Chapter XVII

“Who rowing hard against the stream
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,
And did not dream it was a dream.”

ALFRED TENNYSON.

“The child is really ill,” said Katherine, “I don’t think there is any doubt of it, what with the heat, the fainting fit you mention, and a wetting afterwards, it is not to be wondered at.”

“Oh! I must keep her! I must look after her!” cried Daphne. “Aunt Emma——” she stopped abruptly.

“You can leave her out,” said Katherine, “she is out so often.” The child lay shivering and burning on Daphne’s bed. The two girls talked in low tones by the window.

“I cannot face Uncle Wilfred,” said Daphne, “it is my carelessness!”

“Whatever it is,” said Katherine, “the child is ill—we must have a doctor.” She looked at Daphne. “There is one in the house,” she added.

“Don’t—don’t let him see her!” cried Daphne.

“Why not?” asked Katherine sharply.

“She has seen him already,” whispered Daphne, “I meant to have told you——”

“Oh, no! you didn’t!” interrupted Katherine.

“He frightened her—in the wood—send for some one else! Go and ask Bert,” Daphne pleaded, “don’t tell anyone!” Katherine hesitated, feeling unaccountably shy. Then she grew angry with herself and hurried out of the room.

Bert Russell was in the drawing-room giving the twins their tea. They were explaining to him, with little bursts of laughter, how sandwiches were made.

“I want to speak to you,” said Katherine bluntly. There was a shocked pause. Lady Cheston raised her eyebrows at Vera—who shrugged her shoulders as an equivalent answer, and a shifting of responsibility.

“Why, that’s good,” said Bert Russell, springing to his feet. “But I only receive lectures in private, and I can tell by your tone it’s going to be a lecture, Miss Linton. Take me away where the rest won’t hear.”

Katherine answered nothing. She led the way into the conservatory. The rain and the wind had blown her hair about (it was generally too tidy) and her embarrassment was making the colour in her cheeks a delight to the eyes. Bert Russell took it all in appreciatively. Then his light manner completely forsook him—he saw that she was upset at the consequence of her abruptness in the drawing-room, and that she did not quite know what to say.

“I guess you want me?” he said with a genial alertness.

“Dora is ill,” said Katherine, “fever and a cough—and some nervous shock, I think—— She ought to see a doctor,” she added in a gentle tone, “and Mr. Fordington ought not to come here till then.”

“I’ll just drop round and see him on the way from the doctor’s,” Bert Russell said.

“How do you know where the doctor lives?” Katherine asked.

“Well, I guess I could have found out even if I hadn’t happened to pass his house this morning,” smiled Bert. “Have you any other things you want me to tell you, Miss Linton?”

Katherine turned on her heel. “No!” she said, “I’m telling you this for Daphne.”

“That’s real good in you,” said Bert Russell. Katherine went out of the conservatory. It is a pity, but she certainly did—bang the door after her. The American whistled and put his hands in his pockets. When he stopped whistling he began to smile, but he got very quickly to the doctor’s.

He apologized for calling at The Vicarage unintroduced, but he explained to Mr. Fordington that, as an American, and he was afraid, of no fixed denomination, he was very much interested in the English Church, and very curious about it.

The Vicar gave him a warm welcome, he was preparing to go for Dora, but he re-seated himself in his study. “What is it you want to know about the Church?” he said.

The American smiled at his adroit evasion of the adjective. “Well!” he said, “if we had cathedrals, I guess they wouldn’t be quite such lonely buildings. Your Church doesn’t seem much of a social success either, it doesn’t bring people together, and even your parsons fight each other half the time, and their flock the rest. It doesn’t seem to me, you teach the same things. Here, I’m told that if I don’t make my confession, I shall get cast off, and right in the next parish, the parson says, Auricular Confession is a kind of Devil’s Diary. It doesn’t seem to hang together. Then look at what you pay your ministers! An office boy would want to get more in our country or he’d chuck his job! Either they’re worthy of their hire and oughtn’t to be given pocket-money or they should be kicked out altogether. That’s the way we seem to think it is, but I want to know your view of it from the inside. When I say things to what you call the laity, I’m told, ‘Oh, that’s broad church!’ or ‘They don’t do those things in our parish,’ and I can’t seem to pin them down.”

Mr. Fordington listened with grave attention. “Do you know what are the two hardest things to find in the world?” he asked, offering the American a pipe and lighting his own. Bert Russell shook his head. “A consistent Christian,” said the Vicar, “and an unprejudiced observer. Keep that in your mind as the key-note to what I shall try to tell you. The Church,” the Vicar went on, “is in some ways influenced by the English character. You know perhaps from your stay in the country, that the owners of the oldest and most famous of our great country seats live much of the year in town, and have shown an inclination to let their houses to rich Americans. I do not say this explains the cathedrals, only when you know that centuries ago they were there—and that coming centuries will still find them—you become less momentarily anxious to fill them, and yet you would never find them unoccupied even if they are rarely filled. I must confess that we lack a social system in connection with our Church, though I believe that more and more the spirit of unity is creeping in among us. We have far more social gatherings with the classes mixed, than in the old days would have seemed possible. You must remember that the Church is not the only power that finds class prejudice difficult to cope with, but I believe I am right in thinking that it is the only power that will be enabled to ultimately cope with it. I think that you are in great danger in your country of forgetting that the Church is primarily spiritual. She should never compromise with the world, nor seek to make her doctrines popular. What is truly Christian can never be popular.”

“But why not, sir?” questioned the young man. “Surely you wouldn’t shut the world out?”

“It is the world that shuts itself out,” said the Vicar sadly. “‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God.’ Let him give up the world to find the Church. It is not the place of the Church to give up anything to attract the world. Her Master and Guide said indeed to His Disciples, ‘Ye are the salt of the earth,’ but he warned them at the same time not to lose their savour, and a bid for popularity is the destruction of the spiritual essence. ‘Ye _cannot_ serve God and Mammon,’ and still less can we serve God by making religion easy to Mammon. The curse of modern times is, to my mind, the making things easy. We shudder too much at acquaintance with grief, and we would rather not hear about a man of sorrows. We will gladly cry Hosanna after a miracle, and when we have the crowd with us, but if He turns commerce out of our temples and strips from us the external and the material, the barriers we have put up of comfort, and of custom, and calls upon us to deny our _selves_, to take up a cross, and to follow—quite a poor person, it becomes almost a necessity to cry crucify Him! Or perhaps in more modern language, ‘Ignore Him! give us back the law! The satisfaction in being as other men are! Let the external do our religion for us! The Christ asks too much!’ Alas!” said the Vicar, gazing sadly out of his study window, “we are willing to give so little! We have not ‘resisted unto death,’ we have not even perhaps resisted unto inconvenience. And when anybody wakes up to the claims of the Cross—we say, ‘he goes too far.’”

Bert Russell became conscious that he was talking to a really good man. A thing that had rarely happened to him. “But the Church?” he said gently, “and its inconsistencies, surely if it showed a more Christ-like spirit to the world——” he hesitated. The pain in the Vicar’s face made him pause. “If we were better Christians there would be _more_ Christians?” he questioned.

“Yes—yes, that is our great Rebuke, yet you must not blame the Church for the frailties of her members. She is inviolate! If we but obeyed her precepts we should have ‘shown forth Christ—and Him crucified.’” The Vicar’s head was bowed for a moment as if the reproach had overwhelmed him with a personal shame, and Bert Russell watching him, wondered why the innocent should always know Remorse, so much more heavily, and with so much greater intensity than those who had caused the evil.

The Vicar raised his head. “It is our life that is at fault,” he said almost with passion, “never our Faith! The Apostles’ creed is so very simple, so clear, and so, I venture to believe, truly primitive, that I may not be wrong in holding it up as our mirror of truth, our home of dogma, and our real consistency! I take it that all who use these words in their most obvious meaning, belong to the Church of God, and I hold that all who cannot honestly believe and take these words as their Standard of Christian Faith have no room in the Church. Beyond the simple creed, there are many deep and important questions on which great and good men will always differ, but I trust that these differences, grave as they seem, will not exclude the believers in them from the same Heaven. I venture to think that in another life they will understand each other a great deal better, and when we understand people, it is but a short step towards understanding their views and assimilating the portion of Truth that is almost always enfolded in them. The Church and Truth are alike in this—in one question you can challenge either—but it would take many answers to barely outline the spirit of each, and the answers would seem self-contradictory and inconsistent, for you cannot see all around either of them. In the long run you will realize that the Church is large enough to be inclusive even of extremes and strong enough to be tolerant of them.”

“Thank you,” said the American.

Mr. Fordington smiled. “I fear I have wearied you,” he said, “and I have given you but an inadequate answer. The longer you live the more difficult you will find it to put things into Black and White, the prevailing shade is grey. We are mixed, you know, very mixed!”

“Why, yes!” said Bert, “we can’t even be angry without laughing up our sleeve, and when we love people, we would rather deprive them of their other loves.”

“Perhaps you will walk back with me?” said Mr. Fordington. “I must fetch my little girl.”

“Miss Daphne asked me to tell you, sir,” said the American, taking out an old volume from the Vicar’s shelf, “that as your daughter was a little tired with her walk, she would keep her over night and bring her back to-morrow herself.”

“That was thoughtful of Daphne,” said the Vicar, “very thoughtful, and most kind of Lady Middleton to keep her.” He looked rather anxious. “She is so easily tired!” he explained.

“Oh! she’ll out-grow it,” said the American. “I guess she thinks too much.”

The Vicar nodded. “I am afraid,” he said, “only children so often do, and there is nothing that is so tiring physically.”

“Why, no!” said the American, “one can’t keep up one’s strength when one has got to follow one’s mind. It goes too far.” They shook hands and Bert Russell borrowed the book. The Vicar saw by his handling of it that it was safe. He told his wife about Dora.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Fordington, “I shall try cod-liver oil.”

The American walked back slowly. “He didn’t argue about the pay of the clergy,” he said to himself smiling a little. “I guess he thought it didn’t matter. ‘Poor and unpopular’—it might have come out of the New Testament, but it won’t go down with the world. Somehow one isn’t surprised that Prophets get stoned.”