrived we have been talking nothing but generalities and Church matters. Heavens, how sick I am of Church matters! Yet I know you see a change in me. I am sure you do--and you will not say it. Now you never were secretive--you never said one thing and meant another--so speak the truth as you have always done! I AM changed, am I not?"

"You are,"--replied Walden, steadily--"But I cannot tell how, or in what way. You look ill and worn out. You are overworked and overwrought--but I think there is something else at the root of the evil;--something that has happened during the last seven years. You are not quite the man you were when you came to consecrate my church at St. Rest."

"St. Rest!" repeated the Bishop, musingly--"What a sweet name it is- -what a still sweeter suggestion! Rest--rest!--and a saint's rest too!--that perfect rest granted to all the martyrs for Christ!--how safe and peaceful!--how sure and glorious! Would that such rest were mine! But I see nothing ahead of me but storm and turmoil, and stress of anguish and heartbreak, ending in--Nothingness!"

Walden bent a little more forward and looked his friend full in the eyes.

"What is wrong, Harry?" he asked, with exceeding gentleness.

At the old schoolboy name of bygone years, Brent caught and pressed his hand with strong fervour. A smile lighted his eyes.

"John, my boy, everything is wrong!" he said--"As wrong as ever my work at college was, before you set it right. Do you think I forget!

Everything is wrong, I tell you! I am wrong,--my thoughts are wrong,--and my conscience leaves me no peace day or night! I ought not to be a Bishop--for I feel that the Church itself is wrong!"

John sat quiet for a minute. Then he said--

"So it is in many ways. The Church is a human attempt to build humanity up on a Divine model, and it has its human limitations. But the Divine model endures!"

Brent threw himself back in his chair and closed his eyes.

"The Divine model endures--yes!" he murmured--"The Divine foundation remains firm, but the human building totters and is insecure to the point of utter falling and destruction!" Here, opening his eyes, he gazed dreamily at the pictured face of the Madonna above him.

"Walden, it is useless to contend with facts, and the facts are, that the ma.s.ses of mankind are as unregenerate at this day as ever they were before Christ came into the world! The Church is powerless to stem the swelling tide of human crime and misery. The Church in these days has become merely a harbour of refuge for hypocrites who think to win conventional repute with their neighbours, by affecting to believe in a religion not one of whose tenets they obey!

Blasphemy, rank blasphemy, Walden! It is bad enough in all conscience to cheat one's neighbour, but an open attempt to cheat the Creator of the Universe is the blackest crime of all, though it be unnamed in the criminal calendar!"

He uttered these words with intense pa.s.sion, rising from his seat, and walking up and down the room as he spoke. Walden watched his restless pa.s.sing to and fro, with a wistful look in his honest eyes.

Presently he said, smiling a little--

"You are my Bishop--and I should not presume to differ from you, Brent! YOU must instruct ME,--not I you! Yet if I may speak from my own experience---"

"You may and you shall!"--replied Brent, swiftly--"But think for a moment, before you speak, of what that experience has been! One great grief has clouded your life--the loss of your sister. After that, what has been your lot? A handful of simple souls set under your charge, in the loveliest of little villages,--souls that love you, trust you and obey you. Compared to this, take MY daily life!

An over-populated diocese--misery and starvation on all sides,--men working for mere pittances,--women prost.i.tuting themselves to obtain food--children starving--girls ruined in their teens--and over it all, my wretched self, a leading representative of the Church which can do nothing to remedy these evils! And worse than all, a Church in which some of the clergy themselves who come under my rule and dominance are more dishonourable and dissolute than many of the so- called 'reprobates' of society whom they are elected to admonish! I tell you, Walden, I have some men under my jurisdiction whom I should like to see soundly flogged!--only I am powerless to order the castigation--and some others who ought to be serving seven years in penal servitude instead of preaching virtue to people a thousand times more virtuous than themselves!"

"I quite believe that!" said Walden, smiling--"I know one of them!"

The Bishop glanced at him, and laughed.

"You mean Putwood Leveson?" he said--"He seems a mischievous fool-- but I don't suppose there is any real harm in him, is there?"

"Real harm?"--and John flared up in a blaze of wrath--"He is the most pernicious scoundrel that ever masqueraded in the guise of a Christian!"

The Bishop paused in his walk up and down, and clasping his hands behind his back, an old habit of his, looked quizzically at his friend. A smile, kindly and almost boyish, lightened the grey pallor of his worn face.

"Why, John!" he said--"you are actually in a temper! Your mental att.i.tude is evidently that of squared fists and 'Come on!' What has roused the slumbering lion, eh?"

"It doesn't need a lion to spring at Leveson,"--said Walden, contemptuously--"A sheep would do it! The tamest cur that ever crawled would have spirit enough to make a dash for a creature so unutterably mean and false and petty! I may as well admit to you at once that I myself nearly struck him!"

"You did?" And Bishop Brent's grave dark eyes flashed with a sudden suspicion of laughter.

"I did. I know it was not Churchman-like,--I know it was a case of 'kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks.' But Leveson's 'p.r.i.c.ks' are too much like hog's bristles for me to endure with patience!"

The Bishop a.s.sumed a serious demeanour.

"Come, come, let me hear this out!" he said--"Do you mean to tell me that you--YOU, John--actually struck a brother minister?"

"No--I do not mean to tell you anything of the kind, my Lord Bishop!" answered Walden, beginning to laugh. "I say that I 'nearly'

struck him,--not quite! Someone else came on the scene at the critical moment, and did for me what I should certainly have done for myself had I been left to it. I cannot say I am sorry for the impulse!"

"It sounds like a tavern brawl,"--said the Bishop, shaking his head dubiously--"or a street fight. So unlike you, Walden! What was it all about?"

"The fellow was slandering a woman,"--replied Walden, hotly-- "Poisoning her name with his foul tongue, and polluting it by his mere utterance--contemptible brute! I should like to have horsewhipped him---"

"Stop, stop!" interrupted the Bishop, stretching out his thin long white hand, on which one single amethyst set in a plain gold ring, shone with a pale violet fire--"I am not sure that I quite follow you, John! What woman is this?"

Despite himself, a rush of colour sprang to Walden's brows. But he answered quite quietly.

"Miss Vancourt,--of Abbot's Manor."

"Miss Vancourt!" Bishop Brent looked, as he felt, utterly bewildered. "Miss Vancourt! My dear Walden, you surprise me! Did I not write to you--do you not know---"

"Oh, I know all that is reported of her,"--said John, quickly--"And I remember what you wrote. But it's a mistake, Brent! In fact, if you will exonerate me for speaking bluntly, it's a lie! There never was a gentler, sweeter woman than Maryllia Vancourt,--and perhaps there never was one more basely or more systematically calumniated!"

The Bishop took a turn up to the farther end of the room. Then he came back and confronted Walden with an authoritative yet kindly air.

"Look me straight in the face, John!"

John obeyed. There was a silence, while Brent scanned slowly and with appreciative affection the fine intellectual features, brave eyes, and firm, yet tender mouth of the man whom he had, since the days of their youth together, held dearest in his esteem among all other men he had ever known, while Walden, in his turn, bore the sad and searching gaze without flinching. Then the Bishop laid one hand gently on his shoulder.