“But how do they meet?” asked the diplomatist, with unchanged gravity. “I do not see how they are ever alone together.”
“She has arranged it. She is so clever; the bad, bad girl! She goes to him for confirmation lessons. He teaches her in his study twice a week — separately from the others.”
“But her father is a Unitarian.”
“That does not interfere. She does what she likes with Mr. Romer. Her game now is to want to be baptized into our church. She is going to be baptized first, and then confirmed.”
“And the preparation for baptism is as dangerous as the preparation for confirmation.” remarked the scholar; straightening the muscles of his mouth, after the discipline of St. Ignatius.
“The whole thing is horrible — dreadful! It frets me every hour of the day. He is so good and so innocent. He has no idea where she is leading him.”
“But I cannot prevent her wanting to be baptized,” said Mr. Taxater.
“You can talk to him,” answered Vennie, with intense conviction. “You can talk to him and he will listen to you. You can tell him the danger he is in of being made miserable for life.” She drew her breath deeply. “Oh the remorse he will feel; the horrible, horrible remorse!”
Mr. Taxater glanced across the hay-field. The sun, a red globe of fire, was resting on the extreme edge of Leo’s Hill, and seemed like a great blood-shot eye regarding them with lurid interest. Long cool shadows, thrown across the field by the elms in the hedge and by the stack beside them, melted magically into one another, and made the hillocks of still ungathered grass soft and intangible as fairy graves.
“I will do my best,” said the scholar. “I will do my best.” And indicating to Vennie, who was absorbed in her nervous gratitude, the near approach of the object of their saintly conspiracy, he led her forward to meet the young clergyman with an appropriate air of friendly and casual nonchalance.
“I am sorry to have to say it,” was Mr. Clavering’s greeting, “but that farmer-fellow is the only person in my parish for whom I have a complete detestation. I wish to goodness Mr. Romer had never brought him into the place!”
“I don’t like the look of his back, I must say,” answered the theologian, following with his eyes the retreating figure of Mr. John Goring.
“He is,” said the young priest, “without exception the most repulsive human being I have ever met in my life. Our worthy Romer is an angel of light compared with him.”
With Mr. Goring still as their topic, they strolled amicably together towards the same gap in the hedge, through which the apologist of the papacy had emerged an hour before. There they separated, Vennie returning to the vicarage, and the young clergyman carrying off Mr. Taxater to supper with him in his house by the church.
Clavering’s establishment consisted of a middle-aged woman of inordinate volubility, and the woman’s daughter, a girl of twelve.
The supper offered by the priest to his guest was “light and choice”—nor did it lack its mellow accompaniment of carefully selected, if not “Attic,” wine. Of this wine Mr. Taxater did not hesitate to partake freely, sitting, when the meal was over, opposite his host at the open window, through which the pleasant murmurs of the evening, and the voices of the village-street, soothingly and harmoniously floated.
The famous theologian was in an excellent temper. Rich recondite jests pursued one another from his smiling lips, and his white hands folded themselves complacently above the cross on his watch-chain.
Lottie Fringe, the child of Clavering’s servant, tripped sportively in and out of the room, encouraged in her girlish coquetries by the amiable scholar. She was not yet too old to be the kittenish plaything of the lighter moments of a wise and scholarly man, and it was pleasant to watch the zest with which the vicar’s visitor entered into her sportive audacities. Mr. Taxater made her fill and refill his glass, and taking her playfully on his knee, kissed her and fondled her many times. It was the vicar himself, who finally, a little embarrassed by these levities, sent the girl off to the kitchen, apologizing to his guest for the freedom she displayed.
“Do not apologize, dear Mr. Clavering,” said the theologian. “I love all children, especially when they are girls. There is something about the kisses of a young girl — at once amorous and innocent — which reconciles one to the universe, and keeps death at a distance. Could one for a moment think of death, when holding a young thing, so full of life and beauty, on one’s knee?”
The young priest’s face clouded. “To be quite honest with you, Mr. Taxater,” he murmured, in a troubled voice, “I cannot say that I altogether agree. We are both unconventional people, so I may speak freely. I do not think that one does a child any good by encouraging her to be playful and forward, in that particular way. You live with your books; but I live with my people, and I have known so many sad cases of girls being completely ruined by getting a premature taste for coquetry of that kind.”
“I am afraid, my friend,” answered Mr. Taxater, “that the worst of all heresies is lodged deep in your heart.”
“Heresies? God knows,” sighed the priest, “I have enough evil in my heart — but heresies? I am at a loss to catch your meaning.”
In the absence of his playful Clerica — to use the Pantagruelian allusion — the great Homenas of Nevilton was compelled to fill his “tall-boy of extravagant wine” with his own hand. He did so, and continued his explanation.
“By the worst of all heresies I mean the dangerous Puritan idea that pleasure itself is evil and a thing detestable to God. The Catholic doctrine, as I understand it, is that all these things are entirely relative to the persons concerned. Pleasure in itself is, in the Aristotelian sense, a supreme good. Everyone has a right to it. Everyone must have it. The whole thing is a matter of proportion and expediency. If an innocent playful game, of the kind you have just witnessed, was likely in this definite particular case to lead to harm, then you would be justified in your anxiety. But there must be no laying down of hard general rules. There must be no making a virtue of the mere denying ourselves pleasure.”
Mr. Clavering could hardly wait for his guest to finish.
“Then, according to your theory,” he exclaimed, “it would be right for you, or whoever you will, — pardon my making the thing so personal — to indulge in casual levities with any pretty barmaid, as long as you vaguely surmised that she was a sensible girl and would not be harmed?
“Certainly it would be right,” replied the papal apologist, sipping his wine and inhaling the perfume of the garden, “and not only right, but a plain duty. It is our duty, Mr. Clavering, to make the world happier while we live in it; and the way to make girls happier, especially when their occupations are laborious, is to kiss them; to give them innocent and admiring embraces.”
“I am afraid you are not quite serious, Mr. Taxater,” said the clergyman. “I have an absurd way of being direct and literal in these discussions.”
Certainly, I am serious. Do you not know — young puritan — that some of the noblest spirits in history have not hesitated to increase the pleasure of girls’ lives by giving them frequent kisses? In the Greek days he who could give the most charming kiss was awarded a public prize. In the Elizabethan days all the great and heroic souls, whose exquisite wit and passionate imagination put us still to shame, held large and liberal views on this matter. In the eighteenth century the courtly and moral Joseph Addison used never to leave a coffee-house, however humble and poor, without bestowing a friendly embrace upon every woman in it. The religious Doctor Johnson — a man of your own faith — was notoriously in the habit of taking his prettier visitors upon his knee, and tenderly kissing them. It is no doubt due to this fact, that the great lexicographer was so frequently visited;—especially by young Quakers. When we come to our own age, it is well known that the late Archbishop Taraton, the refuter of Darwin, was never so happy as when romping round the raspberry-canes in his garden with a crowd of playful girls.