Chapter VI: My First Enlightenment

Mr Pugsley sat in the study of his vicarage at Market Grazing. He was composing a sermon--no doubt on the eternal lines of pre-election and the divine partiality. He never gathered how his principles made a comfortable sinecure of his living; but a sinecure it was--a sort of well-furnished limbo, his complete enjoyment of which was only marred by a chronic dyspepsia. He looked up, as I entered, and greeted me with a frown.

“Gaskett!” he exclaimed. “I was somehow thinking of you, and here you are.”

I acknowledged the compliment promptly.

“Yes, I’m the devil, sir,” I said; “and for once in your life you’ve got to answer to me.”

He started, and turned a little yellower.

“This is a strange beginning,” he wondered. “For what, boy, do you hold me answerable to you?”

“For concealment, sir, amongst other things. Mr Pugsley, will you please to tell me if I am my mother’s son?”

He shifted a paper or two on his desk. I could see he was staggered, and thrown for the moment off his balance. I had no object in hurrying him. After all, if he had the elective licence, he had not the instinct to tell a lie.

“Answer at your leisure, sir,” I said. My tone, I quite felt it, took command. This narrow mind had no longer any terrors for me. I had come, in a day, of a very stern and sorrowful intellectual age. He turned to me presently, almost propitiatory.

“What a very curious question, Gaskett! Lady Skene has surely always done her duty by you?”

“That wasn’t what I asked. I asked if I were her son.”

“How can you doubt it?”

“I can’t, sir, to my grief.”

“To your grief? O, this is sad!”

He fidgeted with the lamp--it was evening--and tried to meet my eyes again, but avoided them.

“It is very sad,” I said. “But why should you deplore it, when from the first you have fostered and encouraged in her that spirit which is responsible for all the sadness?”

“_I_, Gaskett?”

“Have you not? Have you not always, sir, accounted me a child of sin?”

“Which you are, in the fullest sense.”

The admission seemed to slip out of him, in his agitation, unintentionally. Having made it, he stooped, and hurriedly took a nerve pill. He always carried a box of them about with him.

“It is what I understand,” I said quietly. “Of whose sin, in the first instance? Mr Pugsley, who was my father?”

He was very much upset. His hands on the paper shook like leaves.

“What has happened?” he said. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Let it be enough, sir, that I am asking them.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Think again, sir.”

“Do you doubt my honour, young man? I tell you I don’t know.”

“Where did it happen? You hail from Clapham, I believe. Was it there?”

“Yes, if you will ask.”

“Where is Clapham?”

“It is a suburb of London.”

“And she came under your administrations there--officially, I suppose.”

He rallied a little, struggling to assert himself.

“Do you bear in mind, Gaskett, of whom you speak--who it is whose errors--whose long-repented errors--you are probing?”

“The repentance came too late for me, sir; and, in any case, if it is religion, it is not reason to make me its scapegoat.”

“You were a child of wrath--a pledge of sinfulness foregone.”

“I see--a sort of whipping-boy to Grace. But I have ceased to be a boy--there’s the devil of it, Mr Pugsley. If _you_ don’t know who my father was, does Lord Skene know?”

He shook his head, with an odd little gasp. I saw him making for the pill-box again.

“What!” cried I. “Did he, too, accept me as a pledge?”

Something in his face enlightened me. The man was too shallow to hide a guilty self-consciousness.

“Did he?” I said sharply; “or was he never told perhaps that there was any question of sinfulness?”

I could see him hesitate, and it decided me.

“Was Lord Skene told?” I said, and took a step towards him. “Was he told?” I read the answer in his perturbed eyes. “Is this how you reconcile your conscience with your interests?” I cried scornfully.

Having yielded, like a weak creature, to resolution, he took refuge, like a woman, in personal grievance. He rose, quivering all over.

“How dare you come and bully me like this!” he cried. “What instigated you to it, I say?”

“A desire for the truth, sir. I understood parsons made a speciality of it.”

“Not at all,” he retorted angrily--“at least there are truths and truths. To withhold some for a worthy purpose is not to lie.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have read about that; but I never knew till now it was a principle of Evangelicism.”

He looked at me balefully.

“And, in any case, what was the worthy purpose here?” I asked.

“You cannot be expected to appreciate it,” he said. “Your mother was a vessel potential for holiness. As you have the indelicacy to question of her past sorrows, you shall be given the truth in full. Better that than the half measure, which would only instigate your base spirit, I fear, to distortion and exaggeration. She had been ensnared by a villain whom she had lent herself to reclaim. It was the usual case of a promise given and forsworn. I never asked or learned his name. In the eyes of Heaven she was a wife; and any confession of the truth would, with such a man as Lord Skene, have been held merely to justify him in his attempts to claim her to ungodliness. As a fact, he was greatly infatuated--accepted the assumption that you were born in wedlock--engaged tacitly to ask no questions, but to accept on its merits the blessing which had been vouchsafed him.”

“Then, at least, in the eyes of Heaven, which you represent, Lady Skene is a bigamist.”

He seemed, to my surprise, to accept this casuistry with a certain relief.

“Put it that way if you like,” he said. “She was distinctly, from the moral point of view, a wife already, though legally unbound.”

“Then why, from the moral point of view, am I a child of sin?”

He began to stammer hopelessly.

“I will tell you,” I said. “It is because of the wrong she has done me, and would visit, like a woman, upon the innocent head of her disgrace. And you hate me because she does, and because you have made her interests your own. I think you have played your cards very well, Mr Pugsley.”

He bristled through all his yellow skin.

“Leave my house,” he said.

“I will leave it,” I answered, “but I will ask you another question first. What was my mother’s position, occupation, when she married?”

“Not another word,” he cried. “I have said too much already. O!”--he shook a wild finger at me--“why would she never accept my advice, given long ago, to place you out in some respectable family! I always foresaw that the time would come when you would begin to quarrel with your bread and butter--to bite the hand that fed you--to----”

“To put myself right with my stepfather,” I said.

“If you attempt it,” he cried--“if you dare--the wrath of the Almighty will fall upon your presumptuous head!”

I laughed.

“Well, I will think it over,” I said, and turned and left him.