Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Volume 3 of 3

“But that poor simple Amy will, if he has brought her with him. Well, I will stay here and lecture her, uncle, about her behaviour to you.”

After all this the old man set forth, in some little irritation, to receive his once–loved friend. He entered the black oak parlour in a cold and stately manner, and bowed without a word to John, who had crossed the room to meet him. The parson held out his hand, as a lover and preacher of peace should do; but the offer, ay, and the honour too, not being at all appreciated, he withdrew it with a crimson blush all over his bright clear cheeks, as deep as his daughterʼs would have been.

Then Sir Cradock Nowell, trying to seem quite calm and collected, addressed his visitor thus:

“Sir, I am indebted to you for the honour of this visit. I apologize for receiving you in a room without a fire. Pray take a chair. I have no doubt that your intentions are kind towards me.”

“I thank you,” replied the parson, speaking much faster than usual, and with the frill of his shirt–front rising; “I thank you, Sir Cradock Nowell; but I will not sit down in the house of a gentleman who declines to take my hand. I am here much against my own wishes, and only because I supposed that it was my duty to come. I am here on behalf of your son, a noble but most unfortunate youth, and now in great trouble of mind.”

If he had only said “in great bodily danger,” it might have made a difference.

“Your interest in him is very kind; and I trust that he will be grateful, which he never was to me. He has left his home in defiance of me. I can do nothing for him until he comes back, and is penitent. But surely the question concerns me rather than you, Mr. Rosedew.”

“I am sorry to find,” answered John, quite calmly, “that you think me guilty of impertinent meddling. But even that I would bear, as becomes my age and my profession,” – here he gave Sir Cradock a glance, which was thoroughly understood, because they had been at school together, – ”and more than that I would do, Cradock Nowell, for a man I have loved like you, sir.”

That “sir” came out very oddly. John poked it in, as a retractation for having called him “Cradock Nowell,” and as a salve to his own self–respect, lest he should have been too appealing. And to follow up this view of the subject, he made a bow such as no man makes to one from whom he begs anything. But Sir Cradock Nowell lost altogether the excellence of the bow. The parson had put up his knee in a way which took the old man back to Sherborne. His mind was there playing cob–nut as fifty years since, with John Rosedew. Once more he saw the ruddy, and then pugnacious, John bringing his calf up, and priming his knee, for the cob–nut to lie upon it. This he always used to do, and not care a flip for the whack upon it, instead of using his blue cloth cap, as all the rest of the boys did; because his father and mother were poor, and could only afford him one cap in a year.

And so the grand bow was wasted, as most formalities are: but if John had only known when to stop, it might have been all right after all, in spite of Georgie Corklemore. But urged by the last infirmity (except gout) of noble minds, our parsons never do know the proper time to stop. Excellent men, and admirable, they make us shrink from eternity, by proving themselves the type of it. Mr. Rosedew spoke well and eloquently, as he was sure to do; but it would have been better for his cause if he had simply described the sonʼs distress, and left the rest to the fatherʼs heart. At one time, indeed, poor old Sir Cradock, who was obstinate and misguided, rather than cold and unloving, began to relent, and a fatherly yearning fluttered in his grey–lashed eyes.

But at this critical moment, three little kicks at the door were heard, and the handle rattled briskly; then a shrill little voice came through the keyhole:

“Oh pease let Fore tum in. Pease do, pease do, pease do. Me ‘ost me ummy top. Oh you naughty bad door!”

Then another kick was administered by small but passionate toe–toes. Of course your mother did not send you, innocent bright–haired popples, and with a lie so pat and glib in that pouting pearl–set mouth. Foolish mother, if she did, though it seal Attalic bargain!

Sir Cradock went to the door, and gently ordered the child away. But the interruption had been enough —ibi omnis effusus labor. When he returned and faced John Rosedew the manner of his visage was altered. The child had reminded him of her mother, and that graceful, gushing, loving nature, which tried so hard not to doubt the minister. So he did what a man in the wrong generally does instinctively; he swept back the tide of war into his adversaryʼs country.

“You take a very strong interest, sir, in one whose nearest relations have been compelled to abandon him.”

“I thought that your greatest grievance with him was that he had abandoned you.”

“Excuse me; I cannot split hairs. All I mean is that something has come to my knowledge – not through the proper channel, not from those who ought to have told me – something which makes your advocacy seem a little less disinterested than I might have supposed it to be.”

“Have the kindness to tell me what it is.”

“Oh, perhaps a mere nothing. But it seems a significant rumour.”

“What rumour, if you please?”

“That my – that Cradock Nowell is attached to your daughter, who behaved so ill to me. Of course, it is not true?”

“Perfectly true, every word of it.” And John Rosedew looked at Sir Cradock Nowell as proudly as ever a father looked. Amy, in his opinion, was peeress for any mortal. And perhaps he was not presumptuous.

“Ah!” was the only reply he received: an “ah” drawn out into half an ell.

“Why, I would have told you long ago, the moment that I knew it, but for your great trouble, and your bitterness towards him. You have often wished that a son of yours should marry my daughter Amy. Surely you will not blame him for desiring to do as you wished?”

“No, because he is young and foolish; but I may blame you for encouraging it, now that he is the only one.”

“Do you dare to think that I am in any way influenced by interested motives?”

“I dare to think what I please. No bullying here, John, if you please. We all know how combative you are. And, now you have forced me to it, I will tell you what will be the conviction, ay, and the expression of every one in this county, except those who are afraid of you. ‘Mr. Rosedew has entrapped the future Sir Cradock Nowell, hushed up the crime, and made all snug for his daughter at Nowelhurst Hall.’”

Sir Cradock did not mean half his words, any more than the rest of us do, when hurt; and he was bitterly sorry for them the moment they were uttered. They put an impassable barrier between him and John Rosedew, between him and his own conscience, for many a day and night to come.

Have you ever seen a pure good man, a man of large intellect and heart, a lover of truth and justice more than of himself, confront, without warning, some black charge, some despicable calumny, in a word (for I love strong English, and nothing else will tell it), some damned lie? If not, I hope you never may, for it makes a manʼs heart burn so.

John Rosedew was not of the violent order. Indeed, as his sister Eudoxia said, and to her own great comfort knew, his cistern of wrathfulness was so small, and the supply–pipe so unready – as must be where the lower passions filter through the intellect – that most people thought it impossible “to put the parson out.” And very few of those who knew him could have borne to make the trial.

Even now, hurt as he was to the very depth of his heart, he was indignant more than angry.

“It would have been more manly of you, Sir Cradock Nowell, to have said this very mean thing yourself, than to have put it into the mouths of others. I grieve for you, and for myself, that so mean a man was ever my friend. Perhaps you have still some relics of gentlemanly feeling which will lead you to perform a hostʼs duty towards his visitor. Have the kindness to order my horse.”

Then John Rosedew, so punctilious, so polite to the poorest cottager, turned his broad back upon the baronet, and as he slowly walked to the door, these words came over his shoulder: —

“To–day you will receive my resignation of your two benefices. If I live a few years more, I will repay you all they have brought me above a curateʼs stipend. My daughter is no fortune–hunter. She never shall see your son again, unless he renounce you and yours for ever, or you come and implore us humbly as now you have spoken arrogantly, contemptibly, and meanly.”

Then, fearing lest he had been too grand about a little matter – not his daughterʼs marriage, but the aspersion upon himself – he closed the door very carefully, so as not to make any noise, and walked away towards his home, forgetting Coræbus utterly. And, before his fine solid face began to recover its healthy and bashful pink, he was visited by sore misgivings as to his own behaviour; to wit, what claim had any man, however elate with the pride of right and the scorn of wrong, to talk about any fellow–man becoming humble to him? Nevertheless, he could not manage to retract the wrong expression in his letter of resignation; not from any false pride – oh no! – but for fear of being misunderstood. But that very night he craved pardon of Him before whom alone we need humbly bow; who alone can grant us anything.

CHAPTER IV

What is lovelier, just when Autumn throws her lace around us, and begs us not to begin to think of any spiteful winter, because she has not yet unfolded half the wealth of her bosom, and will not look over her shoulder – when we take that rich one gaily for her gifts of beauty; what among her clustered hair, freshened with the hoar–frost in imitation of the Spring (all fashions do recur so), tell us what can be more pretty, pearly, light, and elegant, more memoried of maidenhood, than a jolly spiderʼs web?

See how the diamonds quiver and sparkle in the September morning; what jeweller could have set them so? All of graduated light and metrical proportion, every third pre–eminent, strung on soft aerial tension, as of woven hoar–frost, and every carrying thread encrusted with the breath of fairies, then crossed and latticed at just angles, with narrowing interstices, to a radiated octagon – the more we look, the more we wonder at the perfect tracery. Then, if we gently breathe upon it, or a leaf of the bramble shivers, how from the open centre a whiff of waving motion flows down every vibrant radius, every weft accepts the waft slowly and lulling vibration, every stay–rope jerks and quivers, and all the fleeting subtilty expands, contracts, and undulates.

Yet if an elegant spider glide out, exquisite, many–dappled, pellucid like a Scotch pebble or a calceolaria, with a dozen dimples upon his back, and eight fierce eyes all up for business, the moment he slips from the blackberry–leaf all sense of beauty is lost to the gazer, because he thinks of rapacity.

And so, I fear, John Rosedewʼs hat described in the air a flourish of more courtesy than cordiality, when he saw Mrs. Corklemore gliding forth from the bend of the road in front of him. Although she had left the house after him, by the help of a short cut through the gardens, where the rector would no longer take the liberty of trespassing, she contrived to meet him as if herself returning from the village.

“Oh, Mr. Rosedew, I am so glad to see you,” cried Georgie, as he tried to escape with his bow: “what a fortunate accident!”

“Indeed!” said John, not meaning to be rude, but unwittingly suggesting a modified view of the bliss.

“Ah, I am so sorry; but you are prejudiced against me, I fear, because my simple convictions incline me to the Low Church view.”

That hit was a very clever one. No other bolt she could have shot would have brought the parson to bay so, upon his homeward road, with the important news he bore.

“I assure you, Mrs. Corklemore, I beg to assure you most distinctly, that you are quite wrong in thinking that. Most truly I hope that I have allowed no prejudice, upon such grounds, to dwell for a moment with me.”

“Then you are not a ritualist? And you think, so far as I understand you, that the Low Church people are quite as good as the High Church?”

“I hope they are as good; still I doubt their being as right. But charity is greater even than faith and hope. And, for the sake of charity, I would wash all rubrics white. If the living are rebuked for lagging to bury their dead, how shall they be praised for battling over the Burial Service?”

Mrs. Corklemore, quick as she was, did not understand the allusion. Mr. Rosedew referred to a paltry dissension over a corpse in Oxfordshire, which had created strong disgust, far and near, among believers; while infidels gloried in it. It cannot be too soon forgotten and forgiven.

“Oh, Mr. Rosedew, I am so glad that your sentiments are so liberal. I had always feared that liberal sentiments proceeded from, or at least were associated with, weak faith.”

“I hope not, madam. The most liberal One I have ever read of was God as well as man. But I cannot speak of such matters casually, as I would talk of the weather. If your mind is uneasy, and I can in any way help you, it is my duty to do so.”