Surgeon Paul Faber by George MacDonald (e book free reading txt) 📕

know, sir. I have heard of no quarreling. I have made some enemies, but they are not very dangerous, and I hope not very bitter ones; and I have made many more friends, I am sure."

"What they tell me is, that your congregation is divided-that they take sides for and against you, which is a most undesirable thing, surely!"

"It is indeed; and yet it may be a thing that, for a time, can not be helped. Was there ever a man with the cure of souls, concerning whom there has not been more or less of such division? But, if you will have patience with me, sir, I am bold to say, believing in the force and final victory of the truth, there will be more unity by and by."

"I don't doubt it. But come now!-you are a thoroughly good fellow-that, a blind horse could see in the dimmits-and I'm accountable for the parish-couldn't you draw it a little milder, you know? couldn't you make it just a little less peculiar-only the way of putting it, I mean-so that it should look a little more like what they have been used to? I'm only suggesting the thing, you know-dictating nothing, on my soul, Mr. Wingfold. I am sure that, whatever you do, you will act according to your own conscience, otherwise I should not venture to say a word, lest I should lead you wrong."

"If you will allow me," said the curate, "I will tell you my whole story; and then if you should wish it, I will resign my curacy, without saying a word more than that my rector thinks it better. Neither in private shall I make a single remark in a different spirit."

"Let me hear," said the rector.

"Then if you will please take this chair, that I may know that I am not wearying you bodily at least."

The rector did as he was requested, laid his head back, crossed his legs, and folded his hands over his worn waist-coat: he was not one of the neat order of parsons; he had a not unwholesome disregard of his outermost man, and did not know when he was shabby. Without an atom of pomposity or air rectorial, he settled himself to listen.

Condensing as much as he could, Wingfold told him how through great doubt, and dismal trouble of mind, he had come to hope in God, and to see that there was no choice for a man but to give himself, heart, and soul, and body, to the love, and will, and care of the Being who had made him. He could no longer, he said, regard his profession as any thing less than a call to use every means and energy at his command for the rousing of men and women from that spiritual sleep and moral carelessness in which he had himself been so lately sunk.

"I don't want to give up my curacy," he concluded. "Still less do I want to leave Glaston, for there are here some whom I teach and some who teach me. In all that has given ground for complaint, I have seemed to myself to be but following the dictates of common sense; if you think me wrong, I have no justification to offer. We both love God,--"

"How do you know that?" interrupted the rector. "I wish you could make me sure of that."

"I do, I know I do," said the curate earnestly. "I can say no more."

"My dear fellow, I haven't the merest shadow of a doubt of it," returned the rector, smiling. "What I wished was, that you could make me sure I do."

"Pardon me, my dear sir, but, judging from sore experience, if I could I would rather make you doubt it; the doubt, even if an utter mistake, would in the end be so much more profitable than any present conviction."

"You have your wish, then, Wingfold: I doubt it very much," replied the rector. "I must go home and think about it all. You shall hear from me in a day or two."

As he spoke Mr. Bevis rose, and stood for a moment like a man greatly urged to stretch his arms and legs. An air of uneasiness pervaded his whole appearance.

"Will you not stop and take tea with us?" said the curate. "My wife will be disappointed if you do not. You have been good to her for twenty years, she says."

"She makes an old man of me," returned the rector musingly. "I remember her such a tiny thing in a white frock and curls. Tell her what we have been talking about, and beg her to excuse me. I must go home."

He took his hat from the table, shook hands with Wingfold, and walked back to the inn. There he found his horses bedded, and the hostler away. His coachman was gone too, nobody knew whither.

To sleep at the inn would have given pointed offense, but he would rather have done so than go back to the Manor House to hear his curate abused. With the help of the barmaid, he put the horses to the carriage himself, and to the astonishment of Mrs. Ramshorn and his wife, drew up at the door of the Manor House.

Expostulation on the part of the former was vain. The latter made none: it was much the same to Mrs. Bevis where she was, so long as she was with her husband. Indeed few things were more pleasant to her than sitting in the carriage alone, contemplating the back of Mr. Bevis on the box, and the motion of his elbows as he drove. Mrs. Ramshorn received their adieux very stiffly, and never after mentioned the rector without adding the epithet, "poor man!"

Mrs. Bevis enjoyed the drive; Mr. Bevis did not. The doubt was growing stronger and stronger all the way, that he had not behaved like a gentleman in his relation to the head of the church. He had naturally, as I have already shown, a fine, honorable, boyish if not childlike nature; and the eyes of his mind were not so dim with good living as one might have feared from the look of those in his head: in the glass of loyalty he now saw himself a defaulter; in the scales of honor he weighed and found himself wanting. Of true discipleship was not now the question: he had not behaved like an honorable gentleman to Jesus Christ. It was only in a spasm of terror St. Peter had denied him: John Bevis had for nigh forty years been taking his pay, and for the last thirty at least had done nothing in return. Either Jesus Christ did not care, and then what was the church?-what the whole system of things called Christianity?-or he did care, and what then was John Bevis in the eyes of his Master? When they reached home, he went neither to the stable nor the study, but, without even lighting a cigar, walked out on the neighboring heath, where he found the universe rather gray about him. When he returned he tried to behave as usual, but his wife saw that he scarcely ate at supper, and left half of his brandy and water. She set it down to the annoyance the curate had caused him, and wisely forbore troubling him with questions.


CHAPTER X.

MR. DRAKE'S ARBOR.


While the curate was preaching that same Sunday morning, in the cool cavernous church, with its great lights overhead, Walter Drake-the old minister, he was now called by his disloyal congregation-sat in a little arbor looking out on the river that flowed through the town to the sea. Green grass went down from where he sat to the very water's brink. It was a spot the old man loved, for there his best thoughts came to him. There was in him a good deal of the stuff of which poets are made, and since trouble overtook him, the river had more and more gathered to itself the aspect of that in the Pilgrim's Progress; and often, as he sat thus almost on its edge, he fancied himself waiting the welcome summoms to go home. It was a tidal river, with many changes. Now it flowed with a full, calm current, conquering the tide, like life sweeping death with it down into the bosom of the eternal. Now it seemed to stand still, as if aghast at the inroad of the awful thing; and then the minister would bethink himself that it was the tide of the eternal rising in the narrow earthly channel: men, he said to himself, called it
death , because they did not know what it was, or the loveliness of its quickening energy. It fails on their sense by the might of its grand excess, and they call it by the name of its opposite. A weary and rather disappointed pilgrim, he thus comforted himself as he sat.

There a great salmon rose and fell, gleaming like a bolt of silver in the sun! There a little waterbeetle scurried along after some invisible prey. The blue smoke of his pipe melted in the Sabbath air. The softened sounds of a singing congregation came across gardens and hedges to his ear. They sang with more energy than grace, and, not for the first time, he felt they did. Were they indeed singing to the Lord, he asked himself, or only to the idol Custom? A silence came: the young man in the pulpit was giving out his text, and the faces that had turned themselves up to Walter Drake as flowers to the sun, were now all turning to the face of him they had chosen in his stead, "to minister to them in holy things." He took his pipe from his mouth, and sat motionless, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

But why was he not at chapel himself? Could it be that he yielded to temptation, actually preferring his clay pipe and the long glide of the river, to the worship, and the hymns and the sermon? Had there not been a time when he judged that man careless of the truth who did not go to the chapel, and that man little better who went to the church? Yet there he sat on a Sunday morning, the church on one side of him and the chapel on the other, smoking his pipe! His daughter was at the chapel; she had taken Ducky with her; the dog lay in the porch waiting for them; the cat thought too much of herself to make friends with her master; he had forgotten his New Testament on the study table; and now he had let his pipe out.

He was not well, it is true, but he was well enough to have gone. Was he too proud to be taught where he had been a teacher? or was it that the youth in his place taught there doctrines which neither they nor their fathers had known? It could not surely be from resentment that they had super-annuated him in the prime of his old age, with a pared third of his late salary, which nothing but honesty in respect to the small moneys he owed could have prevented him from refusing!

In truth it was impossible the old minister should have any great esteem for the flashy youth, proud of his small Latin and less Greek, a mere unit of the hundreds whom the devil of ambition drives to preaching; one who, whether the doctrines he taught were in the New Testament or not, certainly never found them there, being but the merest disciple of a