We and the World Volume I Part 6

We were cool and tidy by the time that the little "Tom Tinkler" bell began to "hurry up."

"You're coming, aren't you?" said I, checked at the churchyard gate by an instinct of some hesitation on Isaac's part.

"Well, I suppose I am, sir," said the bee-master, and in he came.

The thick walls, the stained windows, and the stone floor, which was below the level of the churchyard, made the church very cool. Master Isaac and I seated ourselves so that we had a good view within, and could also catch a peep through the open porch of the sunlit country outside. Charlie's father was in his place when we got in; his threadbare coat was covered by the white linen of his office, and I do not think it would have been possible even to my levity to have felt anything but a respectful awe of him in church.

The cares of this life are not as a rule improving to the countenance.

No one who watches faces can have failed to observe that more beauty is marred and youth curtailed by vulgar worry than by almost any other disfigurement. In the less educated cla.s.ses, where self-control is not very habitual, and where interests beyond petty and personal ones are rare, the soft brows and tender lips of girlhood are too often puckered and hardened by mean anxieties, even where these do not affect the girls personally, but only imitatively, and as the daily interests of their station in life. In such cases the discontented, careworn look is by no means a certain indication of corresponding suffering, but there are too many others in which tempers that should have been generous, and faces that should have been n.o.ble, and aims that should have been high, are blurred and blunted by the real weight of real everyday care.

There are yet others; in which the spirit is too strong for mortal accidents to pull it down--minds that the narrowest career cannot vulgarize--faces to which care but adds a look of pathos--souls which keep their aims and faiths apart from the fluctuations of "the things that are seen." The personal influence of natures of this type is generally very large, and it was very large in the case of Cripple Charlie's father, and made him a sort of Prophet, Priest, and King over a rough and scattered population, with whom the shy, scholarly poor gentleman had not otherwise much in common.

It was his personal influence, I am sure, which made the congregation so devout! There is one rule which, I believe, applies to all congregations, of every denomination, and any kind of ritual, and that is, that the enthusiasm of the congregation is in direct proportion to the enthusiasm of the minister; not merely to his personal worth, nor even to his popularity, for people who rather dislike a clergyman, and disapprove of his service, will say a louder Amen at his giving of thanks if his own feelings have a touch of fire, than they would to that of a more perfunctory parson whom they liked better. As is the heartiness of the priest, so is the heartiness of the people--with such strictness that one is disposed almost to credit some of it to actual magnetism. _Response_ is no empty word in public worship.

It was no empty word on this occasion. From the ancient clerk (who kept a life-interest in what were now the duties of a choir) to some gaping farm-lads at my back, everybody said and sang to the utmost of his ability. I may add that Isaac and I involuntarily displayed a zeal which was in excess of our Sunday customs; and if my tongue moved glibly enough with the choir, the bee-master found many an elderly parishioner besides himself and the clerk who "took" both prayer and praise at such independent paces as suited their individual scholarship, spectacles, and notions of reverence.

It crowned my satisfaction when I found that there was to be a collection. The hymn to which the churchwardens moved about, gathering the pence, whose numbers and noisiness seemed in keeping with the rest of the service, was a well-known one to us all. It was the favourite evening hymn of the district. I knew every syllable of it, for Jem and I always sang hymns (and invariably this one) with my dear mother, on Sunday evening after supper. When we were good, we liked it, and, picking one favourite after another, we often sang nearly through the hymn-book. When we were naughty, we displayed a good deal of skill in making derisive faces behind my mother's back, as she sat at the piano, without betraying ourselves, and in getting our tongues out and in again during the natural pauses and convolutions of the tune. But these occasional fits of boyish profanity did not hinder me from having an equally boyish fund of reverence and enthusiasm at the bottom of my heart, and it was with proud and pleasurable emotions that I heard the old clerk give forth the familiar first lines,

"Soon shall the evening star with silver ray Shed its mild l.u.s.tre o'er this sacred day,"

and got my threepenny-bit ready between my finger and thumb.

Away went the organ, which was played by the vicar's eldest daughter--away went the vicar's second daughter, who "led the singing"

from the vicarage pew with a voice like a bird--away went the choir, which, in spite of surplices, could not be cured of waiting half a beat for her--and away went the congregation--young men and maidens, old men and children--in one broad tide of somewhat irregular harmony. Isaac did not know the words as well as I did, so I lent him my hymn-book; one result of which was, that the print being small, and the sense of a hymn being in his view a far more important matter than the sound of it, he preached rather than sang--in an unequal cadence which was perturbing to my more musical ear--the familiar lines,

"Still let each awful truth our thoughts engage, That shines revealed on inspiration's page; Nor those blest hours in vain amus.e.m.e.nt waste Which all who lavish shall lament at last."

During the next verse my devotions were a little distracted by the gradual approach of a churchwarden for my threepenny-bit, which was hot with three verses of expectant fingering. Then, to my relief, he took it, and the bee-master's contribution, and I felt calmer, and listened to the little prelude which it was always the custom for the organist to play before the final verse of a hymn. It was also the custom to sing the last verse as loudly as possible, though this is by no means invariably appropriate. It fitted the present occasion fairly enough.

From where I stood I could see the bellows-blower (the magnetic current of enthusiasm flowed even to the back of the organ) nerve himself to prodigious pumping--Charlie's sister drew out all the stops--the vicar pa.s.sed from the prayer-desk to the pulpit with the rapt look of a man who walks in a prophetic dream--we pulled ourselves together, Master Isaac brought the hymn book close to his gla.s.ses, and when the tantalizing prelude was past we burst forth with a volume which merged all discrepancies. As far as I am able to judge of my own performance, I fear I _bawled_ (I'm sure the boy behind me did),

"Father of Heaven, in Whom our hopes confide, Whose power defends us, and Whose precepts guide, In life our Guardian, and in death our Friend, Glory supreme be Thine till time shall end!"

The sermon was short, and when the service was over Master Isaac and I spent a delightful afternoon with his bees among the heather. The "evening star" had come out when we had some tea in the village inn, and we walked home by moonlight. There was neither wind nor sun, but the air was almost oppressively pure. The moonshine had taken the colour out of the sandy road and the heather, and had painted black shadows by every boulder, and most things looked asleep except the rill that went on running. Only we and the rabbits, and the night moths and the beetles, seemed to be stirring. An occasional bat appeared and vanished like a spectral illusion, and I saw one owl flap across the moor with level wings against the moon.

"Oh, I _have_ enjoyed it!" was all I could say when I parted from the bee-master.

"And so have I, Master Jack," was his reply, and he hesitated as if he had something more to say, and then he said it. "I never enjoyed it as much, and you can thank your mother, sir, with old Isaac's duty, for sending us to church. I'm sure I don't know why I never went before when I was up yonder, for I always took notice of the bells. I reckon I thought I hadn't time, but you can say, with my respects, sir, that please G.o.d I shan't miss again."

I believe he never did; and Cripple Charlie's father came to look on him as half a parishioner.

I was glad I had not shirked Evening Prayer myself, though (my s.e.x and age considered) it was not to be expected that I should comfort my mother's heart by confessing as much. Let me confess it now, and confess also that if it was the first time, it was not the last that I have had cause to realize--oh women, for our sakes remember it!--into what light and gentle hands G.o.d lays the reins that guide men's better selves.

The most remarkable event of the day happened at the end of it. Whilst Isaac was feeling the weight of one of his hives, and just after I lost chase of a very peculiar-looking beetle, from his squeezing himself away from me under a boulder, I had caught sight of a bit of white heather, and then bethought me of gathering a nosegay (to include this rarity) of moor flowers and gra.s.ses for Mrs. Wood. So when we reached the lane on our way home, I bade Isaac good-night, and said I would just run in by the back way into the farm (we never called it the Academy) and leave the flowers, that the school-mistress might put them in water. Mary Anne was in the kitchen.

"Where's Mrs. Wood?" said I, when she had got over that silly squeak women always give when you come suddenly on them.

"Dear, dear, Master Jack! what a turn you did give me! I thought it was the tramp."

"What tramp?" said I.

"Why, a great lanky man that came skulking here a bit since, and asked for the missus. She was down the garden, and I've half a notion he went after her. I wish you'd go and look for her, Master Jack, and fetch her in. It's as damp as dear knows what, and she takes no more care of herself than a baby. And I'd be glad to know that man was off the place.

There's wall-fruit and lots of things about, a low fellow like that might pick up."

My ears felt a little hot at this allusion to low fellows and garden thieving, and I hurried off to do Mary Anne's bidding without further parley. There was a cloud over the moon as I ran down the back garden, but when I was nearly at the end the moon burst forth again, so that I could see. And this is what I saw:--

First, a white thing lying on the ground, and it was the widow's cap, and then Mrs. Wood herself, with a gaunt lanky-looking man, such as Mary Anne had described. Her head came nearly to his shoulder, as I was well able to judge, for he was holding it in his hands and had laid his own upon it, as if it were a natural resting-place. And his hair coming against the darker part of hers, I could see that his was grey all over.

Up to this point I had been too much stupefied to move, and I had just become conscious that I ought to go, when the white cap lying in the moonlight seemed to catch his eye as it had caught mine; and he set his heel on it with a vehemence that made me anxious to be off. I could not resist one look back as I left the garden, if only to make sure that I had not been dreaming. No, they were there still, and he was lifting the coil of her hair, which I suppose had come down when the cap was pulled off, and it took the full stretch of his arm to do so, before it fell heavily from his fingers.

When I presented myself to my mother with the bunch of flowers still in my hand, she said, "Did my Jack get these for Mother?"

I shook my head. "No, Mother. For Mrs. Wood."

"You might have called at the farm as you pa.s.sed," said she.

"I did!" said I.

"Couldn't you see Mrs. Wood, love?"

"Yes, I saw her, but she'd got the tramp with her."

"What tramp?" asked my mother in a horror-struck voice, which seemed quite natural to me, for I had been brought up to rank tramps in the same "dangerous cla.s.s" with mad dogs, stray bulls, drunken men, and other things which it is undesirable to meet.

"The great lanky one," I explained, quoting from Mary Anne.

"What was he doing with Mrs. Wood?" asked my mother anxiously.

I had not yet recovered from my own bewilderment, and was reckless of the shock inflicted by my reply.

"_Pooring_ her head, and kissing it."

CHAPTER V.

"To each his sufferings; all are men Condemned alike to groan.

The tender for another's pain--"

GRAY.

Not even the miser's funeral had produced in the neighbourhood anything like the excitement which followed that Sunday evening. At first my mother--her mind filled by the simplest form of the problem, namely, that Mrs. Wood was in the hands of a tramp--wished my father to take the blunderbuss in his hand and step down to the farm. He had "pish"ed and "pshaw"ed about the blunderbuss, and was beginning to say more, when I was dismissed to bed, where I wandered back over the moors in uneasy dreams, and woke with the horror of a tramp's hand upon my shoulder.

After suffering the terrors of night for some time, and finding myself no braver with my head under the bedclothes than above them, I began conscientiously to try my mother's family recipe for "bad dreams and being afraid in the dark." This was to "say over" the Benedicite correctly, which (if by a rare chance one were still awake at the end) was to be followed by a succession of the hymns one knew by heart. It required an effort to _begin_, and to _really try_, but the children of such mothers as ours are taught to make efforts, and once fairly started, and holding on as a duty, it certainly did tend to divert the mind from burglars and ghosts, to get the beasts, creeping things, and fowls of the air into their right places in the chorus of benedictions.

That Jem never could discriminate between the "Dews and Frosts" and "Frost and Cold" verses needs no telling. I have often finished and still been frightened and had to fall back upon the hymns, but this night I began to dream pleasanter dreams of Charlie's father and the bee-master before I got to the holy and humble men of heart.

I slept long then, and Mother would not let me be awakened. When I did open my eyes Jem was sitting at the end of the bed, dying to tell me the news.

"Jack! you have waked, haven't you? I see your eyes. Don't shut 'em again. What _do_ you think? _Mrs. Wood's husband has come home!_"