Mr. Eversley, ever since he was appointed vicar, had been troubled in mind by certain established and apparently immutable local practices, against which he waged war long and valiantly, but with less result than his courage and persistency deserved. For instance, it was a rule of the village, and had always been so within the memory of the oldest parishioner (though nobody justified it, nobody could tell how it had grown up), that the men and women, and the boys and girls too, should sit on opposite sides of the church. Whatever the origin of this ritualistic rule had been at Kestercham, it was certainly not ritualism. Mr. Eversley argued that husbands and wives should sit together; he preached upon the propriety of husbands and wives sitting together; he went so far as to call upon some members of his flock, and to beg that they would sit together. They assented, or seemed to assent; but on the next Sunday they were not in church, and on the Sunday after they were sitting on opposite sides. Nothing is so hard to change, in the country especially, as a thoroughly irrational custom; it is proof against all the resources of civilisation. The males and females of Kestercham had always, it was whispered, sat apart, and apart it seemed that they would always sit.
Another practice which greatly exercised Mr. Eversley’s mind was this. It was the habit of the farmers and labourers, or of a considerable number of them, to seat themselves in the church porch half an hour or more before the beginning of divine service, and, while sitting there, to discuss secular parochial affairs in strident tones, and sometimes to smoke, until the clerk ceased tolling the solitary bell, and Miss Seaford, the farmer’s daughter, began playing a hymn-tune, which served as a voluntary, upon the harmonium; then they would come into the church by two and two according to a rough but recognised order of precedence, all alike dressed in their best Sunday clothes, and would follow Mr. Eversley, like the mutes in procession at a funeral, up the church until they dropped into their various places on the south (or masculine) side of the church, the most important of the farmers sitting nearest to the chancel, and Mr. Seaford himself, in virtue of his churchwardenship, in a large pew immediately under the pulpit. It was rumoured that in Mr. Eversley’s early days at Kestercham two or three of the parishioners had been known to sit in the porch, enjoying the gossip, until he emerged in his surplice from behind the curtain, and then, instead of entering the church, had retired to meditate and smoke in the fields during the hours of divine service. But this must, I think, be a calumny. Nothing was more curious or characteristic of Kestercham, and nothing was a source of greater trouble to Mr. Eversley, than the extreme suspiciousness with which any stranger who might happen to enter the church while divine service was going on, was regarded by the whole congregation. The people of Kestercham had no idea of admitting casual or occasional worshippers to their church; they expected a person to worship there regularly or never. The unhappy visitor found himself the object of a hundred inquisitive and indignant eyes. He became conscious that he was an alien, a heretic, a Gentile, who had no right to set foot within the sanctuary. Not being a parishioner of Kestercham, he possessed no title to enjoy the spiritual privileges of that favoured locality. There might be vacant seats in half the pews, but nobody invited him to occupy one of them. It happened not seldom that Mr. Eversley himself, after making futile signs to the churchwarden who was staring at the interloper over his spectacles, would leave his reading-desk and escort the stranger to a seat in the vicarage pew, running the gauntlet, as he did so, of all the farmers who looked daggers at him for being so foolish or immoral as to encourage the presumption of trespassers upon the spiritual preserves of Kestercham parish.
It would be easy to multiply instances of the eccentricity or exclusiveness that prevailed in Kestercham during Gerald Eversley’s early days. But this chapter is long enough; it may fitly conclude with an extract taken from one of his own letters.
‘The place I loved best in Kestercham,’ he wrote once, ‘was the churchyard. The solemn stillness entranced me. I spent many hours there. I knew by heart most of the inscriptions on the gravestones, and I sometimes wondered, though I never dared to ask my father how it was, that the world, or the parish of Kestercham at least, had grown so much worse in the last few years; for the people buried in the churchyard seemed nearly all to have been virtuous and godly, and yet I often heard my father say in church that the people whom he knew and saw every day and got on with very well, were “miserable sinners,” and their hearts “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” But to me Kestercham churchyard was holy ground. My mother’s grave was there, under the yew tree by the chancel of the church. It was there that she had wished to be buried; the spot was so peaceful (she said) and the trees shaded it so beautifully except on the east side, where the morning rays fell upon it, and she would lie in the midst of her own people. Next to her grave is a space reserved for my father when he dies. Sometimes, when the grass was green above the dead, I would take a book and lie all the summer’s afternoon by the graveside, looking up to the blue heaven. I used to think I should be laid to rest there too. I cannot remember my mother; she died when I was born. All that I can think of her is fancy, imagination. It may be false, but I love the thought that it is true. For now and then, in the early morning, in the golden time between sleeping and waking, a vision comes to me of a sweet calm face, with wistful eyes looking far into the future. It is a vision only; it endures but a little while; then it vanishes, and I see it no more. But I awake, and it is as if I had beheld the face of my mother.’
CHAPTER III
FATHER AND SON
Mr. Eversley did not long remain a widower. He was, it may be supposed, one of those persons of warm hearts and transient affections who imagine that the sincerest compliment which can be paid to a wife who is dead is to marry another wife as soon as possible. He announced his approaching happiness to such of his people as he chanced to meet in his parochial visitations, by saying that he was going to ‘give his little boy another mother,’ Another mother! The words fell painfully upon Gerald’s ears at a later time when he had begun to make an idol of his own mother. Lying by her grave and gazing upwards to the heaven of heavens, he had dreamed of meeting her again. It had not occurred to him that she could be replaced.
Mr. Eversley’s habits were not much changed by his second marriage. He had never cared for society, but had lived much to himself. Visiting is always a serious matter in the country; it cannot be undertaken without a good deal of thought and trouble; it involves a long drive, and that is often difficult (as the readers of Miss Austen’s novels will remember) unless there is a moon, and even so the moon is not to be depended on. But Mr. Eversley at the time of his bereavement got out of the way of associating even with the neighbouring clergy. He seldom received a visit, seldom paid one. He devoted himself to his parish and to his son. They were his world—the only world that he thought of or cared about. For them he felt himself responsible to God; for all beyond the responsibility rested with others. Except when he helped the clergyman of an adjoining parish during illness or absence by taking an evening service after his own regular services at Kestercham, or attended (occasionally, but with decreasing regularity) the annual missionary meeting at X——, he hardly ever left his home. Once after an attack of bronchitis he was persuaded by medical advice to go to the seaside for a month in the hope of recruiting his health, but that was his one holiday between the death of his first wife and the beginning of Gerald’s schooldays at St. Anselm’s, and he was heartily glad when it was over. He was fond of describing himself as a ‘home bird.’ He disbelieved in the migratory tendencies of the age. That a rolling stone would gather no moss was one of his favourite proverbs. It did not, I think, occur to him that if the stone never moved at all, the crust of superincumbent moss might possibly in the lapse of years become excessive.
The second Mrs. Eversley did not alter his opinions or his practices, except accidentally by the introduction of an annual infant, and in one year of twins, into the household. She was not young when he sought her hand in marriage; her enemies might perhaps have called her middle-aged. He had become acquainted with her by correspondence in the prosecution of some charitable undertaking, when she had offered to collect money for an evangelical cause which he had at heart; then he had met her, and after a time he had married her. It could hardly be said that she seemed much nearer to him after the marriage than before it. Her affection was indifference with the chill taken off. But then the feelings of a man and a woman in respect of matrimony are not always the same. The man loves the person. The woman sometimes loves the state. The one desires to marry a particular woman, the other desires to be married.
It would require a skilful artist to paint the character of the second Mrs. Eversley. Whatever she did she did always from a sense of duty. Duty was the keynote of her life. It did not prevent her doing disagreeable things to other people; but it comforted her (not the other people) when she had done them. If it generally happened that her sense of duty coincided with her inclination, that was only what might naturally be expected in a universe ordered by Providence with due regard to the circumstances of the second Mrs. Eversley. Not that Mrs. Eversley ever looked upon her performance of duty as constituting a title to the divine favour; she knew that her righteousness (like other people’s) was no better than ‘filthy rags.’ She belonged to ‘the elect;’ other people, or nearly all other people, did not belong to ‘the elect,’ but to some other body. Mrs. Eversley’s principal horror was of ‘the world.’ She fought a hand-to-hand fight with that mysterious impersonation, which seems to be the sum total of all that a narrowly minded religious man or woman is unwilling that other people should do. If she spoke of a neighbour as ‘worldly,’ there was no hope for him or her. To save her own soul in the first instance, and in the second the souls of her husband and her family (Gerald being included by a sort of special compliment), and in the third, if the Electing Power were so gracious, the souls of the people of Kestercham, was (in Mrs. Eversley’s eyes) the lifework of Mrs. Eversley. It must not be said that her desire was hypocritical. The motives of human action are always hard to classify. They are generally mixed, partly good and partly bad. Two things only may be said to have been clear about Mrs. Eversley, one, that she was a good woman, the other, that she did not make goodness particularly attractive.
Being such as she was, and having been so for a greater number of years than she would perhaps have been willing to confess, it was not to be expected that she would draw Mr. Eversley out of his solitary, meditative mode of life. Apart from other reasons, there is in women, especially in such women as are married late in life, a specious selfishness which takes the form of keeping their husbands perpetually at their sides; but this selfishness appears to them so true a virtue that I have known a woman (who in the phraseology of religious society would have been called ‘a good woman’) take a positive pride in maiming and crippling the active beneficence of her husband’s life. If Mrs. Eversley had been asked why she kept her husband more and more within the confines of his own parish, she would have said that it was not for those who had been ‘converted’ to take a pleasure in the ‘beggarly elements’ of the world. But if anyone else had been asked, he would have said that the reason was—not perhaps wholly, but principally—that she liked to monopolise his society.