Red Pottage Part 10

"Wait a moment," she said, hurriedly. "This last page, James. Might it not be well to reconsider it? Is it politic to a.s.sume such great ignorance on the part of Nonconformists? Many I know are better educated than I am."

"My dear," said Mr. Gresley, "ignorance is at the root of any difference of opinion on such a subject as this. I do not say wilful ignorance, but the want of sound Church teaching. I must cut at the roots of this ignorance."

"Dear James, it is thrice killing the slain. No one believes these fallacies which you are exposing--the Nonconformists least of all. Those I have talked with don't hold these absurd opinions that you put down to them. You don't even touch their real position. You are elaborately knocking down ninepins that have never stood up, because they have nothing to stand on."

"I am not proposing to play a game of mental skittles," said the clerical author. "It is enough for me, as I said before, to cut at the roots of ignorance wherever I see it flourishing, not to pull off the leaves one by one as you would have me do by dissecting their opinions.

This may not be novel, it may not even be amusing, but, nevertheless, Hester, a clergyman's duty is to wage unceasing war against spiritual ignorance. And what," read on Mr. Gresley, after a triumphant moment in which Hester remained silent, "is the best means of coping against ignorance, against darkness"--("It was a root a moment ago," thought Hester)--"but by the infusion of light? The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Half a page more and the darkness was 'Modern Dissent.' Hester put her hand over her mouth and kept it there.

The familiar drama of a clerical bull and a red rag was played out before her eyes, and, metaphorically speaking, she followed the example of the majority of laymen and crept up a tree to be out of the way.

When it was all over she came down trembling.

"Well! what do you think of it?" said Mr. Gresley, rising and pacing up and down the room.

"You hit very hard," said Hester, after a moment's consideration. She did not say, "You strike home."

"I have no opinion of being mealy-mouthed," said Mr. Gresley, who was always perfectly satisfied with a vague statement. "If you have anything worth saying, say it plainly. That is my motto. Don't hint this or that, but take your stand upon a truth and strike out."

"Why not hold out our hands to our fellow-creatures instead of striking at them?" said Hester, moving towards the door.

"I have no belief in holding out our hands to the enemies of Christ,"

Mr. Gresley began, who in the course of his pamphlet had thus gracefully designated the great religious bodies who did not view Christianity through the convex gla.s.ses of his own mental _pince-nez_. "In these days we see too much of that. I leave that to the Broad Church, who want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I, on the contrary--"

But Hester had vanished.

There was a dangerous glint in her gray eyes, as she ran up to her little attic.

"According to him, our Lord must have been the first Nonconformist," she said to herself. "If I had stayed a moment longer I should have said so.

For once I got out of the room in time."

Hester's attic was blisteringly hot. It was over the kitchen, and through the open window came the penetrating aroma of roast mutton newly wedded to boiled cabbage. Hester had learned during the last six months all the variations of smells, evil, subtle, nauseous, and overpowering, of which the preparation of food--and, still worse, the preparation of chicken food--is capable. She seized her white hat and umbrella and fled out of the house.

She moved quickly across a patch of sunlight, looking, with her large white, pink-lined umbrella, like a travelling mushroom on a slender stem, and only drew rein in the shady walk near the beehives, where the old gardener, Abel, was planting something large in the way of "runners"

or "suckers," making a separate hole for each with his thumb.

Abel was a solid, pear-shaped man, who pa.s.sed through life bent double over the acre of Vicarage garden, to which he committed long lines of seeds, which an attentive Providence brought up in due season as "curly kebbidge" or "salary" or "sparrow-gra.s.s."

Abel had his back towards Hester, and only the corduroy half of him was visible as he stooped over his work. Occasionally he could be induced to straighten himself, and--holding himself strongly at the hinge with earth-ingrained hands--to discourse on polities and religion, and to opine that our policy in China was "neither my eye nor my elber." "The little lady," as he called Hester, had a knack of drawing out Abel; but to-day, as he did not see her, she slipped past him, and, crossing the church-yard, sat down for a moment in the porch to regain her breath, under the card of printed texts offered for the consideration of his flock by their young pastor.

"How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of G.o.d,"

was the culling from the Scriptures which headed the selection.[A]

Hester knew that card well, though she never by any chance looked at it.

She had offended her brother deeply by remonstrating, or, as he called it, by "interfering in church matters," when he nailed it up. After a few minutes she dropped over the low church-yard wall into the meadow below, and flung herself down on the gra.s.s in the short shadow of a yew near at hand. What little air there was to be had came to her across the Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank and whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred times before.

[Footnote A: A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in August, 1898, in the porch of a country church.]

Hester's irritable nerves relaxed. She stretched out her small, neatly shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and presently could afford to smile.

"Dear James," she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, "I wish we were not both writers, or, as he calls it, 'dabblers with the pen.' One dabbler in a vicarage is quite enough."

She took out her letters and read them. Only half of them had been opened.

"I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings," she said, as she settled herself comfortably.

Rachel's letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to the end.

"And so she is leaving London--isn't this rather sudden?--and coming down at once--to-day--no, yesterday, to Southminster, to the Palace. And I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the Bishop will come too. I should be glad if I were not so tired."

Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster. In the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral p.r.i.c.king up through the blue. Everything was very silent, so silent that she could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike twelve. A whole hour before luncheon!

The miller's old white horse, with a dip in his long back and a corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor's.

A little bunch of red and white cows, knee-deep in the water, were swishing off the flies with the wet tufts of their tails. Hester watched their every movement. She was no longer afraid of cows. Presently, as if with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of the contemplative life by an exhibition of humor, and, scrambling out of the water, proceeded to canter along the bank with stiff raised tails, with an artificial noose sustained with difficulty just above the tuft.

"How like James and the Pratts!" Hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be very fatiguing to be so comic."

Hester had been up since five o'clock, utilizing the quiet hours before the house was astir. She was tired out. A b.u.mblebee was droning sleepily near at hand. The stream talked and talked and talked about what he was going to do when he was a river. "How tired the banks must be of listening to him!" thought Hester, with closed eyes.

And the world melted slowly away in a delicious sense of well-being, from which the next moment, as it seemed to her, she was suddenly awakened by Mr. Gresley's voice near at hand.

"Hester! _Hester_! HESTER!"

"Here! here!" gasped Hester, with a start, upsetting her lapful of letters as she scrambled hastily to her feet.

The young vicar drew near, and looked over the church-yard wall. A large crumb upon his upper lip did not lessen the awful severity of his countenance.

"We have nearly finished luncheon," he observed. "The servants could not find you anywhere. I don't want to be always finding fault, Hester, but I wish, for your own sake as well as ours, you would be more punctual at meals."

Hester had never been late before, but she felt that this was not the moment to remind her brother of that fact.

"I beg pardon," she said, humbly. "I fell asleep."

"You fell asleep!" said Mr. Gresley, who had been wrestling all the morning with plat.i.tudes on "Thy will be done." "All I can say, Hester, is that it is unfortunate you have no occupation. I cannot believe it is for the good of any of us to lead so absolutely idle a life that we fall asleep in the morning."

Hester made no reply.

CHAPTER XI

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.--GEORGE ELIOT.

The children, who had reached the pear stage, looked with round, awed eyes at "Auntie Hester" as she sat down at the luncheon-table beside the black bottle which marked her place. The Gresleys were ardent total abstainers, and were of opinion that Hester's health would be greatly benefited by following their example. But Hester's doctor differed from them--he was extremely obstinate--with the result that the Gresleys were obliged to tolerate the obnoxious bottle on their very table. It was what Mrs. Gresley called a "cross," and Mr. Gresley was always afraid that the fact of its presence might become known and hopelessly misconstrued in Warpington and the world at large.

The children knew that Hester was in disgrace, as she vainly tried to eat the congealed slice of roast mutton, with blue slides in it, which had been put before her chair half an hour ago, when the joint was sent out for the servants' dinner. The children liked "Auntie Hester," but without enthusiasm, except Regie, the eldest, who loved her as himself.

She could tell them stories, and make b.u.t.terflies and horses and dogs out of paper, but she could never join in their games, not even in the delightful new ones she invented for them. She was always tired directly. And she would never give them rides on her back, as the large, good-natured Pratt girls did. And she was dreadfully shocked if they did not play fair, so much so that on one occasion Mr. Gresley had to interfere, and to remind her that a game was a game, and that it would be better to let the children play as they liked than to be perpetually finding fault with them.