"Dear old Swinton!" was all his comment; "last of the Gallicans!" Vernon was early struck by the gaiety and love of fun among his fellow-workers in the vineyard.
As for the curates: he discovered he was the successor to a long line whose misplaced fervor and attempts to familiarize the channels of grace had brought them into collision with the heady old man.
"Four—times—a—year, Mr. Vernon," his rector would assert, bringing the palm of his hand down on the table at each word. "Four times a year, sir, and no more, if I had my way. And the three months in between all too short to prepare for the reception of this tremendous"—at the word something that was almost ecstasy descended upon the foolish old face—"tremendous Sacrament! Besides"—fretfully—"none of 'em knew how to eat like gentlemen."
Perhaps on account of his superior table manners, perhaps for other reasons, Vernon's enthusiasm—the enthusiasm of the proselyte—was condoned. Often during his strenuous later life he looked back upon those three years of curacy as perhaps the happiest he had known. If he might not sow the seed broadcast, at least he could sow and tend it in his own heart. He loved to read his breviary of an afternoon, pacing up and down between two green matted grass lawns, under the creeper-covered wall of the meek little house of God. The sun, filtering through the tender leaves of the plane trees, made a dappled puzzle-pattern on the broad flagged walk at his feet, or, if the season was late, he crisped their shed vesture beneath his low buckled shoes. Often, as his lips moved in the prayer that he had now got by heart, his eyes, wandering from the familiar page, would map out by the line, and square the foundation of his settlement—his bustling citadel of the friends of God—so soon to arise in the great wilderness, blotting out this selfish little oasis of peace and stillness forever. This very walk the vault of a chancel should cover—vast, imposing, lined with glowing chapels that pictured in fresco and mosaic the hard-won battles of the Church militant—draped with embroidered banners of guild and confraternity. Here, at the ivied presbytery gable, where a mob of sparrows, heedless of impending change, were repairing their frail tenements of straw, the gymnasium should stand, with a dining-hall above, where from henceforth his daily meals should be taken in the company of the starving and the outcast; of the workless man, hovering with amazement upon the brink of crime; of the felon, still sore from the stringent hand of earthly justice; guests gathered at his Master's bidding from highway and byway, and set down with the broad robe of charity over their bowed shoulders. And once a week at night, when chairs and benches had been cleared away, the piano should tinkle and the fiddle tune, and lads and lasses, in whose perverse minds guilt and gaiety had become convertible terms, should learn the religion of joy, and dance the devil out of their souls.
These were his dreams during three years. And yet, in his imagination, susceptible as a woman's to any influence of beauty and grace, and, like a woman's, sworn foe of all that is ugly and irrevocable in life, the quiet close was full of voices that reproached him for their outcasting. He used to pray against his weakness at night, when confessions were over and the church closed. Horse-cars jingled past the doors. The windows shook with raucous oaths; with cries of buyers and sellers in the market outside, from mouths furred with blasphemy and filthy talk; the naphtha flares threw strange, troubled shadows over the doomed pews and galleries.
Father Swinton fell ill in the middle of the third year, and after lingering a few months, died rather suddenly. At his death it was discovered that his private charities had been unbounded, and had eaten up all his inheritance. He left nothing of his own behind, save a family genealogy, in which the connection between the Swintons of Dimpleshall and the Swintons of Blacklash is clearly traced—a connection which, it would appear, Mackenzie, in his "View of the County of Northumberland," has been at pains to dispute, and a bound manuscript, much thumbed, of meditations on the Passion. The projected work had hardly waited on his death; indeed, Vernon was called to his superior's agony from a consultation with his architect. No man's dream is ever realized; but within two years a good deal of his was an accomplished fact. Vernon was a wealthy man, and, when his own money was spent, a consummate beggar. The dining-room, the schools, the gymnasium, the dispensary, and the old folks' hostel took shape one by one, amid discouragement, covert sarcasm, and abundant prophecy of failure. The trees fell, the chapel was gutted and torn down as completely as ever by Gordon rioters; the presbytery, with its panelled chambers, went the same way; the sparrows took to a dusty wing and, as covenanted servants, let us hope found sanctuary elsewhere. Last of all, the chancel, gaunt and bare as yet, a mere shell and outline of all it should be, but imposing if only by virtue of its bulk, with traceried windows, flying buttresses, clerestory and triforium, towered over the wet slate roofs that smoked sullenly all day, like a slaked furnace, beneath its feet. At the centre of the cross, where the long chancel met the truncated apse and aisles, an octagonal lead lantern, lit by eight round lunettes, took the place of tower and spire. It was at this lantern that men stood to stare; toward it that the whips of passing van and 'bus drivers inevitably were pointed for many a long day. For there, set up too high for any to escape His appeal—a symbol of hope to the hopeless, a fable to the scoffer, a source of irritation to the Pharisee, lit up at night by two coronals of electric light that encircled the pierced feet and haloed the drooping head—the Man of Sorrows watched the sorrowing city, and plucked His vesture aside to show the wounded and flaming breast—the Sacred Heart, beneath.
At fifty-eight Canon Vernon would have been a strange portent in the Common Room at Wadham. He had gained sanctity, but there is no denying he had lost polish. One cannot sit to table habitually with the outcast and not become either a little self-righteous or a little disreputable; and nothing could ever have made Antony Vernon self-righteous. He had a brown, seamed face, on which the lines of humor and pain crossed and intercrossed; the loose, mobile mouth of the great actor he might have been; piercing black eyes, an untidy thatch of dark hair whitening only at the temples, and thin, sensitive nostrils rimmed with snuff. Snuff also liberally besprinkled the breast of his shabby cassock. There had been, three hundred years back, an ancestor who wrote himself M. de Vernon, and, in reverting to the ancestral faith, Vernon seemed to have reverted a little to the ancestral type. He had no apparent austerities, was fond of a certain brand of white wine which grocers do not stock, and when his young men saw him in his private room, gave them, together with absolution, an Egyptian cigarette that was no part of their penance. His life is now matter for biography. In the district which is bounded roughly by Kingsland Road on the west and Hackney Road on the south, and which may be said to have London Fields—a rather tuberculous "lung"—for its centre and playground, it was even then matter for legend. Upon some of the legends his own comments were flippant, and we should probably err in attaching greater importance to them than he did himself. In speaking of his spiritual influence we are on safer ground. Very few—perhaps none quite—had ever withstood this. It was the old, old test. Power "went out" from him. Very unjustly, the worship of which he was the object did not extend to the hard-working curates with whom he surrounded himself. His delivery in the pulpit was bad, his writing all but illegible, and, as he never had time to prepare his sermons for the press, a good deal has perished that deserved to survive. We preserve a few fragments, however, as characteristic of his peculiar train of thought.
"Of love:
"There is no way to love God but through His creatures. It is through admiration of the work that we must be brought to the artist. But often the one condition upon which our love can stay sinless is that it shall stay silent."
"Of suffering: