Red Pottage Part 42

There were two hours before bedtime--I mean "Bedfordshire."

He turned over the first blank sheet and came to the next, which had one word only written on it.

"_Husks!_" said Mr. Gresley. "That must be the t.i.tle. Husks that the swine did eat. Ha! I see. A very good sound story might be written on that theme of a young man who left the Church, and how inadequate he found the teaching--the spiritual food--of other denominations compared to what he had partaken freely of in his Father's house. Husks! It is not a bad name, but it is too short. 'The Consequences of Sin' would be better, more striking, and convey the idea in a more impressive manner."

Mr. Gresley took up his pen, and then laid it down. "I will run through the story before I alter the name. It may not take the line I expect."

It did not.

The next page had two words on it:

"TO RACHEL."

What an extraordinary thing! Any one, be they who they might, would naturally have thought that if the book were dedicated to any one it would be to her only brother. But Hester, it seemed, thought nothing of blood relations. She disregarded them entirely.

The blood relation began to read. He seemed to forget to skip. Page after page was slowly turned. Sometimes he hesitated a moment to change a word. He had always been conscious of a gift for finding the right word. This gift Hester did not share with him. She often got hold of the wrong end of the stick. He could hardly refrain from a smile when he came across the sentence, "He was young enough to know better," as he subst.i.tuted in a large illegible hand the word _old_ for _young_. There were many obvious little mistakes of this kind that he corrected as he read, but now and then he stopped short.

One of the characters, an odious person, was continually saying things she had no business to say. Mr. Gresley wondered how Hester had come across such doubtful women--not under his roof. Lady Susan must have a.s.sociated with thoroughly unsuitable people.

"I keep a smaller spiritual establishment than I did," said the odious person. "I have dismissed that old friend of my childhood, the devil. I really had no further use for him."

Mr. Gresley crossed through the pa.s.sage at once. How could Hester write so disrespectfully of the devil?

"This is positive nonsense," said Mr. Gresley, irritably; "coming as it does just after the sensible chapter about the new vicar who made a clean sweep of all the old dead regulations in his parish because he felt he must introduce spiritual life into the place. Now that is really good. I don't quite know what Hester means by saying he took exercise in his clerical _cul-de-sac_. I think she means _surtout_, but she is a good French scholar, so she probably knows what she is talking about."

Whatever the book lacked it did not lack interest. Still, it bristled with blemishes.

And then what could the Pratts, or indeed any one, make of such a sentence as this:

"When we look back at what we were seven years ago, five years ago, and perceive the difference in ourselves, a difference amounting almost to change of ident.i.ty; when we look back and see in how many characters we have lived and loved and suffered and died before we reached the character that momentarily clothes us, and from which our soul is struggling out to clothe itself anew; when we feel how the sympathy even of those who love us best is always with our last expression, never with our present feeling, always with the last dead self on which our climbing feet are set--"

"She is hopelessly confused," said Mr. Gresley, without reading to the end of the sentence, and subst.i.tuting the word _ladder_ for _dead self_.

"Of course, I see what she means, the different stages of life, the infant, the boy, the man, but hardly any one else will so understand it."

The clock struck ten. Mr. Gresley was amazed. The hour had seemed like ten minutes.

"I will just see what happens in the next chapter," he said. And he did not hear the clock when it struck again. The story was absorbing. It was as if through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were sweeping like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was only saved from that reproach by the fact that it hung on his kitchen hob.

What was so unfair about him was that he took gorillas and alligators, and the "wart pig" and all its warts on trust, though he had never seen them. But the emotions which have shaken the human soul since the world began, long before the first "wart pig" was thought of--these he disbelieved.

All the love which could not be covered by his own mild courtship of the obviously grateful Mrs. Gresley, Mr. Gresley put down as exaggerated.

There was a good deal of such exaggeration in Hester's book, which could only be attributed to the French novels of which he had frequently expressed his disapproval when he saw Hester reading them. It was given to Mr. Gresley to perceive that the French cla.s.sics are only read for the sake of the hideous improprieties contained in them. He had explained this to Hester, and was indignant that she had continued to read them just as frequently as before, even translating parts of some of them into English, and back again into the original. She would have lowered the Bishop forever in his Vicar's eyes, if she had mentioned by whose advice and selection she read, so she refrained.

Suddenly, as he read, Mr. Gresley's face softened. He came to the illness and death of a child. It had been written long before Regie fell ill, but Mr. Gresley supposed it could only have been the result of what had happened a few weeks ago since the book was sent up to the publisher.

Two large tears fell on to the sheet. Hester's had been there before them. It was all true, every word. Here was no exaggeration, no fantastic overcoloring for the sake of effect.

"Ah, Hester!" he said, wiping his eyes. "If only the rest were like that. If you would only write like that."

A few pages more, and his eyes were like flint. The admirable clergyman who had attracted him from the first reappeared. His opinions were uncommonly well put. But gradually it dawned upon Mr. Gresley that the clergyman was toiling in very uncomfortable situations, in which he did not appear to advantage. Mr. Gresley did not see that the uncomfortable situations were the inevitable result of holding certain opinions, but he did see that "Hester was running down the clergy." Any fault found with the clergy was in Mr. Gresley's eyes an attack upon the Church, nay, upon religion itself. That a protest against a certain cla.s.s of the clergy might be the result of a close observation of the causes that bring ecclesiastical Christianity into disrepute could find no admission to Mr. Gresley's mind. Yet a protest against the ignorance or inefficiency of some of our soldiers he would have seen without difficulty might be the outcome, not of hatred of the army, but of a realization of its vast national importance, and of a desire of its well-being.

Mr. Gresley was outraged. "She holds nothing sacred," he said, striking the book. "I told her after the _Idyll_, that I desired she would not mention the subject of religion in her next book, and this is worse than ever. She has entirely disregarded my expressed wishes. Everything she says has a sting in it. Look at this. It begins well, but it ends with a sneer."

"Christ lives. He wanders still in secret over the hills and the valleys of the soul, that little kingdom which should not be of this world, which knows not the things that belong unto its peace. And earlier or later there comes an hour when Christ is arraigned before the judgment bar in each individual soul. Once again the Church and the world combine to crush Him who stands silent in their midst, to condemn Him who has already condemned them. Together they raise their fierce cry, 'Crucify Him! Crucify Him!'"

Mr. Gresley tore the leaf out of the ma.n.u.script and threw it in the fire.

But worse remained behind. To add to its other sins, the book, now drawing to its close, took a turn which had been led up to inevitably step by step from the first chapter, but which, in its reader's eyes, who perceived none of the steps, was a deliberate gratuitous intermeddling with vice. Mr. Gresley could not help reading, but, as he laid down the ma.n.u.script for a moment to rest his eyes, he felt that he had reached the limit of Hester's powers, and that he could only attribute the last volume to the Evil One himself.

He had hardly paid this high tribute to his sister's talent when the door opened, and Mrs. Gresley came in in a wrapper that had once been white.

"Dear James," she said, "is anything wrong? It is past one o'clock. Are you never coming to bed?"

"Minna," said her pastor and master, "I have been reading the worst book I have come across yet, and it was written by my own sister under my own roof."

He might have added "close under the roof," if he had remembered the little attic chamber where the cold of winter and the heat of summer had each struck in turn and in vain at the indomitable perseverence of the writer of those many pages.

CHAPTER XL

The only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.--EMERSON.

Mr. Gresley was troubled, more troubled than he had ever been since a never-to-be-forgotten period before his ordination, when he had come in contact with worldly minds, and had had doubts as to the justice of eternal punishment. He was apt to speak in after years of the furnace through which he had pa.s.sed, and from which nothing short of a conversation with a bishop had had power to save him, as a great experience which he could not regret, because it had brought him into sympathy with so many minds. As he often said in his favorite language of metaphor, he "had threshed out the whole subject of agnosticism, and could consequently meet other minds still struggling in its turbid waves."

But now again he was deeply perturbed, and it was difficult to see in what blessing to his fellow-creatures this particular agitation would result. He walked with bent head for hours in the garden. He could not attend to his sermon, though it was Friday. He entirely forgot his Bible-cla.s.s at the alms-houses in the afternoon.

Mrs. Gresley watched him from her bedroom window, where she was mending the children's stockings. At last she laid aside her work and went out.

She might not be his mental equal. She might be unable, with her small feminine mind, to fathom the depths and heights of that great intelligence, but still she was his wife. Perhaps, though she did not know it, it troubled her to see him so absorbed in his sister, for she was sure it was of Hester and her book that he was thinking. "I am his wife," she said to herself, as she joined him in silence, and pa.s.sed her arm through his. He needed to be reminded of her existence. Mr. Gresley pressed it, and they took a turn in silence.

He had not a high opinion of the feminine intellect. He was wont to say that he was tired of most women in ten minutes. But he had learned to make an exception of his wife. What mind does not feel confidence in the sentiments of its echo?

"I am greatly troubled about Hester," he said at last.

"It is not a new trouble," said Mrs. Gresley. "I sometimes think, dearest, it is we who are to blame in having her to live with us. She is worldly--I suppose she can't help it--and we are unworldly. She is irreligious, and you are deeply religious. I wish I could say I was too, but I lag far behind you. And though I am sure she does her best--and so do we--her presence is a continual friction. I feel she always drags us down."

Mr. Gresley was too much absorbed in his own thoughts to notice the diffident plea which his wife was putting forward that Hester might cease to live with them.

"I was not thinking of that," he said, "so much as of this novel which she has written. It is a profane, immoral book, and will do incalculable harm if it is published."

"I feel sure it will," said Mrs. Gresley, who had not read it.

"It is dreadfully coa.r.s.e in places," continued Mr. Gresley, who had the same opinion of George Eliot's works. "And I warned Hester most solemnly on that point when I found she had begun another book. I told her that I well knew that to meet the public taste it was necessary to interlard fiction with _risque_ things in order to make it sell, but that it was my earnest hope she would in future resist this temptation. She only said that if she introduced improprieties into her book in order to make money, in her opinion she deserved to be whipped in the public streets.

She was very angry, I remember, and became as white as a sheet, and I dropped the subject."

"She can't bear even the most loving word of advice," said Mrs. Gresley.

"She holds nothing sacred," went on Mr. Gresley, remembering an unfortunate incident in the clergyman's career. "Her life here seems to have had no softening effect upon her. She sneers openly at religion. I never thought, I never allowed myself to think, that she was so dead to spiritual things as her book forces me to believe. Even her good people, her heroine, have not a vestige of religion, only a sort of vague morality, right for the sake of right, and love teaching people things; nothing real."