Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

Certain it is, however, that Mr. Eversley, after his second marriage, was not less assiduous—he was, if possible, even more devoted than before—in the discharge of his regular parochial duties. Day succeeded day with easy welcome monotony. The morning, after prayers and breakfast, he would devote to reading and writing, or, as the years went on, to teaching Gerald, or sometimes to conversing with his parishioners upon subjects of general or local interest which to them were all-important; in the afternoon, wet or fine, he would visit his people, striding along the road with Gerald at his side; the evening was again a time of study, except on Sundays when Mr. Eversley read aloud a Sunday book or expounded a passage of the Bible. The people of Kestercham felt an affection not unmingled with awe for his tall figure, associated as it was, or would be, with the solemn incidents of their history—baptism, public worship, marriage, sickness, death; one old lady seeing him set out on a snowy evening wrapped in his long Inverness cape remarked that he ‘looked like a warrior.’ But there was not a case of distress or suffering that he did not seek to relieve, nor was he ever weary in his efforts to reclaim and reform those who in the dark theology of his household were known as ‘vessels of wrath.’ It might be thought that his treatment of spiritual and moral evils erred a little in the way of uniformity; he dealt with them all alike, believing, as he used himself to say, that there was ‘one Gospel for all, rich and poor, bond and free,’ and one sole remedy provided by that Gospel for all the varied ills of sorrow-stricken humanity. But it had been well for the Church of England if all her ministers had been as devoted as Mr. Eversley. He won from church-people and dissenters alike the respect which is due to a consistent and God-fearing character. Gerald in all his early years could conceive no idea of a higher or more beneficent life than his father’s. It was his hope, his ambition, to follow in his father’s steps, though he looked forward to finding as much difficulty in keeping pace with those steps in after life as he now found in keeping pace with them in his parochial rounds. He was generally, almost invariably, his father’s companion in visiting his people. As a rule, when Mr. Eversley entered a cottage to bring solace to the distressed or exhortation to the erring, he would leave Gerald outside; but now and then—if the sickness was of a touching kind—Mr. Eversley would take him in, on the principle that it was not good for any Christian soul, however young, to live in ignorance of the dark or painful side of life.

‘I don’t want you, Gerald,’ he would say, ‘to think life is all sunshine; it is often dark, my dear boy, and full of sadness, but to the Christian conscience the shadows, no less than the sunshine, attest the presence of the Sun.’

Mr. Eversley’s manner of visiting his sick people was simple. He generally began with some reference to the sufferer’s health, or family, or worldly circumstances; he showed much kindness in inquiring about them; then he offered prayer, or, in the current phrase of the village, ‘engaged in prayer,’ kneeling reverently by the bedside; then he opened his well-worn Bible and read a Psalm—the 90th and the 103rd were, I know, his favourites—interspersing it with comments, or a passage of the Gospel, most frequently of St. John, and when he had done reading, and perhaps had given some slight pecuniary relief, if it were needed, he took his leave with a divine benediction, solemnly spoken. ‘Always end with the pure word of God’—that was his rule—‘it leaves a taste in the mouth, maybe a savour of life unto life.’

One strange feature of Mr. Eversley’s parochial visitation Gerald seems to have remembered with interest; for I find it recorded long afterwards in one of his letters. ‘It was characteristic,’ he says, ‘of my father, who was a man of very few words, that the observations which he addressed to a sick person were often punctuated by long pauses. I have known him sit for as long a time as five minutes in a sick-room, saying nothing, and without a word being said by anybody. Such silence would seem intolerable. But as between him and his parishioners it did not excite any feeling of constraint. I have sometimes wondered in later days how they could endure it. It appeared that they liked it. There was a subtle sense of sympathy between him and them; he felt for them, and they realised that he felt for them; there was no need to put the feeling into words. I have noticed that lovers in the country will walk for a long time on a summer’s afternoon, hand in hand, but not speaking a word, only conscious of each other’s affection, and delighting in it; that is what was called “keeping company” at Kestercham. Consecutive speech, which is so easy to the cultivated, is to the ignorant an effort or a pain. My father’s parishioners did not always take in the meaning of such words as he used in speaking or reading to them; one old labourer, to whom he had read the fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, I have heard repeating over and over the words, “Arise, let us go hence,” as if they were full of comfort to his soul. The parishioners did not need that my father should sustain a conversation with them, it was enough that he was at their side in the dark hours; they were sure of his sympathy, and content with it.’

Living such a life in such surroundings, and feeling Kestercham to be his one world, and the world of all whom he knew, Gerald Eversley would, perhaps, have called his life dull if he had realised the possibility of any other life. But his glimpses of the outer world were few and far between. He had no companions of his own age; for there was not a gentleman’s family in Kestercham, and the few young children in the farmhouses were such that Mrs. Eversley, who prided herself (so far as she would admit the possibility of pride) upon the uncontaminated gentility of her birth, would not hear of his associating with them, except upon terms of distance and superiority. She was sorely afraid of his losing his ‘gentlemanlike’ manners and sinking to the level of ‘common people.’ For Mrs. Eversley was haunted by a singular dread of any person or any thing that could be called ‘common.’ Whether she imagined herself to be the model of distinction it is difficult to say; but she certainly thought she was the antithesis of what was ‘common.’ The scriptural direction to ‘call nothing common or unclean’ was not interpreted by Mrs. Eversley as having any relation to her own view of her neighbours. Mr. Eversley, in one of his rare humorous sallies, told her once that he could not help doubting if, in her heart, she really approved the Book of Common Prayer. Mrs. Eversley possessed a wonderful scent for the faintest suspicion of ‘commonness’ in friend or foe. To dissenters she was radically hostile, not only because they were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,’ or because a godly dissenting minister resident in one of the neighbouring parishes had the impudence (as she regarded it) to institute open-air services in the summer months on Kestercham Green, but chiefly because they were so ‘common.’ It was a ground of self-complacency in her mind, nor did she feel it to be in any sense unchristian, that at a meeting in behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society she had refused to shake hands with a dissenting minister. He was a worthy little man—Mrs. Eversley did not deny that—he had laboured for a great many years in a quiet way on a miserable pittance among the scattered members of his flock in Kestercham and some half-dozen villages lying around, but nevertheless, in Mrs. Eversley’s eyes, he was a spiritual poacher, against whom she would, if she could, have invoked the protection and the penal severity of a whole code of spiritual game-laws; and, above all, he was so ‘common.’ So the unhappy minister was doomed to forego the privilege of grasping Mrs. Eversley’s hand. It was not known that he ever spoke of this denial, but probably he felt it, and it did not make him love the Church.

The visitors were few who came to Kestercham vicarage in Gerald’s early days. Some cousins, boys and girls, the children of Mr. Eversley’s only surviving sister, who had married a well-to-do stationer—a union which excited something like a qualm in Mrs. Eversley, as the stationer’s deportment, especially his manner of drinking his tea, was not altogether above suspicion—two or three maiden ladies, friends of Mrs. Eversley before her marriage, and, like her, interested in ‘good works,’ so that, when they arrived, she was generally closeted with them for some hours every day, and the room in which their conference had been held was found to be strewn with a débris of calico and tracts; and now and again a college friend of Mr. Eversley, who was always a clergyman, and nearly always preached two sermons for a Missionary Society. Gerald did not take much notice of these guests, except of the clergymen, who left on his mind the impression that clergymen were all grave and tall, and had long beards, and spoke in rather loud nasal tones, wore white neckcloths and stiff collars which must have caused them a great deal of chin-agony, and rejoiced in an almost exclusive, but quite indubitable, possession of a mysterious and all-important commodity called ‘the truth.’ When they were gone, he used to reflect with mingled feelings that some day he would be such a person himself.

Mrs. Eversley’s relation to her stepson, though eminently proper and conventional, was, it may be supposed, not marked by any undue display of warmth. Not one stepmother in a hundred can enter into solemn feelings of the past without intruding upon them. Mrs. Eversley did her duty, or what she conceived to be her duty, by Gerald. She looked after his meals, his clothes, and his prayers; but, for the most part, she left him alone. It was impossible that sympathy should exist between them, for during her early married life she was much occupied with ‘good works,’ and afterwards with the care of her children—an office which by ladies of her disposition is generally distinguished from ‘good works.’ She was not what would be called a good mother; she was a good stepmother, and a good stepmother is, I am afraid, a bad thing. At all events, Mrs. Eversley’s influence upon Gerald’s life was essentially refrigerating and depressing. But she did her duty, and she said she did it.

The result of all these circumstances—the isolation of life at Kestercham, the lack of domestic sympathy, the limitation of experience—was to throw Gerald more and more into the society of his father. They lived not two lives but one. They had few thoughts apart. The father came more and more to treat his son as his equal in years and worldly knowledge, asking his counsel, or seeming to ask it, upon a hundred little matters of parochial interest which it was impossible for a boy of eleven or twelve years to understand. The son looked upon his father as a friend; he had no secrets from him as so many boys have in early boyhood from their fathers: he talked to him freely, laid his soul bare before him, and invited, nay, entreated him, to scan it. For instance, it was taken as the most natural thing in the world that, if a letter came for Gerald—he was not the recipient of many letters—Mr. Eversley should open and read it. It may be that this perfect intimacy of father and son is hardly attainable except where circumstances create an isolation around them. They knew so much of each other because they knew so little of anyone or anything besides. It is possible at Kestercham, it is not possible in London, but wherever it occurs it is precious and beautiful. Mr. Eversley lived for Gerald, lived in him. Of him, if of any living father, it might be said in the sacred words, ‘His life is bound up in the lad’s life.’ He was a stern man, one of those men who veil intensity of feeling beneath an austere and unemotional exterior; but once when Gerald was lying ill of fever and it was thought that he would die, Mr. Eversley’s passion of grief was terrible. He said nothing, but his face in the morning was like the face of one who had passed the night in weeping, and the servants, who had lain awake in the room above him, said that at every hour they had heard his voice ascending in prayer.

Great as had always been the interest which Mr. Eversley displayed in Gerald’s every action and every thought, it was increased as he became aware that his son possessed unusual intellectual powers. He was so little a man of the world that he had never thought of comparing Gerald with other boys, until one day the Rural Dean, whose annual inspection of the church and the church property was a great occasion, having found him reading Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates’ in a corner of his father’s study, and having questioned him upon it, remarked, ‘That’s a very clever boy of yours, Eversley; why don’t you run him for a scholarship somewhere?’

Gerald was now nearly twelve, and he had gained a good deal of rather curious knowledge. He had read much with his father, and more by himself. The books in Mr. Eversley’s library, some of them heirlooms bearing ancient dates, were familiar to him. One advantage too he enjoyed which many boys lack. It had been his father’s practice, when walking with him around the parish, to impart such information as was possible about the natural world. Thus, Mr. Eversley, who was a fair botanist, had taught him the names of all the common wild flowers and the principles of botanical classification. Mr. Eversley was no devotee of natural science, he had rather a distrust of it as tending to infidelity, but he thought the flowers harmless. He had taught him too the names and positions of the stars and something about the illustrious men who had been the founders of modern astronomy, but hardly ever without alluding to the famous epitaph written by Copernicus for his own tomb, or perhaps by another in his honour; and Mr. Eversley, with his scholarly instinct, would point out that the false quantities in the epitaph, much as they were to be regretted in speaking of so great a man, did not affect the true evangelical character of the theology.