Chapter 5: Man of the World and Mystic

“THERE be no zarvice in the church to-day, my lady—not to St. Bride’s,” said a garden lad to Bride one bright Sunday morning in February as she was returning from a walk along the cliff in time for the eight-o’clock breakfast. Eustace had met her strolling homewards and had joined her. This had happened once or twice lately, and the strangeness of the feeling of having a companion was beginning to wear off.

“No service?” questioned the girl, pausing in her walk. “Is Mr. Tremodart ill? I had not heard of it.”

The lad scratched his head as he replied in the slow drawl of his native place—

“‘Tisn’t ezactly that, my lady. Passon isn’t zick; but he du have one of his hens a settin’ in the pulpit, and zo he du not wish her distarbed.”

Eustace broke into a peal of laughter. It seemed a delicious notion to him that the service of the parish church was to be suspended because an erratic hen had chosen to sit herself in the sacred building. It chimed in with many notions he already held of the effeteness and deadness of the Church. He glanced into his companion’s face for an answering smile, but Bride was looking straight before her with an expression in her liquid dark eyes which he was quite unable to fathom.

“You can go to hear Mr. St. Aubyn at St. Erme, George,” she said kindly to the lad, after a moment’s pause, but he only scratched his head again, and said—

“Mappen I’ll go tu Dan’s and year Maister Tresithny. They du zay as he’ll read a bit out o’ the book and tell folks what it all means.”

“That will be better than getting into mischief,” said the lady, with a grave though kindly look at the lad; and then she passed onwards to the house, Eustace walking beside her, smiling still.

“Are the services of the Church often suspended here for such weighty reasons?” he asked.

“Not often,” answered Bride, still in the same gravely quiet way; “but Mr. Tremodart is hardly alive to the sacredness of his calling nor the sanctity of his office. He is a kind man, but he does not win souls by his teaching. The church is very badly attended: no doubt he thinks one service more or less of small importance. The people, I believe, like him all the better for giving them an occasional holiday from attendance, even though they may be very irregular in coming.”

“I should think that highly probable,” answered Eustace, still examining Bride’s face with some curiosity, as if anxious to gauge her thoughts on this subject and to seek to find in them some accord with his own. “My experiences of the services at St. Bride’s Church are not very stirring. The smell of dry-rot suggests the idea that it has been caught from the calibre of the discourses heard there. Our friend Mr. Tremodart may have many virtues, but he has not the gift of eloquence.”

Bride made no response. In her eyes there was a look akin to pain, as though she felt the truth of the stricture, and yet it went against her to admit its truth.

Eustace waited for a moment and then continued in the same light way—

“And will the service of the parish church be suspended for three Sundays?—for, if my boyish recollections serve me, that is the time required by a hen for bringing off her brood.”

“Oh, no,” answered Bride, with a quick earnestness and energy, “that will certainly not be. Poor Mr. Tremodart, he knows no better perhaps; but it is very, very sad. I suppose it was only found out last night or this morning. There was no sermon last Sunday, so I suppose the eggs collecting in the pulpit were not noticed. Of course they should have been taken away at once. But Mr. Tremodart is very fond of his animals, and he does not think of sacred things quite as—as—others do. Of course it will be done before next Sunday. Oh, I am sorry it has happened. I am sorry for the poor people.”

Eustace could not understand her mood. He saw only the humorous side of the incident, but he would not say so to her. He was very anxious to approach nearer in thought and feeling to his beautiful cousin, who was as yet almost as much of a stranger to him as she had been upon the day of his arrival. Although he saw her daily, sat at table with her, and sometimes spent an hour over the piano with her in the evening (for both were good musicians, as things went in those days), he still felt as though she were a thing apart from him, wrapped in a world of her own of which he knew nothing. The barrier which divided them was at once impenetrable and invisible, yet he had never succeeded in discovering wherein its power lay, and what might be done to break it down and bring them together.

“You will go to St. Erme’s Church to-day, I suppose?” he said next, without trying to solve the problem suggested by her speech. “I have never attended St. Erme for a service, although I have met Mr. St. Aubyn. Will you let me be your escort there? I suppose your father will hardly walk as far.”

“No, I think not. He seldom goes out when there is no service at St. Bride. He does not care for Mr. St. Aubyn’s preaching as I do: he prefers that of Mr. Tremodart.”

Eustace secretly thought it must be a queer sort of preaching that could be inferior to that of the parson of St. Bride’s; but he made no remark, and merely asked—

“Then you will let me be your escort?”

“Thank you,” answered Bride quietly; “if you wish to go, I think you will be rewarded.”

Eustace felt that his reward would be in the pleasure of the walk to and fro with his cousin; but he did not say so, even though rather exaggerated and high-flown compliments were then the fashion of the day more than they have since become. Something in Bride’s aspect and manner always withheld him from uttering words of that kind, and his own honesty and common-sense kept him at all times within bounds, so that he had never acquired the foolish foppery that was fashionable amongst the gilded youth of the aristocracy. In one thing at least he and Bride were agreed—that life was given for something more than mere idle amusement and pleasure-seeking. And when they started off together for their two miles’ walk across cliff and down for the little church of St. Erme, Eustace began to ask questions of her as to the condition of the people, their ignorance, their poverty, their state of apathy and neglect, which all at once aroused her interest and sympathy, and caused her to open out towards him as she had never done before.

Bride loved the people—that was the first fact he gathered from the answers she made him. She loved them—and he loved them too. He was conscious that they loved them with a difference—that when they spoke of raising them and making them better and happier, she was thinking of one thing and he of another. He was conscious of this, but he did not think she was; and he was very careful to say no word to check the impulse of confidence which had arisen between them. Bride was grieved for the state of things about her: she mourned over the degradation, the apathy, the almost bestial indifference to higher things that reigned amongst the humble folks about her home. She spoke with a glimmer as of tears in her eyes of their absolute indifference to all that was high and noble and true; of the deep superstitions, which stultified their spiritual aspirations, and the blind error and folly of those who, turning away from God, sought wisdom and help from those calling themselves witches—many of whom did possess, or appear to possess, occult powers that it was impossible altogether to explain away or disbelieve.