It was easy enough to understand why he was the pet and darling of women—for the sex is discerning. Your true woman’s man is always a good deal of a man. This was the case with Jack Blair, in spite of his fatal fondness for a certain ellipse of a mile and a quarter, upon which he had lost more money than he cared to own up to. But, at least, there was no deceit about Blair. Elizabeth often implored him to promise her never to bet at the races, never to bet at cards, and a great many other things; but he always refused. “No,� he said, “I’ll make no promise I can’t keep. I may not be the best husband in the world, but at least I’ve never lied to you, and I don’t propose to put myself in the way of temptation now.�
It was true that he had never even used a subterfuge towards her. But Elizabeth was haunted by a fear that Blair thought lightly of money obligations, and that inability to pay was not, to him, the terrible and disgraceful thing it was to her. Then, she was tormented by a perfectly ridiculous and feminine jealousy. For all she was a clever enough woman, in the matter of jealousy and a few other trifles of that kind all women are fools alike. This amused Blair hugely, who had a smile and a soft word and a squeeze of the hand for every woman in the county, Mrs. Shapleigh included, but who was the soul of loyalty to Elizabeth. If only he would give up horse racing! for so Elizabeth came to think to herself when the mortgages multiplied on Newington, and after every fall and spring meeting of the Jockey Club she was called upon to sign her name to something or other that Blair paid her for in the tenderest kisses. But there seemed to be a sort of fatality about the whole thing. Blair was thought to be the best judge of horses in the county, yet he rarely had a good horse, and more rarely still won a race. Something always happened at the last minute to upset his triumph. Like all men who are the willing victims of chance, Blair was a firm believer in luck. Everybody knows, he argued, that luck ebbs and flows. The more he lost on the Campdown course, the more he was eventually bound to win on that very course. Elizabeth, with her practical woman’s wit, did not believe at all in luck, but she believed in Blair, which was the same thing in that case. The county was a great one for racing, and at Abingdon Church every Sunday, the affairs of the Jockey Club were so thoroughly discussed by gentlemen sitting around on the flat tombstones during sermon-time, that the formal meetings were merely perfunctory. This way of turning church into a club meeting sincerely distressed the clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Conyers.
CHAPTER V.
Mr. Conyers was one of the county gentry by birth, but it seemed as if the whole theory of heredity, as well as tradition, fell through in his case. The people had been used to jolly parsons, who rode to hounds and could stand up to their bottles of port quite as well as the laity. Indeed, it was reported that Mr. Conyer’s predecessor upon occasions only got to church in time to hustle his cassock on over his hunting jacket and breeches. But Conyers was more soul and spirit than body. He grew up tall, pale, slender, with but one wish on earth—to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was an ascetic by nature—an ascetic among people whose temperaments were sybaritic, and to whom nature and circumstance cried perpetually, “Eat, drink, and be merry.� They were a very honest and chivalrous people, but their spiritual part had been feebly developed. Religion to them meant morality. To Conyers it meant morality and the whole question of man’s relations to his Maker besides.
Conyers fancied that when he had begun his scholastic training for the ministry he would enter upon that course of enlightenment of the soul for which he longed. He was cruelly disappointed. He got a great deal of morality still, a little weak theology, and a general recommendation from his ecclesiastical superiors not to be too curious. He was astute enough to see that morality was one thing and religion another, but that as long as he maintained a high standard of personal behaviour he would be allowed a fearful liberty in his beliefs. It was not an age or a place of religious enquiry, and Conyers found that all the excellent young men prepared with him for the ministry, were perfectly well satisfied with historical and biblical explanations which, to him, appeared grotesquely insufficient. When his soul craved a knowledge of the Christian religion from its beginning, and when he would have studied it from the point of sincere belief in regard to its scope, design, and its effect on man, he was expected to confine his investigations within an inconceivably narrow range. Although knowing instinctively the difference between moral practices and religious beliefs, Conyers was too earnest a lover of moral beauty to put faith in any except a good man, and he early found that some very bad men were the fountain head of certain of his beliefs. He did not lack either courage or good parts, but he lacked knowledge dreadfully, and there was no fountain open to him. But the seal of the Levite was put upon him at his birth; tormented with doubts, longings, and terrible questionings, he must still preach the Word. He kept his burning thoughts to himself, and received ordination from highly moral men who had never thought enough to harbour a doubt. He went back to his native county an ordained clergyman, to begin what he believed to be his labour in his Master’s vineyard. But never had shepherd such a flock. When he tried to teach them spiritual things, they resented it as an attack on their morals. Old Tom Shapleigh, who was a vestryman, embodied the prevailing sentiment in his reply to Conyers when the clergyman tried to find out old Tom’s spiritual attitude.
“Now, look here, Conyers, I’ve known you ever since you were born, and I was a regular communicant in Abingdon church before your father married your mother. I was married by a bishop—yes, zounds, sir, by a bishop!—and pretty dear it cost me in more ways than one. I don’t ill-treat my wife, or starve my negroes, or cheat my neighbour, and, further than that, you have nothing to do. Spiritual attitude be hanged! Go after the women if you want to talk that sort of thing.�
Some of the women, notably Mrs. Blair, had a tender, religious sentiment that was grateful to poor Conyers, going blindly upon his way. But he could not accept the popular doctrine that only women had any spiritual side. To him the great fundamental facts of existence—the soul, the future life, all the mysterious hopes and fears of poor humanity concerning that future life—were problems that no thinking man could thrust aside. But when he tried to penetrate further than Mrs. Blair’s simple belief, her daily reading of the Bible to her children and servants, he found that he only startled and confused her. When he tried to get at the master of the house, Blair flatly refused to have anything to say regarding the state of his soul. The men like old Tom Shapleigh guyed Conyers; the men of finer fiber, like Jack Blair, avoided him. When Mr. Conyers, meeting Blair in the road, tried to talk religion to him, Blair put spurs to his horse and galloped off, laughing. When Conyers came to Newington on the same errand Blair announced to his wife that it was useless.
“I’ll be shot if any parson living shall meddle with my religion! I don’t mind a little sermonising from you, my dear, and you know I made an agreement with you that if you’d let me smoke in the drawing-room I’d stand a chapter in the Bible every night; and the fact is, a man will take a little religious dragooning from his wife or his mother without grumbling. But when it comes to a man’s trying it—why, Conyers is an ass, that’s all.�
Poor Conyers, repulsed on every side, knew not what to do. He found but one person in the whole community willing to think on the subject of religion, although the women were usually quite ready enough to feel. This was Sylvia Shapleigh. But Sylvia wanted to be instructed.
“Tell me,� she said, “what is true? The Bible puzzles me; I can’t understand it. Do you?�