“Miss Hutton, can you meet our eyes? said Miss Adam, not without suggestion that this was beyond herself.
“Oh, we will acquit Miss Hutton. She is the most sensible of us all,” said Miss Cliff.
It is appropriate that this is the end of the novel. It is as if here, after the flounderings, the true voice has been found. It is this same voice which will be heard fourteen years later in Pastors and Masters and, developed, perfected, throughout the remarkable novels that follow.
Charles Burkhart
Chapter I
It is a daily thing: a silent, unvisited churchyard; bordering the garden of the parsonage; and holding a church whose age and interest spare our words; a few tombs fenced from their fellows, and marking generations of the family held as great; others naming primitive lives that grew and waned by the spot which harbours their silence; and at some moment of its lying in sight an open grave with its mourners.
An open grave with its mourners. It is a daily thing, but not to be denied our heed. Let us mark the figure foremost in the sombre throng, that clerical figure of heavy build and with bent head. That is the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, the vicar of the parish.
He is not very worthy of our words, the Reverend Cleveland Hutton. He is perhaps less worthy than his parish would have held, and his appearance tends to suggest. The heaviness of build, which was interpreted in the light of feminine fondness for the cloth as a sign of mental and moral profundity, was on other interpretations simply heaviness. The expanse of his brow was due in smaller measure to developement of the brain beneath, than recession of the hair above. The unusual length of his hinder locks, though a feature which, as he was aware, has been in some cases an attribute of genius, was in his own to be referred, simply, to his directions to his barber. Even his Christian name, though to the rustic portion of the village it was an illustration of his removal from things common amongst remaining mankind, had been given him for no better reason than that it was his mother’s maiden surname — a reason which even to his mother seemed to have appeared sufficient only in the case of a younger son, since his elder brother was known to his family as James. In his clerical character also he was one of many. He had discharged the duties of a curate till he was thirty-five; and his recent appointment to this country living, which he had himself been heard to allude to as his first step up the ladder of preferment, was likely to be his final one; and was due not less to the fact that his mother’s cousin was connected with its patron, than to the force of his personality, or the repute of the pamphlet he had published.
No; there was nothing in the Rev. Cleveland Hutton to mark him a man apart. But it does not follow there was nothing about him to be written or read. Our deepest experience is not less deep, that it is common to our race; and the heart of the Rev. Cleveland Hutton was not less wrung, as he watched the ebbing of the life that was to him of price, and wrestled in remembrance of the forgotten wrongs of tone and word, which even the supreme agony of remorse could not make as if they had not been, that it was an ordinary human heart, which had beaten for thirty-eight years in obedience to ordinary human daily things. It was a strong still face, from which he tore his eyes, turning again that its picture might defy the years with different days. There had been a strong, woman’s heart to cleave to his own, through the struggles of the lingering unbeneficed time, the loss of his firstborn, and other things finding a place in his ordinary human lot. Standing by the open grave, dreading for the numbness of grief to pass, and leave him the facing of the future that was dark, he was as fitting a mark for compassion as if his name were to live.
Nor was compassion withheld. The mourners behind him are standing with lips set firm and with bowed heads. They are not his relatives: for the Reverend Cleveland Hutton had a knack of becoming estranged from his kin. He had at times met occasion to borrow from them, or coercion to allow them to borrow from him, and had not met the rarer experience of averting regrettable results. The only member of his family present was his elder brother, the Reverend James Hutton; who, never holding business dealings with relatives on principle, did not find himself disqualified for conducting the burial service. They are all of the district’s familiar dwellers; and they will serve, if patience can be held through seeming wandering, as an example of the power of this passage of the ordinary human lot upon the ordinary human heart.
If you had entered this straggling village, at the time — somewhere in the latter half of the nineteenth century — when its parsonage was the home of the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, you would have thought it well provided in the matter of its spiritual needs. It contained, besides its church of passable antiquity and interest, a Wesleyan chapel without such qualities, and a wooden building in a field; which from having been the barn of a now obsolete farmhouse, had come to be a sort of meeting-place at general disposal for religious ends. But it does not follow, because a place is well provided in the matter of religion, that it is equally furnished in such matters as charity and tolerance. It might rather seem that Providence felt good equipment under both these heads an extravagant moral dower for a single spot, and was at some pains to avoid it. Bearing this in mind; and summoning thither our experience of ordinary human nature as wrought upon by minor religious disagreements, and of districts with a church with traditions in favour of a high ritual, an old-fashioned Wesleyan chapel, and such a peopling that every working man is an accounted unit in each congregation; let us turn our eyes on the figure behind the Reverend Cleveland Hutton. It is a figure similar in height and garb, but with a subtle suggestion of difference.
That is the minister of the Wesleyan Chapel.
Look next at the mourner behind the Wesleyan minister — that broad-shouldered man with the air of the prosperous country gentleman. That is Mr Blackwood; who for some time has been a prominent figure of the neighbourhood; having found in it some years ago a roomy house at a reduced rent, and within easy distance of facilities for Wesleyan worship — adaptable conditions to his large family, straitened income, and the branch of dissent in which both he and his wife had received their nurture. Of his appearance there is little to be told beyond what is said. Mrs Blackwood was of the opinion that he looked like a member of parliament; and he could himself testify that on several occasions in the train he had been taken for one. The senatorial suggestion about him had the excuse that this had once been his destiny. Family losses following his early marriage had cancelled the prospect; and Mr Blackwood, who had seconded with much compliance his parents’ assumption of his insight into national conditions, recognised in a similar spirit that misfortune had averted the career for which he was moulded; and surrendered himself with what was felt a rather fine suppression of repining to the obscure but untaxing career of a country gentleman. This life was diversified by experience of more arduous nature. Mrs Blackwood was unable to be reconciled to the anomaly of public qualities withdrawn from the general advantage; and having strong feelings upon temperance and the deplorable significance of the spread of Roman Catholicism, was wont to urge him to the use of his accepted rhetorical gifts, upon which her views had an unwonted concurrence with those of relatives-inlaw. Further losses in substance having lessened facilities for country pleasures, he had greater resource to declamatory interests. Habit begot inclination; and brought into outline opinions in which he had acquiesced, in the same manner as in his own deliberative fitness; and the addressing of “meetings,” political, religious, and temperance, came to be the main interest of his leisure — in other words, of his life. Temperance and religion encroached upon politics, as being less exacting mentally, and better adapted to the rather emotional and fervid discourse in which he felt his talents to lie; and at the time when this story opens he was recognised in Millfield as an amateur gentleman-evangelist, prepared to exercise his oratorical powers for the intangible advantage of his kind; in the chapel, the open air, or the building in the field; and whether at the request of the Wesleyan minister or in response to his own heart’s prompting. This course of experience, involving the mingling with people of a lower social and mental level on a footing at once of pre-eminence and genial assumption of equality, had not been without effect upon him; and in many respects he was altered from the days when he was designed for a member of parliament. His manner had developed in the direction of freedom rather than polish, and the air of the open-handed country squire was lessening. His greeting to cottagers had grown from his former “Good day,” to a “Well, friend, how goes the world with you and yours?” or “Well, Rogers, I shall expect to see you at the meeting on Tuesday next.” He was rather over-prone to enter into talk, with a view to turning it to temperance or religion, with strangers in the train; and his arguments to prove to the Reverend Cleveland Hutton that a high ritual really involved idolatry, were marked by more sincerity and emphasis than delicacy. But there was much that was gentle and genial about Mr Blackwood. Any labouring man of the district, even if he was a churchman, and could not but regard the Reverend Cleveland Hutton as the standing example of what human nature might attain, would have told you that he was “a real gentleman.” If he confounded the enjoyment of platform prominence with zeal for the souls of his fellows, and the emotions inspired by the sound of his own voice with the enthusiasm of inspiration, the confounding was innocent and honest: and to-day he forgot to view the Reverend Cleveland Hutton through the darkling haze cast by his high ritual, and stood simply with bowed head, and a heart that was full for his brother.