Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 9/Tom Morland's preferment - Part 1
TOM MORLAND’S PREFERMENT.
CHAPTER I.
“Chanleigh! Chanleigh!” shouted the guard, with a conventional accentuation on the word which almost prevented its recognition, and Tom Morland, who had been on the look-out for the station for the last quarter of an hour, got out of the train. But Chanleigh was not his destination. He inquired of the station master how far off the village of Beauchamp was; and learning that the distance might be “something better nor three miles,” he desired that his luggage might be sent on in the solitary square box on wheels which, doing duty as a fly, had come down from the inn on speculation; and set out on foot in the direction indicated.
“I take yon to be the new parson of Beauchamp,” said one of the bystanders to another.
The supposition was a correct one. Tom Morland, at thirty-seven years of age, had become rector of Beauchamp. He had been a hard-working curate for thirteen years: during a portion of them he had had the care of a large straggling parish, in the opposite extremities of which he held three services every Sunday. His preferment came to him in this wise. One Sunday afternoon he had arrived, according to his custom, at a little chapel on a breezy common, which was situated some miles from the Vicarage house in which he was permitted to live during the lengthened absence of its rightful owner in Italy. He was in the act of putting on his surplice, when a sudden idea caused him to feel in his pocket for his sermon,—in vain. He remembered that the weather having suddenly changed just before his leaving home, he had taken off his coat and put on an older and thicker one: in the pocket of his best garment the sermon had undoubtedly remained. Tom Morland had never yet attempted an extempore sermon: he held that the mere fact of writing down ideas compelled a closer and deeper study of the subject; that what was unsound in the matter would sometimes strike the outward eye more readily than the inward one. Nevertheless, on this occasion, there was no help for it. While the congregation were singing four verses of a hymn, he made up his mind what text he would take for his discourse. Tom was not a nervous man; the sight of the thirty or forty upturned faces from the open benches gave him no pang of alarm, and his sermon, which was brief, and very much to the point, did not suffer from the circumstances under which he preached it. He was leaving the church at the conclusion of the service, when the old beadle, whose checks were like a winter apple, hurried up to him with the intelligence that Squire Luttrell had brought a visitor to church with him that afternoon, and that he had it on the authority of the squire’s servants that the visitor was no other than the Bishop of . Tom remembered that once or twice during the service he had met the eyes of a little old gentleman in the squire’s pew, and he laughed as he caught himself wishing that he had not left his sermon in his best coat pocket. Three weeks afterwards, when Tom had almost forgotten the occurrence, the squire’s distinguished visitor presented him to the living of Beauchamp, of the annual value of three hundred and twenty-seven pounds.
Tom came down to his new home a solitary man. His father and mother had died when he was young: the money they left behind them had barely served to complete his preparation for the church. He had had a sister some years older than himself, far away in India, and married to a chaplain there. She was a fair, gentle, kind-hearted creature. She had been Tom’s ideal of womanly perfection in his childhood, and so she remained throughout his life. He never saw her after their separation in his youth. She was amongst the victims of a violent outbreak of cholera at a distant station, and her death was the sole darkening shadow on Tom’s life, which was otherwise essentially a happy one. He had strong health and buoyant spirits; perhaps he had but an ordinary intellect, but he was thoroughly practical in his dealings with the souls as well as the bodies of his fellow-men, and he had an honest-hearted sincerity about him that won him friends amongst all classes. In person he was tall and stout, with a cheerful smile and kindly brown eyes. His was something better than a merely handsome face: it was a bright and genial one.
The fly containing Tom’s luggage rumbled by, and was some time before it was out of sight. He strode on with a pleasant sense of freedom in his limbs. The country grew picturesque as he left the town of Chanleigh behind him. It was certainly flat, but then it was well wooded, and watered by a little river that ran swiftly and clearly over its pebbly bed. On the banks grew tall grasses, luxuriant in the shade of the willows. He came at length upon a common, covered with long brambles, stretching over stunted gorse bushes, behind which were hid away pools of water known only to the cottagers’ asses and their foals, and one or two worn-out plough-horses turned out to graze there. Leaving the common to his right, he made his way down a shady lane, arched with long branches of elm and oak, and presently came upon a village which he rightly concluded to be Beauchamp. At intervals he had passed several farm-houses, which wore an air of comfort and plenty. The village, however, was not in character with them. Damp had seized on many of the cottages. Here, the roof, the walls, and the out-house were covered with a moss of vivid green, which clung tenaciously, and turned all to rottenness beneath it; there, the door was coated with a fungus which grew as surely as the night came, to be destroyed in the morning, and to grow again, till man’s patience was exhausted in the conflict. Hinges had given way; locks were loose, for the screws would never stay in; a dozen carpenters might work from morning till night without effecting much good with such unsatisfactory materials. At every third or fourth house beer was licensed “to be drunk on the premises.” The inn, where hung the sign of the Golden Lion—a prodigious animal with a mane of startling brilliancy—was a modern building of brick, and apparently the only one in decent repair. Near it stood the school-house in a dilapidated state, and contrasting painfully with its neighbour. Tom had heard the church clock strike four as he came up to it, and in a moment out rushed a swarm of children: boys, girls, and infants. He watched them with keen interest. They were the soil in which he was to plant seeds, to weed, to reap—God granting it—the harvest of reward. Half a dozen boys a little older than the rest were in loud turmoil. From the midst of the group Tom heard a rattling noise, then a groan: and a cry of “Shame to knock down Jemmy Bates!” broke from the rest. A boy, about ten years of age, evidently a cripple—for a little pair of crutches had rolled away into a ditch—lay on the ground, unable to rise. In another moment, just as Tom had almost succeeded in reaching him, he was rescued by a woman’s hand, with the fond foolish words which will serve as a panacea for half the woes of childhood till the end of time. Tom turned to the speaker. She had a care-worn look, and was almost shabbily dressed; but she had a profusion of fair hair, and large grey eyes, whose expression atoned for waning youth and freshness. The children made way for her eagerly, and Jemmy Bates himself seemed thankful to be near her even at the cost of his bruises. The boy who had knocked him down slunk away.
“Now Jemmy,” she said, “we will go home together, and to-morrow you shall wait for me. I dare say it was carelessness; no one would be so cruel as to hit you a blow on purpose.”
“Oh, yes, Miss Letitia; I saw him!” was the general cry. “I did!” and “I did!” “And I am afraid I did,” said Tom, who had raised his hat to Miss Letitia, and walked on by her side.
“Are you Mr. Morland?” she asked. “Then do not judge of the boys by this unlucky incident. They are good on the whole; but the schoolmaster has lately suffered much from ill-health, and they have been for some time without the personal superintendence of a clergyman. Altogether, circumstances have been against them.”
Tom said truly that children good, bad, or indifferent were always an object of interest to him. He had been watching poor little Jemmy Bates limping painfully by his side, and somewhat to the boy’s astonishment he took him up in his arms and carried him along. The distance was soon accomplished. Tom deposited his burden in his mother’s cottage, and was overwhelmed with her thanks. Miss Letitia having pointed out to him the nearest way to the rectory, went on her way, and another half-mile brought him to his journey’s end. The house which was henceforward to be his dwelling-place was before him. It was one story high, with lattice windows, and a porch, over which grew honeysuckles and roses in the wildest luxuriance. An unsparing hand had planted half-a-dozen sorts of climbers beneath the windows; one of these had served as a trellis to another, and so on, till the whole front of the house was in a tangle of foliage. In front was a little grass-plot: no scythe had touched its growth for months, and the gravel path that ran round it was almost choked with weeds. It was a neglected spot.
Tom had bought the household furniture of the executors of the late incumbent, and an elderly woman, who had been left in charge of the house, was engaged by him as his housekeeper. His Lares and Penates were thus already set up. To be enabled to form some idea of the work Tom had before him, it will be necessary to revert to a period sixteen years antecedent to his entering on the living. The rector of Beauchamp was, at that time, named Nevil. He was a widower, with one daughter. She was scarcely seventeen years of age, but she had been her father’s almoner, sick-nurse, and school-teacher from childhood. Her education had been built upon his theories, and the result had made her, in some measure, different from other girls. She gave all her energies to assist him in the care of the parish, making no friends in her own class of life. When his death occurred suddenly, she found herself alone in the world. An old fellow-collegian of her father represented her case to a charitable fund, which conferred a small annuity upon her, and Letitia Nevil settled down in the place which circumstances had endeared to her, on an income of fifteen pounds a year; her skill in needlework, and her industry in various ways, supplying whatever her need required beyond that amount. The new rector, Mr. Nugent, was an elderly man of good family—handsome, eloquent, and agreeable. His wife, who was the daughter of a spendthrift Irish peer, died soon after his arrival in the parish; and his only son, on leaving college, was placed in the office of Mr. Wortleby, the solicitor at Chanleigh. George Nugent was like his father in person, careless and extravagant as the elder man was also. Mr. Nugent’s debts had accumulated with his years, but they never sat heavily on his shoulders, like the old man of the sea, as they do on many others; for when his creditors were pressing, he packed up his travelling bags and went to Paris or Brussels till they became weary, or resigned to the hopelessness of their case. He was always expecting windfalls. When they came—as they sometimes did—he lived gaily at Beauchamp, giving pleasant little dinners to the sprightliest people he could get together; never troubling himself with parish work, preaching effectively what he seldom attempted to practice, and never striving to restrain his son in the downward course in which he had walked from his boyhood upwards. Three years passed on thus. Suddenly the news spread like wildfire in Chanleigh and Beauchamp that George Nugent had left Mr. Wortleby’s office overnight, and had taken his passage in a vessel that sailed on the following morning for Australia. Was his father acquainted with his movements? Nobody ever knew; nobody demurred when he stated his inability to meet his son’s debts; nobody wondered at his evasion of the just demands on his time, his energy, or his income. An affection of the lungs was a sufficient excuse to the Bishop of the diocese for Mr. Nugent’s residence in the south of France during the two last years of his life, and a succession of ill-paid curates took the duty at Beauchamp. One became ill and unfit for work from the effects of the damp; another, who had come fresh from a manufacturing town, where he had been accustomed to appeal to intellects as keen as his own, gave up his rural congregation in despair after he had examined a few of the most intelligent-looking members in the churchyard on the subject of the sermon he had just delivered; a third levelled such straightforward denunciations at what he considered the hopeless lethargy of his flock, that they grew too timid to venture into church at all. But in truth it was a discouraging field for action, for no one could look at the vacant eye and the meagre development of brain amongst the labouring population, and hope for much fruit from so sapless a tree. When death removed Mr. Nugent from the supervision of the work to which he had never had sufficient energy to put his own hand, it was owing to the fact of a sermon lying forgotten in the pocket of a coat that an industrious and earnest-minded man had come to fill his place.
CHAPTER II.
Mr. Wortleby lived in a large gloomy house in Chanleigh, of which the lower part was entirely set apart for the transaction of business. On either side of the street-door, which had a ponderous hard-headed looking knocker upon it, and a brass-plate, which was suffered to turn green, were the offices; behind the larger of the two was Mr. Wortleby’s private room. But into this he had not yet descended. He was at breakfast upstairs; at breakfast grimly, solemnly, in the midst of his family; the hush that pervades all atmospheres when the ruling spirit is a cruel one was perceptible in the room. Mr. Wortleby was somewhat past the prime of life; tall, and well-bred, looking with a cold blue eye, and a purple lip that only became life-like when his temper was roused. In his intercourse with his superiors his manners were exquisitely polished; with his equals he was haughty and arrogant; to his inferiors he was simply a tyrant. Amongst the latter class he reckoned his family. Early in life he had married the daughter of a farmer, for the sake of a little hoard of money, which served to buy the business of the solicitor to whom he had been articled, and to secure the best connection in the county. This object attained, he never professed to care whether Mrs. Wortleby lived or died. She bore him seven daughters: like herself, neither pretty nor remarkably ugly; ordinary in ability as in person. As they grew to womanhood, Mr. Wortleby would sit and gaze at them, his hand supporting his chin, almost savagely. Not one of them resembled him; not one of them had a redeeming point of beauty. Mr. Wortleby was a staunch Conservative: he numbered amongst his clients the representatives of the landed interest of the county; he was land-steward to three noblemen; he sat at their tables, he went on professional visits to their houses. Of course he never dreamt of presenting Mrs. Wortleby to their notice, but for a daughter he would have had no difficulty in procuring an introduction, provided she had beauty or talent, or, better still, the two requisites combined. To have heard “Wortleby’s daughter” praised for her beauty, for her singing, for any attraction or accomplishment that would entitle her to be “taken up” by the class he loved to be amongst—this was the craving of his heart, and in it he was doomed to a life-long disappointment. As one little snub-nose after another grew out of the age which their simple-hearted mother looked upon as cherubhood, Mr. Wortleby sighed bitterly, and wrapped himself still more closely in his selfishness. The girls were strongly attached to their mother, who drew all the sunshine of her existence from their kindness and affection. They were but little known amongst their own class in Chanleigh. If a neighbour chanced to call at any time after two o’clock in the day, by which hour the family dinner was concluded, Mrs. Wortleby invariably saluted her with a wistful request to “stay to tea”—provided, of course, as it generally happened, Mr. Wortleby was from home. This was the extent to which she indulged herself in the pleasures of society.
It was Saturday morning, and the usual supply of newspapers had arrived. Mr. Wortleby had a way of appropriating them to his own use which no one ever ventured to dispute. The “Economist” was thrust under the cushion of his chair; beneath his elbows were two county papers, and he held the “Times” in his hands. His attitude symbolised his life.
A knock at the door of the breakfast-room interrupted his study of the course of events, and a junior clerk, with cheeks that always became cherry-coloured at the sight of the seven Miss Wortlebys, announced “Miss Nevil, on business.” “Let her wait in my room,” said Mr. Wortleby. It was unnecessary for him to hurry himself on her account: her position did not justify such a proceeding. He had barely tolerated her since the day when Mrs. Wortleby had innocently let fall an observation on the fact of her mainly supporting herself by various kinds of intricate needlework, which were sent from time to time to an agent in London. It was sufficient to prove her loss of caste, Mr. Wortleby said, that Mr. Parkins, the grocer of Chanleigh, had made her an offer of marriage on becoming acquainted with the fact. How this had ever come to be a matter of public gossip had never clearly transpired. Mr. Parkins, a liberally-disposed man, giving credit for many an ounce of tea and rasher of bacon which he never expected to get paid for, had learnt to look on Miss Letitia as the perfection of womanly grace and sweetness. He was unprepared for the discovery that she took wages for her work, as Miss Simms the village dressmaker did for hers, and with a feeling of chivalry rather than of presumption, he had offered her his home and his honest heart as a desirable alternative. This he had done in a letter, to which Miss Letitia had replied; not accepting his proposal certainly, but declining it with so much gratitude and friendliness that it was generally supposed the publicity of the affair was owing to Mr. Parkins having been discovered opening Miss Letitia’s letter on the top of a tea canister, and sobbing “God bless her kind heart!” when he had finished reading it. She little knew how much this offer of marriage had lowered her in Mr. Wortleby’s estimation.
But breakfast however, lengthened out by human caprice or ingenuity, will not last for ever, and after Miss Letitia had waited patiently for the greater part of an hour, Mr. Wortleby descended to his room. The clerk had placed a chair for her opposite to the one invariably occupied by Mr. Wortleby, which stood with its back towards the window. Why does the light always fall on the client’s face, and never on his counsellor’s? No matter what the standing of a solicitor is, the characteristics of his private room never materially vary. The man who makes ten or twelve thousand a-year is not more daintily lodged during his business hours than the small attorney who makes five hundred; the wooden boxes may have titled names painted on them instead of plebeian ones, but the difference goes no further. Mr. Wortleby did not shake hands with Miss Nevil; it would have been an unnecessary familiarity. He sat down, and waited stiffly for her to state her business. She did so in brief words.
“Reuben Bates was taken before the magistrates yesterday for poaching, Mr. Wortleby, and he has been sent to be tried at the assizes. I understand they begin next week. I have come to beg you to let some one from your office go to watch his case, and to ask you if the expense of engaging counsel will be beyond my means.”
She laid two sovereigns down on the table as she spoke, and seemed to wait for his answer with some anxiety. Mr. Wortleby looked at her suspiciously.
“It is not the first time,” he said, “that you have appealed to me in behalf of this man. Of course I am not aware what claim he can have upon you. As regards myself, I am bound to prosecute him, as representative of the owner of the land on which the offence was committed.”
“Tell me, then, to whom I can apply—what course I can take, so that he may not be utterly friendless when his trial comes on,” she said, earnestly “What is to become of his wife and children? If you could see their distress I am sure you would have pity on him.”
“Mr. Colley of Braxelford will transact any business for you, I have no doubt, Miss Nevil,” replied Mr. Wortleby, coldly. “Did you lay something down on the table?”
She looked in his face, and saw that farther entreaty would be in vain. She went out hopelessly. Mr. Colley of Braxelford was a practitioner of evil report: to him it was impossible for her to apply. She had not gone far in the direction of Beauchamp when she met Tom Morland, who was struck by the unusually anxious look in her face.
“You cannot help me,” she said, when, in answer to his inquiries, she had detailed the case. “In your position, it would be almost an encouragement to crime to attempt to screen a poacher from the justice of the laws, and you do not know, as I do, what his temptation has been.”
“You have helped me too often to make me hesitate on such a point,” replied Tom. “I will see that he is properly defended. At all events, we may be able to save him from a long sentence.”
“Oh! thank you, thank you, Mr. Morland,” she said, eagerly. “But it is my work—a part of my mission here—and I can well afford the expense,” she added, trying to smile as Tom looked disquieted at the suggestion. In his heart he doubted the fact.
He had been nearly a year in Beauchamp. Every month had served to concentrate his interest more completely on his parish, which, like most agricultural districts, was devoid of any striking feature. His life was not likely to provoke any man to write a biographical account of it—surely the meanest injury that one human being can inflict on another, when the grave can give forth no denial, no justification, no contempt even for ill-deserved or wrongly-placed praise. He had laboured hard, and had effected much. By dint of urgent representations to the landlords, drains had been made where mud was once rampant; by force of earnest counsel at least a third of the swaggering haunters of the beer-houses were adopting habits of semi-sobriety. To influence a man so far as to induce him to give up getting drunk more than two or three times a-year was to go far towards saving soul and body also. All this Tom had done: but a woman had done more. “Miss Letitia,” as she was called,—and Tom had acquired the habit of addressing her in the same fashion,—had passed nearly sixteen years in acts of mercy and charity. She had kept many a poor family together: she had saved husband and wife, mother and young children, from the separation entailed by the Union, by help given liberally, given regularly, and how hardly earned! as Tom used to think, with something like anguish, as he learnt from time to time what she had done before he came to the parish. She had watched by sick beds: she had taught in the schools. It was her influence alone that had prevented Beauchamp from sinking irremediably into vice at the period when the culpable inactivity of Mr. Nugent had left his flock uncared for. To all who had been connected with his family she devoted herself unceasingly. The man who had been charged with poaching had been groom to Mr. Nugent’s son; his companion, it was said, in many wild frolics. It was not the first time he had been in trouble; on each occasion Miss Letitia had held out a helping hand to him when he came back with a sullen face and a lagging step from his six weeks’ imprisonment. How did she find the means to do so much? Sometimes Tom, on going to the cottage of the old widow with whom she lived, observed books of German fairy tales, a dictionary, and a heap of manuscripts by the side of them. He had seen packets at the post-office directed in Miss Letitia’s handwriting to a publisher of children’s books in London. From these circumstances he concluded that she helped to eke out her livelihood by the work of translation. Did he care how she earned bread for herself and others? In his long solitary walks across the common, and by the side of the little river that mirrored the hard wintry boughs which overhung it; in the evenings when, pile the logs on as he might, and draw the curtains across his windows as closely as he would, he yet felt himself a homeless man for want of a face that should turn to his, Tom’s thoughts ran ever on what Miss Letitia did, what Miss Letitia thought, what Miss Letitia said. Since his boyhood, when he had loved his sister with an enthusiastic affection which a beautiful woman often inspires in a younger relative, he had never cared for any human being as he cared for Miss Letitia. It was months before he owned it to himself; before he felt something like disappointment when he watched her face, and saw no change in its expression when he came or went. A friendly greeting, frank confidence, ready sympathy; all these he found, but not love. Sometimes he tried to persuade himself that he ought to be happy in being able to see her as often as he did; that possibly she might never marry,—it was certain, he thought, that he never should; they would grow old in this monotonous life, half dream-like, half real; the ties that bound her to the objects which were to be all in all to him to the end of his days, would strengthen her friendship for him, and the end of all things would come. And then he would start up, feeling as if he could never live out the time till his heart should cease to be stirred at the sound of her voice. But there were moments of reaction when he deliberated, should he speak to her in such a way that she need not withdraw her friendship from him, even if she could give him nothing more; should he tell her that he had found out a void in his life which she only could fill up; that a thirst had come upon him for that sense of home which he could never realise without her. A clever writer has declared that there is an out-of-the-way corner in every man’s mind where Superstition, like a slovenly housemaid, sweeps up all sorts of bits and scraps; and there is, undoubtedly, a little green sward in every man’s heart, to the last day of his existence, sometimes parched up for lack of moisture, sometimes scorched by the breath of passion, but always ready to spring up in brightness and freshness, give it but some revivifying influence. Though we may not care to acknowledge the fact, romance is never wholly at an end.
One evening, in a bright spring sunset, Tom returned home after several hours’ absence, and seating himself at his trellised window, spread out his writing materials before him. But he must have found his task either a difficult or a painful one, for he sat for some time with his head in his hands before he applied himself to it. He requested the person he addressed to furnish him with information respecting George Nugent, son of the late Rev. George Nugent, rector of Beauchamp, who had sailed from England for Australia on the 17th of August, 1843, in the merchant vessel Ariadne, and who had written to his family on his arrival at Sydney, announcing his intention of going into the bush to seek employment. He had been heard of last in 1849, when a settler returning to England had stated that George Nugent had sometime previously been occupied as a shepherd in the interior of the country. The letter went on to state that the writer would send a cheque for whatever amount might be necessary for securing the information he required. The envelope was addressed to a late inspector of police, who had opened a Private Inquiry Office in London. When the letter was sent to the post, Tom began to think how and why he had written it. He had gone to Miss Letitia’s cottage on some small matter of parochial business. Something, he could not remember what, had brought the words to his lips that he had been hesitating over so long; he could not recall half he had said, or how she had replied. He only knew that she had told him that for fourteen years she had been George Nugent’s promised wife, and that though she never heard from him, could learn no tidings of him by any means, she lived on in faith and hope, waiting for the day when he should come back and claim her. Then he had said—and his voice was broken and his eyes were blinded as he spoke—could he help her? could he do anything for her that a brother might do? and he had promised—oh, poor Tom!—that if George Nugent were alive, no matter where he was, he would bring him back to Miss Letitia.