Phoebe, Junior

“For my part,” said one of the speakers, “I would rather abandon my sacred calling to-morrow, or make tents as St. Paul did in its exercise, than put on the gilded fetters of the State, and pray or preach as an Archbishop told me; nay, as a Cabinet Council of godless worldlings directed. There are many good men among the clergy of the Church of England; but they are slaves, my friends, nothing but slaves, dragged at the chariot wheels of the State; ruled by a caste of hard-headed lawyers; or binding themselves in the rotten robes of tradition. It is we only who can dare to say that we are free!”

At this sentiment, the Meeting fairly shouted with applause and delight and self-complacency; and the speaker, delighted too, and tasting all the sweetness of success, gave place to the next, and came and sat down by Phœbe, to whose society the younger men were all very glad to escape.

“Miss Beecham, you are fashionably calm,” whispered the orator, “you don't throw yourself, like the rest of us, into this great agitation.”

“Have you a leading member?” whispered Phœbe back again; “and does he never drag you at his chariot wheels? Have you deacons that keep you up to the mark? Have you people you must drink tea with when they ask you, or else they throw up their sittings? I am thinking, of course, of papa.”

“Have I deacons? Have I leading members? Miss Beecham, you are cruel – ”

“Hush!” said Phœbe, settling herself in her chair. “Here is somebody who is in dreadful earnest. Don't talk, Mr. Northcote is going to speak.”

Thus it will be seen that the Minister's daughter played her rôle of fine lady and bel esprit very fairly in an atmosphere so unlike the air that fine ladies breathe. Phœbe paid no more attention to the discomfited man at her elbow. She gathered up her shawl in her hand with a seeming careless movement, and let it drop lightly across her knee, where the gold threads in the embroidery caught the light; and she took off her hat, which she had thought proper to wear to show her sense that the Meeting was not an evening party; and prepared herself to listen. Her complexion and her hair, and the gold threads in the rich Indian work, thus blazed out together upon the startled audience. Many of them were as much struck by this as by the beginning of Mr. Northcote's speech, though it was very different from the other speeches. The others had been routine agitation, this was fiery conviction, crude, and jumping at conclusions, but still an enthusiasm in its way. Mr. Northcote approached his subject gradually, and his hearers, at first disappointed by the absence of their familiar watch-words, were dull, and bestowed their attention on Phœbe; but before he had been speaking ten minutes Phœbe was forgotten even by her uncle and aunt, the two people most interested in her. It would be dangerous to repeat to a reader, probably quite uninterested in the controversy, Mr. Northcote's speech, in which he laid hold of some of those weak points which the Church, of course, has in common with every other institution in the world. Eloquence has a way of evaporating in print, even when the report is immediate. But his peroration was one which startled his hearers out of a calm abstract interest to all that keen personal feeling which accompanies the narrative of facts known to an audience, and affecting people within their own locality.

“I have only been in this place three days,” said the speaker, “but in that short time I have heard of one of the most flagrant abuses which I have been indicating to you. There is in this town, as you all know, an institution called the College; what was its original object I do not know. Nests of idle pauperism, genteelly veiled under such a name, do exist, I know, over all the country; but it is at least probable that some educational purpose was in the mind of the pious founder who established it. The pious founder! how immense are the revenues, how incalculable the means of doing good, which have been locked up in uselessness, or worse than uselessness, by men who have purchased a pass into the kingdom of heaven at the last moment by such gifts, and become pious founders just before they ceased to be miserable sinners! Whatever may have been the original intention of the College, however, it is clear that it was meant for something more than the pitiful use it is put to now. This old foundation, ladies and gentlemen, which might provide half the poor children in Carlingford with a wholesome education, is devoted to the maintenance of six old men, need I say Churchmen?” (here the speaker was interrupted by mingled hisses and ironical “hear, hears”) – “and a chaplain to say their prayers for them. Six old men: and one able-bodied parson to say their prayers for them. What do you think of this, my friends? I understand that this heavy and onerous duty has been offered – not to some other mouldy old gentleman, some decayed clergyman who might have ministered in peace to the decayed old burghers without any interference on my part: for a refuge for the aged and destitute has something natural in it, even when it is a wrong appropriation of public money. No, this would have been some faint approach perhaps to justice, some right in wrong that would have closed our mouths. But no! it is given to a young gentleman, able-bodied, as I have said, who has appeared more than once in the cricket-field with your victorious Eleven, who is fresh from Oxford, and would no more condescend to consider himself on a footing of equality with the humble person who addresses you, than I would, having the use of my hands, accept a disgraceful sinecure! Yes, my friends, this is what the State Church does. She so cows the spirit and weakens the hearts of her followers that a young man at the very beginning of his career, able to teach, able to work, able to dig, educated and trained and cultured, can stoop to accept a good income in such a position as this. Think of it! Six old men, able surely, if they are good for anything, to mumble their prayers for themselves somehow; yet provided with an Oxford scholar, an able-bodied young man, to read the service for them daily! He thinks it very fine, no doubt, a good income and a good house for life, and nothing to do but to canter over morning and evening prayer at a swinging pace, as we have all heard it done: morning prayer, let us see, half an hour – or you may throw in ten minutes, in case the six should mumble their Amens slowly – and twenty minutes for the evening, one hour a day. Here it is under your very eyes, people of Carlingford, a charming provision for the son of one of your most respected clergymen. Why, it is in your newspaper, where I read it! Can I give a more forcible instance of the way in which a State Church cuts honesty and honour out of men's hearts.”

A great many people noticed that when Mr. Northcote ended this with a thundering voice, some one who had been listening near the door in an Inverness cape, and hat over his brows, gave himself a sudden impetuous shake which shook the crowd, and turning round made his way out, not caring whom he stumbled against. The whole assembly was in a hubbub when the orator ceased, and whispers ran freely round among all the groups in the front. “That's young May he means.” “In course it's young May. Infernal job, as I've always said.” “Oh hush, Pigeon, don't swear! but it do seem a black burning shame, don't it?” “Bravo, Mr. Nor'cote!” called out old Tozer, on the platform, “that's what I call giving forth no uncertain sound. That's laying it into them 'ot and 'ot.”

This was the climax of the Meeting. Everything else was flat after such a decided appeal to personal knowledge. Phœbe alone gave a frigid reception to the hero of the evening.

“I dislike personalities,” she said, pointedly. “They never do a cause any good; and it isn't gentlemanly; don't you think so, Mr. Sloely;” and she turned away from Northcote, who had come to speak to her, and devoted herself to the man at her elbow, whom she had snubbed a little while before. Mr. Northcote said to himself that this was untrue, and brought up a hundred very good reasons why he should have employed such an example, but the reproof stung him to the quick, for to be ungentlemanly was the reproach of all others most calculated to go to his heart.

But nobody knew how Mr. May went home in his Inverness cape, breathing fire and flame, nor of the execution he did thereupon.

CHAPTER XVIII

MR. MAY'S AFFAIRS

Mr. May went into his study and closed the door. He poked the fire – he put himself into his easy-chair – he drew his writing-book towards him, and opened it at where a half-written sheet lay waiting. And then he paused, rubbed his hands softly together, and falling back again, laughed quietly to himself.

Yes; he who had stormed out of the drawing-room like a whirlwind, having discomfited everybody, leaving the girls in tears, and the boys in a white heat of passion, when he reached the profoundest depths of his own retirement, laughed. What did it mean? Of all the people in the world, his children would have been most entirely thunderstruck by this self-betrayal. They could not have understood it. They were acquainted with his passions, and with his moments of good temper. They knew when he was amiable, and when he was angry, by instinct, by the gleam of his eye, by the way in which he shut the door; but this was something totally unknown to them. The truth was that Mr. May, like many other people, having a naturally bad temper, which he indulged freely when he pleased, had attained the power of using it when it suited him to use it, without being suspected by anybody. A bad temper is a possession like another, and may be made skilful use of like other things which, perhaps, in themselves, are not desirable. He could work himself up into fury, and launch the doom he felt disposed to launch, like a burning and fizzing thunder-bolt from a hand which was, in reality, not at all excited; and like most other people who possess such an unrevealed power, it pleased him very much when he persuaded his surroundings that it was an impulse of rage which moved him. He had been at the Meeting at the Music Hall, “to hear what those fellows had to say for themselves.” Contempt, unbounded but wrathful, was the feeling in his mind towards “those fellows;” but he felt that young Northcote's eloquence, reported in next day's papers, was quite enough to quash for ever all hopes of his son's acceptance of the chaplaincy. So he walked home as fast as his legs would carry him, and burst into his house, as we have seen, with a semblance of passion so perfect as to deceive his entire family and fill the place with anger and tears. Upon which, withdrawing from the scene of conflict, he threw himself down in his easy-chair and chuckled, recovering his composure by slow degrees.

When, however, this private indulgence was over, Mr. May's face grew dark enough. He pushed his writing away from him, and pulling out a drawer in his writing-table, which was full of papers of a very unliterary aspect, betook himself to the consideration of them, with anything but laughter in his looks, or in his mind. Letters upon blue paper in straight up and down handwriting – other papers, also blue, with ruled lines and numerals, for which Mr. May was more frightened than he would have been for a charge of cavalry. These were the very unattractive contents of this drawer. He brought two or three of them out in a bundle and read them over, one after another, with contracted brows. Debt is an idiosyncrasy like other things. Some people keep clear of it miraculously, some seem to drop into it without cause or meaning, and to spend all their lives afterwards in vain attempts to get out. Mr. May was one of these unfortunate men. He could not tell himself where his money went to. Poor man! it was not so much he had, and there was a large family to be fed and clothed, and schooled after a sort. But still other people on incomes as small as his had managed to maintain their families without dropping into this hopeless condition. He had been in debt since ever he could remember; and to be sure it was not the pain and trouble to him that it is to many people. So long as, by hook or by crook, he could manage to stave off the evil day, so long was he happy enough, and he had managed this by all sorts of semi-miraculous windfalls up to the present time. James's remittances had been like heavenly dew to him. It is true that these remittances had been intended to keep Reginald at Oxford, and perhaps something of the special hardness with which he regarded Reginald arose from the fact that he had done him wrong in this respect, and had appropriated what was intended for him. But after all, he had said to himself, the maintenance of the house in comfort, the keeping clean of the family name, and the staving off disagreeable revelations of the family's poverty, were more, for even Reginald's comfort, than a little more money in his pocket, which everybody knew was very dangerous for a young man.

Mr. May had always a bill coming due, which James's remittances arrived just in time to meet. Indeed, this was the normal condition of his life. He had always a bill coming due – a bill which some good-humoured banker had to be coaxed into renewing, or which was paid at the last moment by some skilful legerdemain in the way of pouring out of one vessel into another, transferring the debt from one quarter to another, so that there may have been said to be always a certain amount of quite fictitious and visionary money floating about Mr. May, money which existed only in the shape of symbol, and which, indeed, belonged to nobody – which was borrowed here to-day, and paid there to-morrow, to be re-borrowed and repaid in the same way, never really reaching anybody's pocket, or representing anything but that one thing which money is supposed to be able to extinguish – debt. When human affairs reach this very delicate point, and there is nothing at any moment, except a semi-miraculous windfall, to keep a man going, the crisis is very serious. And it was no wonder that Mr. May was anxious to drive his son into accepting any possible appointment, and that he occasionally railed unreasonably at his family. Unless a hundred pounds or so fell down from the skies within the next ten days, he saw nothing before him but ruin. This, it is needless to say, is very far from being a comfortable position. The sourde agitation, excitement, feverish hope and fear of the sufferer might well affect his temper. If he could not get a hundred pounds within ten days, he did not know what he was to do.

And nobody could say (he thought to himself) that he was an expensive man; he had no expensive habits. He liked good living, it is true, and a glass of good wine, but this amount of regard for the table does not ruin men. He liked books also, but he did not buy them, contenting himself with such as the library could afford, and those which he could obtain by the reviews he wrote for the Church Magazines. How then was it that he never could get rid of that rapidly maturing bill? He could not tell. Keeping out of debt is one thing, and getting rid of it when you have once taken its yoke upon your neck is another. His money, when he had any, “slipped through his fingers,” as people say. When James's remittance or any other piece of good fortune gave him enough to pay that hundred pounds without borrowing elsewhere, he borrowed elsewhere all the same. It was a mysterious fatality, from which he seemed unable to escape. In such circumstances a crisis must come sooner or later, and it appeared to him that now at least, after many hairbreadth escapes, the crisis had come.

What was he to do? There was no chance, alas! of money from James, and even if Reginald accepted the chaplaincy, and was willing at once to come to his father's aid, there was no hope that he would have anything for some time – for chaplains incomes are not, any more than other people's, generally paid in advance. He leaned back in his chair and went over again, for the hundredth time, the list of all the people he could borrow from, or who would “back” a bill for him, and he was still employed in this melancholy and hopeless enumeration, when a low knock came to the door, and a maid-of-all-work, pushing it open, thrust in a homely little man in a dusty-brown coat, who put up a hand to his forehead as he came in with a salutation which was half charity school-boy, half awkward recruit. Beyond this there was no ceremony about his entrance, no leave asked or question made. Betsy knew very well that he was to come in when he pleased, and that her master did not deny himself to Cotsdean. Mr. May received him with a familiar nod, and pointed hastily to a chair. He did not even take the trouble to put away those blue papers, which he would have done if any other individual, even if one of his children had come into the room.

“Good evening, Cotsdean,” he said, in a friendly tone. “Well, what news?”

“Nothing as is pleasant, sir,” said the man, sitting down on a corner of his chair. “I've been to the bank, and it's no use my explaining, or begging ever so hard. They won't hear of it. 'We've done it times and times,' they says to me, 'and we won't do it no more. That's flat,' and so indeed it is flat, sir, as you may say downright Dunstable; but that ain't no advantage to you and me.”

“Yes, it is, Cotsdean,” said the clergyman, “it is a decided advantage, for it shows there is nothing to be hoped from that quarter, and that is always good – even though it's bad bad, as bad as can be – ”

“You may say so, sir,” said Cotsdean. “I don't know what's to be done no more than the babe unborn, and it's wearing me to death, that's what it's doing. When I looks round on my small family, it's all I can do not to cry out loud. What's to become of my children, Mr. May? Yours, sir, they'll never want friends, and a hundred or so here or there, that don't ruin gentlefolks; but without selling up the business, how am I ever to get a hundred pounds? It ain't equal, sir, I swear it ain't. You gets the money, and you takes it easy, and don't hold your head not a bit lower; but me as has no good of it (except in the way o' a bit of custom that is a deal more in looks than anything else), and has to go round to all the folks, to Mr. Brownlow, at the bank, and I don't know who, as if it was for me! I suffers in my credit, sir, and I suffers in my spirits, and I suffers in my health; and when the smash comes, what's to become of my poor children? It's enough to put a man beside himself, that's what it is.”

Here the poor man's eyes grew bloodshot, partly with rubbing them, partly with tears. He rubbed them with the sleeve of his rough coat, and the tears were very real, though few in number. Cotsdean's despair was indeed tragical enough, but its outside had in it a dash of comedy, which, though he was in no mirthful mood, caught the quick eye of Mr. May. He was himself very painfully affected, to tell the truth, but yet it cost him an effort not to smile.

“Cotsdean,” he said, “have I ever failed you yet? You have done a good deal for me, I don't deny it – you have had all the trouble, but beyond that what have you suffered except in imagination? If you choose to exaggerate dangers, it is not my fault. Your children are as safe as – as safe as the Bank of England. Now, have I ever failed you? answer me that.”

“I can't say as you have, sir,” said Cotsdean, “but it's dreadful work playing with a man's ruin, off and on like this, and nobody knowing what might happen, or what a day or an hour might bring forth.”

“That is very true,” said Mr. May. “I might die, that is what you mean; very true, though not quite so kind as I might have expected from an old friend – a very old friend.”

“I am sure, Sir, I beg your pardon,” cried the poor man, “it wasn't that; but only just as I'm driven out o' my seven senses with thinking and thinking.”

“My dear Cotsdean, don't think; there could not be a more unnecessary exercise; what good does your thinking do, but to make you unhappy? leave that to me. We have been driven into a corner before now, but nothing has ever happened to us. You will see something will turn up this time. I ask you again, have I ever failed you? you know best.”

“No, sir,” said Cotsdean, somewhat doubtfully. “No, I didn't say as you had. It's only – I suppose I ain't so young as I once was – and a man's feelin's, sir, ain't always in his own control.”

“You must take care that it is only to me that you make such an exhibition as this,” said Mr. May. “Who is there? oh, my coffee! put it on the table. If you are seen coming here to me with red eyes and this agitated appearance,” he went on, waiting pointedly till the door was closed, “it will be supposed there is some family reason for it – again – ”

“Oh, lor', Sir! you know – ”

“Yes, I know very well,” said the clergyman. “I know that there couldn't be a better wife, and that bygones are bygones; but you must remember and take care; everybody doesn't know you – and her – so well as I do. When you come to see your clergyman in this agitated state, I put it to yourself, Cotsdean, I put it to your good sense, what is anybody to think? You must take great care not to betray yourself to anybody but me.”

The man looked at him with a half-gasp of consternation, bewildered by the very boldness with which he was thus set down. Betray himself – he drew a long breath, as if he had received a douche of cold water in his face, which was indeed very much like the effect that this extraordinary address produced – betray himself! Poor Cotsdean's struggles and sufferings arose, at the present moment, entirely from the fact that he had allowed himself to be made use of for Mr. May's occasions, and both the men were perfectly aware of this. But though he gasped, Cotsdean was too much under the influence of his clergyman to do anything more. Had he been a Dissenter, he would have patronized young Northcote, who was as good a man as Mr. May (or far better if truth were told), with the frankest certainty of his own superior position, but being a humble churchman he yielded to his clergyman as to one of the powers that be. It is a curious difference. He sat still on the edge of his chair, while Mr. May walked across the room to the table by the door, where his café noir had been placed, and took his cup and drank it. He was not civil enough to ask his visitor to share it, indeed it never would have occurred to him, though he did not hesitate to use poor Cotsdean for his own purpose, to treat him otherwise than as men treat their servants and inferiors. When he had finished his coffee, he went leisurely back into his former place.

“You have nothing to suggest,” he said, “nothing to advise? Well, I must try what I can do. It will be hard work, but still I must do it, you know,” added Mr. May, in a gracious tone. “I have never concealed from you, Cotsdean, how much I appreciated your assistance; everything of this sort is so much worse in my position than in yours. You understand that? A gentleman – and a clergyman – has things expected from him which never would be thought of in your case. I have never omitted to acknowledge my obligations to you – and you also owe some obligations to me.”

“I don't deny as you've been very kind, sir,” said Cotsdean, half-grateful, half-sullen; then he wavered a little. “I never denied it, her and me could never have 'it it off but for you. I don't forget a favour – nobody can say that of me. I ain't forgot it in this case.”

“I don't say that you have forgotten it. I have always put the utmost confidence in you; but, my good fellow, you must not come to me in this down-in-the-mouth way. Have I ever failed you? We've been hard pressed enough at times, but something has always turned up. Have not I told you a hundred times Providence will provide?”

“If you put it like that, sir – ”

“I do put it like that. I have always been helped, you know, sometimes when it seemed the last moment. Leave it to me. I have no more doubt,” said Mr. May, lifting up a countenance which was by no means so untroubled as could have been wished, “that when the time comes all will be well, than I have of the sun rising to-morrow – which it will,” he added with some solemnity, “whether you and I live to see it or not. Leave it all, I say, to me.”

Cotsdean did not make any reply. He was overawed by this solemnity of tone, and knew his place too well to set himself up against his clergyman; but still it cannot be denied that the decision was less satisfactory than one of much less exalted tone might have been. He had not the courage to say anything – he withdrew with his hat in his hand, and a cloud over his face. But as he left the house the doubt in his soul breathed itself forth. “If so be as neither me nor him see it rise, what good will that do to my family,” said Cotsdean to himself, and went his way to his closed shop, through all the sacks of seeds and dry rustling grain, with a heavy heart. He was a corn-factor in a tolerable business, which, as most of the bankers of Carlingford knew, he had some difficulty in carrying along, being generally in want of money; but this was not so rare a circumstance that any special notice should be taken of it. Everybody who knew thought it was very kind of Mr. May to back him up as he did, and even to put his name to bills for poor Cotsdean, to whom, indeed, he was known to have been very kind in many ways. But nobody was aware how little of these said bills went to Cotsdean, and how much to Mr. May.