APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/books/all_flesh/CHAP1_19

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                                      1903

                              WAY OF ALL FLESH

                              by Samuel Butler

                          CHAPTER I


WHEN I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an
old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used
to hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick. He
must have been getting on for eighty in the year 1807, earlier than
which date I suppose I can hardly remember him, for I was born in
1802. A few white locks hung about his ears, his shoulders were bent
and his knees feeble, but he was still hale, and was much respected in
our little world of Paleham. His name was Pontifex.

His wife was said to be his master; I have been told she brought him
a little money, but it cannot have been much. She was a tall,
square-shouldered person (I have heard my father call her a Gothic
woman) who had insisted on being married to Mr. Pontifex when he was
young and too good-natured to say nay to any woman who wooed him.
The pair had lived not unhappily together, for Mr. Pontifex's temper
was easy and he soon learned to bow before his wife's more stormy
moods.

Mr. Pontifex was a carpenter by trade; he was also at one time
parish clerk; when I remember him, however, he had so far risen in
life as to be no longer compelled to work with his own hands. In his
earlier days he had taught himself to draw. I do not say he drew well,
but it was surprising he should draw as well as he did. My father, who
took the living of Paleham about the year 1797, became possessed of
a good many of old Mr. Pontifex's drawings, which were always of local
subjects, and so unaffectedly painstaking that they might have
passed for the work of some good early master. I remember them as
hanging up framed and glazed in the study at the Rectory, and
tinted, as all else in the room was tinted, with the green reflected
from the fringe of ivy leaves that grew around the windows. I wonder
how they will actually cease and come to an end as drawings, and
into what new phases of being they will then enter.

Not content with being an artist, Mr. Pontifex must needs also be
a musician. He built the organ in the church with his own hands, and
made a smaller one which he kept in his own house. He could play as
much as he could draw, not very well according to professional
standards, but much better than could have been expected. I myself
showed a taste for music at an early age, and old Mr. Pontifex on
finding it out, as he soon did, became partial to me in consequence.

It may be thought that with so many irons in the fire he could
hardly be a very thriving man, but this was not the case. His father
had been a day labourer, and he had himself begun life with no other
capital than his good sense and good constitution; now, however, there
was a goodly show of timber about his yard, and a look of solid
comfort over his whole establishment. Towards the close of the
eighteenth century and not long before my father came to Paleham, he
had taken a farm of about ninety acres, thus making a considerable
rise in life. Along with the farm there went an old-fashioned but
comfortable house with a charming garden and an orchard. The
carpenter's business was now carried on in one of the outhouses that
had once been part of some conventual buildings, the remains of
which could be seen in what was called the Abbey Close. The house
itself, emblossomed in honeysuckles and creeping roses, was an
ornament to the whole village, nor were its internal arrangements less
exemplary than its outside was ornamental. Report said that Mrs.
Pontifex starched the sheets for her best bed, and I can well
believe it.

How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ
which her husband had built, and scented with a withered apple or
two from the pyrus japonica that grew outside the house; the picture
of the prize ox over the chimney-piece, which Mr. Pontifex himself had
painted; the transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach
upon a snowy night, also by Mr. Pontifex; the by Mr. Pontifex; the
little old man and a little old woman who told the weather; the
china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of feathery flowering grasses
with a peacock's feather or two among them to set them off, and the
china bowls full of dead rose leaves dried with bay salt. All has long
since vanished and become a memory, faded but still fragrant to
myself.

Nay, but her kitchen- and the glimpses into a cavernous cellar
beyond it, wherefrom came gleams from the pale surfaces of milk
cans, or it may be of the arms and face of a milkmaid skimming the
cream; or again her storeroom, where among other treasures she kept
the famous lipsalve which was one of her especial glories, and of
which she would present a shape yearly to those whom she delighted
to honour. She wrote out the recipe for this and gave it to my
mother a year or two before she died, but we could never make it as
she did. When we were children she used sometimes to send her respects
to my mother, and ask leave for us to come and take tea with her.
Right well she used to ply us. As for her temper, we never met such
a delightful old lady in our lives; whatever Mr. Pontifex may have had
to put up with, we had no cause for complaint, and then Mr. Pontifex
would play to us upon the organ, and we would stand round him
open-mouthed and think him the most wonderfully clever man that ever
was born, except of course our papa.

Mrs. Pontifex had no sense of humour, at least I can call to mind no
signs of this, but her husband had plenty of full in him, though few
would have guessed it from his appearance. I remember my father once
sent me down to his workshop to get some glue, and I happened to
come when old Pontifex was in the act of scolding his boy. He had
got the lad- a pudding-headed fellow- by the ear and was saying,
"What? Lost again- smothered o' wit." (I believe it was the boy who
was himself supposed to be a wandering soul, and who was thus
addressed as lost.) "Now, look here, my lad," he continued, "some boys
are born stupid, and thou art one of them; some achieve stupidity-
that's thee again, Jim-  thou wast both born stupid and hast greatly
increased thy birthright- and some" (and here came a climax during
which the boy's head and ear were swayed from side to side) "have
stupidity thrust upon them, which, if it please the Lord, shall not be
thy case, my lad, for I will thrust stupidity from thee, though I have
to box thine ears in doing so," but I did not see that the old man
really did box Jim's ears, or do more than pretend to frighten him,
for the two understood one another perfectly well. Another time I
remember hearing him call the village rat-catcher by saying, "Come
hither, thou three-days-and-three-nights, thou," alluding, as I
afterwards learned, to the rat-catcher's periods of intoxication;
but I will tell no more of such trifles. My father's face would always
brighten when old Pontifex's name was mentioned. "I tell you, Edward,"
he would say to me, "old Pontifex was not only an able man, but he was
one of the very ablest men that ever I knew."

This was more than I as a young man was prepared to stand. "My
dear father," I answered, "what did he do? He could draw a little, but
could he to save his life have got a picture into the Royal Academy
exhibition? He built two organs and could play the Minuet in Samson on
one and the March in Scipio on the other; he was a good carpenter
and a bit of a wag; he was a good old fellow enough, but why make
him out so much abler than he was?"

"My boy," returned my father, "you must not judge by the work, but
by the work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or
Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition?
Would a single one of those frescoes we went to see when we were at
Padua have the remotest chance of being hung, if it were sent in for
exhibition now? Why, the Academy people would be so outraged that they
would not even write to poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his
fresco away. Phew!" continued he, waxing warm, "if old Pontifex had
had Cromwell's chances he would have done all that Cromwell did, and
have done it better; if he had had Giotto's chances he would have done
all that Giotto did, and done it no worse; as it was, he was a village
carpenter, and I will undertake to say he never scamped a job in the
whole course of his life."

"But," said I, "we cannot judge people with so many 'ifs.' If old
Pontifex had lived in Giotto's time he might have been another Giotto,
but he did not live in Giotto's time."

"I tell you, Edward," said my father with some severity, "we must
judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel
that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough, either in
painting, music or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might
trust him in an emergency he has done enough. It is not by what a
man has actually put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has
set down, so to speak, upon the canvas of his life that I will judge
him, but by what he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at. If he has
made me feel that he felt those things to be lovable which I hold
lovable myself I ask no more; his grammar may have been imperfect, but
still I have understood him; he and I are en rapport; and I say again,
Edward, that old Pontifex was not only an able man, but one of the
very ablest men I ever knew."

Against this there was no more to be said, and my sisters eyed me to
silence. Somehow or other my sisters always did eye me to silence when
I differed from my father.

"Talk of his successful son," snorted my father, whom I had fairly
roused. "He is not fit to black his father's boots. He has his
thousands of pounds a year, while his father had perhaps three
thousand shillings a year towards the end of his life. He is a
successful man; but his father, hobbling about Paleham Street in his
grey worsted stockings, broad brimmed hat and brown swallow-tailed
coat, was worth a hundred of George Pontifexes, for all his
carriages and horses and the airs he gives himself."

"But yet," he added, "George Pontifex is no fool either." And this
brings us to the second generation of the Pontifex family with whom we
need concern ourselves.

 CHAPTER II


OLD Mr. Pontifex had married in the year 1750, but for fifteen years
his wife bore no children. At the end of that time Mrs. Pontifex
astonished the whole village by showing unmistakable signs of a
disposition to present her husband with an heir or heiress. Hers had
long ago been considered a hopeless case, and when on consulting the
doctor concerning the meaning of certain symptoms she was informed
of their significance, she became very angry and abused the doctor
roundly for talking nonsense. She refused to put so much as a piece of
thread into a needle in anticipation of her confinement and would have
been absolutely unprepared, if her neighbours had not been better
judges of her condition than she was, and got things ready without
telling her anything about it. Perhaps she feared Nemesis, though
assuredly she knew not who or what Nemesis was; perhaps she feared the
doctor had made a mistake and she should be laughed at; from
whatever cause, however, her refusal to recognise the obvious arose,
she certainly refused to recognise it, until one snowy night in
January the doctor was sent for with all urgent speed across the rough
country roads. When he arrived he found two patients, not one, in need
of his assistance, for a boy had been born who was in due time
christened George, in honour of his then reigning majesty.

To the best of my belief George Pontifex got the greater part of his
nature from this obstinate old lady, his mother- a mother who though
she loved no one else in the world except her husband (and him only
after a fashion) was most tenderly attached to the unexpected child of
her old age; nevertheless she showed it little.

The boy grew up into a sturdy bright-eyed little fellow, with plenty
of intelligence, and perhaps a trifle too great readiness at book
learning. Being kindly treated at home, he was as fond of his father
and mother as it was in his nature to be of anyone, but he was fond of
no one else. He had a good healthy sense of meum, and as little of
tuum as he could help. Brought up much in the open air in one of the
best situated and healthiest villages in England, his little limbs had
fair play, and in those days children's brains were not overtasked
as they now are; perhaps it was for this very reason that the boy
showed an avidity to learn. At seven or eight years old he could read,
write, and sum better than any other boy of his age in the village. My
father was not yet rector of Paleham, and did not remember George
Pontifex's childhood, but I have heard neighbours tell him that the
boy was looked upon as unusually quick and forward. His father and
mother were naturally proud of their offspring, and his mother was
determined that he should one day become one of the kings and
councillors of the earth.

It is one thing, however, to resolve that one's son shall win some
of life's larger prizes and another to square matters with fortune
in this respect. George Pontifex might have been brought up as a
carpenter and succeeded in no other way than as succeeding his
father as one of the minor magnates of Paleham, and yet have been a
more truly successful man than he actually was- for I take it there is
not much more solid success in this world than what fell to the lot of
old Mr. and Mrs. Pontifex; it happened, however, that about the year
1780, when George was a boy of fifteen, a sister of Mrs. Pontifex's,
who had married a Mr. Fairlie, came to pay a few days' visit at
Paleham. Mr. Fairlie was a publisher, chiefly of religious works,
and had an establishment in Paternoster Row; he had risen in life, and
his wife had risen with him. No very close relations had been
maintained between the sisters for some years, and I forget exactly
how it came about that Mr. and Mrs. Fairlie were guests in the quiet
but exceedingly comfortable house of their sister and
brother-in-law; but for some reason or other the visit was paid, and
little George soon succeeded in making his way into his uncle and
aunt's good graces. A quick, intelligent boy with a good address, a
sound constitution, and coming of respectable parents, has a potential
value which a practised business man who has need of many subordinates
is little likely to overlook. Before his visit was over Mr. Fairlie
proposed to the lad's father and mother that he should put him into
his own business, at the same time promising that if the boy did
well he should not want someone to bring him forward. Mrs. Pontifex
had her son's interest too much at heart to refuse such an offer, so
the matter was soon arranged, and about a fortnight after the Fairlies
had left, George was sent up by coach to London, where he was met by
his uncle and aunt, with whom it was arranged that he should live.

This was George's great start in life. He now wore more
fashionable clothes than he had yet been accustomed to, and any little
rusticity of gait or pronunciation which he had brought from
Paleham, was so quickly and completely lost that it was ere long
impossible to detect that he had not been born and bred among people
of what is commonly called education. The boy paid great attention
to his work, and more than justified the favourable opinion which
Mr. Fairlie had formed concerning him. Sometimes Mr. Fairlie would
send him down to Paleham for a few days' holiday, and ere long his
parents perceived that he had acquired an air and manner of talking
different from any that he had taken with him from Paleham. They
were proud of him, and soon fell into their proper places, resigning
all appearance of a parental control, for which indeed there was no
kind of necessity. In return, George was always kindly to them, and to
the end of his life retained a more affectionate feeling towards his
father and mother than I imagine him ever to have felt again for
man, woman or child.

George's visits to Paleham were never long, for the distance from
London was under fifty miles and there was a direct coach, so that the
journey was easy; there was not time, therefore, for the novelty to
wear off either on the part of the young man or of his parents. George
liked the fresh country air and green fields after the darkness to
which he had been so long accustomed in Paternoster Row, which then,
as now, was a narrow gloomy lane rather than a street. Independently
of the pleasure of seeing the familiar faces of the farmers and
villagers, he liked also being seen and being congratulated on growing
up such a fine-looking and fortunate young fellow, for he was not
the youth to hide his light under a bushel. His uncle had had taught
him Latin and Greek of an evening; he had taken kindly to these
languages and had rapidly and easily mastered what many boys take
years in acquiring. I suppose his knowledge gave him a self-confidence
which made itself felt whether he intended it or not; at any rate,
he soon began to pose as a judge literature, and from this to being
a judge of art, architecture, music and everything else, the path
was easy. Like His father, he knew the value of money, but he was at
once more ostentatious and less liberal than his father; while yet a
boy he was a thorough little man of the world, and did well rather
upon principles which he had tested by personal experiment, and
recognised as principles, than from those profounder convictions which
in his father were so instinctive that he could give no account
concerning them.

His father, as I have said, wondered at him and let him alone. His
son had fairly distanced him, and in an inarticulate way the father
knew it perfectly well. After a few years he took to wearing his
best clothes whenever his son came to stay with him, nor would he
discard them for his ordinary ones till the young man had returned
to London. I believe old Mr. Pontifex, along with his pride and
affection, felt also a certain fear of his son, as though of something
which he could not thoroughly understand, and whose ways,
notwithstanding outward agreement, were nevertheless not as his
ways. Mrs. Pontifex felt nothing of this; to her George was pure and
absolute perfection, and she saw, or thought she saw, with pleasure,
that he resembled her and her family in feature as well as in
disposition rather than her husband and his.

When George was about twenty-five years old his uncle took him
into partnership on very liberal terms. He had little cause to
regret this step. The young man infused fresh vigour into a concern
that was already vigorous, and by the time he was thirty found himself
in the receipt of not less than L1500 a year as his share of the
profits. Two years later he married a lady about seven years younger
than himself, who brought him a handsome dowry. She died in 1805, when
her youngest child Alethea was born, and her husband did not marry
again.

 CHAPTER III


IN the early years of the century five little children and a
couple of nurses began to make periodical visits to Paleham. It is
needless to say they were a rising generation of Pontifexes, towards
whom the old couple, their grandparents, were as tenderly
deferential as they would have been to the children of the Lord
Lieutenant of the County. Their names were Eliza, Maria, John,
Theobald (who like myself was born in 1802), and Alethea. Mr. Pontifex
always put the prefix "master" or "miss" before the names of his
grandchildren, except in the case of Alethea, who was his favourite.
To have resisted his grandchildren would have been as impossible for
him as to have resisted his wife; even old Mrs. Pontifex yielded
before her son's children, and gave them all manner of licence which
she would never have allowed even to my sisters and myself, who
stood next in her regard. Two regulations only they must attend to;
they must wipe their shoes well on coming into the house, and they
must not overfeed Mr. Pontifex's organ with wind, nor take the pipes
out.

By us at the Rectory there was no time so much looked forward to
as the annual visit of the little Pontifexes to Paleham. We came in
for some of the prevailing licence; we went to tea with Mrs.
Pontifex to meet her grandchildren, and then our young friends were
asked to the Rectory to have tea with us, and we had what we
considered great times. I fell desperately in love with Alethea,
indeed we all fell in love with each other, plurality and exchange
whether of wives or husbands being openly and unblushingly advocated
in the very presence of our nurses. We were very merry, but it is so
long ago that I have forgotten nearly everything save that we were
very merry. Almost the only thing that remains with me as a
permanent impression was the fact that Theobald one day beat his nurse
and teased her, and when she said she should go away cried out, "You
shan't go away- I'll keep you on purpose to torment you."

One winter's morning, however, in the year 1811, we heard the church
bell tolling while we were dressing in the back nursery and were
told it was for old Mrs. Pontifex. Our manservant John told us and
added with grim levity that they were ringing the bell to come and
take her away. She had had a fit of paralysis which had carried her
off quite suddenly. It was very shocking, the more so because our
nurse assured us that if God chose we might all have fits of paralysis
ourselves that very day and be taken straight off to the Day of
Judgement. The Day of Judgement indeed, according to the opinion of
those who were most likely to know, would not under any
circumstances be delayed more than a few years longer, and then the
whole world would be burned, and we ourselves be consigned to an
eternity of torture, unless we mended our ways more than we at present
seemed at all likely to do. All this was so alarming that we fell to
screaming and made such a hullabaloo that the nurse was obliged for
her own peace to reassure us. Then we wept, but more composedly, as we
remembered that there would be no more tea and cakes for us now at old
Mrs. Pontifex's.

On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old
Mr. Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the
village according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of
the century; the loaf was called a dole. We had never heard of this
custom before; besides, though we had often heard of penny loaves,
we had never before seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as
inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown-up people,
for our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent
them, but only one. We had never yet suspected that we were
inhabitants at all; finally, the little loaves were new, and we were
passionately fond of new bread, which we were seldom or never
allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be good for us. Our
affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand against the
combined attacks of archaeological interest, the rights of citizenship
and property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness for food of the
little loaves themselves, and the sense of importance which was
given us by our having been intimate with someone who had actually
died. It seemed upon further inquiry that there was little reason to
anticipate an early death for any one of ourselves, and this being so,
we rather liked the idea of someone else's being put away into the
churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme
depression to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new
earth had been revealed to us in our perception of the possibility
of benefiting by the death of our friends, and I fear that for some
time we took an interest in the health of everyone in the village
whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least likely.

Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we
were astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually
living person. We had thought such a great man could only have lived a
very long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it were at our
own doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement
might indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was
all right now, and she knew. In those days the snow lay longer and
drifted deeper in the lanes than it does now, and the milk was
sometimes brought in frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the
back kitchen to see it. I suppose there are rectories up and down
the country now where the milk comes in frozen sometimes in winter,
and the children go down to wonder at it, but I never see any frozen
milk in London, so I suppose the winters are warmer than they used
to be.

About one year after his wife's death Mr. Pontifex also was gathered
to his fathers. My father saw him the day before he died. The old
man had a theory about sunsets, and had had two steps built up against
a wall in the kitchen garden on which he used to stand and watch the
sun go down whenever it was clear. My father came on him in the
afternoon, just as the sun was setting, and saw him with his arms
resting on the top of the wall looking towards the sun over a field
through which there was a path on which my father was. My father heard
him say "Good-bye, sun; good-bye, sun," as the sun sank, and saw by
his tone and manner that he was feeling very feeble. Before the next
sunset he was gone.

There was no dole. Some of his grandchildren were brought to the
funeral and we remonstrated with them, but did not take much by
doing so. John Pontifex, who was a year older than I was, sneered at
penny loaves, and intimated that if I wanted one it must be because my
papa and mamma could not afford to buy me one, whereon I believe we
did something like fighting, and I rather think John Pontifex got
the worst of it, but it may have been the other way. I remember my
sister's nurse, for I was just outgrowing nurses myself, reported
the matter to higher quarters, and we were all of us put to some
ignominy, but we had been thoroughly awakened from our dream, and it
was long enough before we could hear the words "penny loaf"
mentioned without our ears tingling with shame. If there had been a
dozen doles afterwards we should not have deigned to touch one of
them.

George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in
Paleham church, inscribed with the following epitaph:


                      SACRED TO THE MEMORY
                                OF
                          JOHN PONTIFEX
    WHO WAS BORN AUGUST 16TH, 1727, AND DIED FEBRUARY 8, 1812,
                         IN HIS 85TH YEAR,
                               AND OF
                      RUTH PONTIFEX, HIS WIFE,
     WHO WAS BORN OCTOBER 13, 1727, AND DIED JANUARY 10, 1811,
                           IN HER 84TH YEAR.
                THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT EXEMPLARY
                     IN HER DISCHARGE OF THEIR
                 RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND SOCIAL DUTIES
                      THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED
                         BY THEIR ONLY SON.


                          CHAPTER IV


IN a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr.
George Pontifex went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at
Battersby in after-years the diary which he kept on the first of these
occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I read it that
the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he
thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and
art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by
generation after generation of prigs and impostors. The first
glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr. Pontifex into a conventional
ecstasy. "My feelings I cannot express. I gasped, yet hardly dared
to breathe, as I viewed for the first time the monarch of the
mountains. I seemed to fancy the genius seated on his stupendous
throne far above his aspiring brethren and in his solitary might
defying the universe. I was so overcome by my feelings that I was
almost bereft of my faculties, and would not for worlds have spoken
after my first exclamation till I found some relief in a gush of
tears. With pain I tore myself from contemplating for the first time
'at distance dimly seen' (though I felt as if I had sent my soul and
eyes after it), this sublime spectacle." After a nearer view of the
Alps from above Geneva he walked nine out of the twelve miles of the
descent: "My mind and heart were too full to sit still, and I found
some relief by exhausting my feelings through exercise." In the course
of time he reached Chamonix and went on a Sunday to the Montanvert
to see the Mer de Glace. There he wrote the following verses for the
visitors' book, which he considered, so he says, "suitable to the
day and scene":

   Lord, while these wonders of thy hand I see,
   My soul in holy reverence bends to thee.
   These awful solitudes, this dread repose,
   Yon pyramid sublime of spotless snows,
   These spiry pinnacles, those smiling plains,
   This sea where one eternal winter reigns,
   These are thy works, and while on them I gaze
   I hear a silent tongue that speaks thy  praise.

Some poets always begin to get groggy about the knees after
running for seven or eight lines. Mr. Pontifex's last couplet gave him
a lot of trouble, and nearly every word has been erased and
rewritten once at least. In the visitors' book at the Montanvert,
however, he must have been obliged to commit himself definitely to one
reading or another. Taking the verses all round, I should say that Mr.
Pontifex was right in considering them suitable to the day; I don't
like being too hard even on the Mer de Glace, so will give no
opinion as to whether they are suitable to the scene also.

Mr. Pontifex went on to the Great St. Bernard and there he wrote
some more verses, this time I am afraid in Latin. He also took good
care to be properly impressed by the Hospice and its situation. "The
whole of this most extraordinary journey seemed like a dream, its
conclusion especially, in gentlemanly society, with every comfort
and accommodation amidst the rudest rocks and in the region of
perpetual snow. The thought that I was sleeping in a convent and
occupied the bed of no less a person than Napoleon, that I was in
the highest inhabited spot in the old world and in a place
celebrated in every part of it, kept me awake some time." As a
contrast to this, I may quote here an extract from a letter written to
me last year by his grandson Ernest, of whom the reader will hear more
presently. The passage runs: "I went up to the Great St. Bernard and
saw the dogs." In due course Mr. Pontifex found his way into Italy,
where the pictures and other works of art- those, at least, which were
fashionable at that time- threw him into genteel paroxysms of
admiration. Of the Uffizi Gallery at Florence he writes: "I have spent
three hours this morning in the gallery and I have made up my mind
that if of all the treasures I have seen in Italy I were to choose one
room it would be the Tribune of this gallery. It contains the Venus
de' Medici, the Explorator, the Pancratist, the Dancing Faun, and a
fine Apollo. These more than outweigh the Laocoon and the Belvedere
Apollo at Rome. It contains, besides, the St. John of Raphael and many
other chefs-d'oeuvre of the greatest masters in the world." It is
interesting to compare Mr. Pontifex's effusions with the rhapsodies of
critics in our own times. Not long ago a much esteemed writer informed
the world that he felt "disposed to cry out with delight" before a
figure by Michael Angelo. I wonder whether he would feel disposed to
cry out before a real Michael Angelo, if the critics had decided
that it was not genuine, or before a reputed Michael Angelo which
was really by someone else. But I suppose that a prig with more
money than brains was much the same sixty or seventy years ago as he
is now.

Look at Mendelssohn again about this same Tribune on which Mr.
Pontifex felt so safe in staking his reputation as a man of taste
and culture. He feels no less safe and writes, "I then went to the
Tribune. This room is so delightfully small you can traverse it in
fifteen paces, yet it contains a world of art. I again sought out my
favourite arm chair which stands under the statue of the 'Slave
whetting his knife' (L'Arrotino), and taking possession of it I
enjoyed myself for a couple of hours; for here at one glance I had the
'Madonna del Cardellino,' Pope Julius II., a female portrait by
Raphael, and above it a lovely Holy Family by Perugino; and so close
to me that I could have touched it with my hand the Venus de'
Medici; beyond, that of Titian... The space between is occupied by
other pictures of Raphael's, a portrait by Titian, a Domenichino,
etc., etc., all these within the circumference of a small
semi-circle no larger than one of your own rooms. This is a spot where
a man feels his own insignificance and may well learn to be humble."
The Tribune is a slippery place for people like Mendelssohn to study
humility in. They generally take two steps away from it for one they
take towards it. I wonder how many chalks Mendelssohn gave himself for
having sat two hours on that chair. I wonder how often he looked at
his watch to see if his two hours were up. I wonder how often he
told himself that he was quite as big a gun, if the truth were
known, as any of the men whose works he saw before him, how often he
wondered whether any of the visitors were recognizing him and admiring
him for sitting such a long time in the same chair, and how often he
was vexed at seeing them pass him by and take no notice of him. But
perhaps if the truth were known his two hours was not quite two hours.

Returning to Mr. Pontifex, whether he liked what he believed to be
the masterpieces of Greek and Italian art or no, he brought back
some copies by Italian artists, which I have no doubt he satisfied
himself would bear the strictest examination with the originals. Two
of these copies fell to Theobald's share on the division of his
father's furniture, and I have often seen them at Battersby on my
visits to Theobald and his wife. The one was a Madonna by Sassoferrato
with a blue hood over her head which threw it half into shadow. The
other was a Magdalen by Carlo Dolci with a very fine head of hair
and a marble vase in her hands. When I was a young man I used to think
these pictures were beautiful, but with each successive visit to
Battersby I got to dislike them more and more and to see "George
Pontifex" written all over both of them. In the end I ventured after a
tentative fashion to blow on them a little, but Theobald and his
wife were up in arms at once. They did not like their father and
father-in-law, but there could be no question about his power and
general ability, nor about his having been a man of consummate taste
both in literature and art- indeed the diary he kept during his
foreign tour was enough to prove this. With one more short extract I
will leave this diary and proceed with my story. During his stay in
Florence Mr. Pontifex wrote: "I have just seen the Grand Duke and
his family pass by in two carriages and six, but little more notice is
taken of them than if I, who am utterly unknown here, were to pass
by." I don't think that he half believed in his being utterly
unknown in Florence or anywhere else!

 CHAPTER V


FORTUNE, we are told, is a blind and fickle foster-mother who
showers her gifts at random upon her nurslings. But we do her a
grave injustice if we believe such an accusation. Trace a man's career
from his cradle to his grave and mark how Fortune has treated him. You
will find that when he is once dead she can for the most part be
vindicated from the charge of any but very superficial fickleness. Her
blindness is the merest fable; she can espy her favourites long before
they are born. We are as days and have had our parents for our
yesterdays, but through all the fair weather of a clear parental sky
the eye of Fortune can discern the coming storm, and she laughs as she
places her favourites it may be in a London alley or those whom she is
resolved to ruin in kings' palaces. Seldom does she relent towards
those whom she has suckled unkindly and seldom does she completely
fail a favoured nursling.

Was George Pontifex one of Fortune's favoured nurslings or not? On
the whole I should say that he was not, for he did not consider
himself so; he was too religious to consider Fortune a deity at all;
he took whatever she gave and never thanked her, being firmly
convinced that whatever he got to his own advantage was of his own
getting. And so it was, after Fortune had made him able to get it.

"Nos te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam," exclaimed the poet. "It is
we who make thee, Fortune, a goddess"; and so it is, after Fortune has
made us able to make her. The poet says nothing as to the making of
the "nos." Perhaps some men are independent of antecedents and
surroundings and have an initial force within themselves which is in
no way due to causation; but this is supposed to be a difficult
question and it may be as well to avoid it. Let it suffice that George
Pontifex did not consider himself fortunate, and he who does not
consider himself fortunate is unfortunate.

True, he was rich, universally respected and of an excellent natural
constitution. If he had eaten and drunk less he would never have known
a day's indisposition. Perhaps his main strength lay in the fact
that though his capacity was a little above the average, it was not
too much so. It is on this rock that so many clever people split.
The successful man will see just so much more than his neighbours,
as they will be able to see too when it is shown them, but not
enough to puzzle them. It is far safer to know too little than too
much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being
called upon to exert themselves to follow the other. The best
example of Mr. Pontifex's good sense in matters connected with his
business which I can think of at this moment is the revolution which
he effected in the style of advertising works published by the firm.
When he first became a partner one of the firm's advertisements ran
thus:

"Books proper to be given away at this Season.

"The Pious Country Parishioner, being directions how a Christian may
manage every day in the course of his whole life with safety and
success; how to spend the Sabbath Day; what books of the Holy
Scriptures ought to be read first; the whole method of education;
collects for the most important virtues that adorn the soul; a
discourse on the Lord's Supper; rules to set the soul right in
sickness; so that in this treatise are contained all the rules
requisite for salvation. The 8th edition with additions. Price 10d.

** An allowance will be made to those who give them away."

Before he had been many years a partner the advertisement stood as
follows:

"The Pious Country Parishioner. A complete manual of Christian
Devotion. Price 10d.

"A reduction will be made to purchasers for gratuitous
distribution."

What a stride is made in the foregoing towards the modern
standard, and what intelligence is involved in the perception of the
unseemliness of the old style, when others did not perceive it!

Where then was the weak place in George Pontifex's armour? I suppose
in the fact that he had risen too rapidly. It would almost seem as
if a transmitted education of some generations is necessary for the
due enjoyment of great wealth. Adversity, if a man is set down to it
by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than
any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime. Nevertheless a
certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the
last. It is their children of the first, or first and second,
generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more
repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its
ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the
more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a
general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for
recovery. Hence it often happens that the grandson of a successful man
will be more successful than the son- the spirit that actuated the
grandfather having lain fallow in the son and being refreshed by
repose so as to be ready for fresh exertion in the grandson. A very
successful man, moreover, has something of the hybrid in him; he is
a new animal, arising from the coming together of many unfamiliar
elements and it is well known that the reproduction of abnormal
growths, whether animal or vegetable, is irregular and not to be
depended upon, even when they are not absolutely sterile.

And certainly Mr. Pontifex's success was exceedingly rapid. Only a
few years after he had become a partner his uncle and aunt both died
within a few months of one another. It was then found that they had
made him their heir. He was thus not only sole partner in the
business, but found himself with a fortune of some L30,000 into the
bargain, and this was a large sum in those days. Money came pouring in
upon him, and the faster it came the fonder he became of it, though,
as he frequently said, he valued it not for his own sake, but only
as a means of providing for his dear children.

Yet when a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at
all times to be very fond of his children also. The two are like God
and Mammon. Lord Macaulay has a passage in which he contrasts the
pleasures which a man may derive from books with the inconveniences to
which he may be put by his acquaintances. "Plato," he says, "is
never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes
unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political
opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of
Bossuet." I daresay I might differ from Lord Macaulay in my estimate
of some of the writers he has named, but there can be no disputing his
main proposition, namely, that we need have no more trouble from any
of them than we have a mind to, whereas our friends are not always
so easily disposed of. George Pontifex felt this as regards his
children and his money. His money was never naughty; his money never
made noise or litter, and did not spill things on the tablecloth at
meal times, or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did
not quarrel among themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his
mortgages should become extravagant on reaching manhood and run him up
debts which sooner or later he should have to pay. There were
tendencies in John which made him very uneasy, and Theobald, his
second son, was idle and at times far from truthful. His children
might, perhaps, have answered, had they known what was in their
father's mind, that he did not knock his money about as he not
infrequently knocked his children. He never dealt hastily or pettishly
with his money, and that was perhaps why he and it got on so well
together.

It must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth
century the relations between parents and children were still far from
satisfactory. The violent type of father, as described by Fielding,
Richardson, Smollett, and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to
find a place in literature than the original advertisement of
Messrs. Fairlie & Pontifex's "Pious Country Parishioner," but the type
was much too persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely.
The parents in Miss Austen's novels are less like savage wild beasts
than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with
suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le pere de famille est capable
de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part
of her writings. In the Elizabethan time the relations between parents
and children seem on the whole to have been more kindly. The fathers
and the sons are for the most part friends in Shakespeare, nor does
the evil appear to have reached its full abomination till a long
course of Puritanism had familiarised men's minds with Jewish ideals
as those which we should endeavour to reproduce in our everyday
life. What precedents did not Abraham, Jephthah and Jonadab the son of
Rechab offer? How easy was it to quote and follow them in an age
when few reasonable men or women doubted that every syllable of the
Old Testament was taken down verbatim from the mouth of God. Moreover,
Puritanism restricted natural pleasures; it substituted the Jeremiad
for the Paean, and it forgot that the poor abuses of all times want
countenance.

Mr. Pontifex may have been a little sterner with his children than
some of his neighbours, but not much. He thrashed his boys two or
three times a week and some weeks a good deal oftener, but in those
days fathers were always thrashing their boys. It is easy to have
juster views when everyone else has them, but fortunately or
unfortunately results have nothing whatever to do with the moral guilt
or blamelessness of him who brings them about; they depend solely upon
the thing done, whatever it may happen to be. The moral guilt or
blamelessness in like manner has nothing to do with the result; it
turns upon the question whether a sufficient number of reasonable
people placed as the actor was placed would have done as the actor has
done. At that time it was universally admitted that to spare the rod
was to spoil the child, and St. Paul had placed disobedience to
parents in very ugly company. If his children did anything which Mr.
Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father. In
this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to
take. It consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while
his children were too young to offer serious resistance. If their
wills were "well broken" in childhood, to use an expression then
much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would
not venture to break through till they were over twenty-one years old.
Then they might please themselves; he should know how to protect
himself; till then he and his money were more at their mercy than he
liked.

How little do we know our thoughts- our reflex actions indeed,
yes; but our reflections! Man, forsooth, prides himself on his
consciousness! We boast that we differ from the winds and waves and
falling stones and plants, which grow they know not why, and from
the wandering creatures which go up and down after their prey, as we
are pleased to say, without the help of reason. We know so well what
we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there
is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it
is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which
mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

                          CHAPTER VI


MR. Pontifex was not the man to trouble himself much about his
motives. People were not so introspective then as we are now; they
lived more according to a rule of thumb. Dr. Arnold had not yet sown
that crop of earnest thinkers which we are now harvesting, and men did
not see why they should not have their own way if no evil consequences
to themselves seemed likely to follow upon their doing so. Then as
now, however, they sometimes let themselves in for more evil
consequences than they had bargained for.

Like other rich men at the beginning of this century he ate and
drank a good deal more than was enough to keep him in health. Even his
excellent constitution was not proof against a prolonged course of
overfeeding and what we should now consider overdrinking. His liver
would not infrequently get out of order, and he would come down to
breakfast looking yellow about the eyes. Then the young people knew
that they had better look out. It is not as a general rule the
eating of sour grapes that causes the children's teeth to be set on
edge. Well-to-do parents seldom eat many sour grapes; the danger to
the children lies in the parents eating too many sweet ones.

I grant that at first sight it seems very unjust that the parents
should have the full and the children be punished for it, but young
people should remember that for many years they were part and parcel
of their parents and therefore had a good deal of the full in the
person of their parents. If they have forgotten the full now, that. is
no more than people do who have a headache after having been tipsy
overnight. The man with a headache does not pretend to be a
different person from the man who got drunk, and claim that it is
his self of the preceding night and not his self of this morning who
should be punished; no more should offspring complain of the
headache which it has earned when in the person of its parents, for
the continuation of identity, though not so immediately apparent, is
just as real in one case as in the other. What is really hard is
when the parents have the full after the children have been born,
and the children are punished for this.

On these, his black days, he would take very gloomy views of
things and say to himself that in spite of all his goodness to them
his children did not love him. But who can love any man whose liver is
out of order? How base, he would exclaim to himself, was such
ingratitude! How especially hard upon himself, who had been such a
model son, and always honoured and obeyed his parents though they
had not spent one hundredth part of the money upon him which he had
lavished upon his own children. "It is always the same story," he
would say to himself, "the more young people have the more they
want, and the less thanks one gets; I have made a great mistake; I
have been far too lenient with my children; never mind, I have done my
duty by them, and more; if they fail in theirs to me it is a matter
between God and them. I, at any rate, am guiltless. Why, I might
have married again and become the father of a second and perhaps
more affectionate family, etc., etc." He pitied himself for the
expensive education which he was giving his children; he did not see
that the education cost the children far more than it cost him,
inasmuch as it cost them the power of earning their living easily
rather than helped them towards it, and ensured their being at the
mercy of their father for years after they had come to an age when
they should be independent. A public school education cuts off a boy's
retreat; he can no longer become a labourer or a mechanic, and these
are the only people whose tenure of independence is not precarious-
with the exception of course of those who are born inheritors of money
or who are placed young in some safe and deep groove. Mr. Pontifex saw
nothing of this; all he saw was that he was spending much more money
upon his children than the law would have compelled him to do, and
what more could you have? Might he not have apprenticed both his
sons to greengrocers? Might he not even yet do so to-morrow morning if
he were so minded? The possibility of this course being adopted was
a favourite topic with him when he was out of temper; true, he never
did apprentice either of his sons to greengrocers, but his boys
comparing notes together had sometimes come to the conclusion that
they wished he would.

At other times when not quite well he would have them in for the
full of shaking his will at them. He would in his imagination cut them
all out one after another and leave his money to found almshouses,
found almshouses, till at last he was obliged to put them back, so
that he might have the pleasure of cutting them out again the next
time he was in a passion.

Of course if young people allow their conduct to be in any way
influenced by regard to the wills of living persons, they are doing
very wrong and must expect to be sufferers in the end; nevertheless,
the powers of will-dangling and will-shaking are so liable to abuse
and are continually made so great an engine of torture that I would
pass a law, if I could, to incapacitate any man from making a will for
three months from the date of each offence in either of the above
respects and let the bench of magistrates or judge, before whom he has
been convicted, dispose of his property as they shall think right
and reasonable if he dies during the time that his willmaking power is
suspended.

Mr. Pontifex would have the boys into the dining-room. "My dear
John, my dear Theobald," he would say, "look at me. I began life
with nothing but the clothes with which my father and mother sent me
up to London. My father gave me ten shillings and my mother five for
pocket-money and I thought them munificent. I never asked my father
for a shilling in the whole course of my Life, nor took aught from him
beyond the small sum he used to allow me monthly till I was in receipt
of a salary. I made my own way and I shall expect my sons to do the
same. Pray don't take it into your heads that I am going to wear my
life out making money that my sons may spend it for me. If you want
money you must make it for yourselves as I did, for I give you my word
I will not leave a penny to either of you unless you show that you
deserve it. Young people seem nowadays to expect all kinds of luxuries
and indulgences which were never heard of when I was a boy. Why, my
father was a common carpenter, and here you are both of you at
public schools, costing me ever so many hundreds a year, while I at
your age was plodding away behind a desk in my Uncle Fairlie's
counting house. What should I not have done if I had had one-half of
your advantages? You should become dukes or found new empires in
undiscovered countries, and even then I doubt whether you would have
done proportionately so much as I have done. No, no, I shall see you
through school and college and then, if you please, you will make your
own way in the world."

In this manner he would work himself up into such a state of
virtuous indignation that he would sometimes thrash the boys then
and there upon some pretext invented at the moment.

And yet, as children went, the young Pontifexes were fortunate;
there would be ten families of young people worse off for one
better; they ate and drank good wholesome food, slept in comfortable
beds, had the best doctors to attend them when they were ill and the
best education that could be had for money. The want of fresh air does
not seem much to affect the happiness of children in a London alley:
the greater part of them sing and play as though they were on a moor
in Scotland. So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not
commonly recognised by children who have never known it. Young
people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting
themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy- very unhappy-
it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it
out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than
their own sinfulness.

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your
children that they are very naughty- much naughtier than most
children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of
perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their
own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they
cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable
you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they
will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you
are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you
represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward
you are, nor how soon you will run away, if they fight you with
persistency and judgement. You keep the dice and throw them both for
your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily
manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how
singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you
conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all,
but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children
rather than anyone else's. Say that you have their highest interests
at stake whenever you are out of temper and wish to make yourself
unpleasant by way of balm to your soul. Harp much upon these highest
interests. Feed them spiritually upon such brimstone and treacle as
the late Bishop of Winchester's Sunday stories. You hold all the trump
cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with
anything like judgement you will find yourselves heads of happy,
united, God-fearing families, even as did my old friend Mr.
Pontifex. True, your children will probably find out all about it some
day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or
inconvenience to yourself.

Some satirists have complained of life, inasmuch as all the
pleasures belong to the fore part of it and we must see them dwindle
till we are left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age.

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season-
delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very
rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting
east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and
what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Fontenelle at the
age of ninety, being asked what was the happiest time of his life, said
he did not know that he had ever been much happier than he then was,
but that perhaps his best years had been those when he was between
fifty-five and seventy-five, and Dr. Johnson placed the pleasures of
old age far higher than those of youth. True, in old age we live under
under the shadow of Death, which, like a sword of Damocles, may descend
at any moment, but we have so long found life to be an affair of being
rather frightened than hurt that we have become like the people who
live under Vesuvius, and chance it without much misgiving.

                          CHAPTER VII


A FEW words may suffice for the greater number of the young people
to whom I have been alluding in the foregoing chapter. Eliza and
Maria, the two elder girls, were neither exactly pretty nor exactly
plain, and were in all respects model young ladies, but Alethea was
exceedingly pretty and of a lively, affectionate disposition, which
was in sharp contrast with those of her brothers and sisters. There
was a trace of her grandfather, not only in her face, but in her
love of fun, of which her father had none, though not without a
certain boisterous and rather coarse quasi-humour which passed for wit
with many.

John grew up to be a good-looking, gentlemanly fellow, with features
a trifle too regular and finely chiselled. He dressed himself so
nicely, had such good address, and stuck so steadily to his books that
he became a favourite with his masters; he had, however, an instinct
for diplomacy, and was less popular with the boys. His father, in
spite of the lectures he would at times read him, was in a way proud
of him as he grew older; he saw in him, moreover, one who would
probably develop into a good man of business, and in whose hands the
prospects of his house would not be likely to decline. John knew how
to humour his father, and was at a comparatively early age admitted to
as much of his confidence as it was in his nature to bestow on anyone.

His brother Theobald was no match for him, knew it, and accepted his
fate. He was not so good-looking as his brother, nor was his address
so good; as a child he had been violently passionate; now, however, he
was reserved and shy, and, I should say, indolent in mind and body. He
was less tidy than John, less well able to assert himself, and less
skilful in humouring the caprices of his father. I do not think he
could have loved anyone heartily, but there was no one in his family
circle who did not repress, rather than invite his affection, with the
exception of his sister Alethea, and she was too quick and lively
for his somewhat morose temper. He was always the scapegoat, and I
have sometimes thought he had two fathers to contend against- his
father and his brother John; a third and fourth also might almost be
added in his sisters Eliza and Maria. Perhaps if he had felt his
bondage very acutely he would not have put up with it, but he was
constitutionally timid, and the strong hand of his father knitted
him into the closest outward harmony with his brother and sisters.

The boys were of use to their father in one respect. I mean that
he played them off against each other. He kept them but poorly
supplied with pocket-money, and to Theobald would urge that the claims
of his elder brother were naturally paramount, while he insisted to
John upon the fact that he had a numerous family, and would affirm
solemnly that his expenses were so heavy that at his death there would
be very little to divide. He did not care whether they compared
notes or no, provided they did not do so in his presence. Theobald did
not complain even behind his father's back. I knew him as intimately
as anyone was likely to know him as a child, at school, and again at
Cambridge, but he very rarely mentioned his father's name even while
his father was alive, and never once in my hearing afterwards. At
school he was not actively disliked, as his brother was, but he was
too dull and deficient in animal spirits to be popular.

Before he was well out of his frocks it was settled that he was to
be a clergyman. It was seemly that Mr. Pontifex, the well-known
publisher of religious books, should devote at least one of his sons
to the Church; this might tend to bring business, or at any rate to
keep it in the firm; besides, Mr. Pontifex had more or less interest
with bishops and Church dignitaries and might hope that some
preferment would be offered to his son through his influence. The
boy's future destiny was kept well before his eyes from his earliest
childhood and was treated as a matter which he had already virtually
settled by his acquiescence. Nevertheless a certain show of freedom
was allowed him. Mr. Pontifex would say it was only right to give a
boy his option, and was much too equitable to grudge his son
whatever benefit he could derive from this. He had the greatest
horror, he would exclaim, of driving any young man into a profession
which he did not like. Far be it from him to put pressure upon a son
of his as regards any profession and much less when so sacred a
calling as the ministry was concerned. He would talk in this way
when there were visitors in the house and when his son was in the
room. He spoke so wisely and so well that his listening guests
considered him a paragon of right-mindedness. He spoke, too, with such
emphasis and his rosy gills and bald head looked so benevolent that it
was difficult not to be carried away by his discourse. I believe two
or three heads of families in the neighbourhood gave their sons
absolute liberty of choice in the matter of their professions- and
am not sure that they had not afterwards considerable cause to
regret having done so. The visitors, seeing Theobald look shy and
wholly unmoved by the exhibition of so much consideration for his
wishes, would remark to themselves that the boy seemed hardly likely
to be equal to his father and would set him down as an
unenthusiastic youth, who ought to have more life in him and be more
sensible of his advantages than he appeared to be.

No one believed in the righteousness of the whole transaction more
firmly than the boy himself; a sense of being ill at ease kept him
silent, but it was too profound and too much without break for him
to become fully alive to it, and come to an understanding with
himself. He feared the dark scowl which would come over his father's
face upon the slightest opposition. His father's violent threats, or
coarse sneers, would not have been taken au serieux by a stronger boy,
but Theobald was not a strong boy, and, rightly or wrongly, gave his
father credit for being quite ready to carry his threats into
execution. Opposition had never got him anything he wanted yet, nor
indeed had yielding, for the matter of that, unless he happened to
want exactly what his father wanted for him. If he had ever
entertained thoughts of resistance, he had none now, and the power
to oppose was so completely lost for want of exercise that hardly
did the wish remain; there was nothing left save dull acquiescence
as of an ass crouched between two burdens. He may have had an
ill-defined sense of ideals that were not his actuals; he might
occasionally dream of himself as a soldier or a sailor far away in
foreign lands, or even as a farmer's boy upon the wolds, but there was
not enough in him for there to be any chance of his turning his dreams
into realities, and he drifted on with his stream, which was a slow,
and, I am afraid, a muddy one.

I think the Church Catechism has a good deal to do with the
unhappy relations which commonly even now exist between parents and
children. That work was written too exclusively from the parental
point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children
to come in and help him; he was clearly not young himself, nor
should I say it was the work of one who liked children -in spite of
the words "my good child" which, if I remember rightly, are once put
into the mouth of the catechist and, after all, carry a harsh sound
with them. The general impression it leaves upon the mind of the young
is that their wickedness at birth was but very imperfectly wiped out
at baptism, and that the mere fact of being young at all has something
with it that savours more or less distinctly of the nature of sin.

If a new edition of the work is ever required, I should like to
introduce a few words insisting on the duty of seeking all
reasonable pleasure and avoiding all pain that can be honourably
avoided. I should like to see children taught that they should not say
they like things which they do not like, merely because certain
other people say they like them, and how foolish it is to say they
believe this or that when they understand nothing about it. If it be
urged that these additions would make the Catechism too long, I
would curtail the remarks upon our duty towards our neighbour and upon
the sacraments. In the place of the paragraph beginning "I desire my
Lord God our Heavenly Father" I would- but perhaps I had better return
to Theobald, and leave the recasting of the Catechism to abler hands.

                          CHAPTER VIII


MR. Pontifex had set his heart on his son's becoming a fellow of a
college before he became a clergyman. This would provide for him at
once and would ensure his getting a living if none of his father's
ecclesiastical friends gave him one. The boy had done just well enough
at school to render this possible, so he was sent to one of the
smaller colleges at Cambridge and was at once set to read with the
best private tutors that could be found. A system of examination had
been adopted a year or so before Theobald took his degree which had
improved his chances of a fellowship, for whatever ability he had
was classical rather than mathematical, and this system gave more
encouragement to classical studies than had been given hitherto.

Theobald had the sense to see that he had a chance of independence
if he worked hard, and he liked the notion of becoming a fellow. He
therefore applied himself, and in the end took a degree which made his
getting a fellowship in all probability a mere question of time. For a
while Mr. Pontifex, senior, was really pleased, and told his son he
would present him with the works of any standard writer whom he
might select. The young man chose the works of Bacon, and Bacon
accordingly made his appearance in ten nicely bound volumes. A
little inspection, however, showed that the copy was a second-hand
one.

Now that he had taken his degree, the next thing to look forward
to was ordination- about which Theobald had thought little hitherto
beyond acquiescing in it as something that would come as a matter of
course some day. Now, however, it had actually come and was
asserting itself as a thing which should be only a few months off, and
this rather frightened him, inasmuch as there would be no way out of
it when he was once in it. He did not like the near view of ordination
as well as the distant one, and even made some feeble efforts to
escape, as may be perceived by the following correspondence which
his son Ernest found among his father's papers written on gilt-edged
paper, in faded ink, and tied neatly round with a piece of tape, but
without any note or comment. I have altered nothing. The letters are
as  follows:


"MY DEAR FATHER,- I do not like opening up a question which has been
considered settled, but as the time approaches I begin to be very
doubtful how far I am fitted to be a clergyman. Not, I am thankful
to say, that I have the faintest doubts about the Church of England,
and I could subscribe cordially to every one of the thirty-nine
articles which do indeed appear to me to be the ne plus ultra of human
wisdom, and Paley, too, leaves no loophole for an opponent; but I am
sure I should be running counter to your wishes if I were to conceal
from you that I do not feel the inward call to be a minister of the
gospel that I shall have to say I have felt when the Bishop ordains
me. I try to get this feeling, I pray for it earnestly, and
sometimes half think that I have got it, but in a little time it wears
off, and though I have no absolute repugnance to being a clergyman and
trust that if I am one I shall endeavour to live to the Glory of God
and to advance His interests upon earth, yet I feel that something
more than this is wanted before I am fully justified in going into the
Church. I am aware that I have been a great expense to you in spite of
my scholarships, but you have ever taught me that I should obey my
conscience, and my conscience tells me I should do wrong if I became a
clergyman. God may yet give me the spirit for which I assure you I
have been and am continually praying, but He may not, and in that case
would it not be better for me to try and look out for something
else? I know that neither you nor John wish me to go into your
business, nor do I understand anything about money matters, but is
there nothing else that I can do? I do not like to ask you to maintain
me while I go in for medicine or the bar; but when I get my
fellowship, which should not be long, first, I will endeavour to
cost you nothing further, and I might make a little money by writing
or taking pupils. I trust you will not think this letter improper;
nothing is further from my wish than to cause you any uneasiness. I
hope you will make allowance for my present feelings which, indeed,
spring from nothing but from that respect for my conscience which no
one has so often instilled into me as yourself. Pray let me have a few
lines shortly. I hope your cold is better. With love to Eliza and
Maria, I am, your affectionate son,

                                     "THEOBALD PONTIFEX."


"DEAR THEOBALD,- I can enter into your feelings and have no wish
to quarrel with your expression of them. It is quite right and natural
that you should feel as you do except as regards one passage, the
impropriety of which you will yourself doubtless feel upon reflection,
and to which I will not further allude than to say that it has wounded
me. You should not have said 'in spite of my scholarships.' It was
only proper that if you could do anything to assist me in bearing
the heavy burden of your education, the money should be, as it was,
made over to myself. Every line in your letter convinces me that you
are under the influence of a morbid sensitiveness which is one of
the devil's favourite devices for luring people to their
destruction. I have, as you say, been at great expense with your
education. Nothing has been spared by me to give you the advantages,
which, as an English gentleman, I was anxious to afford my son, but
I am not prepared to see that expense thrown away and to have to begin
again from the beginning, merely because you have taken some foolish
scruples into your head, which you should resist as no less unjust
to yourself than to me.

"Don't give way to that restless desire for change which is the bane
of so many persons of both sexes at the present day.

"Of course you needn't be ordained: nobody will compel you; you
are perfectly free; you are twenty-three years of age, and should know
your own mind; but why not have known it sooner, instead of never so
much as breathing a hint of opposition until I have had all the
expense of sending you to the University, which I should never have
done unless I had believed you to have made up your mind about
taking orders? I have letters from you in which you express the most
perfect willingness to be ordained, and your brother and sisters
will bear me out in saying that no pressure of any sort has been put
upon you. You mistake your own mind, and are suffering from a nervous
timidity which may be very natural but may not the less be pregnant
with serious consequences to yourself. I am not at all well, and the
anxiety occasioned by your letter is naturally preying upon me. May
God guide you to a better judgement.- Your affectionate father,

                                                  "G. PONTIFEX."


On the receipt of this letter Theobald plucked up his spirits. "My
father," he said to himself, "tells me I need not be ordained if I
do not like. I do not like, and therefore I will not be ordained.
But what was the meaning of the words 'pregnant with serious
consequences to yourself'? Did there lurk a threat under these words-
though it was impossible to lay hold of it or of them? Were they not
intended to produce all the effect of a threat without being
actually threatening?"

Theobald knew his father well enough to be little likely to
misapprehend his meaning, but having ventured so far on the path of
opposition, and being really anxious to get out of being ordained if
he could, he determined to venture farther. He accordingly wrote the
following:


"MY DEAR FATHER,- you tell me- and I heartily thank you- that no one
will compel me to be ordained. I knew you would not press ordination
upon me if my conscience was seriously opposed to it; I have therefore
resolved on giving up the idea, and believe that if you will continue
to allow me what you do at present, until I get my fellowship, which
should not be long, I will then cease putting you to further expense.
I will make up my mind as soon as possible what profession I will
adopt, and will let you know at once.- Your affectionate son,

                                             "THEOBALD PONTIFEX."


The remaining letter, written by return of post, must now be
given. It has the merit of brevity.


"DEAR THEOBALD,- I have received yours. I am at a loss to conceive
its motive, but am very clear as to its effect. You shall not
receive a single sixpence from me till you come to your senses. Should
you persist in your folly and wickedness, I am happy to remember
that I have yet other children whose conduct I can depend upon to be a
source of credit and happiness to me.- Your affectionate but
troubled father,

                                          "G. PONTIFEX."


I do not know the immediate sequel to the foregoing
correspondence, but it all came perfectly right in the end. Either
Theobald's heart failed him, or he interpreted the outward shove which
his father gave him as the inward call for which I have no doubt he
prayed with great earnestness- for he was a firm believer in the
efficacy of prayer. And so am I under certain circumstances.
Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this
world dreams of, but he has wisely refrained from saying whether
they are good things or bad things. It might perhaps be as well if the
world were to dream of, or even become wide awake to, some of the
things that are being wrought by prayer. But the question is
avowedly difficult. In the end Theobald got his fellowship by a stroke
of luck very soon after taking his degree, and was ordained in the
autumn of the same year, 1825.

                          CHAPTER IX


Mr. ALLABY was rector of Crampsford, a village a few miles from
Cambridge. He, too, had taken a good degree, had got a fellowship, and
in the course of time had accepted a college living of about L400 a
year and a house. His private income did not exceed L200 a year. On
resigning his fellowship he married a woman a good deal younger than
himself who bore him eleven children, nine of whom- two sons and seven
daughters- were living. The two eldest daughters had married fairly
well, but at the time of which I am now writing there were still
five unmarried, of ages varying between thirty and twenty-two- and the
sons were neither of them yet off their father's hands. It was plain
that if anything were to happen to Mr. Allaby the family would be left
poorly off, and this made both Mr. and Mrs. Allaby as unhappy as it
ought to have made them.

Reader, did you ever have an income at best none too large, which
died with you all except L200 a year? Did you ever at the same time
have two sons who must be started in life somehow, and five
daughters still unmarried for whom you would only be too thankful to
find husbands- if you knew how to find them? If morality is that
which, on the whole, brings a man peace in his declining years- if,
that is to say, it is not an utter swindle, can you under these
circumstances flatter yourself that you have led a moral life?

And this, even though your wife has been so good a woman that you
have not grown tired of her, and has not fallen into such ill health
as lowers your own health in sympathy; and though your family has
grown up vigorous, amiable, and blessed with common sense. I know many
old men and women who are reputed moral, but who are living with
partners whom they have long ceased to love, or who have ugly,
disagreeable maiden daughters for whom they have never been able to
find husbands- daughters whom they loathe and by whom they are loathed
in secret, or sons whose folly or extravagance is a perpetual wear and
worry to them. Is it moral for a man to have brought such things
upon himself? Someone should do for morals what that old Pecksniff
Bacon has obtained the credit of having done for science.

But to return to Mr. and Mrs. Allaby. Mrs. Allaby talked about
having married two of her daughters as though it had been the
easiest thing in the world. She talked in this way because she heard
other mothers do so, but in her heart of hearts she did not know how
she had done it, nor indeed, if it had been her doing at all. First
there had been a young man in connection with whom she had tried to
practise certain manoeuvres which she had rehearsed in imagination
over and over again, but which she found impossible to apply in
practice. Then there had been weeks of a wurra-wurra of hopes and
fears and little stratagems which as often as not proved
injudicious, and then somehow or other in the end, there lay the young
man bound and with an arrow through his heart at her daughter's
feet. It seemed to her to be all a fluke which she could have little
or no hope of repeating. She had indeed repeated it once, and might
perhaps with good luck repeat it yet once again -five times over! It
was awful: why, she would rather have three confinements than go
through the wear and tear of marrying a single daughter.

Nevertheless it had got to be done, and poor Mrs. Allaby never
looked at a young man without an eye to his being a future son-in-law.
Papas and mammas sometimes ask young men whether their intentions
are honourable towards their daughters. I think young men might
occasionally ask papas and mammas whether their intentions are
honourable before they accept invitations to houses where there are
still unmarried daughters.

"I can't afford a curate, my dear," said Mr. Allaby to his wife when
the pair were discussing what was next to be done. "It will be
better to get some young man to come and help me for a time upon a
Sunday. A guinea a Sunday will do this, and we can chop and change
till we get someone who suits." So it was settled that Mr. Allaby's
health was not so strong as it had been, and that he stood in need
of help in the performance of his Sunday duty.

Mrs. Allaby had a great friend- a certain Mrs. Cowey, wife of the
celebrated Professor Cowey. She was what was called a truly
spiritually minded woman, a trifle portly, with an incipient beard,
and an extensive connection among undergraduates, more especially
among those who were inclined to take part in the great evangelical
movement which was then at its height. She gave evening parties once a
fortnight at which prayer was part of the entertainment. She was not
only spiritually minded, but, as enthusiastic Mrs. Allaby used to
exclaim, she was a thorough woman of the world at the same time and
had such a fund of strong masculine good sense. She too had daughters,
but, as she used to say to Mrs. Allaby, she had been less fortunate
than Mrs. Allaby herself, for one by one they had married and left
her, so that her old age would have been desolate indeed if her
Professor had not been spared to her.

Mrs. Cowey, of course, knew the run of all the bachelor clergy in
the University, and was the very person to assist Mrs. Allaby in
finding an eligible assistant for her husband, so this last named lady
drove over one morning in the November of 1825, by arrangement, to
take an early dinner with Mrs. Cowey and spend the afternoon. After
dinner the two ladies retired together, and the business of the day
began. How they fenced, how they saw through one another, with what
loyalty they pretended not to see through one another, with what
gentle dalliance they prolonged the conversation discussing the
spiritual fitness of this or that deacon, and the other pros and
cons connected with him after his spiritual fitness had been
disposed of, all this must be left to the imagination of the reader.
Mrs. Cowey had been so accustomed to scheming on her own account
that she would scheme for anyone rather than not scheme at all. Many
mothers turned to her in their hour of need and, provided they were
spiritually minded, Mrs. Cowey never failed to do her best for them;
if the marriage of a young Bachelor of Arts was not made in Heaven, it
was probably made, or at any rate attempted, in Mrs. Cowey's
drawing-room. On the present occasion all the deacons of the
University in whom there lurked any spark of promise were exhaustively
discussed, and the upshot was that our friend Theobald was declared by
Mrs. Cowey to be about the best thing she could do that afternoon.

"I don't know that he's a particularly fascinating young man, my
dear," said Mrs. Cowey, "and he's only a second son, but then he's got
his fellowship, and even the second son of such a man as Mr. Pontifex,
the publisher, should have something very comfortable."

"Why, yes, my dear," rejoined Mrs. Allaby complacently, "that's what
one rather feels."

                          CHAPTER X


THE interview, like all other good things, had to come to an end;
the days were short, and Mrs. Allaby had a six miles' drive to
Crampsford. When she was muffled up and had taken her seat, Mr.
Allaby's factotum, James, could perceive no change in her
appearance, and little knew what a series of delighted visions he
was driving home along with his mistress.

Professor Cowey had published works through Theobald's father, and
Theobald had on this account been taken in tow by Mrs. Cowey from
the beginning of his University career. She had had an eye upon him
for some time past, and almost as much felt it her duty to get him off
her list of young men for whom wives had to be provided, as poor
Mrs. Allaby did to try and get a husband for one of her daughters. She
now wrote and asked him to come and see her, in terms that awakened
his curiosity. When he came she broached the subject of Mr. Allaby's
failing health, and after the smoothing away of such difficulties as
were only Mrs. Cowey's due, considering the interest she had taken, it
was allowed to come to pass that Theobald should go to Crampsford
for six successive Sundays and take the half of Mr. Allaby's duty at
half a guinea a Sunday, for Mrs. Cowey cut down the usual stipend
mercilessly, and Theobald was not strong enough to resist.

Ignorant of the plots which were being prepared for his peace of
mind and with no idea beyond that of earning his three guineas, and
perhaps of astonishing the inhabitants of Crampsford by his academic
learning, Theobald walked over to the Rectory one Sunday morning early
in December- a few weeks only after he had been ordained. He had taken
a great deal of pains with his sermon, which was on the subject of
geology- then coming to the fore as a theological bugbear. He showed
that so far as geology was worth anything at all- and he was too
liberal entirely to pooh-pooh it- it confirmed the absolutely
historical character of the Mosaic account of the Creation as given in
Genesis. Any phenomena which at first sight appeared to make against
this view were only partial phenomena and broke down upon
investigation. Nothing could be in more excellent taste, and when
Theobald adjourned to the Rectory, where he was to dine between the
services, Mr. Allaby complimented him warmly upon his debut, while the
ladies of the family could hardly find words with which to express
their admiration.

Theobald knew nothing about women. The only women he had been thrown
in contact with were his sisters, two of whom were always correcting
him, and a few school friends whom these had got their father to ask
to Elmhurst. These young ladies had either been so shy that they and
Theobald had never amalgamated, or they had been supposed to be clever
and had said smart things to him. He did not say smart things
himself and did not want other people to say them. Besides, they
talked about music- and he hated music- or pictures- and he hated
pictures- or books- and except the classics he hated books. And then
sometimes he was wanted to dance with them, and he did not know how to
dance, and did not want to know.

At Mrs. Cowey's parties again he had seen some young ladies and
had been introduced to them. He had tried to make himself agreeable,
but was always left with the impression that he had not been
successful. The young ladies of Mrs. Cowey's set were by no means
the most attractive that might have been found in the University,
and Theobald may be excused for not losing his heart to the greater
number of them, while if for a minute or two he was thrown in with one
of the prettier and more agreeable girls he was almost immediately cut
out by someone less bashful than himself, and sneaked off, feeling, as
far as the fair sex was concerned, like the impotent man at the pool
of Bethesda.

What a really nice girl might have done with him I cannot tell,
but fate had thrown none such in his way except His youngest sister
Alethea, whom he might perhaps have liked if she had not been his
sister. The result of his experience was that women had never done him
any good and he was not accustomed to associate them with any
pleasure; if there was a part of Hamlet in connection with them it had
been so completely cut out in the edition of the play in which he
was required to act that he had come to disbelieve in its existence.
As for kissing, he had never kissed a woman in his life except his
sister- and my own sisters when we were all small children together.
Over and above these kisses, he had until quite lately been required
to imprint a solemn, flabby kiss night and morning upon his father's
cheek, and this, to the best of my belief, was the extent of
Theobald's knowledge in the matter of kissing, at the time of which
I am now writing. The result of the foregoing was that he had come
to dislike women, as mysterious beings whose ways were not as his
ways, nor their thoughts as his thoughts.

With these antecedents, Theobald naturally felt rather bashful on
finding himself the admired of five strange young ladies. I remember
when I was a boy myself I was once asked to take tea at a girls'
school where one of my sisters was boarding. I was then about twelve
years old. Everything went off well during tea-time, for the Lady
Principal of the establishment was present. But there came a time when
she went away and I was left alone with the girls. The moment the
mistress's back was turned the head girl, who was about my own age,
came up, pointed her finger at me, made a face and said solemnly, "A
na-a-sty bo-o-y!" All the girls followed her in rotation making the
same gesture and the same reproach upon my being a boy. It gave me a
great scare. I believe I cried, and I know it was a long time before I
could again face a girl without a strong desire to run away.

Theobald felt at first much as I had myself done at the girls'
school, but the Miss Allabys did not tell him he was a nasty
bo-o-oy. Their papa and mamma were so cordial and they themselves
lifted him so deftly over conversational stiles that before dinner was
over Theobald thought the family to be a really very charming one, and
felt as though he were being appreciated in a way to which he had
not hitherto been accustomed.

With dinner his shyness wore off. He was by no means plain, his
academic prestige was very fair. There was nothing about him to lay
hold of as unconventional or ridiculous; the impression he created
upon the young ladies was quite as favourable as that which they had
created upon himself, for they knew not much more about men than he
about women.

As soon as he was gone, the harmony of the establishment was
broken by a storm which arose upon the question which of them it
should be who should become Mrs. Pontifex. "My dears," said their
father, when he saw that they did not seem likely to settle the matter
among themselves, "wait till to-morrow, and then play at cards for
him." Having said which he retired to his study, where he took a
nightly glass of whisky and a pipe of tobacco.

                          CHAPTER XI


THE next morning saw Theobald in his rooms coaching a pupil, and the
Miss Allabys in the eldest Miss Allaby's bedroom playing at cards,
with Theobald for the stakes.

The winner was Christina, the second unmarried daughter, then just
twenty-seven years old and therefore four years older than Theobald.
The younger sisters complained that it was throwing a husband away
to let Christina try and catch him, for she was so much older that she
had no chance; but Christina showed fight in a way not usual with her,
for she was by nature yielding and good tempered. Her mother thought
it better to back her up, so the two dangerous ones were packed off
then and there on visits to friends some way off, and those alone
allowed to remain at home whose loyalty could be depended upon. The
brothers did not even suspect what was going on and believed their
father's getting assistance was because he really wanted it.

The sisters who remained at home kept their words and gave Christina
all the help they could, for over and above their sense of fair play
they reflected that the sooner Theobald was landed, the sooner another
deacon might be sent for who might be won by themselves. So quickly
was all managed that the two unreliable sisters were actually out of
the house before Theobald's next visit- which was on the Sunday
following his first.

This time Theobald felt quite at home in the house of his new
friends- for so Mrs. Allaby insisted that he should call them. She
took, she said, such a motherly interest in young men, especially in
clergymen. Theobald believed every word she said, as he had believed
his father and all his elders from his youth up. Christina sat next
him at dinner and played her cards no less judiciously than she had
played them in her sister's bedroom. She smiled (and her smile was one
of her strong points) whenever he spoke to her; she went through all
her little artlessnesses and set forth all her little wares in what
she believed to be their most taking aspect. Who can blame her?
Theobald was not the ideal she had dreamed of when reading Byron
upstairs with her sisters, but he was an actual within the bounds of
possibility, and after all not a bad actual as actuals went. What else
could she do? Run away? She dared not. Marry beneath her and be
considered a disgrace to her family? She dared not. Remain at home and
become an old maid and be laughed at? Not if she could help it. She
did the only thing that could reasonably be expected. She was
drowning; Theobald might be only a straw, but she could catch at
him, and catch at him she accordingly did.

If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true
match-making sometimes does so. The only ground for complaint in the
present case was that it was rather slow. Theobald fell into the
part assigned to him more easily than Mrs. Cowey and Mrs. Allaby had
dared to hope. He was softened by Christina's winning manners: he
admired the high moral tone of everything she said; her sweetness
towards her sisters and her father and mother, her readiness to
undertake any small burden which no one else seemed willing to
undertake, her sprightly manners, all were fascinating to one who,
though unused to woman's society, was still a human being. He was
flattered by her unobtrusive but obviously sincere admiration for
himself; she seemed to see him in a more favourable light, and to
understand him better than anyone outside of this charming family
had ever done. Instead of snubbing him as his father, brother and
sisters did, she drew him out, listened attentively to all he chose to
say, and evidently wanted him to say still more. He told a college
friend that he knew he was in love now; he really was, for he liked
Miss Allaby's society much better than that of his sisters.

Over and above the recommendations already enumerated, she had
another in the possession of what was supposed to be a very
beautiful contralto voice. Her voice was certainly contralto, for
she could not reach higher than D in the treble; its only defect was
that it did not go correspondingly low in the bass: in those days,
however, a contralto voice was understood to include even a soprano if
the soprano could not reach soprano notes, and it was not necessary
that it should have the quality which we now assign to contralto. What
her voice wanted in range and power was made up in the feeling with
which she sang. She had transposed "Angels ever bright and fair"
into a lower key, so as to make it suit her voice, thus proving, as
her mamma said, that she had a thorough knowledge of the laws of
harmony; not only did she do this, but at every pause she added an
embellishment of arpeggios from one end to the other of the
keyboard, on a principle which her governess had taught her; she
thus added life and interest to an air which everyone- so she said-
must feel to be rather heavy in the form in which Handel left it. As
for her governess, she indeed had been a rarely accomplished musician:
she was a pupil of the famous Dr. Clarke of Cambridge, and used to
play the overture to Atalanta, arranged by Mazzinghi. Nevertheless, it
was some time before Theobald could bring his courage to the
sticking point of actually proposing. He made it quite clear that he
believed himself to be much smitten, but month after month went by,
during which there was still so much hope in Theobald that Mr.
Allaby dared not discover that he was able to do his duty for himself,
and was getting impatient at the number of half-guineas he was
disbursing- and yet there was no proposal. Christina's mother
assured him that she was the best daughter in the whole world, and
would be a priceless treasure to the man who married her. Theobald
echoed Mrs. Allaby's sentiments with warmth, but still, though he
visited the Rectory two or three times a week, besides coming over
on Sunday- he did not propose. "She is heart-whole yet, dear Mr.
Pontifex," said Mrs. Allaby, one day, "at least I believe she is. It
is not for want of admirers- oh! no- she has had her full share of
these, but she is too, too difficult to please. I think however, she
would fall before a great and good man." And she looked hard at
Theobald, who blushed; but the days went by and still he did not
propose.

Another time Theobald actually took Mrs. Cowey into his
confidence, and the reader may guess what account of Christina he
got from her. Mrs. Cowey tried the jealousy manoeuvre and hinted at
a possible rival. Theobald was, or pretended to be, very much alarmed;
a little rudimentary pang of jealousy shot across his bosom and he
began to believe with pride that he was not only in love, but
desperately in love, or he would never feel so jealous.
Nevertheless, day after day still went by and he did not propose.

The Allabys behaved with great judgement. They humoured him till his
retreat was practically cut off, though he still flattered himself
that it was open. One day about six months after Theobald had become
an almost daily visitor at the Rectory the conversation happened to
turn upon long engagements. "I don't like long engagements, Mr.
Allaby, do you?" said Theobald imprudently. "No," said Mr. Allaby in a
pointed tone, "nor long courtships," and he gave Theobald a look which
he could not pretend to misunderstand. He went back to Cambridge as
fast as he could go, and in dread of the conversation with Mr.
Allaby which he felt to be impending, composed the following letter
which he despatched that same afternoon by a private messenger to
Crampsford. The letter was as follows:


"DEAREST MISS CHRISTINA,- I do not know whether you have guessed the
feelings that I have long entertained for you- feelings which I have
concealed as much as I could through fear of drawing you into an
engagement which, if you enter into it, must be prolonged for a
considerable time, but, however this may be, it is out of my power
to conceal them longer; I love you, ardently, devotedly, and send
these few lines asking you to be my wife, because I dare not trust
my tongue to give adequate expression to the magnitude of my affection
for you.

"I cannot pretend to offer you a heart which has never known
either love or disappointment. I have loved already, and my heart
was years in recovering from the grief I felt at seeing her become
another's. That, however, is over, and having seen yourself I
rejoice over a disappointment which I thought at one time would have
been fatal to me. It has left me a less ardent lover than I should
perhaps otherwise have been, but it has increased tenfold my power
of appreciating your many charms and my desire that you should
become my wife. Please let me have a few lines of answer by the bearer
to let me know whether or not my suit is accepted. If you accept me
I will at once come and talk the matter over with Mr. and Mrs. Allaby,
whom I shall hope one day to be allowed to call father and mother.

"I ought to warn you that in the event of your consenting to be my
wife it may be years before our union can be consummated, for I cannot
marry till a college living is offered me. If, therefore, you see
fit to reject me, I shall be grieved rather than surprised.- Ever most
devotedly yours,

                                             "THEOBALD PONTIFEX."


And this was all that his public school and University education had
been able to do for Theobald! Nevertheless for his own part he thought
his letter rather a good one, and congratulated himself in
particular upon his cleverness in inventing the story of a previous
attachment, behind which he intended to shelter himself if Christina
should complain of any lack of fervour in his behaviour to her.

I need not give Christina's answer, which of course was to accept.
Much as Theobald feared old Mr. Allaby I do not think he would have
wrought up his courage to the point of actually proposing but for
the fact of the engagement being necessarily a long one, during
which a dozen things might turn up to break it off. However much he
may have disapproved of long engagements for other people, I doubt
whether he had any particular objection to them in his own case. A
pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things
every day but we very seldom see them. Theobald posed as the most
ardent lover imaginable, but, to use the vulgarism for the moment in
fashion, it was all "side." Christina was in love, as indeed she had
been twenty times already. But then Christina was impressionable and
could not even hear the name "Missolonghi" mentioned without
bursting into tears. When Theobald accidentally left his sermon case
behind him one Sunday, she slept with it in her bosom and was
forlorn when she had as it were to disgorge it on the following
Sunday; but I do not think Theobald ever took so much as an old
toothbrush of Christina's to bed with him. Why, I knew a young man
once who got hold of his mistress's skates and slept with them for a
fortnight and cried when he had to give them up.

                          CHAPTER XII


THEOBALD'S engagement was all very well as far as it went, but there
was an old gentleman with a bald head and rosy cheeks in a
counting-house in Paternoster Row who must sooner or later be told
of what his son had in view, and Theobald's heart fluttered when he
asked himself what view this old gentleman was likely to take of the
situation. The murder, however, had to come out, and Theobald and
his intended, perhaps imprudently, resolved on making a clean breast
of it at once. He wrote what he and Christina, who helped him to draft
the letter, thought to be everything that was filial, and expressed
himself as anxious to be married with the least possible delay. He
could not help saying this, as Christina was at his shoulder, and he
knew it was safe, for his father might be trusted not to help him.
He wound up by asking his father to use any influence that might be at
his command to help him to get a living, inasmuch as it might be years
before a college living fell vacant, and he saw no other chance of
being able to marry, for neither he nor his intended had any money
except Theobald's fellowship, which would, of course, lapse on his
taking a wife.

 Any step of Theobald's was sure to be objectionable in his father's
eyes, but that at three-and-twenty he should want to marry a penniless
girl who was four years older than himself, afforded a golden
opportunity which the old gentleman- for so I may now call him, as
he was at least sixty- embraced with characteristic eagerness.

 "The ineffable folly," he wrote, on receiving his son's letter, "of
your fancied passion for Miss Allaby fills me with the gravest
apprehensions. Making every allowance for a lover's blindness, I still
have no doubt that the lady herself is a well-conducted and amiable
young person, who would not disgrace our family, but were she ten
times more desirable as a daughter-in-law than I can allow myself to
hope, your joint poverty is an insuperable objection to your marriage.
I have four other children besides yourself, and my expenses do not
permit me to save money. This year they have been especially heavy,
indeed I have had to purchase two not inconsiderable pieces of land
which happened to come into the market and were necessary to
complete a property which I have long wanted to round off in this way.
I gave you an education regardless of expense, which has put you in
possession of a comfortable income, at an age when many young men
are dependent. I have I have thus started you fairly in life, and
may claim that you should cease to be a drag upon me further. Long
engagements are proverbially unsatisfactory, and in the present case
the prospect seems interminable. What interest, pray, do you suppose I
have that I could get a living for you? Can I go up and down the
country begging people to provide for my son because he has taken it
into his head to want to get married without sufficient means?

"I do not wish to write unkindly, nothing can be farther from my
real feelings towards you, but there is often more kindness in plain
speaking than in any amount of soft words which can end in no
substantial performance. Of course, I bear in mind that you are of
age, and can therefore please yourself, but if you choose to claim the
strict letter of the law, and act without consideration for your
father's feelings, you must not be surprised if you one day find
that I have claimed a like liberty for myself.- Believe me, your
affectionate father,

                                         "G. PONTIFEX.".


I found this letter along with those already given and a few more
which I need not give, but throughout which the same tone prevails,
and in all of which there is the more or less obvious shake of the
will near the end of the letter. Remembering Theobald's general
dumbness concerning his father for the many years I knew him after his
father's death, there was an eloquence in the preservation of the
letters and in their endorsement, "Letters from my father," which
seemed to have with it some faint odour of health and nature.

Theobald did not show his father's letter to Christina, nor, indeed,
I believe to anyone. He was by nature secretive, and had been
repressed too much and too early to be capable of railing or blowing
off steam where his father was concerned. His sense of wrong was still
inarticulate, felt as a dull, dead weight ever present day by day, and
if he woke at night-time still continually present, but he hardly knew
what it was. I was about the closest friend he had, and I saw but
little of him, for I could not get on with him for long together. He
said I had no reverence; whereas, I thought that I had plenty of
reverence for what deserved to be revered, but that the gods which
he deemed golden were in reality made of baser metal. He never, as I
have said, complained of his father to me, and his only other
friends were, like himself, staid and prim, of evangelical tendencies,
and deeply imbued with a sense of the sinfulness of any act of
insubordination to parents- good young men, in fact- and one cannot
blow off steam to a good young man.

When Christina was informed by her lover of his father's opposition,
and of the time which must probably elapse before they could be
married, she offered- with how much sincerity I know not to set him
free from his engagement; but Theobald declined to be released- "not
at least," as he said, "at present." Christina and Mrs. Allaby knew
they could manage him, and on this not very satisfactory footing the
engagement was continued.

His engagement and his refusal to be released at once raised
Theobald in his own good opinion. Dull as he was, he had no small
share of quiet self-approbation. He admired himself for his University
distinction, for the purity of his life (I said of him once that if he
had only a better temper he would be as innocent as a newlaid egg) and
for his unimpeachable integrity in money matters. He did not despair
of advancement in the Church when he had once got a living, and of
course it was within the bounds of possibility that he might one day
become a Bishop, and Christina said she felt convinced that this would
ultimately be the case.

As was natural for the daughter and intended wife of a clergyman,
Christina's thoughts ran much upon religion, and she was resolved that
even though an exalted position in this world were denied to her and
Theobald, their virtues should be fully appreciated in the next. Her
religious opinions coincided absolutely with Theobald's own, and
many a conversation did she have with him about the glory of God,
and the completeness with which they would devote themselves to it, as
soon as Theobald had got his living and they were married. So
certain was she of the great results which would then ensue that she
wondered at times at the blindness shown by Providence towards its own
truest interests in not killing off the rectors who stood between
Theobald and his living a little faster.

In those days people believed with a simple downrightness which I do
not observe among educated men and women now. It had never so much
as crossed Theobald's mind to doubt the literal accuracy of any
syllable in the Bible. He had never seen any book in which this was
disputed, nor met with anyone who doubted it. True, there was just a
little scare about geology, but there was nothing in it. If it was
said that God made the world in six days, why He did make it in six
days, neither in more nor less; if it was said that He put Adam to
sleep, took out one of his ribs and made a woman of it, why it was
so as a matter of course. He, Adam, went to sleep as it might be
himself, Theobald Pontifex, in a garden, as it might be the garden
at Crampsford Rectory during the summer months when it was so
pretty, only that it was larger, and had some tame wild animals in it.
Then God came up to him, as it might be Mr. Allaby or his father,
dexterously took out one of his ribs without waking him, and
miraculously healed the wound so that no trace of the operation
remained. Finally, God had taken the rib perhaps into the
greenhouse, and had turned it into just such another young woman as
Christina. That was how it was done; there was neither difficulty
nor shadow of difficulty about the matter. Could not God do anything
He liked, and had He not in His own inspired Book told us that He
had done this?

This was the average attitude of fairly educated young men and women
towards the Mosaic cosmogony fifty, forty, or even twenty years ago.
The combating of infidelity, therefore, offered little scope for
enterprising young clergymen, nor had the Church awakened to the
activity which she has since displayed among the poor in our large
towns. These were then left almost without an effort at resistance
or co-operation to the labours of those who had succeeded Wesley.
Missionary work indeed in heathen countries was being carried on
with some energy, but Theobald did not feel any call to be a
missionary. Christina suggested this to him more than once, and
assured him of the unspeakable happiness it would be to her to be
the wife of a missionary, and to share his dangers; she and Theobald
might even be martyred; of course they would be martyred
simultaneously, and martyrdom many years hence as regarded from the
arbour in the Rectory garden was not painful; it would ensure them a
glorious future in the next world, and at any rate posthumous renown
in this- even if they were not miraculously restored to life again-
and such things had happened ere now in the case of martyrs. Theobald,
however, had not been kindled by Christina's enthusiasm, so she fell
back upon the Church of Rome- an enemy more dangerous, if possible,
than paganism itself. A combat with Romanism might even yet win for
her and Theobald the crown of martyrdom. True, the Church of Rome
was tolerably quiet just then, but it was the calm before the storm,
of this she was assured, with a conviction deeper than she could
have attained by any argument founded upon mere reason.

"We, dearest Theobald," she exclaimed, "will be ever faithful. We
will stand firm and support one another even in the hour of death
itself. God in His mercy may spare us from being burnt alive. He may
or may not do so. O Lord" (and she turned her eyes prayerfully to
Heaven), "spare my Theobald, or grant that he may be beheaded."

"My dearest," said Theobald gravely, "do not let us agitate
ourselves unduly. If the hour of trial comes we shall be best prepared
to meet it by having led a quiet, unobtrusive life of self-denial
and devotion to God's glory. Such a life let us pray God that it may
please Him to enable us to pray that we may lead."

"Dearest Theobald," exclaimed Christina, drying the tears that had
gathered in her eyes, "you are always, always right. Let us be
self-denying, pure, upright, truthful in word and deed." She clasped
her hands and looked up to Heaven as she spoke.

"Dearest," rejoined her lover, "we have ever hitherto endeavoured to
be all of these things; we have not been worldly people; let us
watch and pray that we may so continue to the end."

The moon had risen and the arbour was getting damp, so they
adjourned further aspirations for a more convenient season. At other
times Christina pictured herself and Theobald as braving the scorn
of almost every human being in the achievement of some mighty task
which should redound to the honour of her Redeemer. She could face
anything for this. But always towards the end of her vision there came
a little coronation scene high up in the golden regions of the
Heavens, and a diadem was set upon her head by the Son of Man Himself,
amid a host of angels and archangels who looked on with envy and
admiration- and here even Theobald himself was out of it. If there
could be such a thing as the Mammon of Righteousness, Christina
would have assuredly made friends with it. Her papa and mamma were
very estimable people and would in the course of time receive Heavenly
Mansions in which they would be exceedingly comfortable; so
doubtless would her sisters; so perhaps, even might her brothers;
but for herself she felt that a higher destiny was preparing, which it
was her duty never to lose sight of. The first step towards it would
be her marriage with Theobald. In spite, however, of these flights
of religious romanticism, Christina was a good-tempered kindly-natured
girl enough, who, if she had married a sensible layman- we will say
a hotel-keeper- would have developed into a good landlady and been
deservedly popular with her guests.

Such was Theobald's engaged life. Many a little present passed
between the pair, and many a small surprise did they prepare
pleasantly for one another. They never quarrelled, and neither of them
ever flirted with anyone else. Mrs. Allaby and his future
sisters-in-law idolised Theobald in spite of its being impossible to
get another deacon to come and be played for as long as Theobald was
able to help Mr. Allaby, which now of course he did free gratis and
for  nothing; two of the sisters, however, did manage to find husbands
before Christina was actually married, and on each occasion Theobald
played the part of decoy elephant. In the end only two out of the
seven daughters remained single.

After three or four years, old Mr. Pontifex became accustomed to his
son's engagement and looked upon it as among the things which had
now a prescriptive right to toleration. In the spring of 1831 more
than five years after Theobald had first walked over to Crampsford,
one of the best livings in the gift of the College unexpectedly fell
vacant, and was for various reasons declined by the two fellows senior
to Theobald, who might each have been expected to take it. The
living was then offered to and of course accepted by Theobald, being
in value not less than not less than L500 a year with a suitable house
and garden. Old Mr. Pontifex then came down more handsomely than was
expected and settled L10,000 on his son and daughter-in-law for life
with remainder to such of their issue as they might appoint. In the
month of July, 1831, Theobald and Christina became man and wife.

                          CHAPTER XIII


A DUE number of old shoes had been thrown at the carriage in which
the happy pair departed from the Rectory, and it had turned the corner
at the bottom of the village. It could then be seen for two or three
hundred yards creeping past a fir coppice, and after this was lost
to view.

"John," said Mr. Allaby to his manservant, "shut the gate"; and he
went indoors with a sigh of relief which seemed to say: "I have done
it, and I am alive." This was the reaction after a burst of
enthusiastic merriment during which the old gentleman had run twenty
yards after the carriage to fling a slipper at it- which he had duly
flung.

But what were the feelings of Theobald and Christina when the
village was passed and they were rolling quietly by the fir
plantation? It is at this point that even the stoutest heart must
fail, unless it beat in the breast of one who is over head and ears in
love. If a young man is in a small boat on a choppy sea, along with
his affianced bride and both are seasick, and if the sick swain can
forget his own anguish in the happiness of holding the fair one's head
when she is at her worst- then he is in love, and his heart will be in
no danger of him as he passes his fir plantation. Other people, and
unfortunately by far the greater number of those who get married
must be classed among the "other people," will inevitably go through a
quarter or half an hour of greater or less badness as the case may be.
Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering
had been undergone in the streets leading from St. George's Hanover
Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate. There is no time at
which what the Italians call la figlia della Morte lays her cold
hand upon a man more awfully than during the first half hour that he
is alone with a woman whom he has married but never genuinely loved.

Death's daughter did not spare Theobald. He had behaved very well
hitherto. When Christina had offered to let him go, he had stuck to
his post with a magnanimity on which he had plumed himself ever since.
From that time forward he had said to himself. "I, at any rate, am the
very soul of honour; I am not," etc., etc. True, at the moment of
magnanimity the actual cash payment, so to speak, was still distant;
when his father gave formal consent to his marriage things began to
look more serious; when the College living had fallen vacant and
been accepted they looked more serious still; but when Christina
actually named the day, then Theobald's heart fainted within him.

The engagement had gone on so long that he had got into a groove,
and the prospect of change was disconcerting. Christina and he had got
on, he thought to himself, very nicely for a great number of years;
why- why- why should they not continue to go on as they were doing now
for the rest of their lives? But there was no more chance of escape
for him than for the sheep which is being driven to the butcher's back
premises, and like the sheep he felt that there was nothing to be
gained by resistance, so he made none. He behaved, in fact, with
decency, and was declared on all hands to be one of the happiest men
 imaginable.

Now, however, to change the metaphor, the drop had actually
fallen, and the poor wretch was hanging in mid air along with the
creature of his affections. This creature was now thirty-three years
old, and looked it: she had been weeping, and her eyes and nose were
reddish; if "I have done it and I am alive" was written on Mr.
Allaby's face after he had thrown the shoe, "I have done it, and I
do not see how I can possibly live much longer" was upon the face of
Theobald as he was being driven along by the fir plantation. This,
however, was not apparent at the Rectory. All that could be seen there
was the bobbing up and down of the postilion's head, which just
over-topped the hedge by the roadside as he rose in his stirrups,
and the black and yellow body of the carriage.

For some time the pair said nothing: what they must have felt during
the first half hour, the reader must guess, for it is beyond my
power to tell him; at the end of that time, however, Theobald had
rummaged up a conclusion from some odd corner of his soul to the
effect that now he and Christina were married, the sooner they fell
into their future mutual relations the better. If people who are in
a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they
can clearly recognise as reasonable, they will always find the next
step more easy both to see and take. What, then, thought Theobald, was
here at this moment the first and most obvious matter to be
considered, and what would be an equitable view of his and Christina's
relative positions in respect to it? Clearly their first dinner was
their first joint entry into the duties and pleasures of married life.
No less clearly it was Christina's duty to order it, and his own to
eat it and pay for it.

The arguments leading to this conclusion, and the conclusion itself,
flashed upon Theobald about three and a half miles after he had left
Crampsford on the road to Newmarket. He had breakfasted early, but his
usual appetite had failed him. They had left the vicarage at noon
without staying for the wedding breakfast. Theobald liked an  early
dinner; it dawned upon him that he was beginning to be hungry; from
this to the conclusion stated in the preceding paragraph the steps had
been easy. After a few minutes' further reflection he broached the
matter to his bride, and thus the ice was broken.

Mrs. Theobald was not prepared for so sudden an assumption of
importance. Her nerves, never of the strongest, had been strung to
their highest tension by the event of the morning. She wanted to
escape observation; she was conscious of looking a little older than
she quite liked to look as a bride who had been married that
morning; she feared the landlady, the chambermaid, the waiter-
everybody and everything; her heart beat so fast that she could hardly
speak, much less go through the ordeal of ordering dinner in a strange
hotel with a strange landlady. She begged and prayed to be let off. If
Theobald would only order dinner this once, she would order it any day
and every day in future.

But the inexorable Theobald was not to be put off with such absurd
excuses. He was master now. Had not Christina less than two hours
ago promised solemnly to honour and obey him, and was she turning
restive over such a trifle as this? The loving smile departed from his
face, and was succeeded by a scowl which that old Turk, his father,
might have envied. "Stuff and nonsense, my dearest Christina," he
exclaimed mildly, and stamped his foot upon the floor of the carriage.
"It is a wife's duty to order her husband's dinner; you are my wife,
and I shall expect you to order mine." For Theobald was nothing if
he was not logical.

The bride began to cry, and said he was unkind; whereon he said
nothing, but revolved unutterable things in his heart. Was this, then,
the end of his six years of unflagging devotion? Was it for this that,
when Christina had offered to let him off, he had stuck to his
engagement? Was this the outcome of her talks about duty and spiritual
mindedness- that now upon the very day of her marriage she should fail
to see that the first step in obedience to God lay in obedience to
himself He would drive back to Crampsford; he would complain to Mr.
and Mrs. Allaby; he didn't mean to have married Christina; he hadn't
married her; it was all a hideous dream; he  would- But a voice kept
ringing in his cars which said: "You CAN'T, CAN'T, CAN'T."

"CAN'T I?" screamed the unhappy creature to himself.

"No said the remorseless voice, "YOU CAN'T. YOU ARE A MARRIED MAN."

He rolled back in his corner of the carriage and for the first
time felt how iniquitous were the marriage laws of England. But he
would buy Milton's prose works and read his pamphlet on divorce. He
might perhaps be able to get them at Newmarket.

So the bride sat crying in one corner of the carriage; and the
bridegroom sulked in the other, and he feared her as only a bridegroom
can fear.

Presently, however, a feeble voice was heard from the bride's corner
saying:

"Dearest Theobald- dearest Theobald, forgive me; I have been very,
very wrong. Please do not be angry with me. I will order the- the-"
but the word "dinner" was checked by rising sobs.

When Theobald heard these words a load began to be lifted from his
heart, but he only looked towards her, and that not too pleasantly.

"Please tell me," continued the voice, "what you think you would
like, and I will tell the landlady when we get to Newmar-" but another
burst of sobs checked the completion of the word.

The load on Theobald's heart grew lighter and lighter. Was it
possible that she might not be going to henpeck him after all?
Besides, had she not diverted his attention from herself to his
approaching dinner?

He swallowed down more of his apprehensions and said, but still
gloomily, "I think we might have a roast fowl with bread sauce, new
potatoes and green peas, and then we will see if they could let us
have a cherry tart and some cream."

After a few minutes more he drew her towards him, kissed away her
tears, and assured her that he knew she would be a good wife to him.

"Dearest Theobald," she exclaimed in answer, "you are an angel."

Theobald believed her, and in ten minutes more the happy couple
alighted at the inn at Newmarket.

Bravely did Christina go through her arduous task. Eagerly did she
beseech the landlady, in secret, not to keep her Theobald waiting
longer than was absolutely necessary.

"If you have any soup ready, you know, Mrs. Barber, it might save
ten minutes, for we might have it while the fowl was browning."

See how necessity had nerved her! But in truth she had a splitting
headache, and would have given anything to have been alone.

The dinner was a success. A pint of sherry had warmed Theobald's
heart, and he began to hope that, after all, matters might still go
well with him. He had conquered in the first battle, and this gives
great prestige. How easy it had been, too! Why had he never treated
his sisters in this way? He would do so next time he saw them; he
might in time be able to stand up to his brother John, or even his
father. Thus do we build castles in air when flushed with wine and
conquest.

The end of the honeymoon saw Mrs. Theobald the most devotedly
obsequious wife in all England. According to the old saying,
Theobald had killed the cat at the beginning. It had been a very
little cat, a mere kitten in fact, or he might have been afraid to
face it, but such as it had been he had challenged it to mortal
combat, and had held up its dripping head defiantly before his
wife's face. The rest had been easy.

Strange that one whom I have described hitherto as so timid and
easily put upon should prove such a Tartar all of a sudden on the
day of his marriage. Perhaps I have passed over his years of courtship
too rapidly. During these he had become a tutor of his college, and
had at last been Junior Dean. I never yet knew a man whose sense of
his own importance did not become adequately developed after he had
held a resident fellowship for five or six years. True- immediately on
arriving within a ten-mile radius of his father's house, an
enchantment fell upon him, so that his knees waxed weak, his greatness
departed, and he again felt himself like an overgrown baby under a
perpetual cloud; but then he was not often at Elmhurst, and as soon as
he left it the spell was taken off again; once more he became the
fellow and tutor of his college, the Junior Dean, the betrothed of
Christina, the idol of the Allaby womankind. From all which may be
gathered that if Christina had been a Barbary hen, and had ruffled her
feathers in any show of resistance, Theobald would not have ventured
to swagger with her, but she was not a Barbary hen, she was only a
common hen, and that too with rather a smaller share of personal
bravery than hens generally have.

                          CHAPTER XIV


BATTERSBY-ON-THE-HILL was the name of the village of which
Theobald was now Rector. It contained 400 or 500 inhabitants,
scattered over a rather large area, and consisting entirely of farmers
and agricultural labourers. The Rectory was commodious, and placed
on the brow of a hill which gave it a delightful prospect. There was a
fair sprinkling of neighbours within visiting range, but with one or
two exceptions they were the clergymen and clergymen's families of the
surrounding villages.

By these the Pontifexes were welcomed as great acquisitions to the
neighbourhood. Mr. Pontifex, they said, was so clever; he had been
senior classic and senior wrangler; a perfect genius in fact, and
yet with so much sound practical common sense as well. As son of
such a distinguished man as the great Mr. Pontifex, the publisher,
he would come into a large property by-and-by. Was there not an
elder brother? Yes, but there would be so much that Theobald would
probably get something very considerable. Of course they would give
dinner parties. And Mrs. Pontifex, what a charming woman she was;
she was certainly not exactly pretty perhaps, but then she had such
a sweet smile and her manner was so bright and winning. She was so
devoted too to her husband and her husband to her; they really did
come up to one's ideas of what lovers used to be in days of old; it
was rare to meet with such a pair in these degenerate times; it was
quite beautiful, etc., etc. Such were the comments of the neighbours
on the new arrivals.

As for Theobald's own parishioners, the farmers were civil and the
labourers and their wives obsequious. There was a little dissent,
the legacy of a careless predecessor, but as Mrs. Theobald said
proudly, "I think Theobald may be trusted to deal with that." The
church was then an interesting specimen of late Norman, with some
early English additions. It was what in these days would be called
in a very bad state of repair, but forty or fifty years ago few
churches were in good repair. If there is one feature more
characteristic of the present generation than another it is that it
has been a great restorer of churches.

Horace preached church restoration in his ode:

             Delicta, majorum immeritus lues,
             Romane, donec templa refeceris
              AEdesque labentes deorum et
               Foeda nigro simulacra fumo.

Nothing went right with Rome for long together after the Augustan age,
but whether it was because she did restore the temples or because
she did not restore them, I know not. They certainly went all wrong
after Constantine's time and yet Rome is still a city of some
importance.

I may say here that before Theobald had been many years at Battersby
he found scope for useful work in the rebuilding of Battersby
church, which he carried out at considerable cost, towards which he
subscribed liberally himself. He was his own architect, and this saved
expense; but architecture was not very well understood about the
year 1834, when Theobald commenced operations, and the result is not
as satisfactory as it would have been if he had waited a few years
longer.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or
architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and
the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his
character appear in spite of him. I may very likely be condemning
myself, all the time that I am writing this book, for I know that
whether I like it or no I am portraying myself more surely than I am
portraying any of the characters whom I set before the reader. I am
sorry that it is so, but I cannot help it- after which sop to
Nemesis I will say that Battersby church in its amended form has
always struck me as a better portrait of Theobald than any sculptor or
painter short of a great master would be able to produce.

I remember staying with Theobald some six or seven months after he
was married, and while the old church was still standing. I went to
church, and felt as Naaman must have felt on certain occasions when he
had to accompany his master on his return after having been cured of
his leprosy. I have carried away a more vivid recollection of this and
of the people, than of Theobald's sermon. Even now I can see the men
in blue smock frocks reaching to their heels, and more than one old
woman in a scarlet cloak; the row of stolid, dull, vacant plough-boys,
ungainly in build, uncomely in face, lifeless, apathetic, a race a
good deal more like the prerevolution French peasant as described by
Carlyle than is pleasant to reflect upon- a race now supplanted by a
smarter, comelier, and more hopeful generation, which has discovered
that it too has a right to as much happiness as it can get, and with
clearer ideas about the best means of getting it.

They shamble in one after another, with steaming breath, for it is
winter, and loud clattering of hob-nailed boots; they beat the snow
from off them as they enter, and through the opened door I catch a
momentary glimpse of a dreary, leaden sky and snow-clad tombstones.
Somehow or other I find the strain which Handel has wedded to the
words "There the ploughman near at hand" has got into my head and
there is no getting it out again. How marvellously old Handel
understood these people!
 They bob to Theobald as they pass the reading desk ("The people
hereabouts are truly respectful," whispered Christina to me; "they
know their betters"), and take their seats in a long row against the
wall. The choir clamber up into the gallery with their instruments-
a violoncello, a clarinet, and a trombone. I see them and soon I
hear them, for there is a hymn before the service, a wild strain, a
remnant, if I mistake not, of some pre-Reformation litany. I have
heard what I believe was its remote musical progenitor in the church
of SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice not five years since; and again I
have heard it far away in mid-Atlantic upon a grey sea-Sabbath in
June, when neither winds nor waves are stirring, so that the emigrants
gather on deck, and their plaintive psalm goes forth upon the silver
haze of the sky, and on the wilderness of a sea that has sighed till
it can sigh no longer. Or it may be heard at some Methodist Camp
Meeting upon a Welsh hillside, but in the churches it is gone forever.
If I were a musician I would take it as the subject for the adagio
in a Wesleyan symphony.

Gone now are the clarinet, the violoncello, and the trombone, wild
minstrelsy as of the doleful creatures in Ezekiel, discordant, but
infinitely pathetic. Gone is that scarebabe stentor, that bellowing
bull of Bashan, the village blacksmith, gone is the melodious
carpenter, gone the brawny shepherd with the red hair, who roared more
lustily than all, until they came to the words, "Shepherds, with
your flocks abiding," when modesty covered him with confusion, and
compelled him to be silent, as though his own health were being drunk.
They were doomed and had a presentiment of evil, even when first I saw
them, but they had still a little lease of choir life remaining, and
they roared out:

wick - ed hands have pierced and nailed him to a tree. (See
illustration.)

but no description can give a proper idea of the effect. When I was
last in Battersby church there was a harmonium played by a
sweet-looking girl with a choir of school children around her, and
they chanted the canticles to the most correct of chants, and they
sang Hymns Ancient and Modern; the high pews were gone, nay, the
very gallery in which the old choir had sung was removed as an
accursed thing which might remind the people of the high places, and
Theobald was old, and Christina was lying under the yew trees in the
churchyard.

But in the evening later on I saw three very old men come
chuckling out of a dissenting chapel, and surely enough they were my
old friends the blacksmith, the carpenter, and the shepherd. There was
a look of content upon their faces which made me feel certain they had
been singing; not doubtless with the old glory of the violoncello, the
clarinet, and the trombone, but still songs of Sion and no new fangled
papistry.

                          CHAPTER XV


THE hymn had engaged my attention; when it was over I had time to
take stock of the congregation. They were chiefly farmers- fat, very
well-to-do folk, who had come some of them with their wives and
children from outlying farms two and three miles away; haters of
popery and of anything which anyone might choose to say was popish;
good, sensible fellows who detested theory of any kind, whose ideal
was the maintenance of the status quo with perhaps a loving
reminiscence of old war times, and a sense of wrong that the weather
was not more completely under their control, who desired higher prices
and cheaper wages, but otherwise were most contented when things
were changing least; tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was
familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been
equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at
seeing it practised.

"What can there be in common between Theobald and his parishioners?"
said Christina to me, in the course of the evening, when her husband
was for a few moments absent. "Of course one must not complain, but
I assure you it grieves me to see a man of Theobald's ability thrown
away upon such a place as this. If we had only been at Gaysbury, where
there are the A's, the B's, the C's, and Lord D's place, as you
know, quite close, I should not then have felt that we were living
in such a desert; but I suppose it is for the best," she added more
cheerfully, "and then of course the Bishop will come to us whenever he
is in the neighbourhood, and if we were at Gaysbury he might have gone
to Lord D's."

Perhaps I have now said enough to indicate the kind of place in
which Theobald's lines were cast, and the sort of woman he had
married. As for his own habits, I see him trudging through muddy lanes
and over long sweeps of plover-haunted pastures to visit a dying
cottager's wife. He takes her meat and wine from his own table, and
that not a little only but liberally. According to his lights also, he
administers what he is pleased to call spiritual consolation.

"I am afraid I'm going to Hell, Sir," says the sick woman with a
whine. "Oh, Sir, save me, save me, don't let me go there. I couldn't
stand it, Sir, I should die with fear, the very thought of it drives
me into a cold sweat all over."

"Mrs. Thompson," says Theobald gravely, "you must have faith in
the precious blood of your Redeemer; it is He alone who can save you."

"But are you sure, Sir," says she, looking wistfully at him, "that
He will forgive me- for I've not been a very good woman, indeed I
haven't- and if God would only say 'Yes' outright with His mouth
when I ask whether my sins are forgiven me-"

"But they are forgiven you, Mrs. Thompson," says Theobald with
some sternness, for the same ground has been gone over a good many
times already, and he has borne the unhappy woman's misgivings now for
a full quarter of an hour. Then he puts a stop to the conversation
by repeating prayers taken from the "Visitation of the Sick," and
overawes the poor wretch from expressing further anxiety as to her
condition.

"Can't you tell me, Sir," she exclaims piteously, as she sees that
he is preparing to go away, "can't you tell me that there is no Day of
Judgement, and that there is no such place as Hell? I can do without
the Heaven, Sir, but I cannot do with the Hell." Theobald is much
shocked.

"Mrs. Thompson," he rejoins impressively, "Let me implore you to
suffer no doubt concerning these two cornerstones of our religion to
cross your mind at a moment like the present. If there is one thing
more certain than another it is that we shall all appear before the
Judgement Seat of Christ, and that the wicked will be consumed in a
lake of everlasting fire. Doubt this, Mrs. Thompson, and you are
lost."

The poor woman buries her fevered head in the coverlet in a paroxysm
of fear which at last finds relief in tears.

"Mrs. Thompson," says Theobald, with his hand on the door,
"compose yourself, be calm; you must please to take my word for it
that at the Day of your sins will be all washed white in the blood
of the Lamb, Mrs. Thompson. Yea," he exclaims frantically, "though
they be as scarlet, yet shall they be as white as wool," and he
makes off as fast as he can from the fetid atmosphere of the cottage
to the pure air outside. Oh, how thankful he is when the interview
is over!

He returns home, conscious that he has done his duty, and
administered the comforts of religion to a dying sinner. His
admiring wife awaits him at the Rectory, and assures him that never
yet was clergyman so devoted to the welfare of his flock. He
believes her; he has a natural tendency to believe anything that is
told him, and who should know the facts of the case better than his
wife? Poor fellow! He has done his best, but what does a fish's best
come to when the fish is out of water? He has left meat and wine- that
he can do; he will call again and will leave more meat and wine; day
after day he trudges over the same plover-haunted fields, and
listens at the end of his walk to the same agony of forebodings, which
day after day he silences, but does not remove, till at last a
merciful weakness renders the sufferer careless of her future, and
Theobald is satisfied that her mind is now peacefully at rest in
Jesus.

                          CHAPTER XVI


HE does not like this branch of his profession- indeed he hates
it- but will not admit it to himself. The habit of not admitting
things to himself has become a confirmed one with him. Nevertheless
there haunts him an ill-defined sense that life would be pleasanter if
there were no sick sinners, or if they would at any rate face an
eternity of torture with more indifference. He does not feel that he
is in his element. The farmers look as if they were in their
element. They are full-bodied, healthy, and contented; but between him
and them there is a great gulf fixed. A hard and drawn look begins
to settle about the corners of his mouth, so that even if he were
not in a black coat and white tie a child might know him for a parson.

He knows that he is doing his duty. Every day convinces him of
this more firmly; but then there is not much duty for him to do. He is
sadly in want of occupation. He has no taste for any of those field
sports which were not considered unbecoming for a clergyman forty
years ago. He does not ride, nor shoot, nor fish, nor course, nor play
cricket. Study, to do him justice, he had never really liked, and what
inducement was there for him to study at Battersby? He reads neither
old books nor new ones. He does not interest himself in art or science
or politics, but he sets his back up with some promptness if any of
them show any development unfamiliar to himself. True, he writes his
own sermons, but even his wife considers that his forte lies rather in
the example of his life (which is one long act of self-devotion)
than in his utterances from the pulpit. After breakfast he retires
to his study; he cuts little bits out of the Bible and gums them
with exquisite neatness by the side of other little bits; this he
calls making a Harmony of the Old and New Testaments. Alongside the
extracts he copies in the very perfection of handwriting extracts from
Mede (the only man, according to Theobald, who really understood the
Book of Revelation), Patrick, and other old divines. He works steadily
at this for half an hour every morning during many years, and the
result is doubtless valuable. After some years have gone by he hears
his children their lessons, and the daily oft-repeated screams that
issue from the study during the lesson hours tell their own horrible
story over the house. He has also taken to collecting a hortus siccus,
and through the interest of his father was once mentioned in the
Saturday Magazine as having been the first to find a plant, whose name
I have forgotten, in the neighbourhood of Battersby. This number of
the Saturday Magazine has been bound in red morocco, and is kept
upon the drawing-room table. He potters about his garden; if he
hears a hen cackling he runs and tells Christina, and straightway goes
hunting for the egg.

When the two Miss Allabys came, as they sometimes did, to stay
with Christina, they said the life led by their sister and
brother-in-law was an idyll. Happy indeed was Christina in her choice-
for that she had had a choice was a fiction which soon took root among
them- and happy Theobald in his Christina. Somehow or other
Christina was always a little shy of cards when her sisters were
staying with her, though at other times she enjoyed a game of cribbage
or a rubber of whist heartily enough, but her sisters knew they
would never be asked to Battersby again if they were to refer to
that little matter, and on the whole it was worth their while to be
asked to Battersby. If Theobald's temper was rather irritable he did
not vent it upon them.

By nature reserved, if he could have found someone to cook his
dinner for him, he would rather have lived in a desert island than
not. In his heart of hearts he held with Pope that "the greatest
nuisance to mankind is man" or words to that effect- only that
women, with the exception perhaps of Christina, were worse. Yet for
all this, when visitors called he put a better face on it than
anyone who was behind the scenes would have expected.

He was quick too at introducing the names of any literary
celebrities whom he had met at his father's house, and soon
established an all-around reputation which satisfied even Christina
herself.

Who so integer vitae scelerisque purus, it was asked, as Mr.
Pontifex of Battersby? Who so fit to be consulted if any difficulty
about parish management should arise? Who such a happy mixture of
the sincere uninquiring Christian and of the man of the world? For
so people actually called him. They said he was such an admirable
man of business. Certainly if he had said he would pay a sum of
money at a certain time, the money would be forthcoming on the
appointed day, and this is saying a good deal for any man. His
constitutional timidity rendered him incapable of an attempt to
overreach when there was the remotest chance of opposition or
publicity, and his correct bearing and somewhat stern expression
were a great protection to him against being overreached. He never
talked of money, and invariably changed the subject whenever money was
introduced. His expression of unutterable horror at all kinds of
meanness was a sufficient guarantee that he was not mean himself.
Besides, he had no business transactions save of the most ordinary
butcher's book and baker's book description. His tastes- if he had
any- were, as we have seen, simple; he had L900 a year and a house;
the neighbourhood was cheap, and for some time he had no children to
be a drag upon drag upon him. Who was not to be envied, and if
envied why then respected, if Theobald was not enviable?

Yet I imagine that Christina was on the whole happier than her
husband. She had not to go and visit sick parishioners, and the
management of her house and the keeping of her accounts afforded as
much occupation as she desired. Her principal duty was, as she well
said, to her husband- to love him, honour him, and keep him in a
good temper. To do her justice, she fulfilled this duty to the
uttermost of her power. It would have been better perhaps if she had
not so frequently assured her husband that he was the best and
wisest of mankind, for no one in his little world ever dreamed of
telling him anything else, and it was not long before he ceased to
have any doubt upon the matter. As for his temper, which had become
very violent at times, she took care to humour it on the slightest
sign of an approaching outbreak. She had early found that this was
much the easiest plan. The thunder was seldom for herself. Long before
her marriage even she had studied his little ways, and knew how to add
fuel to the fire as long as the fire seemed to want it, and then to
damp it down, making as little smoke as possible.

In money matters she was scrupulousness itself. Theobald made her
a quarterly allowance for her dress, pocket-money, and little
charities and presents. In these last items she was liberal in
proportion to her income; indeed she dressed with great economy and
gave away whatever was over in presents, or charity. Oh, what a
comfort it was to Theobald to reflect that he had a wife on whom he
could rely never to cost him a sixpence of unauthorised expenditure!
Letting alone her absolute submission, the perfect coincidence of
her opinion with his own upon every subject and her constant
assurances to him that he was right in everything which he took it
into his head to say or do, what a tower of strength to him was her
exactness in money matters! As years went by he became as fond of
his wife as it was in his nature to be of any living thing, and
applauded himself for having stuck to his engagement- a piece of
virtue of which he was now reaping the reward. Even when Christina did
outrun her quarterly stipend by some thirty shillings or a couple of
pounds, it was always made perfectly clear to Theobald how the
deficiency had arisen- there had been an unusually costly evening
dress bought which was to last a long time, or somebody's unexpected
wedding had necessitated a more handsome present than the quarter's
balance would quite allow: the excess of expenditure was always repaid
in the following quarter or quarters even though it were only ten
shillings at a time.

I believe, however, that after they had been married some twenty
years, Christina had somewhat fallen from her original perfection as
regards money. She had got gradually in arrears during many successive
quarters, till she had contracted a chronic loan, a sort of domestic
national debt, amounting to between seven and eight pounds. Theobald
at length felt that a remonstrance had become imperative, and took
advantage of his silver wedding day to inform Christina that her
indebtedness was cancelled, and at the same time to beg that she would
endeavour henceforth to equalise her expenditure and her income. She
burst into tears of love and gratitude, assured him that he was the
best and most generous of men, and never during the remainder of her
married life was she a single shilling behindhand.

Christina hated change of all sorts no less cordially than her
husband. She and Theobald had nearly everything in this world that
they could wish for; why, then, should people desire to introduce
all sorts of changes of which no one could foresee the end?
Religion, she was deeply convinced, had long since attained its
final development, nor could it enter into the heart of reasonable man
to conceive any faith more perfect than was inculcated by the Church
of England. She could imagine no  position more honourable than that
of a clergyman's wife unless indeed it were a bishop's. Considering
his father's influence it was not at all impossible that Theobald
might be a bishop some day- and then- then would occur to her that one
little flaw in the practice of the Church of England -a flaw not
indeed in its doctrine, but in its policy, which she believed on the
whole to be a mistaken one in this respect. I mean the fact that a
bishop's wife does not take the rank of her husband.

This had been the doing of Elizabeth, who had been a bad woman, of
exceedingly doubtful moral character, and at heart a Papist to the
last. Perhaps people ought to have been above mere considerations of
worldly dignity, but the world was as it was, and such things
carried weight with them, whether they ought to do so or no. Her
influence as plain Mrs. Pontifex, wife, we will say, of the Bishop
of Winchester, would no doubt be considerable. Such a character as
hers could not fail to carry weight if she were ever in a sufficiently
conspicuous sphere for its influence to be widely felt; but as Lady
Winchester- or the Bishopess- which would sound quite nicely- who
could doubt that her power for good would be enhanced? And it would be
all the nicer because if she had a daughter, the daughter would not be
a Bishopess unless indeed she were to marry a Bishop too, which
would not be likely.

These were her thoughts upon her good days; at other times she
would, to do her justice, have doubts whether she was in all
respects as spiritually minded as she ought to be. She must press
on, press on, till every enemy to her salvation was surmounted and
Satan himself lay bruised under her feet. It occurred to her on one of
these occasions that she might steal a march over some of her
contemporaries if she were to leave off eating black puddings, of
which whenever they had killed a pig she had hitherto partaken freely;
and if she were also careful that no fowls were served at her table
which had had their necks wrung, but only such as had had their
throats cut and been allowed to bleed. St. Paul and the Church of
had insisted upon it as necessary that even Gentile converts should
abstain from things strangled and from blood, and they had joined this
prohibition with that of a vice about the abominable nature of which
there could be no question; it would be well therefore to abstain in
future and see whether any noteworthy spiritual result ensued. She did
abstain, and was certain that from the day of her resolve she had felt
stronger, purer in heart, and in all respects more spiritually
minded than she had ever felt hitherto. Theobald did not lay so much
stress on this as she did, but as she settled what he should have at
dinner she could take care that he got no strangled fowls; as for
black puddings, happily, he had seen them made when he was a boy,
and had never got over his aversion for them. She wished the matter
were one of more general observance than it was; this was just a
case in which as Lady Winchester she might have been able to do what
as plain Mrs. Pontifex it was hopeless even to attempt.

And thus this worthy couple jogged on from month to month and from
year to year. The reader, if he has passed middle life and has a
clerical connection, will probably remember scores and scores of
rectors and rectors' wives who differed in no material respect from
Theobald and Christina. Speaking from a recollection and experience
extending over nearly eighty years from the time when I was myself a
child in the nursery of a vicarage, I should say I had drawn the
better rather than the worst side of the life of an English country
parson of some fifty years ago. I admit, however, that there are no
such people to be found nowadays. A more united or, on the whole,
happier, couple could not have been found in England. One grief only
overshadowed the early years of their married life: I mean the fact
that no living children were born to them.

                          CHAPTER XVII


IN the course of time this sorrow was removed. At the beginning of
the fifth year of her married life Christina was safely delivered of a
boy. This was on the sixth of September, 1835.

Word was immediately sent to old Mr. Pontifex, who received the news
with real pleasure. His son John's wife had borne daughters only,
and he was seriously uneasy lest there should be a failure in the male
line of his descendants. The good news, therefore, was doubly welcome,
and caused as much delight at Elmhurst as dismay in Woburn Square,
Woburn Square, where the John Pontifexes were then living.

Here, indeed, this freak of fortune was felt to be all the more
cruel on account of the impossibility of resenting it openly; but
the delighted grandfather cared nothing for what the John Pontifexes
might feel or not feel; he had wanted a grandson and he had got a
grandson, and this should be enough for everybody; and, now that
Mrs. Theobald had taken to good ways, she might bring him more
grandsons, which would be desirable, for he should not feel safe
with fewer than three.

He rang the bell for the butler.

"Gelstrap," he said solemnly, "I want to go down into the cellar."

Then Gelstrap preceded him with a candle, and he went into the inner
vault where he kept his choicest wines.

He passed many bins: there was 1803 Port, 1792 Imperial Tokay,
1800 Claret, 1812 Sherry, these and many others were passed, but it
was not for them that the head of the Pontifex family had gone down
into his inner cellar. A bin, which had appeared empty until the
full light of the candle had been brought to bear upon it, was now
found it, to contain a single pint bottle. This was the object of
Mr. Pontifex's search.

Gelstrap had often pondered over this bottle. It had been placed
there by Mr. Pontifex himself about a dozen years previously, on his
return from a visit to his friend the celebrated traveller, Dr. Jones-
but there was no tablet above the bin which might give a clue to the
nature of its contents. On more than one occasion when his master
had gone out and left his keys accidentally behind him, as he
sometimes did, Gelstrap had submitted the bottle to all the tests he
could venture upon, but it was so carefully sealed that wisdom
remained quite shut out from that entrance at which he would have
welcomed her most gladly- and indeed from all other entrances, for
he could make out nothing at all.

And now the mystery was to be solved. But alas! it seemed as
though the last chance of securing even a sip of the contents was to
be removed for ever, for Mr. Pontifex took the bottle into his own
hands and held it up to the light after carefully examining the
seal. He smiled and left the bin with the bottle in his hands.

Then came a catastrophe. He stumbled over an empty hamper; there was
the sound of a fall- a smash of broken glass, and in an instant the
cellar floor was covered with the liquid that had been preserved so
carefully for so many years.

With his usual presence of mind Mr. Pontifex gasped out a month's
warning to Gelstrap. Then he got up, and stamped as Theobald had
done when Christina had wanted not to order his dinner.

"It's water from the Jordan," he exclaimed furiously, "which I
have been saving for the baptism of my eldest grandson. Damn you,
Gelstrap, how dare you be so infernally careless as to leave that
hamper littering about the cellar?"

I wonder the water of the sacred stream did not stand upright as a
heap upon the cellar floor and rebuke him. Gelstrap told the other
servants afterwards that his master's language had made his backbone
curdle.

The moment, however, that he heard the word "water" he saw his way
again, and flew to the pantry. Before his master had well noted his
absence he returned with a little sponge and a basin, and had begun
sopping up the waters of the Jordan as though they had been a common
slop.

"I'll filter it, Sir," said Gelstrap meekly. "It'll come quite
clean."

Mr. Pontifex saw hope in this suggestion, which was shortly
carried out by the help of a piece of blotting paper and a funnel,
under his own eyes. Eventually it was found that half a pint was
saved, and this was held to be sufficient.

Then he made preparations for a visit to Battersby. He ordered
goodly hampers of the choicest eatables, he selected a goodly hamper
of choice drinkables. I say choice and not choicest, for although in
his first exaltation he had selected some of his very best wine, yet
on reflection he had felt that there was moderation in all things, and
as he was parting with his best water from the Jordan, he would only
send some of his second best wine.

Before he went to Battersby he stayed a day or two in London,
which he now seldom did, being over seventy years old, and having
practically retired from business. The John Pontifexes, who kept a
sharp eye on him, discovered to their dismay that he had had an
interview with his solicitors.

                          CHAPTER XVIII


FOR the first time in his life Theobald felt that he had done
something right, and could look forward to meeting his father
without alarm. The old gentleman, indeed, had written him a most
cordial letter, announcing his intention of standing godfather to
the boy- nay, I may as well give it in full, as it shows the writer at
his best. It runs:


"DEAR THEOBALD,- Your letter gave me very sincere pleasure, the more
so because I had made up my mind for the worst; pray accept my most
hearty congratulations for my daughter-in-law and for yourself.

"I have long preserved a phial of water from the Jordan for the
christening of my first grandson, should it please God to grant me
one. It was given me by my old friend, Dr. Jones. You will agree
with me that though the efficacy of the sacrament does not depend upon
the source of the baptismal waters, yet, ceteris paribus, there is a
sentiment attaching to the waters of the Jordan which should not be
despised. Small matters like this sometimes influence a child's
whole future career.
 "I shall bring my own cook, and have told him to get everything ready
for the christening dinner. Ask as many of your best neighbours as
your table will hold. By the way, I have told Lesueur not to get a
lobster- you had better drive over yourself and get one from
Saltness (for Battersby was only fourteen or fifteen miles from the
sea coast); they are better there, at least I think so, than
anywhere else in England.

"I have put your boy down for something in the event of his
attaining the age of twenty-one years. If your brother John
continues to have nothing but girls I may do more later on, but I have
many claims upon me, and am not as well off as you may imagine.-
Your affectionate father,

                                       "G. PONTIFEX."


A few days afterwards the writer of the above letter made his
appearance in a fly which had brought him from Gildenham to Battersby,
a distance of fourteen miles. There was Lesueur, the cook, on the
box with the driver, and as many hampers as the fly could carry were
disposed upon the roof and elsewhere. Next day the John Pontifexes had
to come, and Eliza and Maria, as well as Alethea, who, by her own
special request, was godmother to the boy, for Mr. Pontifex had
decided that they were to form a happy family party; so come they
all must, and be happy they all must, or it would be the worse for
them. Next day the author of all this hubbub was actually
christened. Theobald had proposed to call him George after old Mr.
Pontifex, but strange to say, Mr. Pontifex overruled him in favour
of the name Ernest. The word "earnest" was just beginning to come into
fashion, and he thought the possession of such a name might, like
his having been baptised in water from the Jordan, have a permanent
effect upon the boy's character, and influence him for good during the
more critical periods of his life.

I was asked to be his second godfather, and was rejoiced to have
an opportunity of meeting Alethea, whom I had not seen for some few
years, but with whom I had been in constant correspondence. She and
I had always been friends from the time we had played together as
children onwards. When the death of her grandfather and grandmother
severed her connection with Paleham my intimacy with the Pontifexes
was kept up by my having been at school and college with Theobald, and
each time I saw her I admired her more and more as the best,
kindest, wittiest, most lovable, and, to my mind, handsomest woman
whom I had ever seen. None of the Pontifexes were deficient in good
looks; they were a well-grown, shapely family enough, but Alethea
was the flower of the flock even as regards good looks, while in
respect of all other qualities that make a woman lovable, it seemed as
though the stock that had been intended for the three daughters, and
would have been about sufficient for them, had all been allotted to
herself, her sisters getting none, and she all.

It is impossible for me to explain how it was that she and I never
married. We two knew exceedingly well, and that must suffice for the
reader. There was the most perfect sympathy and understanding
between us; we knew that neither of us would marry anyone else. I
had asked her to marry me a dozen times over; having said this much
I will say no more upon a point which is in no way necessary for the
development of my story. For the last few years there had been
difficulties in the way of our meeting, and I had not seen her,
though, as I have said, keeping up a close correspondence with her.
Naturally I was overjoyed to meet her again; she was now just thirty
years old, but I thought she looked handsomer than ever.

Her father, of course, was the lion of the party, but seeing that we
were all meek and quite willing to be eaten, he roared to us rather
than at us. It was a fine sight to see him tucking his napkin under
his rosy old gills, and letting it fall over his capacious waistcoat
wwle the high light from the chandelier danced about the bump of
benevolence on his bald old head like a star of Bethlehem.

The soup was real turtle; the old gentleman was evidently well
pleased and he was beginning to come out. Gelstrap stood behind his
master's chair. I sat next Mrs. Theobald on her left hand, and was
thus just opposite her father-in-law, whom I had every opportunity
of observing.

During the first ten minutes or so, which were taken up with the
soup and the bringing in of the fish, I should probably have
thought, if I had not long since made up my mind about him, what a
fine old man he was and how proud his children should be of him; but
suddenly as he was helping himself to lobster sauce, he flushed
crimson, a look of extreme vexation suffused his face, and he darted
two furtive but fiery glances to the two ends of the table, one for
Theobald and one for Christina. They, poor simple souls, of course saw
that something was exceedingly wrong, and so did I, but I couldn't
guess what it was till I heard the old man hiss in Christina's ear:
"It was not made with a hen lobster. What's the use," he continued,
"of my calling the boy Ernest, and getting him christened in water
from the Jordan, if his own father does not know a cock from a hen
lobster?"

This cut me too, for I felt that till that moment I had not so
much as known that there were cocks and hens among lobsters, but had
vaguely thought that in the matter of matrimony they were even as
the angels in heaven, and grew up almost spontaneously from rocks
and seaweed.

Before the next course was over Mr. Pontifex had recovered his
temper, and from that time to the end of the evening he was at his
best. He told us all about the water from the Jordan; how it had
been brought by Dr. Jones along with some stone jars of water from the
Rhine, the Rhone, the Elbe, and the Danube, and what trouble he had
had with them at the Custom Houses, and how the intention had been
to make punch with waters from all the greatest rivers in Europe;
and how he, Mr. Pontifex, had saved the Jordan water from going into
the bowl, etc., etc. "No, no, no," he continued, "it wouldn't have
done at all, you know; very profane idea; so we each took a pint
bottle of it home with us, and the punch was much better without it. I
had a narrow escape with mine, though, the other day; I fell over a
hamper in the cellar, when I was getting it up to bring to
Battersby, and if I had not taken the greatest care the bottle would
certainly have been broken, but I saved it." And Gelstrap was standing
behind his chair all the time.

Nothing more happened to ruffle Mr. Pontifex, so we had a delightful
evening, which has often recurred to me while watching the
after-career of my godson.

I called a day or two afterwards and found Mr. Pontifex still at
Battersby, laid up with one of those attacks of liver and depression
to which he was becoming more and more subject. I stayed to
luncheon. The old gentleman was cross and very difficult; he could eat
nothing- had no appetite at all. Christina tried to coax him with a
little bit of the fleshy part of a mutton chop. "How in the name of
reason can I be asked to eat a mutton chop?" he exclaimed angrily;
"you forget, my dear Christina, that you have to deal with a stomach
that is totally disorganised," and he pushed the plate from him,
pouting and frowning like a naughty old child. Writing as I do by
the light of a later knowledge, I suppose I should have seen nothing
in this but the world's growing pains, the disturbance inseparable
from transition in human things. I suppose in reality not a leaf
goes yellow in autumn care about its sap and making the parent tree
very uncomfortable by long growling and  grumbling- but surely
nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business
if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap
one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little
cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank
of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that
its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow,
but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live
consciously on its own account?

About a year and a half afterwards the tables were turned on
Battersby- for Mrs. John Pontifex was safely delivered of a boy. A
year or so later still, George Pontifex was himself struck down
suddenly by a fit of paralysis, much as his mother had been, but he
did not see the years of his mother. When his will was opened, it
was found that an original bequest of L20,000 to Theobald himself
(over and above the sum that had been settled upon him and Christina
at the time of his marriage) had been cut down to L17,500 when Mr.
Pontifex left "something" to Ernest. The "something" proved to be
L2500, which was to accumulate in the hands of trustees. The rest of
the property went to John Pontifex, except that each of the
daughters was left with about L15,000 over and above L5000 a piece
which they inherited from their mother.

Theobald's father then had told him the truth but not the whole
truth. Nevertheless, what right had Theobald to complain? Certainly it
was rather hard to make him think that he and his were to be
gainers, and get the honour and glory of the bequest, when all the
time the money was virtually being taken out of Theobald's own pocket.
On the other hand the father doubtless argued that he had never told
Theobald he was to have anything at all; he had a full right to do
what he liked with his own money; if Theobald chose to indulge in
unwarrantable expectations that was no affair of his; as it was he was
providing for him liberally; and if he did take L2500 of Theobald's
share he was still leaving it to Theobald's son, which, of course, was
much the same thing in the end.

No one can deny that the testator had strict right upon his side;
nevertheless the reader will agree with me that Theobald and Christina
might not have considered the christening dinner so great a success if
all the facts had been before them. Mr. Pontifex had during his own
lifetime set up a monument in Elmhurst Church to the memory of his
wife (a slab with urns and cherubs like illegitimate children of
King George the Fourth, and all the rest of it), and had left space
for his own epitaph underneath that of his wife. I do not know whether
it was written by one of his children, or whether they got some friend
to write it for them. I do not believe that any satire was intended. I
believe that it was the intention to convey that nothing short of
the Day of could give anyone an idea how good a man Mr. Pontifex had
been, but at first I found it hard to think that it was free from
guile.

The epitaph begins by giving dates of birth and death; then sets out
that the deceased was for many years head of the firm of Fairlie and
Pontifex, and also resident in the parish of Elmhurst. There is not
a syllable of either praise or dispraise. The last lines run as
follows:

            HE NOW LIES AWAITING A JOYFUL RESURRECTION
                         AT THE LAST DAY
                    WHAT MANNER OF MAN HE WAS
                     THAT DAY WILL DISCOVER.

                          CHAPTER XIX


THIS much, however, we may say in the meantime, that having lived to
be nearly seventy-three years old and died rich he must have been in
very fair harmony with his surroundings. I have heard it said
sometimes that such and such a person's life was a lie: but no man's
life can be a very bad lie; as long as it continues at all it is at
worst nine-tenths of

Mr. Pontifex's life not only continued a long time, but was
prosperous right up to the end. Is not this enough? Being in this
world is it not our most obvious business to make the most of it- to
observe what things do bona fide tend to long life and comfort, and to
act accordingly? All animals, except man, know that the principal
business of life is to enjoy it- and they do enjoy it as much as man
and other circumstances will allow. He has spent his life best who has
enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more
than is good for us. If Mr. Pontifex is to be blamed it is for not
having eaten and drunk less and thus suffered less from his liver, and
lived perhaps a year or two longer.

Goodness is naught unless it tends towards old age and sufficiency
of means. I speak broadly and exceptis excipiendis. So the psalmist
says, "The righteous shall not lack anything that is good." Either
this is mere poetical licence, or it follows that he who lacks
anything that is good is not righteous; there is a presumption also
that he who has passed a long life without lacking anything that is
good has himself also been good enough for practical purposes.

Mr. Pontifex never lacked anything he much cared about. True, he
might have been happier than he was if he had cared about things which
he did not care for, but the gist of this lies in the "if he had
cared." We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making
ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done, but in this
particular case Mr. Pontifex did not care, and would not have gained
much by getting what he did not want.

There is no casting of swine's meat before men worse than that which
would flatter virtue as though her true origin were not good enough
for her, but she must have a lineage, deduced as it were by
spiritual heralds, from some stock with which she has nothing to do.
Virtue's true lineage is older and more respectable than any that
can be invented for her. She springs from man's experience
concerning his own well-being- and this, though not infallible, is
still the least fallible thing we have. A system which cannot stand
without a better foundation than this must have something so
unstable within itself that it will topple over on whatever pedestal
we place it.

The world has long ago settled that morality and virtue are what
bring men peace at the last. "Be virtuous," says the copy-book, "and
you will be happy." Surely if a reputed virtue fails often in this
respect it is only an insidious form of vice, and if a reputed vice
brings no very serious mischief on a man's later years it is not so
bad a vice as it is said to be. Unfortunately, though we are all of
a mind about the main opinion that virtue is what tends to
happiness, and vice what ends in sorrow, we are not so unanimous about
details- that is to say as to whether any given course, such, we
will say, as smoking, has a tendency to happiness or the reverse.

I submit it as the result of my own poor observation, that a good
deal of unkindness and selfishness on the part of parents towards
children is not generally followed by ill consequences to the
parents themselves. They may cast a gloom over their children's
lives for many years without having to suffer anything that will
hurt them. I should say, then, that it shows no great moral
obliquity on the part of parents if within certain limits they make
their children's lives a burden to them.

Granted that Mr. Pontifex's was not a very exalted character,
ordinary men are not required to have very exalted characters. It is
enough if we are of the same moral and mental stature as the "main" or
"mean" part of men- that is to say as the average.

It is involved in the very essence of things that rich men who die
old shall have been mean. The greatest and wisest of mankind will be
almost always found to be the meanest- the ones who have kept the
"mean" best between excess either of virtue or vice. They hardly
ever have been prosperous if they have not done this, and, considering
how many miscarry altogether, it is no small feather in a man's cap if
he has been no worse than his neighbours. Homer tells us about someone
who made it his business aien arhoteuein kai upeirhochon emmenai allon
-- always to excel and to stand higher than other people. What
uncompanionable, disagreeable person he must have been! Homer's heroes
generally came to a bad end, and I doubt not that this gentleman,
whoever he was, did so sooner or later.

A very high standard, again, involves the possession of rare
virtues, and rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that
have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be
serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more
durable metal.

People divide off vice and virtue as though they were two things,
neither of which had with it anything of the other. This is not so.
There is no useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly
any vice, if any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue;
virtue and vice are like life and death, or mind and matter -things
which cannot exist without being qualified by their opposite. The most
absolute life contains death, and the corpse is still in many respects
living; so also it has been said, "If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to
mark what is done amiss," which shows that even the highest ideal we
can conceive will yet admit so much compromise with vice as shall
countenance the poor abuses of the time, if they are not too
outrageous. That vice pays homage to virtue is notorious; we call this
hypocrisy; there should be a word found for the homage which virtue
not unfrequently pays, or at any rate would be wise in paying, to
vice.

I grant that some men will find happiness in having what we all feel
to be a higher moral standard than others. If they go in for this,
however, they must be content with virtue as her own reward, and not
grumble if they find lofty Quixotism an expensive luxury, whose
rewards belong to a kingdom that is not of this world. They must not
wonder if they cut a poor figure in trying to make the most of both
worlds. Disbelieve as we may the details of the accounts which
record the growth of the Christian religion, yet a great part of
Christian teaching will remain as true as though we accepted the
details. We cannot serve God and Mammon; strait is the way and
narrow is the gate which leads to what those who live by faith hold to
be best worth having, and there is no way of saying this better than
the Bible has done. It is well there should be some who think thus, as
it is well there should be speculators in commerce, who will often
burn their fingers- but it is not well that the majority should
leave the "mean" and beaten path.

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure- tangible material
prosperity in this world- is the safest test of virtue. Progress has
ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme
sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than
to asceticism. To use a commercial metaphor, competition is so keen,
and the margin of profits has been cut down so closely that virtue
cannot afford to throw any  bona fide chance away, and must base her
action rather on the actual moneying out of conduct than on a
flattering prospectus. She will not therefore neglect- as some do
who are prudent and economical enough in other matters- the
important factor of our chance of escaping detection, or at any rate
of our dying first. A reasonable virtue will give this chance its
due value, neither more nor less.

Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For
hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often
still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead
us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning
pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure
they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone
wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following
after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The
devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only
be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he
adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an
angel at all and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more
homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy
guide.

Returning to Mr. Pontifex, over and above his having lived long
and prosperously, he left numerous offspring, to all of whom he
communicated not only his physical and mental characteristics, with no
more than the usual amount of modification, but also no small share of
characteristics which are less easily transmitted- I mean his
pecuniary characteristics. It may be said that he acquired these by
sitting still and letting money run, as it were, right up against him,
but against how many does not money run who do not take it when it
does, or who, even if they hold it for a little while, cannot so
incorporate it with themselves that it shall descend through them to
their offspring? Mr. Pontifex did this. He kept what he may be said to
have made, and money is like a reputation for ability- more easily
made than kept.

Take him, then, for all in all, I am not inclined to be so severe
upon him as my father was. Judge him according to any very lofty
standard, and he is nowhere. Judge him according to a fair average
standard, and there is not much fault to be found with him. I have
said what I have said in the foregoing chapter once for all, and shall
not break my thread to repeat it. It should go without saying in
modification of the verdict which the reader may be inclined to pass
too hastily, not only upon Mr. George Pontifex, but also upon Theobald
and Christina. And now I will continue my story.