Stone so habitually suppressed it, that few suspected how great was his gift of satire. When he chose, or rather had he so chosen, he could so wing his satiric shaft as to pierce the thickest hide, and never was he more tempted to employ this “devil’s weapon” as he held it to be, than when irritated by vulgar boastfulness.
Looking back long years after upon this incident, I know that to no one could what happened that night be more irritating, and even objectionable, than to Stone. On the part of a friend, it was an affront to everything by which he held in our social code, a wound to his own pride of breeding and good manners. How sorely I must have tempted and irritated him, I now fully realise, yet his affection for the offender held back the stinging word, and neither then, nor at any other time in our long friendship, did I ever hear from him one reproachful or ungentle word. I recall his forbearance to me—a very young man when he was becoming middle-aged, and so might reasonably have spoken—on this particular occasion, an occasion which even now I cannot recall without shame. I recall a score of times when I grieved him by my apathy upon some question upon which he felt intensely, for Stone’s convictions were so positively held that he would readily have gone to the stake in defence of them, and that those he loved, and to whom he looked for sympathy, could be apathetic upon matters which he held to be of vital consequence, was to him a positive pain. I recall all these, and many other things in which I failed or wounded him by some indifference, some thoughtless act, or unconsidered word, and remembering that never once did he fail me by sympathy, interest, help or love withheld—I sicken at my own unworthiness, and at the thought of the sorry return I made for all his love and forbearance.
It is with relief that I turn to another incident in the early days of our friendship.
One night, in the eighties, when I was dining with Stone and his and my kind old friend, the Rev. Frederick Arnold, at St. Paul’s Vicarage, Haggerston, a maid brought in the last post. Stone asked permission to run through his letters, in case there was anything requiring an immediate answer. Over one he uttered an exclamation of glad and grateful surprise.
“Good news?” one of us asked.
“Very good,” said Stone, flushed and radiant. He hesitated a moment. Then, handing Mr. Arnold the letter, he said, “There is no reason why you two, one an old, and the other a young, but both true and dear friends of mine, should not see it.”
It was from the Bishop of London—I think Bishop Jackson, but of this I am not quite sure. In any case it was a very gracious letter. Upon Stone, the Bishop said, the mantle of John Keble had by virtue of his hymns, admittedly fallen. Thus far Stone had for some fifteen years given all his time, energies, and abilities to working among poor and uneducated folk in an East End parish, where practically the whole of the small stipend was swallowed up in church work and charities, and where Stone had no time or opportunity to do justice to his gifts as a writer. The Bishop was aware, he said, that Stone was fast wearing himself out, and could not go on much longer. Hence he had pleasure in putting before Stone the offer of preferment to a West End parish, where he would have an educated, intellectual, and appreciative congregation, as well as the leisure and the opportunity to devote his great gifts as poet and hymn-writer for the benefit of the church and the world.
It was a tempting offer, for much as Stone loved sport and travel he had hitherto had neither the time nor the money for anything more extended than a few weeks in Switzerland or in “God’s Infirmary” (as quoting George MacDonald he often called the country), generally on a visit to his old friend the Rev. Donald Carr, of Woolstaston Rectory, Salop. Moreover, though Stone grudged no service given to God or to his own congregation, he grieved sometimes that he had so little time to devote to hymn-writing and to literature, concerning which he had many projects. In a letter dated June 15, 1892, he had written to me, “I am up to my ears in work and behindhand because, if you please, I am in the thick of writing a religious novel. I am not really joking!”
But grateful as he was for the Bishop’s kind and fatherly offer, Stone declined it as, later on, he declined similar offers, including a Colonial Bishopric.
“I am not and I do not expect to be the man I was,” he said to Mr. Arnold and me that night, “but I ought to be, and am, thankful that, nervously constituted as I am, I have gone through fifteen years in the East End, out of twenty-three in the Ministry. When health and strength give out, when for my people’s sake I must let the work pass into younger and stronger hands, I will go. Till then, in Haggerston, where my heart is, and where the people whom I love are living, I must remain.”