Chapter IV

The time passed very pleasantly at Caistorholm Vicarage. Edward rose betimes each morning, and was often deep immersed in the intricacies of the Skerne Iron Works Company’s accounts long before his host had quitted his downy bed, and could with clear conscience enter into those delights of country-life that were to him all the sweeter because unaccustomed. The glories of the Vicarage garden were on the wane, but its orchard was prepared to yield its juicy fruits. The fields were fast ripening for the sickle. The great calm and hush of those pastoral scenes stole over his senses like a young child’s sleep. There were no revelries, but there was constant interest. The Archdeacon had suggested a dinner-party, but Edward had been so emphatic in his declarations of preference for quiet, the project had been abandoned. A neighbouring vicar or rector dropped in occasionally for luncheon, and was easily persuaded to stay for dinner. Edward had, at first, spoken rarely and with reserve about matters social and political—doctrine was avoided by common consent. Strange, one may pass a month in a clergyman’s house and never hear religion discussed. Presumably the household has so long taken fundamental dogma for granted that the possibilities of wide divergence amounting to repudiation is not so much as thought of. Edward saw with amaze men of unquestioned scholarship and intelligence equally indisputably above the average grow warm and excited in discussing the Eastward position, incense, lights, stoles, birettas, man millinery generally. He itched to tell them that the vast bulk of those who should be their flock didn’t care a brass farthing about genuflexions or ecclesiastical trappings. What the human soul yearns to understand is the Divine rule and ordinance, if rule and ordnance there be and not blind chaos; to know if man be indeed _Imaginis Imago_, or but the last if not the final link of a chain long drawn out with a protoplasm at one end of it; if there is indeed and in very sooth a God our Father, who sees and loves and can be moved by prayer, if man have in truth an immortal spirit or is like unto the beasts that perish; if it be true that after death comes the judgement, when the gross inequalities of this world shall be made right and virtue shall indeed reign. Edward knew, as any man with ears to hear may know, that the avowed scepticism of mankind is a mere speck of dust compared with the huge mass of practical perhaps unconscious, infidelity that pervades society. It filled him with impatient scorn that men who should be leaders of thought, able to give counsel and enlightenment to those who grope in darkness, should spend the priceless years in mumbling twaddling homilies and in agitated harassment about stage effects. He could not interest himself in the question how far a beneficed incumbent may go on the road to Rome without jeopardising his living. He longed to tell these clerical traitors who let “I dare not wait upon I would,” that in this country any man worth his salt, who had a message to give, need not be uneasy about the forthcoming of the salt. He could go back to Yorkshire, he reflected sardonically, and find a score of half-educated weavers who had borne hunger and thirst, imprisonment, and stripes for conscience sake, and were ready to do it again and glory in the doing. But, then, hunger and thirst and imprisonment and stripes are one thing to a man to whom hunger and thirst and oppression are the daily lot, and quite another to a sleek, soft man who basks in the sunshine all his days and counts himself piteously poor and an object of commiseration on five hundred a year. “Why, don’t you all turn dissenters?” he asked of a clerical party one evening, as they lingered over the desert. “You all find fault with your Bishop. The poor man can apparently do nothing right. If you were dissenting ministers you would be your own bishops.”

“I fancy, my dear Beaumont, the dissenters have their Trust deeds.”

“Oh, Trust deeds—a fico for your Trust deeds. They talk about driving a coach and six through an Act of Parliament—why, a regiment of soldiers could walk through a Trust deed. ’Tis an instrument as little resorted to for the purpose of torture in a Nonconformist church as the thumbscrew in the Tower of London. Besides a man isn’t a fixture in a Dissenting Church. When he has talked himself dry, or made more enemies than friends, he can always change pulpits with another fellow who has talked himself dry or made more enemies than friends.”

“There are our social status and influence to be considered,” said a sucking young curate just emerged from the Bishop’s Hostel. “Our mere position invests us with a sacred authority never wielded by a mere dissenter.”

“Your social position is largely the result of social factors. The Established Church draws its ministers mainly from families socially established, and they receive not only the education and culture, but also the social stamp of Oxford or Cambridge. The dissenting parson is often the son of a grocer or a shoemaker, and receives a surface polish and a surfeit of theology at a training college, but seldom loses the smell of the ancestral shop. Your clergyman is a gentleman first, a clergyman afterwards. Turn all your well-born scholars into Methodists, and your half-educated social inferiors into the Church, and you would reverse the present social positions of the established and the nonconforming divines.”

“Then you think our present social superiority, and therefore our greater influence for good, for, of course, it is only to be valued for that, is a matter of birth and education.”

“Largely, but not entirely. You see, your present status is official. You owe your posts directly or indirectly to the Crown. You are part of the machinery of the State. And it is surprising how mere officialism and the possession of authorised and acknowledged titles impress the popular imagination in this country. You see it all through. Dub a man M.A. or LL.D., and the general man will persist in thinking him a better scholar than another who far surpasses him, but has not received the hall-mark of a University. So put a man in uniform with epaulettes and dub him an officer. He bears a social cachet, though he may be a poltroon and a blackguard. It is largely an affair of clothes and names and State-connection. You clergymen, if you really care about retaining your social importance, would commit social suicide if you got yourselves disestablished, even if you retain those endowments and other fleshpots you are so concerned about, but which appear to me the element you could most easily compensate under a system of voluntaryism.”

“Then you think, Mr. Beaumont,” asked the Rector of Fillingham, “our policy is to let well alone?”

“Yes, if you’re let. I think if I were an incumbent with a fat living I could swallow my bishop and make no bones about it. Remember the dissenting parsons have their deacons, and I can conceive of nothing more galling than for a man of principle and education to have to trim his sails to suit the views of a coarse, uneducated deacon with all the soul of a village tyrant, just because he happens to have more money than some of the humbler worshippers. I should preach either him or myself out of the conventicle.”

“Ah! he would be your bishop,” laughed the Archdeacon.

“Those dissenters are just the plague of my life,” confided one of the country vicars from a neighbouring parish. “Just fancy, Mr. Beaumont, there aren’t five hundred families in all my parish, and yet there is besides mother church, a Wesleyan chapel, a Congregational and a Baptist. It turns my modest glass of wine and my crust to gall and ashes when I think of it.”

“Oh! I know something of the feeling, Vicar. You don’t suppose I like to see people taking their cases to the man next door, who, I am persuaded is not half so fine a fellow as I am. But you can’t go begging for communicants, any more than I can go touting for clients. Besides, what does it matter in which church a man saves his soul alive, so long as it is saved. _Ut palata, sic judicia_ is of universal application.”

“Ah! but can a man be saved outside the true Church?” asked the young curate from the Bishop’s Hostel.

“That’s a question the next Roman Catholic parish priest might have something to say about,” rejoined Edward. “Anyway, people seem willing to risk it. Don’t you think, Archdeacon, instead of trying to filch flocks from the folds, the shepherds of the Church could find quite enough to do in casting their crooks about those wandering sheep that are utterly lost in the wilderness?”

“Pray condescend to particularise, Mr. Beaumont,” begged his host.

“Well, a day or two before I came down here a vulgar case, of which I need not trouble you with the details, gave me a glimpse of the workings of the Salvation Army.”

“A most valuable institution, no doubt,” said the Archdeacon.

“Yes,” said Edward, “but you will pardon my saying—why a Salvation Army at all? Here are more than half our churches and chapels with yawning pews, and out in the street are crowds of earnest enthusiasts following a dancing Dervish and a big drum.”

“You wouldn’t have me dancing in my cassock through Caisterholm, and the parish clerk or verger tinkling a tambourine?”

“Well, no. But, after all, if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain. And that’s just General Booth’s secret.”

“A very latitudinarian young man,” commented one vicar to another, as they jogged home together in the still autumnal evening through the fragrant hedgerows. “Whatever did St. Clair mean by taking advice from a man like him. But the man may be a good lawyer for all that, and I won’t look too closely at his Church principles if he’ll pull my good sovereigns out of those infernal Skerne blasts.”

The Archdeacon himself, before Beaumont had been a week under his roof, had conceived not only a high opinion of his guests’ acumen and legal attainments, but also a warm regard for himself personally. Their very points of difference seemed to enhance the pleasure the cleric found in the lawyer’s society and conversation. It is true they approached almost every subject from an entirely different point of view, and therein lay constant danger of friction or collision. But Edward had ever a seemly consideration for his senior in years and a ready concession of whatever deference the Archdeacon’s ecclesiastical dignity reasonably demanded. There is, perhaps, nothing so well designed as practice in the Courts to develop in a man a happy blending of due submission to authority with the respectful but unflinching assertion of one’s own opinions. The Archdeacon declared in later years that it was as great a pleasure to be routed in argument by Beaumont as to prevail, for the fellow had a sweet reasonableness about him that took away the sting of defeat, and almost persuaded the vanquished that he himself was victor. The elder man was fond of controversy if it were not pushed too far, of debate if it were conducted decently. It was an intellectual treat to meet a man with the generous enthusiasm of youth and with ideas outside the narrow range with which a country clergyman, whose only associates are clergymen like unto himself, must, almost perforce, be content. Though not so disputative as the man who repined because the very wife of his bosom was ceasing to contradict him, the Archdeacon wearied at times of speaking _ex cathedra_ Moreover, in a society drawn almost exclusively from one’s fellows controversy lacked not only variety of interest but variety of treatment. No doubt the smooth serenity of a soundly Conservative orthodoxy was an excellent thing, but the Vicar of Caistorholm confessed to himself that Beaumont’s radical heterodoxy, if a disturbance, was one that acted as a mental tonic and wholesome fillip. Exercise is a disturbance; but it is recommended for the liver. Mr. St. Clair acknowledged with a sigh that, intellectually and spiritually, life at Caistorholm might be serene, but it was unquestionably sluggish.

“We touched on Disestablishment the other evening,” he said one day to Edward, as they walked together in the peaceful afternoon of a mellow autumn day about the Vicarage gardens; “I did not encourage you to pursue the subject, because some of our friends are very sensitive on that topic. To us clergymen, you know, the Church is as the Ark to the Levites, not to be touched by unholy hands.”

“Well,” said Edward, smiling, “I’ve no mind to bring upon myself the fate of Uzzah—at all events, I must avoid it whilst I am at the Vicarage. Percz-Uzzah is not near so pretty a name as Caistorholm.”

“But though I did not think it desirable to discuss the question when some of my friends were present who are, I fear, too apt to confound persons and principles and to think suspiciously, if not evilly, of a man who differs from them as widely as I know you do, I hope you will not conclude I shrink from discussing it. Nay, I confess, I should like to know your views on the question more at large, for then we of the Order should at least know how we appear to the outer world and learn the worst we have to expect.”

“To tell the truth, Mr. St. Clair, it is a question I have little at heart. It has always seemed to me more an affair between Church and Chapel than one that concerns the masses very largely. And, you see, if I’m but an indifferent Churchman I’m just as bad a Chapel man. Indeed, so far as I can see, a Chapel man is only an average Trinitarian, plus envy, indocility, and cant. In the abstract, of course, I certainly think the Establishment cannot be justified to-day whatever might have been said for it, at the reformation, say. As for your endowments, I think the nonconforming envy of them simply contemptible, and the claim that they ought to be applied to national education, free libraries, art galleries, etc., a mere pretence. If John Bull wants art galleries he can afford to pay for them without taking the coat off your back. No! I don’t feel like slapping you in the face, Archdeacon, just to pleasure the Rev. Josiah Boanerges, who would have no objection to be snugly endowed himself. Frankly, I don’t think the Church will fall from any blows that may be dealt from without. Its danger lies in the dry-rot that is silently but surely Consuming the inner rafters and supports.”

“Dry rot, my dear Beaumont!”

“Yes, dry-rot. If I speak at all you must let me speak frankly, and you know I do not want to wound your sensibilities. Burns, after all, was foolish to sigh for the gift to see ourselves as others see us. It might from ‘mony a faultie free us and sair mistake’; but it would so rudely and so constantly shake our serenity that life would not be worth the living. Let us change the subject, Archdeacon.”

“Well, I’ll tell you frankly enough the great danger of the Church. You know it is a common lament that your services, in the towns, I mean, attract the women, not the men?”

The Vicar bowed a silent assent.

“Now, how do you account for it, Mr. St. Clair?”

“I can only suggest spiritual indifference.”

“Nay, I cannot subscribe to that. Take my town. Let a good speaker be announced to deliver an address on political or social questions he can fill the Town Hall with men and women, mostly men, of every grade—clergy men, dissenting ministers, lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, merchants, shop-keepers; and working-men.”

“Yes, but that is to hear about worldly affairs, Beaumont, not heavenly. Your lecturers deal with to-day and here. I speak of to-morrow and there.”

“Ah! well, Archdeacon, I think you will find if a man is anxious about setting matters right to-day and here he will not be indifferent about to-morrow and there. But you must satisfy him there is a to-morrow and there.”

“But that is of course.”

“To you, yes. But to how many? I don’t judge men by their professions or their creeds. I judge them by their acts. And so judged I conclude that for most men to-day and here are very real, to-morrow and there are very visionary, very problematical; so distant, so uncertain, as to be a negligible quantity.”

“Then you would have us?”

“I would have the Church remember that we live in a questioning age, an age when the fact of an institution or an opinion being hoary with age, so far from rendering it secure from investigation rather makes it an object of suspicion. We have found our forefathers wrong in so many things, and we have improved on them so much, that we have lost our confidence in their judgment. The Church drones about things nobody questions I mean what Matthew Arnold calls ‘right conduct,’ what you call ‘righteousness’; it dogmatises, I mean asserts positively or takes for granted things which an increasing number of intelligent men are very far indeed from taking for granted. Men will no more endure being droned to about right conduct than they will submit to having it eternally dinned into their ears that twice two makes four. They cry you ‘granted.’ They go to Church for bread and you give them a stone. They seek for guidance and assurance, if guidance and assurance there may be, on matters you have made a special study, and instead of showing them how to be sure, you only tell them that you are sure.”

“What more can we do? People don’t believe, because their hearts are corrupt, and they don’t want to believe. If anyone wish to know the truth let him seek it on his knees. ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whither it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’”

“Possibly,” said Edward, dryly. “We quote authorities in the Law Courts, Mr. St. Clair; but, you see, they are of acknowledged validity there. The suitors in our Courts are bound by the law they seek to invoke, and submit themselves to the jurisdiction when they enter their plaints. You see, the whole point is that, to-day, you have to deal with honest doubters who deny the authority of your authority, and your only answer is a _petitio principis_. But I see Miss St. Clair is ready for her expedition to the village, and I am to have the honour of accompanying her.”

The Archdeacon looked thoughtfully at the figures of his daughter and guest, as, side by side, apparently in gay converse, they passed down the Vicar’s Walk that led through orchard and paddock, past the hoary church and mouldering churchyard into the road that led to the straggling rows of peasants’ and small farmers’ houses, with here and there a shop, that constitute the village of Caistorholm. He could not fail to observe that Eleanor took pleasure in the lawyer’s company, that her glance had been brighter, her face happier of late. Mr. St. Clair was glad that Edward’s stay at the Vicarage should be made pleasant to him, and that his daughter should find a visit that might have developed into a visitation an agreeable break in the monotony of rural life. It was, of course, eminently satisfactory that the stranger whom he had been advised to consult and to trust in a matter of the very gravest importance should turn out to be not only a sound and reliable lawyer and a shrewd business man, but also a well-educated, well-read man, with the manners of a gentleman. Mr. St. Clair’s acquaintance with solicitors was chiefly confined to the urbane practitioners who dealt in advowsons or were learned in dilapidations, and with them he had permitted himself rather a condescending affability. From the first he had recognised that he could not patronise Beaumont, and had enjoyed the discomfiture and amazement with which Squire Wright had retired from his attempt in that direction, and which had so affected him that he had given the Vicarage a wide berth ever since. But Mr. St. Clair told himself that, after all, he knew very little about Beaumont. His old college friend, Fortescue, had told him that he had heard the best accounts of Beaumont’s successful conduct of a difficult and delicate matter, in which a mutual friend had been embroiled, and on his recommendation, and not without some natural hesitation, he had invited Edward to his home, feeling that he would rather confide to a stranger living at a distance than to a Lincoln lawyer the whole story of what he was now fully persuaded had been his very foolish, nay, reckless speculations in the Skerne shares. With Edward as a legal adviser he felt that he had more than reason to be satisfied, and he had enjoyed his conversation and the interchange of thought not a little. But he noticed with anything but satisfaction that Edward had made his conversation very acceptable to the stately Eleanor, who was not easily pleased. Not one afternoon passed but the young people found some occasion for being together—a round of parochial visits in which Edward carried the basket, and supplemented Eleanor’s tracts with covert half-crowns to rheumatic and asthmatical pensioners; a drive in Eleanor’s pony-carriage to some object of antiquarian interest, an ancient tower or a ruined church—who does not know the devices by which the tedium of the country is enlivened for the visitor from the towns?

On these excursions the Archdeacon felt he could not, even privately to his daughter, put an embargo, without giving them an importance which they might not deserve, and even suggesting to his daughter’s mind ideas that might never lodge there unless suggested. To be sure, the Archdeacon might accompany the young folk on these jaunts; but the archdeacon, like many less exalted individuals, liked to take his ease of an afternoon, and found himself on all the better terms with himself and mankind in general for forty winks in the armchair of his study, after luncheon of an afternoon, when it was a matter of faith in the household that he was meditating his next Sunday sermon, and must on no account be disturbed.

And so it came about that if Edward spent many a long hour with the father over the wearying and irritating concerns of the Iron Works, or holding forth, as was his wont, upon topics of more general interest, sometimes startling, sometimes alarming, but always interesting the Vicar, he spent also hours that seemed neither long, tedious, nor irritating with Eleanor St. Clair, when we may be sure the subjects of conversation were neither law nor theology nor commerce.

“This kind of thing, Miss St. Clair, is idyllic,” said Beaumont. “I have always had my mental picture of the Lady Bountiful of a village. She must, of course, be beautiful, with a soft, musical, tender voice, a heart quick to feel, and a soft and lily-white hand quick to help. Her path is strewn beneath her feet with the heartfelt blessings of the poor and afflicted. She moves a ministering angel among the hovels of the destitute.”

“Ah! now, Mr. Beaumont, you are laughing at me. Surely you would have me help the sick and needy.”

“It is the most priceless prerogative of the rich, and if I seem to mock I hasten to cry _peccavi_. But, seriously, this kind of parochial charity is but a dainty dilettantism, and you engage in it, Miss St. Clair, I beg you to confess, partly because it grieves you to see suffering without trying to relieve it and partly because it is picturesque.”

“Then I shall confess nothing of the kind, Mr. Beaumont. It is my simple duty to visit the sick and to do what little I can to ease their pains.”

“There’s Stokes the cobbler laid up with the lumbago, I am told. I went into his little shop the other day to get a trifling repair done, and the poor old fellow was nearly doubled up with pain, and, if I’m not very much mistaken, slowly dying of hunger. Shall we take Stokes the cobbler on our round?”

“Stokes does not belong to us, Mr. Beaumont. Papa would not like me to visit him. And I’m not sure that Stokes would be over civil to me.”

“He seemed a surly sort of customer, truly. I was chatting away quite comfortably with him when I mentioned casually that I was staying at the Vicarage. Then he seemed to shut himself up as I’ve seen a flower do in an east wind. Is there war between him and the Vicarage?”

“As if there could be! Papa would not condescend to notice anything such a man could say or do. All the same, it isn’t nice to be called a whited sepulchre, and I believe that is Stokes’ mildest epithet for papa.”

“Then he’s a dissenter, I suppose. He did not appear unctuous enough for hat. But religion may have disagreed with him. I have observed that with some people it acts like whey in a curd.”

“They say,” spoke Eleanor, with bated breath, “he’s a Bradlaughite, an atheist. He talks about Tom Paine and the rights of man.”

“And how does he live?”

“As you know, he is a cobbler. But I don’t suppose he gets much work. It is very inconvenient. Of course, we cannot send our repairs to him, and his being here prevents another setting up in the village.”

“It’s most inconsiderate of him,” said Beaumont, gravely. “He ought to be made to see that he is inconveniencing the servants of the Vicarage. No doubt, if he were told, he would go away, and make room for a better man. Then he doesn’t get much work?”

“Very little. He seems to spend most of his time, in the summer, in the fields; and I have heard he has a curious gift of taming birds and animals. I fancy he ekes out a scanty livelihood that way.”

“Perhaps he has taken to birds and animals because he can’t get men and women to have anything to do with him. A man must love something or other.”

“What! all men?”

“Yes, I suppose so—all men. Even lawyers.”

“I know one lawyer who is very fond of something.”

“And of someone?”

“I said something, sir!”

“And that is?”

“Lecturing other people.”

“A hit, a most palpable hit, Miss St. Clair. I own my fault. But confess I don’t pretend to be a bit better than my neighbours. But about this Stokes, now. He interests me.”

“Of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Well, you see, Stokes would be all right if he would only take things as he finds them. Why can’t he come to church like other people, and be a decent member of society? Instead of that he goes on Saturday night to the public-house and talks—oh! horrid things—blasphemy and high treason, to the labourers. Papa says if his ricks are burned he shall have Stokes arrested as an accessory before the fact.”

“I don’t suppose Mr. St. Clair will entrust me with the brief for the prosecution.”

“Oh, no! If you don’t take care, sir, you’ll have enough to do to defend yourself some fine day. But I’ve done Stokes an injustice. I said he went to the public-house. He used to; but the Publican refused to serve him any more.”

“Got too much to drink, I suppose. I always knew tailors were a guzzling lot. Tailoring runs to drink, as naturally as cobbling to atheism. I don’t know why, but cobblers are all free-thinkers and tailors and lawyers’ clerks born tosspots.”

“Well, you’re out this time, Mr. Beaumont. The landlord—he’s people’s warden, you know, at the church and a most respectable man—turned Stokes out because, whenever he went of a Saturday night, he drank only one mug of small beer in a matter of three hours, and all the time discoursed of nothing but the evils of strong drink. He so frightened our undergardener, who was of the company, that he turned teetotaller, and got my maid to stitch him a piece of blue ribbon in the lapel of his Sunday coat.”

“That was carrying the war into the enemy’s camp with a vengeance. Well, he won’t be able to corrupt the farm labourers any longer of a Saturday night now he’s ejected from the ‘Blue Boar.’”

“Oh! they’ve started a club, and Joseph Arch came to open it. Papa was so upset he fled to Lincoln, and stopped a whole week at the Palace, though he does nothing but quarrel with the dear bishop.”

“And I suppose the Vicarage set the fashion in tabooing this poor son of St. Crispin?”

“Of course, papa cannot countenance atheism and arson”

“Clearly. But if the man’s ill, the man’s ill, and atheist or no atheist the man’s a man. I’m sorry I didn’t know more about him when I went to have my boot stretched. However, the other boot isn’t very comfortable, that’s one consolation.”

They walked on in silence for a time. Then, apropos of nothing, Eleanor said, very quietly: “The man must have some good about him or he wouldn’t be so fond of birds and animals. I think my boot is not very comfortable, Mr. Beaumont.”

Edward laughed gaily. “What will the Archdeacon say?”

“Oh! papa won’t mind. He’ll probably tell me I’m a goose for my pains.”

“Ah! well; I don’t know. I think the Church makes a mistake in being so discriminating in its charity.”

“You are a universal fault-finder, Mr. Beaumont. But I suppose that is what makes you a Radical. It must be a very unhappy state of mind—to be always seeing the imperfections of things.”

“Somebody must do it, Miss St. Clair. Even critics have their uses. But when you announced so unexpectedly that your shoe pinched you, I was wondering how Sister Gertrude would have dealt with old Stokes.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister. Do tell me about her.”

“Well you see, I haven’t, except in a very broad sense. Sister Gertrude is the name of a young lady I met under rather interesting circumstances. Shall I tell you about her?”

Then Edward narrated the story of the troubles of Patrick Sullivan.

“Was she very beautiful?”

“Very. It was a sort of awful beauty. You forgot the artistic delight inspired by her perfection of form, colour, and expression, in the sense that you gazed upon one who was superior to mere charm of person. There seemed something like sacrilege in thinking of her as beautiful. I suppose a devout Catholic does not let his thoughts dwell upon the physical charms of the Madonna.”

“You cease to be critical, Mr. Beaumont, sometimes I see. And she was a lady, you say?”

“Unquestionably, or I’m no judge.”

“But, after all, this lady only does ostentatiously and to the sound of the drum and the tambourine what I, what we, try to do quietly and unostentatiously. You sneer at my tracts; but as I have no gifts for sermon-making, what can I do but take a tract?”

“Oh! I don’t find fault with the tracts, Miss St. Clair, though they’re twaddly things.”

Miss St. Clair smiled.

“I fear they’re very goody-goody. But I don’t write them, you know. Why don’t you write a tract yourself, Mr. Beaumont, and show the world how it should be done?”

“Again a hit, a most palpable hit. But you see, that isn’t my line.”

“No; your line is fault-finding. What’s that Latin papa always quotes—_si possis, ernenda_. I forget the rest.”

“_Si non, his utere mecum_,” completed Edward. “Well, I won’t amend your tracts, still less use them. A Radical has greater work cut out for him. You see that hind labouring in the field yonder, Miss St. Clair? Now, I think I know the kind of life that man leads. He toils like a slave year in and year out for a wretched twelve shillings a week. He lives on fat bacon and cabbage and coarse bread. His thatched cottage is small, dark, unwholesome. There is a cesspool at his very door and a dunghill under his window. His great dissipation is a quart of beer and a big drunk at harvest time. He can scarcely read, and if he could read he has no literature but a Bible, of which only very small portions are intelligible to him for want of other knowledge, and, of course, your tracts. When he is old, and rheumatism wracks his bones, and he is past work, he and his dame must either be burdens on their children, who will be no better off than he is now, or go to the Union Workhouse. And this kind of thing has been going on for generation after generation, and all the suggestion the Church, or Sister Gertrude I suppose for that matter, has to make, takes the form of a bottle of medicine, a roll of flannel, and a tract or a sermon.”

Edward spoke warmly indignantly.

“And you?” said Miss St. Clair.

“I—nay, not I. Say We. We, Radicals I mean, would tell that man he is a fool to be content to till the land all his life for another to reap the harvest. We don’t think that it is one of the divinely ordained laws of nature that there should be a Squire Wright and a Hodge.”

“There always has been, there always will be, just as there have always been horses and riders.”

“And hammers and anvils? Well, we Radicals think otherwise. We say that it is better that all men should walk on their own legs than that one should be borne in a palanquin. Some day the people will examine the title deeds of your Squire Wrights.”

“That will be a fat day for the lawyers, Mr. Beaumont,” suggested Eleanor mischievously.

“Nay, in the ideal state there’ll be no lawyers.”

“And clearly there’ll be no critics; there’ll be nothing to criticise. Poor Mr. Beaumont. How unhappy you’ll be. _Quelle triste veillesse vous vous preparez_.”

“Oh, well, imperfection will last my time, Miss St. Clair. And if I cannot find perfection in this sweet Arcadia of yours, why I deserve to. . . .”

“Get Sister Gertrude to find it for you in the slums. How provoking there’s the bell, and only just time to dress for dinner.”