It has been cynically remarked that the young have no faults; they have only the faults of their parents or their teachers. Certain it is that the knowledge of parents is a clue to the understanding of their children. Without that knowledge the teacher enters upon the study of character as upon a property that has never been surveyed. For we are creatures of circumstances; we are what others who live before us have made us; nor is it possible for any man, however chequered his life may be, to emancipate himself from the determining influences of his home life.
Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley were alike the creatures of their homes. But how different were those homes! It is a strange thought that men and boys may live side by side, and may see each other every day, and yet be as far apart as if they were dwellers in opposite continents.
Harry Venniker was the elder son of an English peer, who possessed a stately ancestral seat at Helmsbury, in one of the Midland counties, and a house in Grosvenor Square. His father’s time was divided between Parliamentary attendance, which he regarded sometimes as a relaxation, but more frequently as a bore, and sport, which he considered to be the serious business in life. If Lord Venniker lived a good part of the year in town, he was never at home there. He remembered a few words of an old Horatian stanza, which he had learned by heart as a schoolboy—something about fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ; it was his solitary Latin quotation, and he was fond of making use of it to express his satisfaction at escaping from the business and bustle and vaporous fogs of the great city into rural peace and felicity. It is possible that he had not realised all the causes which rendered London distasteful to him. One of them was that he was unconsciously intolerant of a place where there were people who did not know him or salute him. At Helmsbury he was everybody’s friend and everybody’s master. He deserved his popularity and enjoyed it. His family had been settled in that part of England since the Revolution; and the house, which had been built in Queen Anne’s reign, had scarcely been altered, except in some of its sanitary details, during two centuries. When he drove his four-in-hand along the country roads, the silver bells jingling upon the necks of his handsome bays, the villagers would come out of their cottages and bow or curtsy in the doorways, and in answer to his kindly greeting would say, ‘Good morning to you, my lord; God bless your lordship!’ It would in those days have seemed as unnatural, as contrary to the established and recognised system of human affairs, that they should not be respectful to him and his family as that he should not be just and generous to them. His social superiority was taken for granted by them as much as by himself. It was the foundation of society in Helmsbury. Could it be denied or disputed, the world would come to an end; so he thought, and so his neighbours thought with him. But he was alive to the duties as well as to the rights of landownership. It was his boast that he knew the names and histories and had set foot in the farmhouses or cottages of all the tenants on his estate. One touch of feudal or patriarchal distinction he jealously retained. He was fond of arriving just a minute late on Sunday morning at the village church, in the hope that the rector, out of deference to his rank and dignity, would allow him a little grace and would not begin the prayers until he had taken his seat, after burying his face for two or three seconds in his tall hat and then depositing it on the cushion, when he would give a sort of nod to the reading-desk, as much as to say, ‘I am ready now.’ The long avenue of chestnuts stretches from the Hall to the Park gates, and the church is just outside them across the road, so that the sexton, who was set to keep watch, could see ‘my lord’s party’ coming churchwards and could give the signal for the rector to leave the vestry. Lord Venniker never failed—not even in the worst weather—to occupy his seat at the morning service in the square, tall family pew with its red baize cushions and hassocks, and the little grate in which his lordship, if the sermon were too long, would somewhat ostentatiously poke the fire, and the hatchments of the Venniker family looking down from the walls above it. He was a good and worthy man, Lord Venniker, but he believed in the world as it was, with a noble Venniker always supreme at Helmsbury Hall. He hated what he called ‘ideas,’ though it would seem that the opinions of the lord of Helmsbury were not ‘ideas.’ He belonged politically to the country party, and all Helmsbury, including its voters, belonged to him. There were three epithets which he was in the habit of hurling at such persons as were the objects of his animosity or aversion, and it was believed that the epithets represented ascending degrees of iniquity; but he did not always use them with a nice discrimination. If a person of different political or economical views gave him offence (as was generally the case if they came into contact with him at all), he would probably call him an ‘agitator.’ If the offence was aggravated, he would call him a ‘Chartist’; for he remembered the days of blazing hayricks and farm-buildings, and it was his conviction that a ‘strong hand’ was needed to crush the early symptoms of revolution. But there was a worst epithet of all not often employed, but reserved for such outrageous persons as presumed to dispute the natural right of the lords of Helmsbury to rule and homage in their own domains: Lord Venniker would speak of them as ‘atheists.’
His family consisted of Lady Venniker, two sons, the elder Harry, whose full Christian name was Henry Alfred Brabazon, and a younger boy, now six years old, and the daughter Etheldreda, or, as she was always called, Ethel, whose portrait has been already mentioned as adorning (along with the stag’s head and other trophies) the wall of her brother’s study at St. Anselm’s.
If Lord Venniker’s influence was visible everywhere, as, indeed, I think it was, in the village of Helmsbury, it was the influence of his wife that gave charm and character to the home. Lady Venniker was one of those rare beings who seem born to diffuse happiness without knowing it. It would have surprised her to be told that she did good; she would have said that her ill-health, limiting her activities, made it impossible. But she did good in the only way in which it is sure to be done—by being good. Her personal beauty, marked as it was with that wonderfully sanctifying transparency which nothing but congenital delicacy can impart, was irradiated by the light of virtue. There are some faces, women’s faces especially, that excite an unwilling admiration; we look at them, and look again, but we do not care to remember them. Other faces there are—not so beautiful, perhaps, theoretically—that linger as sweet memories in the mind and heart. Lady Venniker’s was a beauty, not of feature only, but of expression. Though she was generally confined to her couch, yet her interest in her family and household and in her neighbours never failed. No word of complaining, no word even of recognising her own sufferings, escaped her lips. Her thought was for others, not for herself. It was not without reason that the villagers, who seldom saw her unless illness or misfortune drew them to her side, would speak of her as ‘the good lady.’
But upon no one was Lady Venniker’s sweet influence felt so powerfully as upon her husband. He had loved her when she was a girl of seventeen, the only daughter of a country gentleman in the same county, and as a lover he loved her still. Time had wrought no change or lessening of his affection. Between him and her no cloud had ever spread. Her pleasure was the law of his life. She did not bend him to her will; he did not need to be bent. Abrupt and imperious as he was at times in his dealing with others, it seemed as if his manner were softened and his voice subdued when he came into her presence. There are marriages which preserve to the end the dream—who will dare to call it a delusion?—of the wedding morning, and such had been his. In his eyes she was still the same as when he had seen and loved her sixteen years before. She was still the same when she died. She has long been dead now; but the villagers of Helmsbury, some of whom never saw her, still speak of ‘the good lady.’ No one so good, no one so beautiful, has been known to them since.
Harry, her eldest born, in face and manner resembled his father. The mother’s beauty, something too, perhaps, of her delicacy, reappeared in her daughter. There was the same pale lustre, the same transparency, the same (yet not the same) foreshadowing of death. A stranger looking at either of them would have said that she was one of those whom the gods love too well. To her children, as to her husband, Lady Venniker seemed ever as a vision of delight—a being too good, too fair, too sensitive for earth.
Born and bred in such a home, Harry Venniker, if he looked to his future life, must have seen it traced for him in clear and definite lines. To go to St. Anselm’s, the school in which his family had been educated for four generations, to distinguish himself not so much in work as in cricket and football, to get into the army, to spend a few years in the House of Commons and then to become a respectable peer and country gentleman, to be in fact what his father had been before him, and his grandfather before his father, was his ambition, if anything so natural and, as it seemed, so inevitable, could be strictly called an ambition. He was at this time, like so many English boys when they enter upon public school life, a splendid animal, healthy, vigorous, proud, elate, with no low tastes, possibly without any high aims, taking life as it came, and being content to enjoy it fully, but having no special sense of a vocation or mission in life. After all, the world’s missionaries are but few, abroad or at home, and the world would not be so comfortable if they were numerous. For it is the missionary’s business to disturb and upset established things, and there are secular missionaries (who are sometimes called ‘bores’) as well as spiritual. Harry Venniker must not be blamed if his vocation or mission remained obscure to him in boyhood. But he owed to his mother not only his sunny smile (although his had not as yet, like hers, a tinge of sadness) and his rich curling auburn hair, but the generous sympathy—derived from her example still more than from her precept—which made it impossible for him to resist the silent appeal of suffering or to withhold his aid if it were invoked in the cause of weakness and sorrow. It was this sympathy, spontaneously elicited, which had led him to swear eternal friendship with a boy so dissimilar to himself as Gerald Eversley. Until now Harry Venniker had had no great friend, or his only friend had been his sister.
The contrast between the stately pile of Helmsbury, which was Harry Venniker’s home, and the vicarage of Kestercham, where Gerald Eversley had spent the first thirteen years of his life, was strongly marked. But the two boys, when they met at St. Anselm’s, were not conscious of it, as neither of them had ever seen the home of the other. If I can succeed in delineating both these homes, the progress of this story will be more easily understood. Fortunately, in speaking of Kestercham vicarage it is possible to use some letters of Gerald’s—written partly to Harry Venniker and partly to another—which lie before me.
The village of Kestercham is situated in the heart of the most beautiful of English counties. It is hidden, I had almost said, it seems to hide itself, from human eyes. The rare traveller who should happen to pass through it, making a slight détour, perhaps, to catch the view of the cathedral which bursts upon the eyes at the sharp turning where the road emerges from the valley of Depedown, about a mile and a half from Kestercham, would be likely to judge (and not unreasonably) that it was cut off from the affairs of the outer world. The large manufacturing town of X—— lies at a distance of some ten miles from Kestercham; its tall chimneys rise like giants into the air; but the smoke dies away, and the din of the great city, long before you come to the blacksmith’s shop where the three roads meet, and the left arm of the time-worn signpost bears the inscription ‘To Kestercham.’ In one of Gerald Eversley’s letters, written some years after the beginning of this story, the following passage occurs:
‘How well I remember that blacksmith’s shop! Often and often, when driving home on winter evenings with my father from one of the neighbouring villages where he had been doing duty, have I strained my eyes to catch the jolly inspiring glow of the blacksmith’s stithy, and I think the drive always seemed less cold and dreary when once the ruddy flame, shining through the little windowpane, came into view. The blacksmith himself was my particular friend. I remember how I used to stand by his side, when I was a child, in silent eager admiration of the force with which he brought down the large hammer on a bar of red-hot iron, sending the sparks in wild confusion through the stithy, like so many fireworks, and what a delight it was to me—never to be forgotten—when he took my little arms in his brawny black hands and let me play at producing the same luminiferous effect. I do not know or did not reflect in those days that it was an operation used long ago by a sacred writer to exemplify the multitude of human troubles. The blacksmith was kind to me, and I think he was my first boyish hero. Certainly, if anyone had asked me in these days what was the profession that most satisfied my ambition next to the clerical (for I always put the clerical first, as being my father’s), I should have answered “the blacksmith’s.”’
A little afterwards in the same letter he says: ‘From there (i.e. from the blacksmith’s shop) to Kestercham every inch of the way is familiar to me. The tall late-flowering limes—I never knew why they were so late in flower, but they always were—the hedgerows in which it was my boyish pleasure to search for the clematis and the wild rose, or to whisk off the heads of the ox-eyed daisies for violating my father’s rule that flowers, like young ladies, ought not to be staring, the two trim high-gabled farmhouses, hardly distinguishable one from the other, between which the road passed (the daughter of one of the farmers in these houses was a teacher in the Kestercham Sunday school), then the cottages, straggling at first, but gradually becoming closer until you descend a steepish hill and come upon a gully where a torrent rushes across the road in the winter or even in the summer if it is unusually wet, and you go through the green gate where the path turns off the high road and leads to the vicarage. That green gate was a great feature in the life of the vicar’s family at Kestercham; it marked the boundary between the vicarage and the world, the world being the parish of Kestercham with its barely three hundred souls. A walk to the green gate was a regular incident of the day; my father and I took it always, even if we did not go farther, after breakfast. I think he must have taken that walk nearly five thousand times since we came to Kestercham. Perhaps a hundred yards or a little more before reaching the gate on the way from X——, if you lift your eyes, you may catch a distant glimpse of the church nestling sleepily among the elms (unless it is summer, and the foliage so thick as to spoil the view), or if the wind is from the south, and your ears are sharp, you may hear the cawing of the rooks from their immemorial home in the churchyard. No gun was ever pointed at those rooks, or at the old owl that lived in the venerable riven elm between the churchyard and the Grange; for Mr. Seaford, the farmer who occupied the Grange, protected the owl as being the enemy of the mice which infested his farm and stackyard, and the rooks were the traditional favourites of my father, who looked upon them as possessing a special right of sanctuary within the precincts of the church.’
The vicarage, as this letter shows, lies off the high-road, nearly half a mile away from it. You go through several fields of oats and barley (or perhaps of mangoldwurzel and turnips, if it is the turn for root crops), then through a hay-field, generally the last to be cut in the village, then past the church and the moated Grange, and finally a sharp turn in the road or lane brings you in sight of the single cadaverous-looking poplar by the vicarage gate. The house itself is invisible until you stand at the front door; it is literally embedded in the trees.
This was Gerald Eversley’s home; he had never known any other. A quiet, sober red brick house with a facing of flint-stones built into the rubble; two rooms on the ground floor, looking into the garden, one of them the drawing-room with its ample bay-window, the other the dining-room, though in Gerald’s mind it was associated with lessons as much as with meals; above these rooms two corresponding bedrooms, in one of which Mr. Eversley had slept ever since he became vicar of Kestercham; on the other side of the house, which extended some way backwards, other bedrooms above the kitchen and the morning-room (which was seldom used until the afternoon) and Mr. Eversley’s study. Just outside the front door a noble birchtree raised its branches high above the roof of the house: how those boughs would creak and whistle in the north wind! Gerald had often lain awake in the still hours of the night listening to the rhythm of their moaning and wondering how long it would be before one of them fell with a thunder-clap to the ground. In front of the doorway was an oval grass-plot with a flowerbed, containing a large cactus in the middle, and a gravel carriage drive encircling it; beyond, a level bowling-green carefully kept and overshadowed by firs. There had been trees at the far end of the bowling-green as well as at its sides when Mr. Eversley came to Kestercham; but they had been cut away so as to allow a clear view from the vicarage of the church and the meadows leading to Kestercham Green. For it is a peculiarity of Kestercham, rendering the life at the vicarage still more solitary than it would otherwise have been, that the church and the vicarage are removed by a long distance—a mile and a half, even if one takes the short cut across the fields—from the ordinary scenes of the village life. It would seem that the church was originally designed to subserve the spiritual needs of several hamlets (for it is fully as near to the confines of Ripenham or Coddington as it is to Kestercham Green) and that the vicarage was built in due proximity to the church. The result is that at Kestercham the spiritual centre—the church—and the secular centre—the public house—are as far divided locally as possible. There is not a human habitation near the vicarage or in sight of it except the Grange, and even that is not visible from the vicarage itself. The vicarage stands in a solitude which may be felt.
But to Mr. Eversley, and therefore, of course, to Gerald in his early days, the heart of Kestercham parish—the building to which it owed its unity and sanctity—was the church. Mr. Eversley, who had some slight knowledge of architecture, would delight in pointing out to his young son the traces of many hands and different ages in the structure of the church—the outline of the old Norman archway at the west end, the six (would be) decorated windows of the nave, the groined roofing in the chancel and the massive tower built in the reign of Henry VII. by Edward Rickling, then the head of the Rickling family who for many generations owned the manor of Kestercham and lived at the Grange—it was then called the Hall—before it passed into the hands of the Seafords. The Ricklings have left many marks of their importance upon the church, perhaps the most striking being a large monument on the north wall representing the same Edward Rickling laid out after his death, and his wife and three sons and two daughters weeping beside him. Nearly opposite to the memorial of the Rickling family is a monument in brass supposed (though nobody knows) to have borne the name of a certain Balthazar Gardereau, a French Huguenot and silk-merchant of Lyons who settled at Kestercham, when he had been driven out of his own country by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, acquired the great tithes of the living, and presented to the church the service of Communion plate which still exhibits the letters B. G. in monograph. But this is history, or it is legend, the best of which Kestercham is capable.
The Kestercham folk were not, it may be supposed, loyal to the Crown in the seventeenth century, or, as is more probable, they displayed no interest in politics or war, and so escaped the anger of Cromwell’s army which is said to have been once encamped somewhere in the neighbourhood; for there is a royal coat of arms of Charles I., with the date 1640, hanging in the church, and it can hardly be thought that the Roundheads, if they had caught sight of it, would have left it there. Mr. Eversley, as a loyalist and a believer in the divine right of kings, was very proud of it. The south porch of the church is or was a little remarkable; for under its gable was the figure of a flying angel bearing a scroll with the legend, ‘Gather my saints together unto me,’ the church being dedicated to All Saints. When Mr. Eversley came to Kestercham a tall cross rose behind the figure of the angel and surmounted the gable. Mr. Eversley left the angel, not without a qualm of conscience, but he caused the cross to be taken down at the same time as he removed all traces of a holy-water basin which some workmen in repairing the porch had brought to light.
Gerald Eversley’s earliest recollections were associated with Kestercham church. Twice every Sunday, in the morning and the afternoon, he accompanied his father thither. Its simple services impressed themselves upon his mind. They represented his ideal of public divine worship. In after days, when his thoughts and feelings had become liberalised, he was fond of dwelling with a certain irony upon some quaint prehistoric customs which lingered on at Kestercham. But these very customs seemed venerable to him as a boy. The church had no vestry, but a curtain (which Mr. Eversley himself provided, for before his time there had been none) hung in front of the belfry—if, indeed, it can be called a belfry, when there was only a single bell—and behind that curtain, underneath the tower of the church, Mr. Eversley would assume his surplice before the prayers, and would exchange it for his black gown before the sermon. He had a commanding air—so Gerald felt—as he slowly walked the length of the church, joining heartily in the hymn that was being sung. He did strange things, or things which would seem strange in more modern times, for he was exempt from the fear of criticism which affects the minds of men, and especially of clergymen, living in the eye of the world. The parishioners of Kestercham did not regard or read the newspapers; they did not care to inquire what other people said. Thus it was, for instance, that Mr. Eversley would pause in his sermon and address some poor woman whose infant exhibited signs of crying, saying kindly, ‘Never mind. Stay where you are. Better a screaming baby than an absent mother!’ So, too, he has been known, in passing up the church, to ask a parishioner about his health or his family. All this would seem odd nowadays, perhaps irreverent; but nobody thought it odd at Kestercham.
Mr. Eversley, ever since he was appointed vicar, had been troubled in mind by certain established and apparently immutable local practices, against which he waged war long and valiantly, but with less result than his courage and persistency deserved. For instance, it was a rule of the village, and had always been so within the memory of the oldest parishioner (though nobody justified it, nobody could tell how it had grown up), that the men and women, and the boys and girls too, should sit on opposite sides of the church. Whatever the origin of this ritualistic rule had been at Kestercham, it was certainly not ritualism. Mr. Eversley argued that husbands and wives should sit together; he preached upon the propriety of husbands and wives sitting together; he went so far as to call upon some members of his flock, and to beg that they would sit together. They assented, or seemed to assent; but on the next Sunday they were not in church, and on the Sunday after they were sitting on opposite sides. Nothing is so hard to change, in the country especially, as a thoroughly irrational custom; it is proof against all the resources of civilisation. The males and females of Kestercham had always, it was whispered, sat apart, and apart it seemed that they would always sit.
Another practice which greatly exercised Mr. Eversley’s mind was this. It was the habit of the farmers and labourers, or of a considerable number of them, to seat themselves in the church porch half an hour or more before the beginning of divine service, and, while sitting there, to discuss secular parochial affairs in strident tones, and sometimes to smoke, until the clerk ceased tolling the solitary bell, and Miss Seaford, the farmer’s daughter, began playing a hymn-tune, which served as a voluntary, upon the harmonium; then they would come into the church by two and two according to a rough but recognised order of precedence, all alike dressed in their best Sunday clothes, and would follow Mr. Eversley, like the mutes in procession at a funeral, up the church until they dropped into their various places on the south (or masculine) side of the church, the most important of the farmers sitting nearest to the chancel, and Mr. Seaford himself, in virtue of his churchwardenship, in a large pew immediately under the pulpit. It was rumoured that in Mr. Eversley’s early days at Kestercham two or three of the parishioners had been known to sit in the porch, enjoying the gossip, until he emerged in his surplice from behind the curtain, and then, instead of entering the church, had retired to meditate and smoke in the fields during the hours of divine service. But this must, I think, be a calumny. Nothing was more curious or characteristic of Kestercham, and nothing was a source of greater trouble to Mr. Eversley, than the extreme suspiciousness with which any stranger who might happen to enter the church while divine service was going on, was regarded by the whole congregation. The people of Kestercham had no idea of admitting casual or occasional worshippers to their church; they expected a person to worship there regularly or never. The unhappy visitor found himself the object of a hundred inquisitive and indignant eyes. He became conscious that he was an alien, a heretic, a Gentile, who had no right to set foot within the sanctuary. Not being a parishioner of Kestercham, he possessed no title to enjoy the spiritual privileges of that favoured locality. There might be vacant seats in half the pews, but nobody invited him to occupy one of them. It happened not seldom that Mr. Eversley himself, after making futile signs to the churchwarden who was staring at the interloper over his spectacles, would leave his reading-desk and escort the stranger to a seat in the vicarage pew, running the gauntlet, as he did so, of all the farmers who looked daggers at him for being so foolish or immoral as to encourage the presumption of trespassers upon the spiritual preserves of Kestercham parish.
It would be easy to multiply instances of the eccentricity or exclusiveness that prevailed in Kestercham during Gerald Eversley’s early days. But this chapter is long enough; it may fitly conclude with an extract taken from one of his own letters.
‘The place I loved best in Kestercham,’ he wrote once, ‘was the churchyard. The solemn stillness entranced me. I spent many hours there. I knew by heart most of the inscriptions on the gravestones, and I sometimes wondered, though I never dared to ask my father how it was, that the world, or the parish of Kestercham at least, had grown so much worse in the last few years; for the people buried in the churchyard seemed nearly all to have been virtuous and godly, and yet I often heard my father say in church that the people whom he knew and saw every day and got on with very well, were “miserable sinners,” and their hearts “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” But to me Kestercham churchyard was holy ground. My mother’s grave was there, under the yew tree by the chancel of the church. It was there that she had wished to be buried; the spot was so peaceful (she said) and the trees shaded it so beautifully except on the east side, where the morning rays fell upon it, and she would lie in the midst of her own people. Next to her grave is a space reserved for my father when he dies. Sometimes, when the grass was green above the dead, I would take a book and lie all the summer’s afternoon by the graveside, looking up to the blue heaven. I used to think I should be laid to rest there too. I cannot remember my mother; she died when I was born. All that I can think of her is fancy, imagination. It may be false, but I love the thought that it is true. For now and then, in the early morning, in the golden time between sleeping and waking, a vision comes to me of a sweet calm face, with wistful eyes looking far into the future. It is a vision only; it endures but a little while; then it vanishes, and I see it no more. But I awake, and it is as if I had beheld the face of my mother.’