Jason Quarm for once had succeeded in a speculation. The Torquay building society promised to be a prosperous company, and to pay good dividends. Jason was not able to contribute much in capital, but as promoter of the scheme he received certain shares. He was occupied, his mind engrossed in carrying out the plans of the company, in making contracts, in buying materials, in supervising, in altering, in scheming terraces and detached villas, in planting Belle Views and Sea Prospects, and Rosebank Cottages, and Lavender Walks, and Marine Parades, and he could afford no time to be at Coombe.
Zerah was wrapped up in her niece. She could not have loved her more dearly had Kitty been her own child. The hardness in the woman’s character gave way; the trouble she had undergone had softened and sweetened a nature really good and kind, but ruffled and soured by adverse circumstances and uncongenial associations. A great change had taken place in the opinion of the public in Coombe-in-Teignhead relative to Kitty. The general feeling was, that she had been hardly treated, in having a crime attributed to her of which she had been guiltless; that if she had been reserved in her manner, it was her way, and all folk were not constituted alike; that if she asked questions, no one was bound to answer them unless he liked, and if he couldn’t give the required information. Kitty was quiet’she harmed nobody. She had done Rose Ash a great favour in stepping out of the way when Jan Pooke was inclined to “make a fool of himself wi’ her.” She was worth three thousand pounds for certain, and it was said that her father was piling up a fortune in Torquay. Coombe Cellars would ultimately be hers, as well as the little bit of ground about it’or rather, at the back of it, which was what remained of the farm. And she had been grown in Coombe, she had foothold there, and “all knew the worst o’ her, and that weren’t so cruel bad.” Finally, and conclusively, Mr. Puddicombe pronounced in her favour.
So public opinion veered round, and was prepared to make much of Kate. The worst that could be spoken of her was that she had taken up with that schoolmaster again. But then, just as Scripture said that the believing wife might sanctify the heathen husband, so it was reasoned that the indigenous Kitty might naturalise the foreign Walter, and that because she belonged to the place, he might be accepted as a strange plant, given room to root in at Coombe.
It was very well known that sometimes a stray cat came to a house from nobody knew where, and meeowed, entreating to be fed and harboured, and few housewives would shut it out. They would take in the stranger, give it milk and a place by the fire, and domesticate it. Even so came this Walter Bramber into Coombe out of space; whom he had belonged to, and from what sort of habitation, no one knew. He asked to be domiciled in Coombe, and Kitty took him in. What was allowable to a cat was surely not to be refused to a schoolmaster.
If Walter Bramber was afflicted with superior education, it was probably no more his fault than is water on the brain in a rickety child. And if he was a schoolmaster by profession, perhaps it was not his fault, but his misfortune. He’d been bred to it by his unfeeling and unnatural parents, just as in London some boys were brought up to be thieves and pickpockets. Mr. Puddicombe, indeed, had taken up schoolmastering, but that was a different matter; he had not been reared to anything of the sort, and had adopted it rather as a pastime than a profession, and had never allowed it to interfere with his robust and intelligent pleasures, such as cock-fighting; and Mr. Puddicombe drank and smoked and swore sometimes, and all that showed he was a man. On the whole, Coombe-in-Teignhead agreed to accept Walter Bramber and Kitty as his wife, with the proviso that it would kick them over should they attempt to give themselves airs.
As for the rector, he was radiant with happiness. Now at last he saw some prospect of making an impression for good on his parishioners, if not of elevating the existing generation, of greatly raising the moral and intellectual tone of that which would follow. He had striven hard for years in isolation and with absolutely no success. Now, with the aid of a peculiarly well-qualified schoolmaster, and with Kitty at that master’s side to direct the girls as Bramber guided the minds of the boys, he was sanguine of success, not of much that he would see himself, but of a success in the far future. Of no profession can that be said more truly than of that of the pastor, “One soweth’another reapeth.”
“Walter,” said he to his schoolmaster, “I was not sent here to blow Sunday soap-bubbles, sometimes iridescent emptiness, sometimes emptiness without the iridescence. Soap-bubbles please for the moment, but they do not satisfy. No father, the gospel says, when asked for bread, will give his children a stone, but a stone has in it substance, whereas a soap-bubble has but emptiness. But the children will not ask for bread unless they be hungry, and will always be pleased to see soap-bubbles sail over their heads. I believe the apostles were sent forth to be the salt of the earth. Their successors are self-satisfied if they be but insipid carbonate of soda. I have striven to feed, not to amuse, but nothing can avail till the hunger come. You find that in the school, I find it in the church. Some Indians chew clay, because they have not bread. Our people have quite a fancy for this stodgy substance; we have to rectify their appetites, so that they may come to desire nourishing diet, and not what is merely stuffing’to seek for instruction, and not amusement. You in your sphere, I in mine, have a similar office, and similar obligations weighing on us, and similar difficulties to encounter. If you seek for popularity, make Puddicombe your model; take the level of the people among whom you are set, and do not stir to cure them of clay-chewing. If you seek to do your duty, then do not expect to have a path of soft herbage to tread, but one of thorns. If I had been indefinite, flowery, hollow in my teaching here, I should have been the most popular man in the parish, and after forty years’ ministration would have passed away with a smile of self-satisfaction that I had given no offence to anyone’only to awake in the vast beyond to the startling conviction that I had done no good to anyone!
“Cast your bread on the waters, and you will find it after many days; cast chaff, and it will be blown, washed, rotted away. Many a man in my profession and in yours’we are both teachers’is like the cuckoo-spittle-insect, which throws out a great froth bubble about it. So do some of my profession surround themselves with a copious discharge of words’words without substance. Avoid that in your school, Bramber. Teaching must be definite, or it is trifling, not teaching; and in sacred matters trifling is a guilty desertion of a duty. We are sent to feed, not befool our flocks. Form a clear conception in your mind of what you want to teach, and then impress it sharply, well defined, on the minds given you to act upon. So only will you rear a generation in advance of that to which we belong. But you will get no praise for so doing, save from your own conscience.”
Roger Redmore had surrendered to justice, by the advice of Jason, and he had been sentenced to a nominal punishment of two months’ imprisonment. Mr. Pooke had readily pleaded for him, had frankly acknowledged that the man had been greatly aggravated, and was perhaps hardly sensible of what he was doing.
On leaving prison, Roger was taken, along with his wife, into the service of the Cellars, and gave promise of being a faithful and energetic workman.