The Challoners

by E. F. Benson

Mr. Challoner shook his head.

“I hope, I pray, I have not done wrong to let them go,” he said. “I did it with a definite purpose, in order to let them see that sort of life. Helen is not naturally frivolous. Look at her work here with her classes. How admirable she is, how they adore her, how her heart is in it. And to bring a girl up in ignorance of what the world is like does no good. Sometimes I wonder whether I have not sheltered her too much, kept her too much in this sweet place with all her duties and pleasures round her. But it is not of her that I am most thinking. She will come back unspoiled, with just the memory of a great deal of laughter and innocent amusement. No; it is of Martin. Rupert speaks chiefly of him.”

He took from his pocket the letter he had just received and read it to her.

“It is a great puzzle, a great difficulty to know what to do,” he said. “Even at Cambridge, where he is surrounded by all those grave, industrious influences, Martin does not seem to me to gain in depth or in set purpose of life. And if I consent to this, he is plunged into surroundings that so much more conduce to shallowness, to indulgence of the senses. Thank God, I believe my son is pure. But he is so impressionable, so easily stirred by enjoyment into thoughtlessness, that I am very much afraid.”

He got up and moved over to the window, where he stood looking out. In front the ground sloped sharply away down to the church-yard, where in the last fading light of evening the grey tower stood like a shepherd watching over its flock among the gravestones, below which rested the bodies of those entrusted in sure and certain hope to its hallowed care. Like all strong, hard-working men, Mr. Challoner was far too much occupied in the duties of his strenuous life to give much thought to death, except as to some dim, quiet friend whose hand some day he would take without fear or regret. But how terrible death could be, and how terrible it would be to him if through carelessness or biassed judgment he had chosen wrongly for one so dear to him, so peculiarly entrusted to his care. How terrible, again, would be that quiet friend if, through want of wideness in sympathy, he had tried to nip, to starve, to stifle a gift with which God had endowed his son.

Then suddenly with a wave of bitterness all that he had planned in long, sweet day-dreams, years ago, for Martin filled his mind as the harsh salt-water fills a creek. He had seen him a scholar, minute, painstaking, absorbed, perfecting himself in accuracy and subtlety of mind by the study of the great classical authors. He would be a fellow of his college, and his father, so he pictured to himself, would live over again his own college-days, which perhaps were the happiest in his life, when he saw Martin seated at the high-table among the masters of learning, or in professorial gown crossing the dear familiar grass of the quadrangle to the grave grey chapel on summer afternoons when the sun made jewels of the western panes, or in winter when the soft, mellow glow of candles shone dimly by the dark oak stalls and scarcely reached to the vaulted fans of the roof.

Then the picture took large lines. With the wealth and position that would one day be his, there was no limit to the influence that Martin might have in an England which even now seemed to him to be dozing in a stupor of contented unreligious, unintellectual enjoyment. There was need of a scholar, a man with a great position, a man of strong Christian faith to arise who, with a life unselfish in its aims, liberal, charitable, encouraging all sorts of godly learning and scholarship, should give to the world a strenuous, intellectual ideal again. How often in his prayers had that vision risen before him, that future which he desired so eagerly for his son, and which, so he believed, was humanly possible for him. Chartries should be again what it had been four generations ago, the centre of the scholarly, intellectual men of England. The accounts of those days in the history of Chartries read to him like a wonderful true fairy-story. Three or four times in the year the house was filled by his great-grandfather with men of learning, and after breakfast and morning service in the chapel they would meet and discuss till dinner-time some exquisite point of scholarship or hear from some expert of the latest discoveries in the Roman forum. At these discussions his great-grandmother, a woman of culture and knowledge, had always been present. She had once even read a paper on the Elgin marbles, then but lately come to England, in which with a marvellous subtlety and accuracy of observation she had upheld the view, in the face of strong attack, that they were Greek originals, not Roman copies. This and all other papers read there were preserved among the printed “Horæ aureæ Chartrienses,” which was the record of these gatherings.

For Martin, then, he had dreamed a life like that,—the life of a cultured, scholarly, Christian gentleman, not monkish, but with a brood of growing children round him, busy at his books, busy in all matters of education, instant in prayer, and a churchman staunch to uphold the rights and the glory and the privileges of the Mother of his faith. Instead, he was asked to give permission that Martin, after years of expensive education, which had ended in utter failure, should devote himself to music, or as Mr. Challoner put it to himself, to playing the piano,—a profession which, to his mind, was akin to a sort of mountebank’s. Nor was that all. If it was only in intellectual attainment that Martin had shewn himself desultory and idle his father would, it is true, have deeply regretted it; but it would have been as nothing compared to the anxiety he felt with regard to that slackness and indolence of character which he thought he saw in him. Left to himself, he would lounge the day away, not only without acquiring knowledge of any kind, but without a thought as to the strengthening and building up of his own character. He would scribble amusing sketches by the score, play on the piano by the hour, or, as like as not, lie on the grass and smoke, in purposeless waste of these infinitely precious hours of youth. Had he ever shewn interest in matters naval, military, or political, his father would gladly have seen him a soldier or a member of Parliament. But he was purposeless, desultory, without aims or interests, and so utterly unlike himself in every point of character that he could scarcely believe he was his son. And this estimate was no new one; ever since Martin was a little boy, through his school life and through his three years at the University, he had noticed the same drifting weakness, the same tendency to take any amount of trouble to save trouble. Nothing had made any impression on him,—not his confirmation, nor his growing responsibilities as he rose in the school, nor the duties attaching to the sixth form when he was dragged up into it, nor the widened life at Cambridge. It was all one to him. He had the pleasant smile when things went well, the yawn when effort was demanded of him, the eternal drifting towards the piano.

All this passed through his mind with the rapidity of long and bitterly familiar thought.

“They all urge me to do it, Clara,” he said; “yet they don’t know him as I do, and they are in no position of responsibility with regard to him. I can’t see my way at all. It is no use his continuing to waste his time at Cambridge,—and yet London for my poor, rudderless Martin! What influences may he not come under? Who is Rusoff, of whom Rupert speaks? But I must settle. It is no use putting off a decision that has to be made.”