i: ORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRAR as'e 1 ISITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOR 1SITY OF CALIFORNIA (T& LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOR Q O Hppletons' ZTown an& Country Xibrarg No. 238 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP A NO^EL BY GRANT ALLEN OF THB UNIVERSITY NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1898 CONTENTS. A2 PART I. AUSTRALASIA. CHAPTER PAGE I. AMONG THE ISLANDS i II. A BRUSH WITH THE NATIVES . . . . . 10 IH.RlVAL PIONEERS OF CIVILISATION . . . .22 IV. THE MISSIONARY'S ILLNESS ..... 29 V. BULLY FORD'S LIVE-STOCK 36 VI. THE OTHER SIDE OF IT 47 VII. LAW AND ORDER . , . ', 53 VIII. A GENTLEMAN AGAIN 59 IX. ENTANGLEMENT 71 X. THE COMPLETE CASUIST 83 XI TOM PLUNGES 94 XII. THE INEVITABLE io4 XIII. VITA NUOVA 116 XIV. CROSSING THE RUBICON 127 PART II. ENGLAND. XV. THE PALACE, DORCHESTER ... 137 XVI. PERPLEXITY 152 XVII. TO GO OR NOT TO GO . . . . .164 XVIII. LOVE UP TO DATE I7 2 V vi THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. CHAfTOt PAG* XIX. THE EPISCOPATE STOOPS 156 XX. THE LION'S MOUTH 196 XXL A QUESTION OF ORDINATION . . . .207 XXII. A LIGHTER TREATMENT 22O XXIII. AN OFFICIAL INTERVIEW 230 XXIV. SUCH SWEET SORROW 240 THE CLOUDS THICKEN 246 XXVL AT BAY 256 XXVII. EVELYN ACTS 269 XXVIII. OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 275 XXIX. THE BISHOP TURNS 285 XXX. THE BISHOP DECIDES 295 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. PART I. AUSTRALASIA. CHAPTER I. AMONG THE ISLANDS. "HARD A-STARBOARD! " The John Wesley turned her slow length; and the two tall cocoa-nut palms on the distant hill- top, which served as seamarks to ships engaged in what was euphemistically called " the Labour Traffic/' having been brought into line, she pro- ceeded to steam at a cautious rate into the har- bour of Temuka. Its reefs have wrecked many better vessels. And what a beautifully-chosen name for its purpose, the John Wesley! It smacked of peace and the London Missionary Society. If any meddlesome gunboat of Her Britannic Majes- ty's fleet, engaged in superintending or suppress- ing the Labour Traffic aforesaid, had chanced to encounter that long slim steamer, on the prowl after " apprentices," surely the mere sight of the l 2 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. rds "John \ " le^ihh in pit let- ters on her stern, must have disarmed at the first blush the most officious and suspicious of naval officers. The John Wesley, look you! so well- meaning! so innocent! doubtless a vessel engaged distributing Sunday-School books, and tracts, and cotton pocket-handkerchiefs to the mild but unfortunately heathen inhabitants of those isles of summer. Who could suspect a ship with such :ame as the John Wesley of anything blacker than ecclesiastical nonconformi That was Tom Pringle's idea when he first signed articles for his memorable voyage. The skipper had assured him (with just a faint qui of the left eyelid, it is true) that the expedition '.>Ily concerned with the purchase of bi\ mer, for export to China, and the peaceful col- :ion of dried cocoa-nut or copra from ; meMan islands. Nevertheless, it struck Tom as odd that all ids were on deck when they approached the coast, and that even the sleepy Malay cook with the fat red eyes had an air of alertness and a re- Ivcr in his hand, as the shore drew near; it looked as if they were prepared for sometl 4tiore exciting than the peaceable exchange of tobacco and hollands (known locally a> " square for sea-slugs and dried fibres. He be.L AMONG THE ISLANDS. 3 to suspect the meaning of the two dozen sniders on the rack in the cabin, and the handcuffs hung up by the Captain's locker. Those were the good -old days of the early Queensland Labour Traffic. And one may as i well admit, without making further ado about it, that the microscopic distinction between the Labour Traffic and the Slave Trade, as they ex- isted thirty years ago, would have puzzled the brains of the minutest casuist. The Traffic, to say the truth, was usually conducted by the primitive method of descending upon an island, buying sturdy young blackfellows, if you could, from their affectionate relations, and stealing them if you could not, by force and arms, with- out pretence of purchase. Either proceeding was of course just equally illegal; but once get your cargo of human live-stock safe landed in Queens- land, and either was winked at by the indulgent labour-employing planter magistrates. To ask no questions, and to take " indentured " serv- ants on the importer's warranty, were the ethics of the times; the John Wesley perhaps was no better and no worse than most other ships then engaged in the Traffic. Tom Pringle, however, knew nothing of all this; as indeed, how could he? A simple-na- tured, gently-bred Canadian young man, who 4 THE INCinr.NTAL BISHOP. had run away to sea as a lad of sixteen from a home in the interior, and spent the years before the mast, he took it for granted that all other sailors were as indifferent honest as himself; and he accepted a berth on a Labour Traffic steamer as readily as he would have ac- cepted it on a Canadian four-master in the grain trade on lake Ontario. He was not specially good, but he was not wholly bad: he was just the average well-educated, adventurous youth who goes to sea or to an Africa diamond-mine, carch of sensation. The night before, lolling in the forecastle on a balmy star-lit tropical evening, he had - \ed to the mate, a most accomplished ruti of the name of Hemmings: " Do you have miu h 'ible in jjettini; the blackfellows to sign tlu-ir Indentur Hemmings stared at him contemptU" noment, and sucked in a copious draught of the i<>l>acco-smoke of contemplation. Then he blew it out through his nose in a long si- stream, and waited to consider. Should he < lighten this green-horn now. or let en- lighten him? After all, there's no teacher on h to equal experience. The mate was a New England blackguard of the first water, trained to humanity on a Louisiana * Before the \\ AMONG THE ISLANDS. 5 He watched the last white curl of smoke disap- pear in the luminous southern starlight before he answered with the usual seafaring embellish- ments: "Well, I can't say the niggers give us much trouble, anyhow. They're fond of civilisa- tion. Stands to reason they should be. Just see what it has done for 'em! It's brought 'em big ships, and cloth, and beads, and squafe gin, and Winchester breech-loaders, and tobacco, and measles, and missionaries, and small-pox, and rum, and the Labour Traffic. Why, a few years ago, say, what outlet was there for an enterpris- ing young native on Temuka, I'd like to know? If he was a chief, well and good; as the sailor said to the Port Admiral: ' You've got a bloom- ing fine berth, old chap; mind you stick to it.' But if he warn't a chief, he couldn't do anything; every durned thing he ever wanted to do was safe as houses to be taboo, and he couldn't even try it. He had jest to lie on his back in the sun and grow fat ; and as soon as he was fat enough, by George, if the chiefs didn't use to eat him." " And now? " Tom asked, looking up. The mate eyed him again in the mellow star- light with a curious glance of dubious enquiry. He was a green 'un, and no mistake; appeared to the mate they'd made a little error in bring- ing such a raw chap on a job like this one. He 6 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. took another long pull at his pipe, and blew an- other curl of most meditative smoke up into the calm, soft tropical air. " Well, naow," he an- swered slowly, weighing his words as he " an in-telligent young native and some of 'em is almost as intelligent as a dog, I kin tell you an intelligent young n: ith a spark of enterprise in him. ... kin take advantage of the opportunities afforded him by the Labour Traffic. He kin sign his indentures " the mate glanced sicK ^ain at his unconscious hearer; " or rather, not knowing how to write, he kin put his cross agin his name on a paper; and then he kin be taken over sea to Queensland, free of charge, in a commodious steamer; while our own flesh and blood, if they want to emigrate, h to pay their passage in the steerage quarter of a beastly emigrant vessel. Then he kin work se years, all found, on an estate in Queensland, where the Queen's government gives him medi- cal attendance, and everything else thrown in, gratis. And he kin get converted; he kin find religion; he kin have the blessings of Christ i ity conferred upon him for nothing, with as much square gin as he wants, into the bargain. And at the end of his time, well, he kin return to hi> own home, with a felt hat. an' a pair of pa: a breech-loader rifle, and be as good as a AMONG THE ISLANDS. 7 chief himself, and shoot other blackfellows, and cook 'em, and eat 'em. Oh, there ain't any deny- ing it, no flies on the Labour Traffic: it's been a durned fine thing for the march of intellect in the South Sea Islands; it's brought home to their own doors the blessings of civilisation." The mate took another pull, as he spoke, at the particular blessing which was nearest, save one, to his own heart; the solitary exception being of course hollands. " Do they ever give any trouble? " Tom en- quired again, musing. " Want to fight and so forth?" Hemmings laughed outright. " Oh, you are an innocent one! " he cried. " Why, mister, you don't suppose savages lift their hats politely when they meet you on the beach, and say, ' Mr. Hemmings, I reckon? Step in and have a drink, sir/ Blackfellows is blackfellows; and there ain't no counting on 'em. They're always a bit sus- picious of the man that tries to civilise 'em. Didn't they kill Captain Cook? and wasn't it Captain Cook that first introduced the blessings of civilisation to the Pacific islands, when the natives in their blindness knew no better nor to bow down to stocks and stones, instead of buy- ing bottled beer, and couldn't so much as tell you the right word for tobacco? Didn't they 8 THI BISHOP. kill Bishop Patteson and sane him rivjht. too; what in thunder did he want to come ii for in a sphere as is better left to the pio- neers of civilisation in the square gin and labour trades? They're the people for the South Seas; you bet your bottom dollar on it. They under- stand the natives, and they understand the trade, and they ain't hampered by any of your all-fired Exeter Hall nonsense. A man must make mo And the mate brought down his fist on his own lean knee with a fervour of conviction i there was no gaii "Then we may have a brush with them?" Tom enquired. He was an average young Briton, ;her better nor worse than most others of his age, though superior to the run of sailors education; and to say the truth, he would not wholly have minded the chance of a fight, pro- ed he believed the natives to be the ag- gressors. Hemmings stroked fns goatee beard. This s more like the right spirit! " Don't you be afeard, young man/' he answered, staring hard at him. " If it's a brush ymi want, you stand ( as fair a chance of seeing some fun with the black- fellows aboard the John \\ esley as aboard any other vessel engaged in the Traffic on the South Pacific. Captain Ford ain't the build of man AMONG THE ISLANDS. 9 to stand their nonsense. Every blackfellow has got to mind his p's and q's when Captain Ford's about. A nigger in these latitudes ain't got any p's, no doubt, and don't know any q's, being just a poor benighted heathen, ignorant of his alphabet; but he's bound to acquire 'em where Captain Ford's around, I kin tell you; for Cap- tain Ford takes care a blackfellow shall mind 'em, whether he's got 'em or not; and mind 'em he must, or Captain Ford will ask the rea- son why, with the muzzle of a Winchester." Tom laughed unconcernedly. He did not realise the full import of the mate's remarks; and if they only meant that aggressive natives would be kept at arm's length, why, Tom rather looked forward than otherwise to the fun of a skirmish. He turned into his berth that night, when his watch was over, without much compunction; but he fell asleep, repeating to himself a stray line of Horace, which he had learnt when he was a boy at the Grammar School In Canada; for he was not without the rudiments of a polite education. He hadn't thought of Horace for six years or so, he fancied; but the mate had said: "A man must make money"; which brought him back by a curious side-touch to a forgotten hexameter something about " Rem facias, rem: si possis, recte; si non, quocunque modo, rem." CHAPTER II. A BRUSH WITH THE NATIY THIS morning, however, Tom was clearly ire that something unusual was now expected. cry one was on deck cry one's face wore an eager look of keen expectation. They were steaming cautiously round a head- land into a dark open harbour. Black 1>a-alt S hemmed it in. Tom took it for the crater of an extinct volcano. In shape it was abso- lutely circular, with tall walls of cliff, broken only by a single narrow and shallow opening, which he judged at sight to be the lip through wl lava had flowed in prehistoric eruptions. Just opposite this lip. three conical hills rose abruptly in the foreground, backed up by the great ram- part of sheer basalt precipice. Tom was no ge- ologist, but he could see at a glance that t ipart represented the old funnel of the era while the three small hills were clearly cones of erupted ash and pumice-stone. A merciless tropical sun beat hard on black cliff and white 10 A BRUSH WITH THE NATIVES. It hillock. The whole was thickly covered, how- ever, by a beautiful mantle of tropical greenery; cocoa-nut palms waved on the slopes of the three hills, and bamboos sprang feathery from the black clefts of the precipice. In and out among the bush that draped the lesser hills rose groups of native huts, surrounded by flaming crimson hi- biscus bushes. It was one of the most glorious harbours Tom had ever beheld; and its beauty was increased by the numberless small waterfalls which tumbled in sheets of white foam from the precipice above down the ravines to the fore- shore. They suggested delicious pictures of ro- mantic bathing-places deep basins shaded by thick forest foliage, where one could spend the whole day in swimming and diving. Tom was the only person on deck, however, who paid the slightest attention to this exquisite scene. The others were all standing in very at- tentive attitudes, engaged in watching the hurry and bustle that possessed the native town, at the sudden appearance of a European steamer. Tom looked round also, and saw at once that the arrival of these pioneers of civilisation had unaccountably thrown the Melanesian popula- tion into a fervour of panic. Before the John Wesley had rounded the point, almost (among rocks and reefs most perilous to seamen), he 12 THK IN< IDFNTAL BISHOP. could see hasty preparations going on in the wattled villages th ned the three hilloc Mothers caught up their naked black children in their arms, and fled shrieking to the paths that nid in zigzag up the precipice. Young g lied after them with every sign of terror. Men emerged from the huts with long spears in their hands, and advanced towards the shore, threat- eningly, brandishing their weapons as they went, and crying aloud with fierce and angry gestures. The whole district looked at once like an ant- hill stirred up by the foot; the black human ai re removing their young, or saving their own skins, or showing fight against the intruder, in ay that absurdly recalled their insect proto- t > pes. And a blazing hot sun revealed it all with tropical distinctness. As Tom stood and gazed, immensely inter- ested in this strange sight for it was his t voyage to the South Pacific a voice at his side suddenly roused him from his inaction. It \ Hemmings who spoke. "Here, you, Pringle," he cried, catching Tom by the arm, " what are you standing staring there for? This is business, mir man! ]\\ into the bargain. Tom took them, half bewilde: He began to be aware with a sudden start of A BRUSH WITH THE NATIVES. 13 surprise that the " little brush " was at hand in real earnest. " And mind you," Hemmings went on ; " none of your durned Puritanical nonsense here! You've shipped on a Labour Vessel, and you've got to accommodate yourself. We don't want no passengers, and we don't want no neutrals. It's fight, or get speared; either the niggers will do it, or a civilised six-shooter." Tom hurried to the gunwale, and looked across towards the shore, whence canoes were shoving off through the surf as fast as the ex- cited natives could man them. Captain Ford stood close by, with a very resolute air, a large, loose man, with a Napo- leonic nose, inflamed by drinking. He was not quite such a ruffian, to look at, as the mate; but he was a determined person, and his business was slave-making. On occasions like this, he kept studiously sober. Glancing at the foremost canoes, he held his hand up for a sign. Tom guessed at once it meant " Is it peace or war? " for even the skipper preferred buying coolies to fighting for them. But the men of Temuka knew the John Wesley and its ways too well. A shout of defiance and a fierce clatter of spears was the instant answer. " Show them the square gin," the skipper 14 CIE 1, very calmly. He was a phlegmatic scoun- A sailor held up three of the coveted bot while another displayed an empty case with in- viting gestures. The mate himself flung out a packages of tobacco. But the natives pro- ceeded to shout threateningly as before; me while, the women and children kept flying to the hills, while all in the villages was bustle of prep- aration. Fair ir de's no go," the skipper urn- ing to Hemmings. " It's no use trying them with square gin this journey. They remember old Nouman. ( live 'cm a shot. I lemming-: gi a shot. That'll bring 'em to reason! " In a second, a loud boom resounded from the big gun, and a shot plough hrough the canoes, dashing foam right and left, and up- setting one of them. There was a scramble life. The nan am and struggled in the water like tadpoles. It was clear some of tl ounded. The skipper paused a moment to judge the effect of this practical warning. For a minute or two, the blackfellows shouted and chattered incoherently. Then a retreat v beat. The canoes began to put back, the men still brandishing their spears in anger. " \Ve can't do anything just A BRUSH WITH THE NATIVES. jj turning to his second in command. " No busi- ness here this morning. They won't come near now, and we can't land in face of them; if we wait till night, they'll have made up their differ- ences with the nearest villages, and they'll all swarm out in their canoes to surround us. Hem- mings, we must steam out again and land a party to take them at their dances from the shore in the rear. Then we can fire a shot or two to divert the main body, and keep the rest engaged till you've crept round to surprise them." The John Wesley steamed out again, obedi- ent to the bell, in her slow majestic fashion. Tom could see the natives had very rudimentary no- tions of strategy; for the moment she turned, they seemed to consider the game was up, and put off again in their canoes, deriding and in- sulting her. It was evident they thought their mere show of opposition had frightened away the well-armed white men. Captain Ford smiled grimly at this childish demonstration, for he knew they would find out their mistake before long. He took action calmly. The John Wes- ley steamed off some four miles to northward, past a region of mangrove swamps, to a hard surf-beaten beach where landing was possible. Then the boats were put out, and most hands ordered into them. Tom went with the rest, a 16 THI-: WCIDl BISHOP. little doubtful now as to the legality of this method of recruiting apprentices, but too full of the excitement and novelty of the occasion to find much room just then for mere moral com- punctions. They rowed through the sobbing breakers of a great white reef towards a shelving hard. 1 landed, unseen, in a bay by the shore a i miles from the harbour. A native or two ni>hcd out from a group of huts close by; but a well- directed shot or so drove them into the bu-h once more. There, they skulked behind the es, and fired, for they were armed with old terns of discarded rifles; but it was impos- sible to see them. ** Single file!" the skipper called out in a military voice; and the men. forming in single file, followed him alnni; a track that led tortuously through the forest. The skip- 1 first; it was a tangled path, along which two men could not go abreast. Tom had had a harder march in his life, for the gnarled roots and twisted stems of the creepers re troublesome, and the ground was boggy; besides which, every now and again, with a sud- den clash, the natives beat tom-toms, and yelled, and peppered them from behind a tree, dis pearing as instantly. The jungle was close and ip: the air steamed: it was the climate of A BRUSH WITH THE NATIVES. 17 an orchid house. Still, the skipper marched on, as along a road that he knew; while the natives fell behind, not caring for the rest, as soon as they saw their own little group of huts in the ravine by the bay was not seriously menaced. Even then, the mosquitoes made each step an annoyance, while leeches dropped from the trees as they passed beneath them. The whites continued through the wood for a mile or two in silence. Not a word was spoken. Suddenly, a turn in the tortuous path led them again to the shore. There, a glade opened up, and to Tom's great surprise, they burst upon a body of young people dancing. It was a strange, weird scene. The whole party halted and drew itself up in line for a moment. The dancers, too much occupied in their dance to be conscious of anything else, never even observed the arrival of the white men. In a second the skipper saw he had reached his aim in the nick of time: this was a great annual religious ceremony. Dozens of young men and women, with their smooth black limbs half draped in garlands, were moving up and down in a measured rhythm, with painted faces. " It's a meke," the skipper said low; " stand aside, boys, and take care; I thought this would be on: we can catch the whole lot of them:" 18 Mi! iOP. Tli- g men and -lup- tnouxly backward and forward in the shade of the trce>. their shining black bodies silhouet the foam on the shore. They moved like the figures on a Celtic cross, in strange rhythmic cur ; intertwining circles. Clearly, they had heard nothing of the arrival of the stear at Temuka harbour: their tom-toms must 1 droxviu the noise of the cannon. Besides, in the >y of religious abandonment, all outer e ere wholly forgotten. Tom could see their festival \va> the Klen-inian / of some South Sea Ashtaroth. It was at once a liymn. a procession. .V men chanted slow their mystic chorus in line. keeping time to the tom-toms. Louder and louder grew the strains: quicker and quicker became the motions of their bodies. "II back till I give the word/ the skipper mnttc in a low voice: " then, the moment I say, Go, < i/e them! " At the time, it struck Tom this \\ merest slave-raid. lUit though it revolted his ^e of right to take part in such an att. he had not depth of moral conviction enough to make him hold back from joining in it. 1 the signal breathle ;he cried; and almost before Tom could i\ A BRUSH WITH THE NATIVES. ig ise what was happening, the sailors had rushed forward, like a body of wild beasts, and were se- curing the likeliest young men and women with cords and handcuffs. The whole thing took but a moment. At once, the shore was alive with tumult. The natives were numerous, but unarmed; for though they used spears in their dance, the points were blunted; they were like ornamental fencing foils. A few of the medicine men or sorcerers behind, beating tom-toms and directing the dance, had long knives, to be sure; but these were of little use against the white man's fire-arms. Captain Ford stood close by, with his revolver raised; four sailors, beside him, pointed rifles at the na- tives. The men were cowed; the women, scream- ing and terrified, rushed wildly towards the bush, and were allowed for the most part to escape, for the planters only require girls in the propor- tion of one to every four " apprentices." In an incredibly short time, some forty or fifty young men had been secured and handcuffed; they grovelled now on the ground at the skipper's feet, with the muzzles of the rifles covering them all in turn, and waited to learn what fate was re- served for them. As Tom, too, waited and wondered, the John Wesley hove in sight, while the boats in which 20 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. they had landed came paddling slowly round the corner. Then Tom saw the whole attack had been carefully planned and ably executed. The -kipper knew of this festival, and had counted upon its occurrence. He had created a diversion at Temuka harbour, to take off the attention of the main body of blackfellows, and then had sur- ed the unarmed young men and women where their capture was easiest. The empty boats rowed landward. One by one, the captured nati re marched to the shore and huddled into them carelessly, tied hand and foot, bundled into the boats much as one has seen fowls packed in crates for railway trav- elling. They resist for they saw f all was up: but those who did resist were quietly knocked on the head with the butt-end of a ritle. and, half-stunned by the blow, forced hastily the gig. Then, a strong net was fastened across them, beneath the thwarts, as one has seen it fastened over a calf in a market cart. Al- together, not the slightest recognition was given to the fact that a Melanesian, after all, is a ver- tebrate animal. Tom began to perceive the true inwardness of that extremely elastic phrase, the Labour Traffic, and to understand that he had been inveigled into a man-stealing expedition. As they busied themselves about putting off, A BRUSH WITH THE NATIVES. 21 the natives behind, now recovering from their panic, began to show their heads once more among the bush in the background, or even to advance towards the shore, with sticks and stones and other improvised weapons. The skipper's cue was not to hesitate. " Fire! " he said short- ly to the four men with rifles; and at the word, four bullets whizzed in among the blackfellows. Two of them fell wounded; the rest, not wait- ing to help them or to see whether they were dead, rushed back pell-mell under cover of the jungle. " Now, row off," the skipper said. " To the ship at once! We've got as much stock as we shall get at Temuka." CHAPTER III. RIVAL PIONEERS OF CIVILISATION. TOM took his place at the oars, feeling uncomfortable. It was an ugly business. For all he knew, those two blackfellou s might be dead, and lie himself might have been acces- sory to their murder. In any case, he had 1 inveigled. : : little on his own account by malice aforethought, into a slave-making raid on a Pacific island. To increase hi> di -comfort, pper gazed across at him with a sardonic and copra, you se< said calmly. "And in a ship like this! Oh, my soul, Tom Pringle, you are a fresh one! " Tom rowed on in silence towards the hate- ful black hull of the slim John \ They had passed the reef, where the sea : rled and seethed like a boiling cauldron, and were Hearing the ship, when a sudden cry from the -kipper made Tom look up in astonishment. " Why. what's this. Hemi: the ski; exclaimed, looking anxiously forward. " Blessed 22 RIVAL PIONEERS OF CIVILISATION. 23 if that canoe there ain't flying the British col- ours! " All hands looked in front. The skipper was quite right. Four well-manned canoes were sweeping round the point from Temuka harbour; and the first of them displayed the Union Jack, waved prominently in front by a man in a pith helmet. The skipper gazed again. Then he whistled long and hard. " Blamed if it ain't one of them confounded missionaries! " Still, the four canoes rowed straight on, head- ing steadily between the boats and the John Wesley. " And he means to cut us off," Hem- mings put in, acquiescing. " I shall fire," the skipper said briefly. " He's a white man," Hemmings answered. " It's an act of piracy. You're boss on your own ship, of course; but if I was you, Captain Ford, I'd be careful." " White man or no white man, what does he want to come interfering with the Labour Traf- fic for? " the skipper answered angrily. " We've got to have labourers; and we've got to get 'em the best way we can. If it wasn't for these con- founded white-livered missionaries, we wouldn't have half the trouble. I shall give him a piece of my mind. Fire a shot across her bows, Jim.'' 24 'I'! IK INCIDKNTAL BISHOP. The man he had ordered fired without a sec- ond's hesitation. But the canoe, never heeding the shot, came on till it was within hailing dis- tance. Then a weather-beaten man, with an open honest face, stood up in her bow and shouted. " Don't shoot/' he said quietly. " We come on a mission of peace. We only want to ask what you are doing in our waU What the blank is that to y the skip- per answered, scowling. " We're trading among the islands. Don't interfere with free trade. Keep your distance, or we'll fire." Then he added lower: " He don't know we've got 'em already. If he comes near enough to see we have stock aboard, he'll make mischief in Sydney." The man with the open face took no notice of the prohibition. If skippers can be resolute, so too can missionaries; and Tom realised at that moment that it needs a brave man to take his life in his hands and settle down alone among these savage islanders. He waved his hand to his crew and drew a little nearer; then he called out again: " Are you Bully Ford "My name is Ford." the -kipper answered. ' If VMU choose to call me Bully, that's your own affair. It's a name I've been called hv. And RIVAL PIONEERS OF CIVILISATION. 25 I allow I ain't one to stand any blamed non- sense, from blackfellows or from missionaries." The weather-beaten man gave some order in an unknown tongue to his men. They seemed to have implicit confidence in him, for they went on rowing. The canoe was now quite close, and the missionary stood up in the bows. Then he gave a sudden start. " Why, you've got natives aboard!" he exclaimed, half incredulously. The skipper made up his mind with the rapid decision of a man of action, engaged in a dan- gerous trade, and accustomed to face emergencies with instant resolution. He turned to his men. " Fire at them," he said quietly. Two of the men hesitated. It is one thing to shoot unknown and nameless savages; quite another thing to shoot an English missionary. But the other two had no such scruples. The South Seas in those days were fairly remote; the Queen's writ did not run beyond Fiji. Two rifles snapped sharply; in the canoe, a black man dis- appeared into the w r ater, and the white man fell back, wounded, into the arms of his followers. Still, the foremost canoe, in which he lay, moved steadily on. The others followed it at a cautious distance. The missionary came alongside. He was bleeding profusely. " Bully Ford," he said slow- Till iOP. ly. " I think you have killed me. Hut thank God, you have killed this iniquitous trat": The skipper gazed at him with a shade of re- morse and horror. Then his coarse nature re- asserted itself. * 4 Row back," he cried to the men. " Back at once to the stcan Tom flung down his oar. " Back? he ci nd leave him 1 " Young fellov. -kipper -aid. " : ibordinate, I shall know how to deal with you. " Oughtn't never to have shipped him.' 1 lem- mings murmured slowly. But Tom's blood was up now. " You shall not row back/' he cried. " You shall take him aboard and nurse him. The man ait yon shall not abandon him. Look here, yon mates." he went on. turning to his fellow-sailors. " He's a white man. anyh :i him on board, and let him die, and i; him Christian burial." There was a moment's hesitation. Then I lemmings bent forward. "Better do as he he suggested. " It'll save trotibK rds. Things are getting rough on the isla; for the Labour Traffic." The skipper gave way sullenly. " Pull him d! " he answered. RIVAL PIONEERS OF CIVILISATION. 2 / Three of the sailors took hold of the wounded man. The Temukans, raising a loud cry, seemed as if they would resist. Tom could not under- stand them, of course, but he guessed fairly enough the general meaning of their wild cries of "Oh, my father, stop with us!" "Do not take him away!" "He is our friend, our fa- ther!" The wounded man raised his hand and said something in Melanesian to his body-guard of converts. The natives gave way at once. With loud wailings, they let him go, and rested on their paddles in impressive silence. " Anyhow," the skipper said calmly, " we've put a spoke in his wheel! He won't try any more to interfere with the Labour Traffic." Tom laid the wounded man's head on his own lap, and resumed his oar, much incommoded by the struggling and writhing natives on the bot- . torn. "Row on!" the skipper said again; and they rowed on steadily. Ten minutes more brought them up to the John Wesley. They lifted the wounded man aboard; then they began one by one to transfer the live-stock. As fast as each native was put on board, he was carefully ironed. The women wailed a little with low savage growls, but the men for the most part took the whole affair quietly. They knew 3 2g THE INCID! . I-HOP. well enough for what tin- '.. n<>\v, and they resigned themselves to their fate with the stnu-ism of the savage. After all, it was bet- than U-in^ cooked and eaten, the usual end of their race when captured by enemies of their own people. Some of them even laughed at each other's plight; and all took blows with incredible composure. The sailors knocked them about as drovers knock about sheep. Nobody seemed to regard them as anything more than so much use- ful and insensitive merchandise. " Now," the skipper said, when all was taut on board, and the " stock " had been carefully secured on deck, " off to Brisbane at once! The sooner the better, before these devils can get to- gether their war-canoes to attack us." CHAPTER IV. THE MISSIONARY'S ILLNESS. TOM had wondered on the journey from Singapore to Temuka why the John Wesley car- ried so large a crew; she had more hands aboard, he saw, than any steamer of her size, peaceably engaged in local trade of dried cocoa-nut, could be expected to require. But he was unaccus- tomed to the South Seas and harboured no mean suspicions; indeed, he had never heard of the Labour Traffic before he signed articles at Singa- pore; nor had he sailed east of Calcutta on any previous voyage. Now, he understood that the crew was not a crew alone; it was also an armed body. Bully Ford needed a compact force of men, both to assist him in securing native lads and women, and to prevent them from rising in case of emergency. The consequence was that Tom's services were not much needed on the re- turn voyage. The skipper saw at once he was little to be trusted on such an errand, and pre- ferred to tell him off as sick-room attendant upon 29 3 o THE INCH'! IOP. the wounded missionary, rather than let him too much of what went on on deck with the cap- tured V He's a sniveller at heart." he observed to Hemmings. The missionary was seriously wounded, in ad- dition to which he had suffered so >r some years past from the climate and its hardships; Tom did not think he could reach Brisbane alive. it her did the skipper. which was why he tol- erated him. From the skipper's point of vi it was safer business to give out that the mis- sionary had been wounded in an accidental scuffle with the natives; and that to prevent his IK killed and eaten by his flock, the John Wesley 1 taken him off and tended him carefully. Bully Ford could thus turn his act of piracy into one of humanity. The man v. ire to die be- fore they hove in sight of Brisbane. As soon as dead, nothing could be easier than to clap that fellow IVinjjlc into irons as an insubordinate or; and who then would believe his un>up- por The missionary was a young man about Tom's own age tall. wiry, sunburnt, lie had a bushy beard, and a generally unkempt appearance: beneath it all, Tom could see marks of a gen ous disposition and a profound enthusiasm, i nan Cecil Glisson. When Tom first heard THE MISSIONARY'S ILLNESS. 3! that name, he could hardly have believed how deeply familiar it was destined to become to him in future. The missionary's wound was in his right lung; but Glisson took little notice of it. He had known his days were numbered even before he was shot; and his one hope now was that he might manage to live till he reached Brisbane, so as to put an end by his martyrdom to this in- famous traffic. Tom told him the plain truth about his presence on the John Wesley: hon- esty understands honesty; and Glisson believed him. As Tom sat by the wounded man's bed- side, preparing arrowroot with Swiss milk, a friendship gradually sprang up between them. " Could you read to me? " Glisson asked wist- fully, in an interval of his fever. Tom hesitated. " Read what? We have nothing to read here." " Not a Bible? " " No, nothing at all, except the charts and the South-Sea Sailing Directions." The dying man hesitated. " I have a Greek Testament," he said; " it's in my pocket there, hanging up. I always carry it about with me. But my eyes are too weak, and of course you can't read it." " I haven't read Greek for some time," Tom 32 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. ind I don f 1 suppose I should understand it. But I think I could just manage to read out the words, if that would be any good. I'll have a try, anyhow/' Glisson opened his weary eyes and looked up at the sailor in surprise. " You, read Greek? " he exclaimed in astonishment. " No, no! Y.-u must be mistaken." Tom felt in the missionary's pocket, and found what he sought a small and much thumb- marked Testament. He opened it at the place where it naturally bent back, the third of Second Corinthians. Then, in a clear soft voice, he began reading slowly the sonorous Greek, giving the full value to his open Eta's and Omega's. Glisson listened with dreamy eyes. "How did you learn? " he asked at last slo\\ I \\as at a grammar school in Canada," Tom answered. " I learnt a tidy bit of Latin there, and a little Greek. But what surprises me most is this; I never knew much: yet 1 think I unliT-tand the (.reck Letter now, though I haven't looked at it since, than I did when I was icolboy." That's natural," Glisson replied. "Mere age often does it. You catch at things bet now. Can you follow what you read?" " I think, everv word of it THE MISSIONARY'S ILLNESS. 33 " You read as if you did. You must read to me often. Go on now. It soothes me." Tom read on and on, and saw that Glisson was right. Mere age told. He could recollect fairly well the run of the epistle in the English version; and the Greek suggested it to him wherever he forgot it. Besides, he knew he had a natural gift of languages. He had picked up some words of Arabic when he was cruising in the Red Sea; and even on board the John Wes- ley he was learning already a phrase or two in Melanesian from the talk of the poor creatures tied up in pairs on the deck of the steamer. Glisson listened with his eyes shut. At last he opened them slowly. " It's like old times," he said. " It reminds me of the days when I was reading for orders." ''' You are a clergyman of the Church of Eng- land?" Tom asked. 'Yes; ordained in England." "An 'Oxford man?" Glisson gave a little start as of surprise. " Oh, nothing like that," he answered. " A poor waif and stray. I was an orphan in a Liverpool foundling hospital. I had no friends on earth, except good Bishop Patteson. He befriended me as a boy; and when I was growing up, he had me sent to a theological college, where I learnt 34 THE IN iOP. these things. It was he who had me ordained, and brought me out here to help him." That made Tom feel more at home at once with his patient. The honest desire not to seem more than he was drew Tom towards him in- stantly. From that moment forth, they talked much together; much, that is to say. lering (.' son's condition The missionary told his sailor friend all about his youth at the orphanage, and his life at the theological college; more still about his work among the savages of Temuka. Most of them, of course, were still heathen and cannibals; but (ilisson had collected a little band about him. He In kfellows; and Tom could clearly ^ee that he longed to live till t reached Brisbane, mainly because he thought his i death might redound to the putting d of this infamous >l :i But he grew worse daily, in the stilling of his cabin, in spite of all Tom could do for him. His \\nnnd \\as serious. Each time Tom came on deck, the skipper asked with a grim smile: " Well, li- r palie: And each time, when Tom an ing WOT the skipprr nodded, well pleased, and mutU ;ie words: " What do the>e people want to go interfering with free trade f< THE MISSIONARY'S ILLNESS. 35 At last, about three days off from Brisbane, Tom was watching by the wounded man's side, when he saw Glisson suddenly start and lift one hand up. Then a red stream gurgled from mouth and nostrils. Tom knew what had happened. l Haemorrhage of the wounded lung. He was bleeding to death internally. It was all up with him. He held Glisson in his arms, very white and pallid. The missionary's lips just moved. Tom bent over to listen. " Tell them in England what has happened let my blood be the last that is shed in this wicked traffic." He fell back,, dead. And Tom knew that Bully Ford was that innocent man's murderer. CHAPTER V. BILLY FORD'S LIVE-STOCK. ON deck, the skipper sat discoursing business with his assistant, Hemmings. " First-rate stock. Hemmings," he ejaculated. He was a judge of slave-fle " Lot of trouble to get 'em, though," the mate responded. " Ay, these missionaries are ruining the trade." the skipper admitted, pensively. "There ain't no t\\ al>out it. Tlii^ is as fine-look- healthy a lot of stock as you'd \\ to see: yet he wants to stop us from tak them. Why. \\hen I first began supplying labour to the Brisbane market, we could n co- nomically: hands could be sold at a pound a head, easy. No nonsense then about indent- or contracts. \Ve just came down on an island, carried 'em off without a word, and sold 'em, open, to the highest bidder. Xow, they've got all this new-fangled rubbish about apprentices. There's no knowing where it'll end. Last time 36 BULLY FORD'S LIVE-STOCK. 37 I was in Sydney, I heard talk of a Government Inspector to sail on every vessel, and the owners to pay him twenty pound a month. It ain't fair to capital. It 'ud be the ruin of the Traffic." (The amenities of literature compel me to sup- press the running fire of oaths which agreeably diversified Bully Ford's style, adding point and picturesqueness to his mildest sentence: but I do so with regret, for the skipper's conversation was estimated to contain a larger percentage of coarseness and profanity to the square mile than any other man's on the South Pacific.) " That's so," the mate assented. " We are a sight too much governed. Same at Brisbane. When we got there, do you mind, we used to march the stock in gangs to the verandah of the store, and leave 'em there for inspection by in- tending purchasers. Now, what have you got to do? You've got to clothe 'em, and feed 'em, and see they don't resist when folks come to buy them, or the magistrates '11 say they ain't willing immigrants. Willing immigrants, indeed! As if anybody believed it! What I hate in this world is its confounded humbug. If you're doing a trade in slaves, why the thunder can't you say so?" " You're right there," Ford replied. "If things goes on like this, we shall have to do every- 3 g THK INCIDENTAL BISHOP. where like they do in Fiji take off your hat to the natives and beg 'em to be kind enough to do a ( ; -rk for you. How k to be done, I'd like to know, if you can't get the !><_ We shall have to do like they do in Fiji, I say. 'Very good; you go along a Melbourne along a me? Very good ki-ki. Pay very good. Pay money. Plenty shop. You buy what you like. You very good fellow; me very good master.' ig to a Kanaka! Yah! I couldn't stoop to i; " Nor me," the mate continued. ' It makes k to hear 'en no take you. sup- pose you no like: me put you ashore at place >ng a you.' And then, all that rot about iiteen pounds clear at the end of three yam crop-! You no be frightened. Captain good fellow man; he no fight: he no at you; ity eat; plenty square gin: plenty Mary long a Malo; plenty young man belong a your place: all missionary boy: me missionary man/ 'Kit the sort of way for a white man to U-l. to niggers? " " Besides, it ain't humane." lUilly Ford ft apologetically; for even blackguards make apolo- gies to vir bring a woman down to your boat, tied hand and foot; and they want a stick of tobacco for her. She's got into a r BULLY FORD'S LIVE-STOCK. 39 and they're bound to punish her. But she ain't a willing recruit, and you say: ' Can't take her.' Well, what do them natives do? Just carry her back, and roast her." As he spoke the words, Tom Pringle's head appeared above the companion. " What does that sneaking chap want? " the skipper asked. " He's dead," Tom answered. " A good job too," the skipper said. " Well, throw him overboard!" " What, now without waiting? and without burial? " Tom exclaimed. The skipper eyed him curiously. " Young man," he said, with philosophic calm, " it strikes me very forcibly you've mistaken your vocation. A labour vessel don't pretend to be a missionary ship." Tom glanced at the " stock," packed on deck like sardines, in the baking heat, and admitted at once the truth of this reflection. But before anything more could pass between them, the mate jumped up with a sudden ex- clamation. " Hullo there," he cried. " Look to starboard, captain!" Bully Ford looked round and gave a long low whistle. Tom's eyes followed theirs. Away off on the 40 ; INCIDENT AI. HISHOP. horizon, a steamer was in slight, hearing down at full steam in the direction of the John \\ ley. The skipper seized his binoculars. Tor unaided sight did not avail to tell him it was a gun-boat cruiser; but he guessed as much from* skipper's sudden look of dismay and disap- pointed anger. Full steam ahead?" the mate enquired. The skipper stared again. " No good/' he answered, with his usual quick determination; for, bully and scoundrel as he was, he was a born commander. " She steams faster tli If run for it, she'll run us down, and the chase will tell against us. We must chuck the stock. That's the only way. If they come here and catch us. it's piracy. I reckon." Tom hardly yet understood what this prompt determination involved; but whatever it \\ he saw Bully Ford intended it. "Bring up that dead devil-dodger first," Ford went on, closing his mouth like a rat- trap. The mate disappeared. In another minute, he and a sailor came up, carrying Glisson's body , like a dead weight bet \\een them. Nobody spoke a word. One of the sailors fastened to it a heavy leaden shape, of a sort that Tom had noticed in a bunker on the main BULLY FORD'S LIVE-STOCK. ^ r deck, and had examined with no little wonder as to what might be their purpose. " Chuck it over to leeward! " Bully Ford said. The gunboat was coming from windward. Without a word of reply, the sailors carried the body to the lee gunwale, which was also the side remotest from the gunboat, and flung it over heavily. One two three, and it disap- peared with a slight splash into the angry water. The wake closed over it. For a fair sea was run- ning, and the wind rose steadily. "Now, below with the stock!" Ford ex- claimed, without a shudder. The sailors proceeded to hurry the men and women to the hold, one by one; Tom hardly knew why; but a minute later, he saw it was to prevent resistance and the chance of a rising. Handcuffed as they were, they might still have given trouble had they known what was coming. One man alone was left on deck at the last. Meanwhile, the John Wesley continued on her course, as if she had never even noticed the gun- boat, though it was signalling now from its dis- tant position. " Weight! " the skipper said. Quick as light- ning, two sailors fastened a weight to the black- fellow's feet. "Now, over!" They lifted him, struggling and screaming, in their arms, carried 42 Tin iOP- him to the lee gunwale, and dropped him quietly into the dark sea like a bale of goods, as they had dropped the corpse. With a wild shriek he fell. The shriek was choked by the ru>hing water. He sank like lead to the bottom. The rollers closed over him. " Good money gone!" all the skipper's comment. " Next ! Bully Ford said calmly. The sailors iivjlit up another in turn from the hold, where Tom could see two of their number standing guard with six-shooters over the excited bla fellows. The natives did not know exactly what happening, indeed, but they suspected mis- chief, and rushed about wildly or crouched in :or. Quickly and silently, with military order. the sailors brought up one man after another. As each reached the deck, a weight was fastei with mechanical regularity to his feet, he I carried to the edge, and, with a "One, two, three," heaved over into the black water. The monotonous repetition of the loud cries, the sud- iek. the dull thud upon the surface, the immediate and ghastly silence as the shriek led, ^ickened Tom as he looked. He had a ^ue suspicion tl. irn \\oiild come m when they had finished with the blackfell< > Time after time the same horrible scene curred. They \\<>rked their way through the BULLY FORD'S LIVE-STOCK. 43 men, and proceeded to the women. These met their fate with more sullen resignation. Perhaps they were better accustomed to brutal treatment. As the last was just reached, a shot across their bows ploughed up the water. Bully Ford glanced aside. " Ha, she's angry," he said, " because we don't notice her signals. But I'd knock this ship's brains out on a reef, if I could, sooner'n let her catch us." He rang the bell to stop her. The engine reversed. Then he glanced with cold eyes at Tom. " Go below, sir," he said shortly. " I ain't got time left to chuck you overboard just now; but by George, if once we run past this tight place, I'll break every bone in your sneak- ing white body. A white man, and you'd want to side with niggers! He's under arrest, Hem- mings. Mind you keep your eye on him." What happened next, Tom never really knew. He slunk down the companion, but Hemmings did not follow him. By a sort of blind instinct, he took refuge in the empty bunk where Glisson had lain dying. The missionary's clothes hung idly on a peg by the door of the cabin. A sud- den idea seized Tom. If the gunboat came up and searched, as likely as not every man on board would be arrested on a charge of piracy; for pirates they were, and now he knew it. In that 44 Tln * Cr- ease, his protestations of innocence would a him little, especially as all the crew would turn against him. But supposing he put on the mis- sionary's clothes? The suggestion was a good one. Almost before he had time to know what he was doing, he had taken action the action that was to turn him into a different person. It is always one minute that decides our lives for us. He changed his clothes rapidly. Glisson and he ran fairly of a size; but what was more im- portant still, the missionary's kit was of a rough- and-ready make which rendered fit unimportant. Hi- garment < were not what in temperate cli- mate- \ve >hould regard as a sti erical garb, it is true; a white flannel shirt, with a red cross l>roidered on it, and a pair of flannel trousers that was Glisson's simple uniform. But at any 6 they were (juite unlike Tom's sailor costume, which would have stamped him at once as belong- to the crew of the John Wesley. He thrust his hand in his pocket, and drew out n leather case. It contained a few official letters, addressed to the Rev. Cecil (i son. Teinuka. with some other papers which he not time at the moment to examine. T! he stuck the ( ireek Testament into the other pocket, ami sat down on a bunk, to await in BULLY FORD'S LIVE-STOCK. 45 silence the next development. Naturally, after what he had seen, he was trembling with excite- ment; but he tried to calm himself and to ex- pect the gunboat. Another gun went off. The John Wesley lay to, in the trough of the waves. Night was rushing on the sea with tropical rapidity. Be- low, all was dark. Presently, he heard noises above, noises that sounded like hurried consulta- tion. Next, a boat shimmered quickly past the port-hole by his side. They were lowering it from the davits. In it, he could just make out the dim heads of Ford and Hemmings and some dozen others. He guessed then what was hap- pening. Terrified at the last moment, they were abandoning the John Wesley, and hurrying to seek their fate on the open Pacific. Perhaps some of the sailors had shown a disposition at the last moment to turn Queen's evidence. He thought so afterward. But just at that second, he thought no more about anything. For r'rY a sudden explosion resounded in his ears. The ship shook from stem to stern. He was dimly aware that Ford had tried to blow up the steamer. That was all he knew. The explosion stunned him. He closed his eyes, with a consciousness of hav- ing been violently hit on the forehead by some flying fragment. And in that moment of uncon- 4 6 Tin r. M r.isiiop. sciousness, so far as the rest of the world was con- cerned, Tom Pringle faded for ever from exist- ence. When he came to again, he had changed his mnlitv. He was no longer himself, but Cecil Glisson. CHAPTER VI. THE OTHER SIDE OF IT. THE few breathless minutes that Tom had employed in tremulously changing his clothes down below for Glisson's were a time of wild haste and sudden consternation on deck for the other occupants of the John Wesley. As the gunboat approached, steaming ominously on, an embodied representative of the British empire, their courage began to fail them. Civilisation and law stared at them from her muzzles. They had murdered the blackfellows without a second's compunction, and now, it occurred to them that they had done it in vain. For they had a traitor on board. That man Pringle, if he chose, might round and peach on them. " I reckon we ought to shoot him/' Hem- mings suggested calmly, as Tom disappeared down the ladder like a rabbit to its burrow. " Can't shoot without making a mess," the skipper answered hurriedly. " If they board us, they'll search us; and if they search us and find 47 48 'I'M i. IV blood on the decks, there'll he the devil to j they'll carry us off to Sydney and try us all for pira That's so," Hemmings admitted. "I; bad look-out either way." \\Vd ought to have chucked him over at first with the nigs," Bully Ford continued, glan- cing round him for support. "That's the only safe way of dealing with a chap who turns traitor." He said it tentatively, for he knew it was a question whether his e nld obey if-he gave such an order. They were ready enough, r true, to drop blackfellows overboard, in case of 'ri^eney: hlaokfell<>\vs are cargo SO much r the market, to be flung away when it becomes necessary to lighten ship, like any other form of merchandise. But a white man that was different. He was one of themseh a fe' dor and a fellow creature; and if o Bully Ford began flinging white men overboard, nobody could tell how soon his own turn might come: it \va< a dangerous precedent. So no one responded. " Shall we chuck him? " the skipper asked in a low voice of Hemmings. Hemming* cleared his throat. " It's pretty dangerous now," he answered slowly. " SI drawing too near. They've got an eye on us THE OTHER SIDE OF IT. 4 g through their glasses; if they happen to see us chuck anything alive, it'll be all the worse for us." " I'll risk it! " the skipper answered, making up his mind quick. " It's growing dark now, and we could chuck him to leeward next time she lurches " he paused, and looked significantly at the angry water. Hemmings pursed his lips. " They'll refuse," he answered low. " They won't chuck a white man." The skipper turned to two of the sailors. " Fetch up Pringle," he said calmly, in an au- thoritative voice. " I'm a-going to chuck him." The men stared at him stonily. " No you don't," one of them answered. " Not with a gunboat bearing down on us. I've had enough of you, Bully Ford, and I tell you so, flat. If you try on that game, I turn Queen's evidence." Without another word, Bully Ford drew his revolver. "You mean it?" he asked, covering the man. Quick as lightning, the sailor had whipped out a revolver in return. "Aye, I mean it," he answered, pointing the muzzle at the skipper. "Take care of yourself, Bully Ford! It's rope, or bullet!" Bully Ford sprang back. He eyed the other jo THi I'.ISHOP. or, who had not yet spoken. In his silent face, he read the same resolution. A second hand went up. and two revolvers covered him. The skipper was a resolute man, making his mind up easily. He saw the game was played, er a boat ! M he cried to Hemmings. " There's traitors about! Man her, those of you who are with me! Better run for it than cave in! It's the mercy of the sea, or to be hanged at Sydney! " iftly. silently, with the sudden throbbing consciousness of a great emergency, the sailors who were loyal to the cause of piracy lowered the boat and manned her. It was a hurried moment. Ford and Hemmings stepped into her first. 1 he sea ran high, but they lowered her all the same and put her off successfully. Till the last second, Ford kept his revolver pointed at the two recalcitrant sailors who had refused to chuck Tom Pringle overboard. Then, as the boat rose once on the curing crest of tin he took aim steadily. 'What are you doing?" Hemmings asked, seizing the skipper's arm. Let me go," the skipper cried, shaking it free and firing. " Do you think I always told you chaps everything on the John Wesley? I'm a-going to blow her up! I've a powder reser and gun-cotton! " THE OTHER SIDE OF IT. 5! He fired with a steady hand, aiming straight at a particular spot between decks on the John Wesley. The shot took effect. A white puff of smoke rose almost instantly, where the bullet struck, in a huge dense column. Then came a terrible thud; a throb thrilled through the water. The hull reeled: the air trembled. As the smoke cleared away, the place where the two sailors had stood was vacant. Only a mangled limb or two, seen vaguely through the gloom, repre- sented what had been two human lives one mo- ment earlier. Ford glanced at the hull through the dusk. " Hasn't sunk her!" he muttered with a slight tinge of regret. " But it's killed those beggars, any way! And the other skunk, too, I hope. Well, we're in for it, now, boys: civilisation's all over: there's nothing left us but to try our luck with the savages in the Islands! " And the boat rowejl off through the gather- ing dusk, before a rising wind, away from the explosion and the pursuing gunboat. It had all been so rapid, indeed, that half the sailors in the boat hardly realised what was hap- pening, till they found themselves alone in the dark Pacific, a crew of proscribed pirates, row- ing off for dear life in an open gig, between the devil and the deep sea an angry gunboat be- Till IOP. hind, a stormy ocean in front, and Bully Ford at the stern to steer them to perdition. One thought was uppermost in every m breast; one voice alone uttered it. " It's done now, and there's no help for it; but if only Id knowcd. I'm blessed if I'd have started with Bully Ford for the Islands. I'd rather have faced it out, and stood my chance for my life at Sydr, CHAPTER VII. LAW AND ORDER. CAPTAIN PEACHEY, of H. M. S. Avenger, stood on deck with his Navigating Lieutenant. " By Jove, Byers," he exclaimed, taking a good look through the telescope, " it's that rascal Bully Ford, in the John Wesley! " "And we've caught him red-handed?" " Red-handed? yes. It's my belief, he's chucking his blackfellows overboard to prevent our finding them!" " Another shot across his bows, sir? " the officer beyond enquired. " No! That one has brought him to. He'll have to wait now till we come within hailing dis- tance." The Avenger steamed on, till she was almost alongside the slaver. Then in the dusk the Cap- tain saw strange proceedings aboard. " Hang me," he cried again, " if I don't believe they're going to abandon her! " 53 54 THE INCH-: I;ISHOP. " They daren't, le for two days, for a splinter had struck him on the temple and wounded him bad When he came to again, the doctor on the Avenger forbade him to talk for awhile. But he treated him as a missionary. Tom did not even have to tell a lie upon the matter. Nobody ques- tioned him. They took it for granted he \ Cecil Glisson. The clothes, the letter-case, the ordination papers, the Greek Testament, all told the same story. It ne\ f er even occurred to the officers to doubt him. Tom drank his beef tea held his peace prudently. After all, it only till they landed at Sydney. Once - ashore, he could disappear in the crowd, and find a berth on some other ship either there or at Mel' He did not alise how hard it is to appear in a crowd, when once you have done anything to attract attention. Tom Pringle, the mil anadian sailor, could vanish into sp. 1 no one would miss him: hut Cecil Glisson, missionary from Temuka, was a marked man ; nt< would be chronicled; he could no more vanish unobserved than a prince of the house royal. fa he began to mend, indeed, the ship's of- fice: :ioned him about details of his cap- LAW AND ORDER. 57 ture. The ship's doctor, on the other hand, counselled quiet and moderation in talking. Tom was glad of that, for when inquiries grew too hot and answers were dubious, he could plead fatigue and gain time for reflection. " I'll tell you by and bye," he would say, and lie back in the fold- ing chair which they had brought out on deck for the convalescent's use. It was only a tem- porary deception, just to save his own life and to avoid being included in a charge which would be false in essence. He salved his conscience with the thought that if he told the truth, nobody would believe him, and that to tell a white lie was to serve in the end the real cause of justice. So he threw himself frankly, for this voyage only, into Glisson's part. He answered every- thing as if he were the missionary. " The ship was Bully Ford's," he said; "and we knew him of old as a desperate slave-stealer. So, when his vessel hove in sight, I went out in our canoes, with my little band of converts, just to let the man feel he was observed and that his proceed- , ings would be reported. I found he had already captured a body of men and girls who were en- gaged in a religious dance upon the shore; and I paddled up with my crew to look into the mat- ter. All at once, he fired upon us, wounding sev- eral of my men, and myself slightly. Then he jg I II! AI. BISHOP. took me on board, I 1> ;h the intention of letting me die there; hut one of his sailors, who blown up. poor fellow, as well as I can judge, nursed me most carefully, and I was getting con- valescent when the Avenger came in sight. Tl Ford horrified me by flinging all the stock, as he called it, overboard; and while I was waiting for my turn to come, this explosion occurred; and that's practically all I know about the matter." " He shall be caught and hanged/' the Cap- tain said, if the Avenger can catch him. 1! the worst rogue unhung on the South Pacific! " Which was saying a great deal as those < it among the Islands. But the Avenger never found him. Whether the boats foundered in the high seas, or whether they came to shore in one or other of the re- moter archipelagoes, was never known. But traders to the Caroline Islands will sometimes tell you that a grey-haired old beach-coml with three brown families, who is suspected of having tasted human flesh, and is universally known as Cannibal Dick, is really Bully Ford, in the l\\est stage of drunken degradation. The story goes that he shot and ate his last compan- ion, and landed, half dead, after many weeks of exposure, at the harbc* onape. CHAPTER VIII. A GENTLEMAN AGAIN. IT was a relief to Tom when after five days' sail they sighted the Macquarie lighthouse at the mouth of Sydney Harbour. For now, he said to himself, he would be able to shuffle off this false personality which he had unwillingly as- sumed, and be once more plain Tom-'Pringle. " The Reverend " did not suit him. As they passed between the Heads into that magnificent port the most beautiful in the world Tom was little engaged in observing the bold and rocky shore, the fantastic hills, the luxuriant vegeta- tion of Australian shrubs and orange-trees and bananas. His mind was wholly occupied with the consoling thought that he had fairly escaped the peril of being numbered among the pirates, and could now disappear into his primitive obscurity. Still, he was invalided as yet, and unable to move. He suggested to his kind hosts on board the Avenger that a few days' stay at the hospital might be necessary. But the Captain pooh- 5 59 60 'nil IOP. poohed the idea. " I'rejH^ " preposterous ! Why, the Sydney people ulcln't even dream of it. As soon as they know who you are, bless you, they'll be de- lighted to take you in. One or other of the par- sons in the town is sure to annex you. The\ the most hospitable set in the world, the Sydney folk. They would feel it a slight on the fame of their hospitality if you ventured to suggest going into a common hospital/' " But I prefer to be independent," Tom said, making a feeble resistance. " I'm a rough South Sea Island missionary, unaccustomed to to\\ and I have no clothes with me but those I stand up in: I should get on much better among my blackfellows at Temuka than in parson's dress in a Sydney drawing-room." " Xonsensc. the Captain answered, good- luimouredly. " A clergyman is a clergyman, and must behave as sich. He's none the worse for going out like a man to risk his life among sav- ages. I don't say as a rule I'm fond of mission- aries, Glisson seen a deal too many of them they're ah ing us trouble on the Pacific stations: but hang it all, when a man is a man, as you are, and goes among such rough savages as those Temuka fellows, prepared to d hat he believes the truth whether it's true or isn't A GENTLEMAN AGAIN. 6l why, I don't see how one can help liking and admiring him." Tom winced a little. This was hard to en- dure. To be modest under praise for what you have never done is trying to the nerves. But he consoled himself by thinking it was only for a time, and he would soon escape from it. " Besides," the Captain went on, " you've got no precious parson nonsense about you. You're a Man that's what I like about you. You can laugh and talk and join in with the rest of us. If a sailor like myself happens accidentally to let drop an occasional damn, you don't pull a long face over it as if you thought he was straight on the road to perdition. I admire a parson who can fight for his beliefs, but doesn't want to thrust them down other people's throats. Leave your quarters to me, Glisson: when we get into port, I'll take jolly good care you're properly looked after by a decent sort of family." This was just what Tom didn't want; but he dared not say nay. He only murmured feebly: " But I've got no clothes except these that I wear. And I've got no money. Everything I had is left at Temuka." " All the more reason you should be taken in and looked after by some good Samaritan. If you landed with your pocket full of money, and a Tin IOP. clean white choker, you could go at once to the best hotel in Sydney. But, hang it all, if people ft look after a wounded parson, who's been \\n up by slavers because he tried to take care of his own people, and who returns to civilisation with a shirt to his back and nothing else much to brag about what's our Christianity good for, I wonder? Just you leave that to me. /'// take e that Sydney doesn't lose its reputation for hospitality." Tom winced again. These laudations hurt him. But he was forced to submit. He must keep up this farce till he was well enough to move, and could run away by rail or sea to Mel- bourne. There, he would have a chance of pick- ing up a vessel. Captain Peachey was quite right in his prog- nostication. As soon as all Sydney knew that a unded missionary from the South Seas v. aboard the Avenger, and that he had come aboard from an abandoned and blown up Labour vessel with nothing in the world save the clothes he wore, all Sydney was eager to show him its har- bour and its hospitality those beinir in point of fact the two things on which proud Sydney most especially prides itself. Half-a-dozen clergymen in the town were eager to put him up. Tom, see- ing there was nothing else for it, selected from A GENTLEMAN AGAIN. 63 among them the one who seemed to him least obtrusively clerical. This was a certain Mr. Strong, a rector in the town, with a pleasant house in one of the most fashionable suburbs. Almost before he had realised the step he was taking, he found himself lifted into a comfortable carriage, and driven slowly through the streets to his host's home by the Parramatta river. Two things buoyed him up at this trying mo- ment. He had never been at Sydney before; and he knew from Cecil Glisson's own lips that the dead man he was half innocently personating had never been there either. So the chance of meeting any one who could detect the deception either way who could say with confidence " This is Tom Pringle," or " This is not Cecil Glisson " was in so far lessened. The carriage drew up at a pretty suburban house, ringed round by a verandah, and covered with bright creepers. A girl of twenty stood waiting at the door. " Olive, my dear/' his host said, " this is Mr. Glisson. " By this time, Tom was beginning to get sick of it. His first impulse was to cry out: "Oh, no, it isn't; it's only Tom Pringle, a sailor out of work, from the steamer John Wesley." But two things restrained him. One was the fear that if he told the truth he might be indicted as 64 TH1 XI HISHOP. one of a gang of sea murderers; the other the apparently irrelevant fact that Olive Strong was distinctly pretty. A serious question in the history of order the English Church hung ultimately on Olive Strong's appearance that moment. Had she been less attractive, the doubt as to the validity of ordinations in the diocese of Dorchester which afterwards agitated the soul of a bishop might never have arisen. Tom looked at her shyly. Olive Strong a vigorous, well-built girl, of what we should now- adays call the lawn-tennis-playing type, but which was rarer in those days, lawn tennis not ha\ en invented. She was tall, after the fre- quent Australian fashion, and. very supplely 1 her movements made a pi ompromise be- tween grace and strength; her step was li^ht. hut her PMJSC was self-confident with the just self-confidence of youth, health, and vigour, in a beautiful woman's body. That was Tom'.s first impression: what he noticed most of all as he looked at her that moment was this abundant ise of life and fitness. Olive Strong was, above apable woman. He looked again, and saw next that his host's lighter v. Not violently, trusivdy. aggressively pretty; certainly not pi A GENTLEMAN AGAIN. ty in the common acceptation, with prettiness of the coloured chocolate-box order. Quiet strength of character gave the key-note to her face; she was pretty with the prettiness that is an index of effectiveness. Till then, Tom had always vaguely admired, after the fashion of very young men, the mere pink-and-white complexion, the fluffy hair, the somewhat hot-house beauty of the artificial young woman. He had admired small hands, enclosed in still smaller dainty kid gloves; small feet, jammed close in tight high- heeled boots; a waist, too narrow for the organs it should contain, and still further cramped by the art of the corset-maker. He had admired' that soft white skin which comes of insufficient exercise and lack of exposure to healthy sun and air; he had admired in one word what is con- sidered " feminine/' but what is really a mere product of the boudoir and the hairdresser's shop, violet powder, bloom of Ninon, bandoline, and lip-salve. Admired it from afar, for the most part, of course, for Tom's own position as a common sailor had not allowed him of late years to see much more of such women than a passing glimpse in a street when he was in port for a fortnight. Still, that was hitherto his ideal the laced and bandaged woman of the fashion-plate, the 66 'I' HK IN' I MENTAL BISHOP. blanched and etiolated product of an exotic cul- ture. He gazed at Olive Strong, and felt his tions undergo a sudden expansion, an instantane- ou- al. For Olive was quite other than this preconceived model, yet she struck him at sight as far more truly beautiful than any other girl he had ever yet hit upon. Her skin brown, a rich transparent creamy brown, not un- burnt by the strong sun of the southern heavens. brownness. the bright col on her chei ed through it with a red flush. which deepened somewhat as Tom's eyes fixed themselves upon hers for a moment with too k a glance. He had to recall his clericali-iu 1 curb his eagerness for a second. Then the >r in him overcame the pretended parson, and he gazed back once more, to note that Olive ly beautiful eyes not eyes of tropical splendour or of arch coquetry, like the ladie- the stage whom he had most admired, but calm, serene, strong, able eyes, eyes that i; ur- ance of steadfastness and capacity, 1 In features illicit not seem very delicately moulded to an uimbservar. 1 they were the features of a good woman and a powerful character rather t the of a professed beauty. Yet when Tom looked clo- 'vith the rapid intuition of A GENTLEMAN AGAIN. 67 a man for the help that is meet for him that they were really modelled with underlying firmness and elusive delicacy. Even at a first glance, he noticed in particular a certain dainty cutting away of the lid of the nostrils, which gave a sin- gular quiver to her charming smile, and reminded him somehow of a high-bred Arab. Taken as a whole, Olive Strong was not fair to outer view with the fairness that would take the most casual observer; but Tom Pringle, who had more in him than he himself suspected, saw at once that she possessed a deeper and a more perfect type of beauty than any that he had ever yet learned to think beautiful. He was sorry as he gazed at her that he was not a missionary. What had ailed him to run away to sea and turn common sailor? That was his real great error. After all, he was better born and better bred than Glisson. But he had thrown away his chances for a boyish freak; and though he loved the sea, and had never before complained of it, it occurred to him now with a pang of regret that he had made it impossible for himself ever to marry a girl of the same class and stamp as Olive. It is so delightful to find oneself with " a real lady." 68 Tin 'OP. Fully to realise what those hackneyed \v mean, how< u must have lived, like Tom, for some years as a common sailor. Olive stood on the step of the door and wel- comed him. " You must make yourself quite at home," she said, with that quivering smile. " I'm accustomed to invalids, Mr. Glisson, and I'm so very glad you were able to come to us. Not too quick up the steps we know how you must have been shaken. Captain Peachey told Papa what the Avenger's doctor said the real wonder \ that you should have escaped at all, when the men by your side were killed in the explosi< " Oh, I feel all right now," Tom answered and, to do him justice, at that moment he did. I can walk quite well; it's only my head that es me any trouble." Olive led him to a long wicker chair on the mdah. A passion-flower draped it in lithe festoons. " You'd better sit here awhile," she said, " and rest, before you go to your room. The doctor told us we mustn't let ert yourself at all for some days. You must have perfect feel more wretched and more guilty than ever. Oh. why had he consented to him A GENTLEMAN AGAIN. 69 to begin this deception? He had half a mind even now to brazen it all out, and declare himself a member of the crew of pirates. Fancy living for some days in the bosom of a family, with this charming girl, and palming oneself off as a pious . missionary! Could he keep it up, he wondered, he, the most careless and happy-go-lucky of sailors. And even if he could, how heartily he must despise himself! " Oh, I dare say by to-morrow or next day I shall be well enough to to think about get- ting back," Tom began, growing hot. Then, seeing the look of surprise on Olive's face, he added quickly, " Of course I mustn't presume to trespass one day longer than is necessary on your kind hospitality." "Why not?" Olive asked, astonished at this strange haste. " We're delighted to see you. And then, we sympathise so much with your work, you see. I think it so brave of you to go and risk your life like that, all for a pure idea, among those dreadful savages. Captain Peachey told Papa you almost gave up your own safety for your people and you were taken, defending . them, by those horrid slavers. Of course one ought to be glad one's allowed to do anything for those who will do so much for others." Tom's face was fiery hot. This was more than he could endure. " I I have done noth- ing," he answered. " Nothing, nothing at all, I assure you. I'm afraid you misunderstand. I I couldn't help being taken prisoru Then a certain sense of loyalty to poor dead Glisson closed his lips once more. It was of Glisson she i speaking, not of his own doings. How could he dissociate the tangled personalities? how ven- ture to make light of that brave fellow's acts? For though he had only been a few days in Glis- son's company on the John Wesley, he had learned to appreciate and admire to the full the < ngth and devotion of that simple, manly, single-hearted young Englishman. He grew hotter and redder still as he thought of this treachery. And Olive, who saw it. put 11 down to the brave young missionary's cessive modesty. His \rr\ discomfiture told in ln> favour The more he floundered, the bet she thought of him. CHAPTER IX. ENTANGLEMENT. THREE days later, the Rev. Cecil Glisson, alias Tom Pringle, sat on the verandah of the Strongs' house on the Parramatta River, look- ing out with dazed eyes towards the beautiful harbour. He was a Reverend indeed: in the clothes which he wore, Tom hardly knew him- self. For there he sat, rigged out in a com- plete suit of black clerical broadcloth, hastily made to measure by the best tailor in Sydney. It was in vain that he had protested on four dif- ferent grounds, personal, economical, moral, and sartorial, against this complete transformation of his outer man: his host maintained that a clergyman in Sydney must dress as Sydney does: he must wear the accepted clerical clothes of a civilised parish: and Tom, after fighting a los- ing battle all along the line, had finally retired from the contest, discomfited. The financial ar- gument was a strong one. He declared he had no means to pay for his new suit, having arrived 71 'III! iOP. in Sydney without a penny to l>le>- himself: Mr. Strong replied that as local sc. of the (lunch of England Missionary Society it duty to see to the proper clothing of ship- u recked or destitute missionaries, and that Tom must Milnnit to his superior officer. Then Tom urged feebly that he could never wear it when he returned to Temuka; to which Mr. Strong rejoined that his return to Temuka was a prob- lematical event, after the harm inflicted upon him by the fight and the explosion. " We like en- thusiasm." he said, smiling; " but we don't de- sire our missionaries to court martyrdom too easily; the palm should be won, not snatch and V'/f want to snatch it." Tom blushed un- easily again; in point of fact, no man on earth felt less anxious for martyrdom than he did. He psed into silence, and allowed himself to be passively measured for his clerical suit without further remonstrance. And now, the hateful black things had come home in due course, and Tom found himself, to his own intense discomfort, masquerading in that very uncongenial costume before Olive Strong on her own verandah. " I don't even know how to wear them, Mine ; ENTANGLEMENT. 77 difficulty. To put one's hand to the plough and then turn back is bad. Apart from anything else, it shows lack of courage." " I don't think anybody would suspect you of want of courage," Olive answered with convic- tion. And once more Tom .coloured. The re- mark was true enough, even as applied to him- self; for Tom had the usual endowment of the British sailor in that respect; he was by no means a coward: but he knew the praise was intended for Glisson, and it made him uncomfortable. Olive noticed his blush, and thought all the bet- ter of him for it. " He's as modest as he's brave," she said to herself admiringly. As a rule, to be sure, she was not attracted by curates; but this bronzed and weather-beaten young missionary (as she naturally thought him), with his frank sailor face and his shy sailor manners, was only a parson by the accident of orders. In essence she felt and felt more truly than she knew he was of the genus explorer, a daring young fellow who took his life in his hands, and accepted mission work with the eager delight of a boy in a danger- ous adventure. She noticed, indeed, that when he talked of his own life (which was seldom) he dwelt little on professional details, but spoke much of the sea, the fight with the Labour vessel, the delights of roughing it, the savagery of the -8 TII: iOP. natives. Olive had lived long enough in a cleri- family to be just a trifle sick of the slang of parochialism; but this South Sea Island parson in the flannel shirt seemed to her a totally new species and no wonder. 1 don't think you ought to go back," she interposed after a pause. " You know now how dangerous it is. liven if you don't mind for yourself, you should consider others your moth- er, for instance, or your sisters." I have no mother," Tom answered, turn- ing toward- her as he spoke, and catching his neck on that horrid round collar. " She died years ago, my dear good mother. And I m Which was true, every word of it. both of himself and the man he personated. 1 hen he prevaricated again. " If you looked up the name n in the Missionary Recor he added. " didn't it mention that thp fellow came out of a Liverpool orphanage?" "It did." Olive replied, admiring him still more for his honest frankness and complete ab- sence of snobbery. " But then, I thought per- haps that might only mean that you had lost your father." I have lost both parents." Tom answered, " and 1 was an only son." Which attain equally true of himself and of Glisson. Then he ENTANGLEMENT. 79 plunged once more. " I think," he went on, the thought really occurring to him on the spur of the moment, " only people without home ties ought ever to undertake missionary work. It's too dangerous for men with mothers and sisters it puts too great a strain on their affections. Apart from the possibilities of being killed and eaten, just think what torture it must be for a mother who loves one to wait months together without the chance of a letter and with all the terrors of a tropical climate and the caprices of savages vividly before her mind all the time in the night watches." " You're quite right," Olive answered. " I never thought of that before. But I see it now. It must be really terrible. . . . Yet some mis- sionaries even take their wives out with them." " And have children born to them in the Islands; yes; they do: but do you think it is right, it is fair to a woman? I don't. A man may risk his own life if he likes, especially in a good cause; it's his own to chuck away, his own to gamble with I mean, to use for what he thinks the highest purpose." (Very difficult for a sailor to assume all at once this new professional man- ner!) " But his wife's and his children's, no! There are dangers to which no man should expose a woman least of all a woman he loves. And his 8o 'i in-: DfCn>] !OP. little children! Do you remember how those missionaries' families were massacred and tor- tured in Madagascar? It makes me feel that no man should ever take a wife with him on such edition." And he shuffled in his clothes, for the collar galled him. Olive paused to consider. " I think you're right," she said at last. " as a matter of prin- ciple, for the man. And yet it's very hard that i who are exposed to such risks should not be cheered and encouraged by the consolation of fe's care, a lp. a wife's sympathy." After that, there was a long pause. Tom Mt it in reflecting that if he mi-Monary. and he laid a chance of winning such a girl Olive, lie would certainly not take her to Teinuka. to be cooked and eaten. It was all very well to talk about put tin- one's hand to the plough and not looking back; for a celibate clergy, that was an excellci A monk mi-lit stick to it. I.ut if yon were going to marry a wife like Olive hang it all. yon ought to govern yourself ac- cordingly, and make a home fit for her. Th could be no great merit in marrying a wife, and >osing her to risks too horrible to contemplate. Such vicarious martyrdom in no way suited Tom's sailor nature. As for Olive, she spent the same moments in ENTANGLEMENT. g t reflecting that Mr. Glisson was a charming young man, so simple, so brave, so candid, so honest; and that it was a pity he thought of going back to Temuka especially if he meant to go alone, and thought it positively wrong to take a wife out with him. She certainly wouldn't care to live at Temuka herself; the isolation and the danger must both be terrible: and if a young man such as Mr. Glisson were to ask her to marry him which of course was improbable she would much prefer he should make her a home in New South Wales or in England. Theoret- ically, she was an ardent supporter of foreign missions it was her duty as her father's daugh- ter to be so; but practically and personally she felt that not every one is called to this difficult work, and that, unless you have a call, it would be foolish to embark in it. Which showed Olive's good sense; for no more people are fitted to be missionaries than to be scientific explorers; and a missionary who is not to the manner born makes his own life wretched, without doing much good to anybody else's. Glisson, the real Glisson, was a missionary born. He had that ardent love of universal hu- manity, black, white, or brown, which is essen- tial to success in his chosen calling: and he had also that buoyant hope, that unfailing energy g2 Till !OP. which alone can sustain a man through the d appointments and failures of a life spent in trying to raise lower natures to a height far above tlu He had the enthusiasm of humanity. Tom. \ ^ only an amiable and adventurous youni; sailor, felt consciou^ h<>\\ difficult it was for him to sustain the part of such a fervent apostle. Fortunately, he thought to himself, he had only to do it for a few days longer, and then, he could get a \\.iy and be once more a mere boisterous ish sailor. In which case, of course, he must say good- for ever, to Oli That was a painful consequence of his half- unwilling deception. For he began to Ix that in tho^- u-\\ short days Olive had come to nu-aii a great deal to him. CHAPTER X. THE COMPLETE CASUIST. ACCIDENT, I hold, is answerable for much in most human lives; it was answerable for almost everything in Tom Pringle's. When he first de- cided to change his clothes hurriedly for Cecil Glisson's in the cabin of the John Wesley, on that critical evening, he had certainly no deeper in- tention than to escape for the moment from an awkward predicament into which chance had led him. He had taken a berth on the Labour vessel without the faintest idea of the true nature of the trade in which she was engaged; that first unfortunate step had involved his taking an un- willing part in the fight and the capture of the blackfellows. When he saw the Avenger bearing down upon Bully Ford, he had had no thought beyond that of putting himself visibly on the right side, and disclaiming all share in the John Wesley's nefari- ous proceedings. Most assuredly he had not an- ticipated masquerading for a whole week in cler- 83 S 4 'I'M I M. ical dress as the dead man's representati soon as he discovered into what difficulties this one false step had landed him. his sole anxiety next to get free from the coils of his decep- tion. He desired to leave Sydney as early as possible; he wanted to find some homeward- bound ship on which he could bury himself once more in his native obscurity. Meanwhile, he had a sense that he was acting in private theatric- dressed up for the singularly uncongenial part of an English curate. But the stars in their courses fought against Tom Pringle, and slowly compelled him to a con- tinued deception. He was not well enough to go out for a week after he reached Sydney. As soon as he could move with safety, he determined in his own soul that he \\<>tild slink away in << son <>ss shirt; sell his uncomfortable new black parson suit for what it would fetch at a marine store dealer's; buy such other clothes as he could obtain with the money; and then sign icles for any voyage to any port on earth. provided only he could at once shuffle off this uncomfortable personality which his own ra>h act had foolishly thrust upon him. Here again, however, the fates were un; pitions. On the morning when he confidently hoped to get away, he had a relapse, no doubt THE COMPLETE 'CASUIST. 85 through nervous anxiety, and had to yield himself up once more to Olive's nursing. And Olive's nursing was always so delightful that he felt in his heart he could be only half sorry for it. Of course, he would not allow himself to fall in love with that girl. It would be madness under the circumstances: nay, worse, it would be dishon- ourable. He was only a common sailor, however well born for his father had been a gentleman; and if Olive showed some slight liking for him, no doubt that was only because she thought he was Cecil Glisson. Though to be sure, if it came to that, is it not rather the concrete man now and here before a girl that she falls in love with, not his name or antecedents? If you fall in love, do you not fall in love with a person rather than with a profession? These were pregnant ques- tions. Still, it was absurd in any case for him to think about Olive. And if Olive thought about him, his clear duty as a man of honour was to pretend to ignore it. Indeed, what else could he do? It would be useless to win Olive's heart as the Reverend Cecil Glisson, and then have to confess he was plain Tom Pringle, able-bodied mariner, without a penny in the world, and with not the faintest chance of ever supporting a wife of her quality. Meanwhile, to make things worse, Sydney 86 THI :OP. did not allow the supposed parson to rest at peace in his convalescence. They had caught a hero, and they meant to lionize him. On the Thursday of that week. t\\o clergymen call with Mr. Strong to back them up, and made the HIT 1. the wholly incredible request that Tom would preach in aid of the Mission Fund to the South Seas on Sunday. Tom preach! He had never even dreamt of that appalling possibility. It was too absurd. His horror and consternation showed themselves legibly on his face. Preach in a church! Oh, dear us! 44 Not at all," his host said blandly for he a suave parson don't want a set seim>n. (llisson. What our people would like best to hear is a plain account in simple language of IT own mission." Temuka indeed! Where he had spent one wild day! What on earth could he tell them of r There is a legal and moral maxim that no one omes of a sudden a blackguard nemo pente fit turpissimus. And Tom did not de- scend at once into the lowest depths of duplicity. I tell you all this, at some length, because, unless I told you step by step how the gl reption arose, you would think more hardly of him than THE COMPLETE CASUIST. 8/ the circumstances justify. You would set him down, sans phrase, as an unmitigated scoundrel; when, as a matter of fact, he was to some extent merely the victim of circumstances. This first naked suggestion that he should clothe himself in a surplice and mount the steps of a pulpit to expound the Word struck his mind, indeed, as a horrible profanity. He did not plot and scheme to personate a clergyman; certainly he did not rush into it with deliberate hypocrisy. On the contrary he drew back from the consequences of his act with genuine fear and unfeigned horror. " Oh, no," he said, taken aback. " I could never dream of preaching." Then, the necessity for keeping up the farce re- curred to him, and he added hastily, as an after- thought, " before an educated congregation such as one would have at Sydney." It was only just in time that he remembered to say " congrega- tion " instead of " audience " the word that had first naturally occurred to him. Mr. Strong, however, would hear of no re- fusal. Tom pleaded ill-health. Very well, then; if not this week, why, next. Tom declared he had never preached to a body of English hearers. Oh, that was not what they wanted; they did not care for a discourse full of orthodox doc-' trine; they would like to have just some plain 88 Tin account of his own work and his strange- tures. Much talking at last .\vn all op- position. ' rne by their importunity, Tom consented in the end, for the sake of peace and quiet, reserving in his own soul the silent deter- mination to contract on the fatal day a sudden indisposition. ( )live for her part was much interested in this sermon. " I don't think, Mr. Glisson." she said, "you ought exactly to preach to thorn. us here, about the wickodness of this Labour trade, and the neces- Mty for doing something to put down its hor- ror^ " That would hardly bo churchy." Tom inter- posed, very dubiously. " I don't think the apostles cared much whether things were churchy." ( Hive answered with common sense. "And I know that's not :r-df. At Temuka, I'm sure, yon didn't think about churchiness. You were satisfied to be pie Here, you're filled with the idea that taey'fl a town, and that what was good enough for Temuka wouldn't be good . THE COMPLETE CASUIST. 89 for us. But I can see you are horrified and in- dignant at this wicked slave-trading that goes on almost unchecked under our own flag; why don't you just stand up in a pulpit and say so in your own way tell them what you've told Papa and me here alone in the evenings? It would be real: it would be genuine. And it would do more good than a great many sermons which you and I know nobody ever listens to." Tom thought the notion a good one as far as it went. He didn't mean to go in for the profa- nation of preaching in church at all he must back out of it somehow. Still, if he had to preach, (he, in a clean white surplice!) he really thought he would do as Olive suggested. While he had nothing particular to say about justifica- tion by faith and he felt himself lamentably weak in that direction he had a great deal to say about Bully Ford and his proceedings. What he had seen on the John Wesley had stirred his indignation. His blood boiled at it. Queensland pretended it knew nothing of these things: but Queensland was built up on a virtual slave trade. And then, he reflected that he was now in a sense Cecil Glisson's representa- tive. A strange feeling of loyalty to the dead man possessed him. As long as this miserable deception lasted, and people still believed him to 90 :1 (ilisson, he ought at least to i in a y that would bring no t upon the ar- dent young missionary whose place he had usurped. If Glisson were alive, Tom thought, he would certainly go into a Sydney pulpit and preach such and such a sermon. As he lay awake at night, wondering how he er to creep out of this hole into which he had let himself, he thought that sermon all out in his head, just as (ili>n would have preached it just as he would preach it himself if he were a real registered Ai parson. Part of it he made up from his \i\id recollection of the stirring things Cecil Glisson had said to him when he lay dying on the John Wesley, filled even in death with that unquenchable enthusiasm of humanity; part of it he supplied from his own experiences on the hateful Labour vessel. He was almost sorry he couldn't preach such a sermon; it might do much good; more good by many lengths than half the sermons one he mere strings of commonplace droned out to order by perfunctory parsons. He had sor thing to say, and he thought he could say it. It 3 a pity, after all, the chance could never occur for him. If he hud heen a parson, how h<>t he would make it for the smugly respectable (j land plant THE COMPLETE CASUIST. 91 He thought that sermon all out in every sen- tence and every epithet. He was not aware of it himself, but, being half Irish by descent, he had the natural Irish gift of eloquence. Going on with his sermon, he worked himself up to a pitch of enthusiasm in the dead hours of the morning. He half rehearsed it to himself in an impassioned undertone. He was enslaved by his own phrases. What a pity he couldn't deliver it as a lecture at least! He found himself car- ried away by the sense of his own message. And he had a message. He was Cecil Glis- son for the moment, with a burning story to tell of wrong and cruelty. If only he could tell it, he felt sure he had the power to make people listen. He talked of it next day to Olive. She lis- tened certainly. She was enthusiastic about the necessity for putting down this vile traffic, and preaching a new crusade. " I believe, Mr. Glis- son," she said w r ith confidence, " you would be twice as well employed in opening the eyes of people in Australia and England to the wicked- ness of this labour trade than in evangelising Temuka. It is a larger work. You would be doing more real service to your people, I'm sure, than by merely teaching. And besides, you wouldn't have to settle down again in the Islands then: and ;ilur hand from the plough eitl Tom was a modest enough young fellow, not apt to suppose such a girl as O 19 likely to care for him; hut when he posed as Glisson, he felt at once that a certain new element imported into the situation. As she said those with a faint flush on the dark cheek. ami a slight droop of the downcast eyes, as if hal: blowing too obvious an in* est in her hearer's welfare, it did occur to Tom as possible that Olive Strong was falling in 1 if not with him, at any rate with Cecil Glisson. rc acting a part, and a woman falls in love with that part you are acting, it is diffi- cult for you to dissever the character from the actor. So Tom felt at that moment. It was a queer conundrum. Supposing Olive Strong v. in love with Cecil Glisson, was not Tom the Cecil Glisson Olive Strong was in love with? m that moment forth, his life became one long attempt both to entangle and to disentan- gle those two diverse personalities. They puz/ If. The Cecil Glisson of the future n artificial compror :i the : Tom Prin^lc and the dead missionary of Te- mul And when Olive said those THE COMPLETE CASUIST. 93 to Tom that by doing his best against that in- iquitous slave traffic he would in a certain sense be carrying out Cecil Glisson's wishes. Fate rather than deliberate design had forced him into this impersonation of a dead man whom he could not help respecting; surely the way in which he could at any rate do least dishonour to the part he had been driven by accident to assume would be by acting at Cecil Glisson himself would have acted had he been really living. Tom was turned by circumstances into a com- plete casuist. CHAPTER XI. TOM PLUNGES. TEMPTATION creeps from point to point. Sunday came at last that eventful Sunday, which formed the real turning-point in the his- tory of Tom Pringle's half-unwilling deception. Till Sunda\ : was still always possible; by Monday, it was not: he had raised meanwhile an impassable bar; . the new Cecil < ilisson and the old Tom Prim. He came down to breakfast half undecided how to act. He still clung to the hope that he might plead indisposition. But as he entered the breakfast room, with a furtive -mile, his host dispelled that illusion by saying at < < )h, how much better you look this morning, d son! Ym're a man again. I see. You've picl up Milly in our bracing climate-. \c\t to harbour. \ prides itself on its air: it as good as England after a year or two of the troj I'm so glad yor, 94 TOM PLUNGES. 95 looking up from the tea-tray, where she was occupied as housewife. " We've all set our hearts, you know, upon your undertaking this crusade; and indeed, when you can do it so well, we can none of us imagine why you want to shirk it." " Too much modesty/' her father answered. " But tfien, modesty is not always an unalloyed virtue. A man should have just confidence in his own powers. However, you're fit enough, Glis- son; that's one good point; and I haven't a doubt you will find our people enthusiastic." What could poor Tom do? He was not ec- clesiastical, and the act did not occur to him as a great sacrilege just then at least; the hon- est historian is bound to admit that he consid- ered it rather as an awkward social fix, out of which he must extricate himself by a disagree- able piece of solemn masquerading. Yet of one thing he was sure; it was no use now to plead indisposition. As Mr. Strong said, he was fit- undeniably fit. He felt it; he looked it; and he felt he looked it. The fresh air of a temperate country had revived him wonderfully after his illness on the Avenger; and the unwonted luxury of that comfortable home, with the equally un- wonted pleasure of a lady's society, had suc- ceeded in making him happy and lively in spite cf> Tin of his anxiety. He was adventurous by nat: hance thrust this adventure upon him agar will, why, he must embrace it, that was all, and pull himself out of it as well as he was able. Though he did draw a line at personating a par- son in the very pulpit. He got through breakfast somehow. II he hardly knew himself. He crumbled his bread 1 gulped down his coffee. He was too tremu- lous even to be conscious of his stiff white chol After breakfast, Olive spoke to her father in the study for a moment. " He's terribly nervous," she said (and her father, who was a student of human nature. <>1 served for the first time that spoke of their visitor as " he," not as " Mr. is though there were no other / V in : h considering). " Did you notice that he hardly ate anything, and that he seemed quite t'ri-hU'iu I Ie is nervous/' her father answered, pulling clerical tie straight in front of the glass. "But is that to be wondered at? Remember, it practically his first sermon. He never f 1 emuka. He just talked ar ; ned things in a very crude language to a set of savages. I i-lf when 1 preached my t sermon. But that <^re a bishop, and I an unknown man; whereas Glisson has the ad- TOM PLUNGES. 97 vantage of a congregation entirely predisposed in his favour/' " I shall make him take a glass of port in a medicine bottle," Olive exclaimed, " and drink it in the vestry just before the sermon." " An excellent thing," her father answered. " With an egg beaten up in it. But he will be all right, I'm sure, when once he begins. His heart is in this matter, and therefore he'll speak well about it." At a quarter to eleven, a neighbour's carriage called for Tom by appointment. As the fatal hour drew nigh, he grew whiter and more terri- fied. The real seriousness of the step he was taking did not even now appeal to him from the point of view of sacrilege: but he was increas- ingly conscious of the social ordeal. He drove to church in silence, with trembling knees. He had not felt half so frightened in the jungle at Te- muka, when the blackfellows were peppering them from behind the brushwood. Through the earlier part of the service he sat in a white surplice and a face somewhat whiter. The terror of the task increased upon him each instant. When at length the dreaded moment arrived, he had one last impulse to rise in his place and cry aloud: "I am not Cecil Glisson; I have been fooling you all: I am only Tom OP THR TJN TVER SIT Y Prince, an able-bodied mariner." I'.u: Olive's eye, and the M^lu of ! d him. The crucial moment went by. and \\ent by for ever. Xext instant, in a breathless turmoil, and with legs that scarcely bore him. lie felt him- self mounting the pulpit stairs, as if by so tcrnal compulsion, and saw a sea of up- turned faces all looking toward- him and ing. As he stood there for one second, pausing and drawing breath, it occurred to him all at once that though he had quite decided in his o\\n mind what sort of sermon he should preach, if he had to preach a ^mion. the trilling initial for- mality of a text had entirely 1 him. In an ago . he opened the big Bible m the rail in front of him; opened it at random, and i;a\e out the hr-t words on which his lighted. They happened luckily to be these "And I, brethren, when 1 came to yon. came not with excellency of speech MII." Tom tittered them mechanically; then he looked at his congregation. A sudden sense of their con- gruity overcame him. "That is true," he said simply. " I will :[>]< you to listen to me, not for my poor manner of delivering my message, but because I / u->age to give to the people of Sydn. TOM PLUNGES. 99 After that, he paused again and looked round. Then, conscious of the unique importance of the moment, he dropped his voice suddenly to a col- loquial tone and began to tell his hearers, in his homely sailor way, the story of what he had seen on board the John Wesley. He forgot for the moment he was supposed to be Cecil Glisson; but as he. spoke impersonally, that lapse did not much matter. He told them how skippers such as Bully Ford, sailing under the British flag, and making that flag hateful to the people of the South Pacific, descended suddenly, like birds of prey that swoop from the sky, upon those beauti- ful islands. He described with simple but graphic eloquence the harbour of Temuka, its rampart of rock, its palms, its waterfalls. He told them how the white men were armed and trained; how ruthless was their method; how their business was that of organised slave-stealers. He painted in the telling touches of an eye-witness the land- ing on the white beach; the terror of the first villagers; the toilsome march through the tan- gled forest; the fierce swoop of onslaught upon the defenceless natives; the seizure and hand- cuffing of men and women; the swift retreat to the boats; the utter carelessness of life; the treatment of the slaves as though they were bales of merchandise. It was a picture from life: as he 100 Til! IOP. spoke, \u> hearers seemed to see it all before them. Then, still in an impersonal way. as if he v her himself nor Cecil Glisson, he described in -rds how a missionary living among these people, and anxiously endeavouring to teach them higher and better ways, found his and his precepts nullified by the descent of these cruel white fiends upon his com- munity. " Oh father," his poor natives would pray to their ancestor rom sail- gods who come to steal us in fire-vessels." He spoke of the canoes of native Christians putting forth with courage from the little bay: the nn- >ected shot discharged at them from the slaver; the surprise of the missionary; the con- sternation of his flock; the episode of the single sailor who would not let a white man die un- led: the nameless horrors of the passage; the natives cooped up in their quarters like pig- the total lack of either comfort or de- cency: then, the approach of the gunboat; the callous cruelty of the skipper and his crew; the vile talk about the "stock"; the sternly eal way in which the order " Chuck them o\ board and obeyed. It was a graphic narrative. lie ha -ith his own eve-, and he made hi> 1;> :'eel the realitv of what he TOM PLUNGES. IO i told them. The congregation listened spell- bound. This was not a sermon; it was a genu- ine piece of native oratory. When he spoke of the thud as each shrieking slave struck the water, with the silence that followed, a hush fell upon his hearers: the whole church was still in an awed access of horror. But the oddest part of it all was this; as soon as Tom once warmed up to his subject, he for- got where he was; he forgot what he was pre- tending; he did not even recollect that he must speak in the formal dialect of the pulpit: he re- membered only his own burning indignation that such things should be done, and that the flag of his country should be used to cover them. Now and then, indeed, he slipped out unawares some sailor-like colloquialism, for which he forgot to apologise. His hearers smiled; but the earnest- ness and the naivete of the man and his speech made them not only forgive but actually appre- ciate these curious little lapses. His sunburnt face, his seafaring manners, his plain English wording, all contributed to his success. Every- body could see or thought they could see he was a plain rough missionary, accustomed to the simple life of a Melanesian island, and without graces of manner such as one gets in town churches; but they could also see that he spoke IO2 '1'HI 1 lie-art, and that the things he :l>ed had tilled his .\vn soul with the most thrilling horror. At last he finished with one simple ap] " Now. what I tell you is no distant fable. These things are being done, to-day, within a fortnight's sail of this port of Sydney. They are being done under oner h flag, the flag that all love in order to supply cheap Melanesian labour to British capitalists in a British colony. The people who do them are making that flag hated throughout the South Pacific. Where it appears, men tly. and women cower. England i- annot move her. But I ask i, men and \\ -hake ha- TOM PLUNGES. IO 3 with the orator. Even Tom himself was dimly aware that day that his fate was now sealed; he could never go back; he had made himself a parson. When all the others had dropped off, Olive Strong came up. " Thank you, Mr. Glisson," she said. " It was a wonderful description. As you spoke of what you had seen, we all seemed to see it. I knew you could do this thing; and you did it splendidly. I see now quite clearly what your work must be in future. You must stir this matter up in Australia and in England." Tom was boyishly delighted and pleased with her praise; yet it made him feel more of an im- postor and a rogue than ever. CHAPTER XII. Tin: i NT: vi TABLE. WHEN, long years mis. it first be to IK- ] red in England that Cecil >son (as everybody called him) was not a c gyman at all. l>ut in forged orders, the few who rd to accept that startling rumour took it for granted at once that Cecil Glisson li an unmitigated scoundrel. The crime of Personating a priest is one which seems peculiar- ly heinous to all who accept the inherent sanc- tity of the clerical cal lurefore I almost of making you understand by what grad- ual stages, and through what persistent freaks of fate, Tom lYin-le fell slowly into this life-long ion. On board the Avenger, he said to himself, it \\as only till he could reach Sydney. At Sydney, it was only till he could steal away to Melln>nnK'. After that fatal Sunday, it v only still till he could escape from the Strongs. I when once he had fled. ( )live Strong must id him with the rest of this strange 104 THE INEVITABLE. 105 phantasmagoric episode in the life of an adven- turous Canadian sailor. That he was a Canadian, too, must be allowed to count for a little in whatever exculpation an apologist may find possible for Tom Pringle's conduct. Not that I am myself concerned to defend or to condemn him; the historian's task is but to state facts as they occur, leaving judg- ment of good and evil to his readers. Still, it must be admitted in fairness that in European lands the sense of some inherent sanctity in holy orders is stronger by far than in Protestant America, where the man who feels an inner call to preach goes forth and preaches, with or with- out credentials. And when Tom Pringle grew suddenly conscious that morning at Sydney that he had a message to give to the people of Aus- tralia, and that the people would listen to it, he felt himself in some ways more or less justified in the role of deception which chance and cir- cumstance had forced upon him. He lay awake that night none the less, how- ever, and reflected very seriously on his present - position. What was he going to do next? For as yet his thoughts were all concentrated on the project of getting free from this awkward fix; he had no idea so far of embarking in a deliberate and life-long deception. He still wanted to steal Til! I OP. away to M !ie or elsewhere; and he : still no design of any other permanent path in lan that of a casual British sailor. One tiling alone stood a little in the way; he ild be sorry to say good-bye for ever to Olive. For Oli a revelation, an ideal, an cp since he was a boy in Canada had it hap- > him before to speak on equal terms with an English lady. Gently born and 1>: had tiling away his ancestral birthright of gentility the only birthright he had ever possessed for a boy's love of the sea. a love that rarely lasts much beyond h\ e-and-t wenty. And now that he had spent ten days in a house with Olive Strong, he saw his mi-take; he began to regret his altered position in society. Rc< Vankly in that cultivated home as an e<|ual. it suddenly came back to him that he could still be a gentleman. He had had a good many hours alone when Oli\e was out and those hours he had spent for the most part in the library. They suggested to him the idea that after all he did really like books; that he v good for something better, something higher in the \\orld. than reeling sails and lowering jolly- its. But Olive herself, after all, was the irgument. He that if he left Sydney he would leave a great part of him- THE INEVITABLE. lO/ self behind there. As he lay in bed and thought over that distracting day that day of unex- pected and glorious triumph that day of shame- ful and incredible deceit he was most of all conscious that he did not now wish to be a sailor any more, because he was in love with Olive. And Olive had said one thing, too, that touched him to the core. She talked it all over with him in the drawing-room that evening; and she exclaimed more than once: " That sailor who took you from the canoes and nursed you on the John Wesley must have been a good fel- low too. How sad that he should have been blown up in the explosion afterwards! It seems to me he must have been really brave to venture upon having his own way at such a time against that horrid captain." And Tom could only look down and say: " Oh, yes, he was a good fellow enough; " which under the circumstances seemed painfully luke- warm. This odd conflict of real modesty with the curious fear of seeming to underrate the man who, according to the official story, had saved his life, was difficult to carry off with a becom- ing demeanour. Before he quite knew what was happening he found himself engaged in a glowing eulogy of his own tenderness as a io8 'nil ! or. e and a touching tribute to his own memory. In the small hours of the night, he half laughed to himself at the absurdity of the situa- tion. It would have been immensely comic, if rre not so embarrassing. But he felt none the less that the affair was growing a trifle too complicated. Sooner or later, he must go. And the sooner the better. led with this idea, he rose early next morn- ing, determined, like a foolish young sailor that as, on a somewhat precipitate line of action. It was no use loitering. He must break at once. He must get rid for ever of these lyinir black clothes; he must return to the sea and be an honest sailor. Determined to act, he dressed himself in Cecil Glisson's red cross >hirt. and descended to the drawing-room. A fever of penitence on him the first of many from which he suffered during a life of alternate emotions, all fiercely suppressed under a calm exterior. He had l>e- d abominably; he could feel that no\\ he had taken the only possible alternative that he could see to being unjustly hanged for partici- pation in acts which horrified and revolted him. Nay, would it not even have been wron^ in him to let such a tr e take its c THE INEVITABLE. IO g without an effort to prevent it? And how else could he prevent it save in the way he had chosen? Yet he was really penitent. Above all, for his attitude towards that innocent Olive. He had unwillingly and almost unwittingly deceived her; but he had deceived her for all that; and he respected her so much that the sense of having deceived her was odious and unendurable to his candid nature. So now he had made up his mind to steal away without even saying good-bye to her; to embark on a ship for some distant port; and then to write in general and non-committing terms about the gross deception he had practised upon her. If so, how could he sign it? Cecil Glisson? To do that would be to put a hateful slight upon the memory of the man whom he had nursed and admired and wronged and personated. Tom Pringle? To do that would be to play once more into the hands of injustice and secure his own hanging; for Tom knew that in these days the police of the world, like a banded brotherhood, can track a suspected criminal from Sydney to San Francisco and from Temuka to Constanti- nople, Rio, or Petersburg. This, however, was a remoter difficulty, which he was not now called IIO THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. upon for the moment to solve; though it oc- curred to him even then that if he fled away suddenly, he might suggest the notion that he not Cecil Glisson; and if that notion were once suggested, and enquiry aroused, it would i go hard under the circumstances if they did not hang him. For if. when he first landed, he had proclaimed himself as Tom Pringle, and told the whole truth, it was just conceivable, though scar obable, that people might have be- lieved him; but now that he had played the p of the missionary 'successfully for ten days to- gether, and even preached with unction an af- fecting sermon, all the world would conclude he one of the pirate gang, unless he was Glis- son; and hanged he would be more certainly than ever. Yet he was prepared to risk that last i ril>le chance itself rather than continue any longer his gross deception of the girl he was beginning to confess himself in love with. It was early morning, and he had crept down furtively into the dining-room. lie was on the prowl after food, for even in such desperate straits, a man must feed; and he had just suc- ceeded in finding a loaf of bread in the sideboard, when steps on the stairs aroused him. He pan and listened. It was a woman's tread, lie lis- THE INEVITABLE. Iir tened again and felt sure it was Olive descend- ing. Now, Tom was quite prepared to face mere hanging, but he was not prepared to face such a ridiculous position as being caught by that angel in the act of stealing a loaf of bread from her side- board. He beat a hasty retreat, and, finding no other way open, retired on to the verandah. Then, terrified lest Olive should look out and see him, he crouched for a while behind a long wicker chair, and waited to fly till Olive should disappear again. He heard her open the dining-room door and peer in. He heard her approach the window. He had left it unfastened, of course. She looked out, glanced around, and surveyed the garden. At the same moment, he heard the study door open. He knew that Mr. Strong used to rise very early to write his sermons, but he had hardly expected him quite as early as this. A voice called out: " Olive!" " Yes, Papa." " What are you doing, up at this hour? " Mr. Strong had come into the dining-room by this time, and Olive had left the window open. Tom, crouched behind his wicker chair, could hear every word they spoke as easily as if he had been in the room with them. Olive's tone had something of hesitation in it as she answered 112 TI1K IN uneasily: " I thought I heard Mr. (ilisson come down, and I was afraid he might be ill or in want of something; so I slipped on my dress and ju^t ran down to ask him." "Olive, you are thinking too much of this Mr. Glisson." " Am I, Papa? " He could feel her heart beat- ing in the voice with which she said it. Yes, my child, you are. I have seen it for some days. I have watched till I was sure. And I'm doubly sorry for it. In the first place, he means nothing; he's too full of his work, and too eager to get back again, to think of anything else. And in the second place, you know very well, you don't want to go to Temuka." Olive paused a second. Then she answered slowly. " That's quite true in one way; I don't want to go to Temuka. But I could go any- where, Papa, with a man that loved me." Mr. Strong drew an audible breath. " It's as bad as that, then, is it?" he asked. "You've been thinking it over, and you'd be prepared to go, even to Temuka? " "How do I know, Papa?" Olive ansu- demurely. "Nobody has asked me yet. If I were asked by somebody I would take time, I suppose, to consider my ans\ She said it as lightly as she could; but T THE INEVITABLE. T ! 3 was aware where he lurked that she said it with a restrained air which meant a great deal. She was trying to laugh it off because it meant so much to her. " Olive, you're in love with this young man." She dropped her voice. " I I suppose so." " And he has nothing to marry upon." " That doesn't matter. He has courage, and cleverness, and a great deal beside. Everyone said on Sunday they never heard such a sermon." " Ah, that was because he was describing what he had seen and gone through. He forgot him- self wholly in his dramatic story. I don't know whether he could preach at all on any ordinary subject." " I don't know either. He can do better than that. He can make one listen when he talks about what he knows. And as to going to Temuka, why should he ever go back again? He has better work to do here, a thousand times better, and you ought to tell him so. He would be of infinitely more use in New South Wales than thrown away on a Melanesian island." " Olive, take care! you overrate his abilities." " No I don't, Papa. He's far cleverer than he knows; only, he's much too modest. He could do anything that he tried. I can hear by II 4 THE IN vl BISHOP. all he tells us 1 remely clever he is, if only he had some one to spur him on, and if he lr where he could make any use of his cleverness." 44 I ought never to have asked him here/' Mr. Strong broke out. 4t I might have foreseen, of course, that this would happen. But as local secretary of the Society, I thought I must ask him; and he's a nice young fellow too, and I confess, I took a fancy to him. " 44 So did I." Olive answered simply. Her father laughed. Poor Tom, behind the chair, felt guiltier than ever. His face was fiery red; he could feel it burning. He hardly knew what to do. Oh, suppose they were only to find him hiding the; "Well, where is he?" the father asked. 44 I don't know," Olive answered. 44 He must have come down, because his bedroom door's open; and besides, he has unfastened this win- dow; you shut it yourself last night, you know, and none of the servants are down yet. I'm afraid he's ill, or else he's gone out in the garden ." The father went off to search the grounds for the truant. Olive turned into the drawing-room. The moment she was gone, Tom felt it was now or never. He must bolt for the front gate and be done for ever with this impossible situation. avpt noiselessly to the steps, and made a THE INEVITABLE. H 5 dart for the gate. As he did so, Olive stepped out once more on to the verandah. Tom stood facing her for a second, in his red cross shirt, with his face somewhat redder. Then, overcome by shame, he sank into the long wicker chair, cov- ered his face with his hands, and half laughed, half cried, half groaned, half sobbed in his per- plexity and confusion. CHAPTER XIII. TA NUOVA. OLIVE'S face, too, was crimson, for she dimly felt the young man had heard all. She looked down at him with her steady eyes, now troubled for a second. " Where were you going, Mr. Glisson?" she asked very tremulously. Tom told the truth for once, and shamed the il. " I I was going away, Miss Strong/' he \vered slowly. " Stealing away, unper like a thief in the night. I ought never to have come. And I was trying to undo the first false step by taking a second/' He could face her like a man. now, for he - no longer dressed up in those ridiculous canonicals. Olive gazed at him. irresolute. Her face flushed; her cheeks were burning. " I don't un- derstand yu." she cried, grasping a chair for ><>rt, and feeling the world reel round her. " You were going to leave us? " Tom leant over her. in an agony, torn asunder 116 VITA NUOVA. ll j between despair and love. " I was going to leave you/' he repeated resolutely. " It was the only way out. I have put myself in a false position: I was trying to escape from it. I did wrong to come at all. And your father does not want me." " You heard us? " Olive gasped, with a wild flush of shame. Tom put the devil to the blush again. " Yes, unintentionally, unwillingly, I heard you. 1 was trying to slink away from the house unperceived, when you came down hurriedly. I stepped out here on the verandah, and did my best to hide. I could not foresee what was going to happen. Then your father called; and Miss Strong, Miss Strong forgive me, believe me I really couldn't help it." Olive stood glued to the spot. Her face was on fire now. Her heart stood still. Her breath came and went with difficulty. She could only repeat 1 in a dazed and terrified undertone: " You heard us! You heard us! " Tom seized her hand in his. There was noth- ing else left to do. " Yes, Miss Strong," he cried; " Olive I have surprised your secret. But you have surprised mine too. What you feel, / feel. I did not mean to tell you. I knew I had no right. I had thought every word of 11$ THE INCH'! OP. what your father said, before he said it. It would be wrong of me to ask such a woman as you to link your life with mine. 1 knew it : I recognised it. And yet. . . . every day that I spent in this house, I admired and longed for you more each minute." He leaned eagerly forward. " I loved you, Olive. And because I l>\ed you, and tore I knew I could never ask you to be my wife, I ing to steal away when you came down and prevented me. What else could I do your own heart that. If I stayed, I must fall deeper and deeper in love with you. And I knew from the very first my love was quite hope- les Olive looked up at him through the tears that began to fill her eyes. " /f"//y. Mr. Glisson? " she asked slowly. The delicious simplicity and unexpectedness of that answer took Tom's breath away with a tremor of delight and happiness. So Ol wanted him! His voice had the clear ring of truth in it: and ( )li\e had recognised it at once. She saw this man loved her; and if he lovrd what else could matter? She knew that in the-e matters there is no such word as impos- sible. And when she asked " Why, Mr. Glis- son?" Tom's heart i;ave one wild bound. It would have bounded harder if she had said " \Vhy, VITA NUOVA. ng Mr. Pringle? " The sense of that continued de- ception alone prevented him from rising to the seventh heavens. He grasped her hand tighter. " Because " he answered, scarcely knowing what he said, and casting about him for some adequate reason, " I am quite a poor man, with nothing to depend upon but my very small salary." (What was Glisson's salary, he wondered, and who the dickens paid it?) " Because I could never dream of taking you to Temuka. Because your father would not give his consent. Because it would be mean to repay his hospitality so ill. Because it would be wrong of me to tie a life like yours to my own poor fortunes." " And you were really going to leave me? " Olive repeated, clinging to his hand with a sense of terror as if she thought he would with- draw it which, to do Tom justice, was far at that moment from his intention. i To leave me without one word, without a good-bye, even!" Tom had an irresistible impulse. Parson or no parson, impostor or honest man, he was only aware at that instant that a woman who loved him was clinging to his hand; and with a great flood of feeling, he stooped down and kissed her. He did it with reverence, with reluctance almost; 120 THE INCIM i-ISHOP. he was profoundly aware as his lips touched hers how unworthy he was of that pure, calm woman. en if he had not been playing a part, a mean, deceptive part, he would have felt it more than a little; for Tom had that kind of chivalry which recognises at once its own infinite inferiority to a good woman's heart. But as things stood, he hated himself for the desecration he was com- mitting To be perfectly frank, Tom, who v no ecclesiast, felt much more acutely the desecra- tion of which he was guilty by that kiss to Olive than he had felt the desecration of mounting the pulpit steps as an ordained priot on Sunday morning. The one was a thing that he could fully understand; it came within his purview: the other belonged to a special range of thought, as yet unfamiliar to him. He had still to learn it, kcloth and ashes. Still, he stooped down and kissed her. And unworthy as he knew himself to touch those pure lips, he was yet aware as he did so of a inrush of feeling, a sort of ineffaM from heaven. He lingered on them for a sec- ond. As for Olive, she took the kiss with a sense as of her right. She loved him; he loved her; that was all she thought about. Her hand tightened on his. The blush died away from her face. If he felt like that, she had VITA NUOVA. 121 no cause to be ashamed. Their secret was mu- tual. She looked up into his face and murmured gently: " Then, you love me Cecil? " " Cecil! " That " Cecil " brought Tom back with a horrid thud to solid earth again. The seventh heavens melted away. A pang darted through his heart. More than ever before, he knew the die was cast now. There was no going back from this. He had sealed his fate, and bound himself in honour for life to Olive. Yet, what a horrible outlook! Must he go on for years with this odious deception? Must he begin love's dream under false pretences? Must he marry the woman he loved under an- other man's name? Must he shuffle off himself and pass his life henceforth with somebody else's personality. The thought was hateful to him. Had he had time to reflect, he would probably have decided that such a course was too danger- ous. Apart even from its wickedness, he would have doubted his own ability to sustain for long years so difficult a deception. But it was Tom Pringle's misfortune that he had never time to reflect, to deliberate, to resolve, at any one of these great crises. Events forced him to act at once; and, acting at once on the spur of the moment, without any fixed intention of embark- ing on a career of crime, he yet found himself led TH1 U. BISHOP. step by step, half against his will, into abysses un- fathomable. So now, a man's virile instinct compelled him to refrain from serious thought, and to lean down and murmur: "\Yhy, Olive. I loved you from the moment I first saw you, here on the mdah." Her fingers tightened on his hand again, and she gave a little satisfied gasp. If he really loved her if she had not forced him into an unwilling avowal she cared for nothing else. He might see into her heart if only his was hers already. " And yet/' she whispered, half chiding, " \ e going to run away from me! " He gave a despairing gesture. " Olive, what else could I do? What else can I do now? I e no right to make love to you. What will your father say? He will think I have taken a dishonourable advantage of his hospitable kind- ness. He will say I should never have ventured to dream of you." Olive looked deep into his eyes again. I wouldn't mind ///(//." she answered. " This is a question for me. I love Papa dearly he is the kindest and best of fathers. But a girl's he is her own. Her own, not her father's." " To you and me, yes. But fathers do not think so." VITA NUOVA. 123 " He will think so soon. Cecil, I have no fear for you. I know you are cleverer and greater than you think. That is one of the very things that makes me love you. I see you are so mod- est about your own abilities. But where did you mean to go? What were you going to do with yourself? If you ran away from Papa like that, you could never have gone back as a mis- sionary to Temuka." " Olive, I will tell you the truth. I was going back to be a common sailor." With a mighty effort he had braced himself up for it. He meant to confess all. And if only Olive had understood his meaning, he would really have confessed it. But the same moral ill luck pursued him throughout. Olive did not notice the ambiguous phrase " going back." She fastened only on the last words of his sentence. ' To be a common sailor! " she cried. " How do you mean? You would have given up the church, and gone to sea for always? " The horror in her voice at the bare idea checked him. He answered evasively, with a hang-dog air: "What else was open to me? I couldn't have returned to Temuka, if I slank away like a thief from your father's house; and I couldn't tell your father I meant to leave be- cause I had fallen in love with his daughter and 9 r "OF TRK UNIVERSITY Til! !OP. kn< tterly unworthy to ask her." The psychological moment had passed, and he had taken advantage of it. And for my sake, you would have given up everything, and begun life over again Tom reflected to himself that he had not much to give up a common sailor's off-chance: and this false ascription of heroism was hateful to his real nature. But what could he say? He had not strength of mind to confess the whole truth when it came to the push especially as to confess would be to make Olive hate him. He could only murmur: " I could begin life over again easily enough, for I should only be giv- ing up a savage hut in a wild island. And a sailor's place can hardly be much worse than a missionary's in Melanesia." " But I mean you to be something much more than that." Olive cried, with a girl's confidence in her chosen lover, her eyes growing prouder. I mean you to do work that all the world will praise and admire. You are mine now, and it is my place to inspire you. / know what you rth. an > not. For that. I love \ But I am going to re that you realise your own value. Ym shall never be thrown away on a Pacific Island." Tom looked at her admiringly. With a VITA NUOVA. 125 woman like this to spur one on to great things, a man might surely rise to be anything. He had no exalted opinion of his own abilities indeed, Olive was right; he was much too modest: but he knew he had a good memory and a taste for languages; and as to intelligence, why, hang it all- Mem., that if he was really going to be a par- son henceforth, he must dismiss for the future this tell-tale sailor habit of saying " hang it all/' or worse, at every turn of the conversation. Well, hang it all, then, or don't hang it; he had surprised himself the other day by the ease with which he read Cecil Glisson's Greek Testa- ment. Perhaps he had more brains than he had ever suspected. He gazed back at Olive with unaffected de- light. " Do you really think/' he said, " I might be good for something in Australia, for in- stance? " Olive gazed back at him with a girl's proud trust in the man who has won her. " I think," she answered with the ring of conviction, " you could do anything you liked. And now you are mine, I mean to make you do it." Even as she said it, a voice came from behind the big wattle-bush on the edge of the lawn. " I've searched for him everywhere, Olive, and 126 THI-: IM IDKNTAI. BISHOP. I can't find him, up or down. He's not in the CO, I'm certain." "No, Papa," Oli\ cred, growing sud- denly hot again. ** He's here on the veranc and I am with him." CHAPTER XIV. CROSSING THE RUBICON. THERE was something in her tone which told her father that much had happened while he went round the garden. He moved up the steps hurriedly. Olive had dropped Tom's hand, and stood opposite him now with a sweet new ex- pression lighting up her face; her eyes were downcast, but she did not attempt otherwise to conceal her feelings. Tom had a guilty look upon his countenance, but was nevertheless as miti- gatedly happy as a man can be who has won a good girl's love by a regrettable subterfuge. The father took it all in at once. To say the truth, it needed no Columbus to make that discovery. " Well," he murmured slowly. " You have found him? " " Yes," Olive answered with meaning, lifting her calm eyes to his face. " We have found one another." There was a long pause. Then Mr. Strong remarked curtly: "So I see." Nobody said 127 128 much else. .But all three understood one an- other. Olive stood for a minute, undecided. Aft y short pause, she took Tom's hand in hers. " Good-bye for the present/' she said, letting it drop. And she glided upstairs again. Tom was left, flushed and trembling, face to face with the hostile element of a father. Again there was a pause. Mr. Strong waited for Tom to begin. Tom waited for Mr. Strong. Neither felt quite easy. At last, a faint smile played round the clergyman's lips. He knew Olive well, and he knew therefore that if Olive had made up her mind, a father was, after all, a mere spectator, called in at the last moment to latify her decisions. "Well?" he observed once more, interrogatively. Tom sank into a chair, a picture of perplexity. What do you propose to do next?" the elder man asked with emphasis. Thus driven to bay, Tom rushed into it at once. " I don't know," he answered. " 11 just what puzzles me. It has all come upon me so suddenly. I didn't guess it myself at all till n. >w. That is to say," he corrected, " I didn't mean to confess it. But but circumstances were too strong for me. An Occasion arose three minutes since and the Occasion was inevitable. CROSSING THE RUBICON. I2 9 It wasn't really my fault. Set it down to coin- cidence/' He stammered and stumbled. Mr. Strong more than half understood the situation so far as Olive was concerned, at least; for he knew already she was in love with the new comer. " And you have arrived at an understanding? " he put in tentatively at last. " Oh, dear me, no!" Tom exclaimed. "I would not venture to presume. We we just read one another's eyes, that's all little more. An understanding far from it. But, in a way, I think Miss Strong well, no, not that: I don't know how to put it. Nothing at all has passed; still, perhaps, she infers from what I said to her just now that I admire her greatly." " I see," the father answered with chilly re- serve. Tom threw himself at once on the elder man's mercy. " But I didn't mean to speak," he cried. " I assure you I didn't mean it. You must really forgive me. I know how unjustifiable it was; how wrong; how foolish. I have nothing to offer her; absolutely nothing: and I would not have dared to offer it did not offer it in fact only well, I think I had better explain exactly. I felt I was falling in love, and I felt it was wrong 130 PAL BISHOP. of me, and I didn't want to repay your ho tality so ill; so I got up this morning meaning to slink away from Sydney, and then to write to i explaining my reasons; because I was too nervous to say to your face that " He broke n utterly. *' Oh, Mr. Strong," he cried, trem- bling, and leaning eagerly forward, with his brown hands clasped, " you must make some allowances for me. I am a rough man from the sea, and I'm not used now to t i oi civilisation. And a lady is strange to me so strange, so no so wonderful, so to be worshipped. The mere touch of her hand thrilled me. It wa-n't my fault if I fell in love at sight; and having fallen in love, what could I do as a man of honour but run away at once when I knew it was impos- You are not quite articulate," the father smiling grimly. 1 know it," Tom answered. :n quite inarticulate. I am no great speaker. And that - one reason why I felt it was absurd, impos- sible for me to dream of her. I would not h. amt of her. I refrained from dreaming of 1 I tried to leave her. But if I find she dreams of of me Mr. Strong, I am a man; and we most of us human! " "Do 1 understand/ 1 the father asked, half CROSSING THE RUBICON. ^ annoyed, half amused, at his evident earnestness, " that you really contemplated running away from this house without so much as even saying good-bye to us? " Tom gave a gesture of deprecation. " I was driven to it," he answered. " And do you think that is conduct of a sort to encourage a father in entrusting you for life with his daughter's happiness? " " No, I don't," Tom blurted out doggedly. " If you want the plain truth, I think I was a fool; but I think I was hard put to it; and when a man's a fool, and is also hard put to it, I ask you as a man, is it kind to make him feel his position too acutely? " Mr, Strong sat down and gazed at him. " Now, this is serious," he said slowly. '* You have told me nothing; but you have told me enough to see that it is serious. Am I to under- stand that you consider ^ourself engaged to my daughter Olive?" " I'm sure I don't know," Tom cried. " I have said hardly anything to her. It wasn't what we said; it was the way we looked at one an- other." ' " And does Olive consider herself engaged to you?" I can't tell you," Tom cried, growing more Tin ;op. and more helpless. Then a happy thought struck hin. i had better ask he- Mr. Strong gave hirri a respite of five min- utes while he went upstairs. Now was a chance for Tom to get away if he wanted. Half an hour ago he would have seized it. The half hour between had completely altered the face of life for him. There was no more going back. He realised now that he was bound to Olive; which implied that henceforth he was Cecil Glisson. He sat there, deeply in love, as happy as a and supremely miserable. " Olive," the father asked, when after a short delay she opened her door to him, " I want to ask, is this young man engaged to you? " Olive's eyes were wet with happy tears. She met her fatlu T 's ^aze fearlessly. " I don't know whether he's cngitgcii to me." she answered: " he 1 nothing about engagement; but /';;/ engaged to him; I am his, for e She said it so simply, so strongly, so reso- lutely, that her father, who knew her, accej> her word >cable. "Very well/' he said in a slow voice; " if that is so, what do you pro- pose he should do for the future? " Olive reflected a second. " It's all so m she answered; " so fresh; so undecided. It broke upon us so suddenly. \Ye haven't any plans. CROSSING THE RUBICON. 133 We have said nothing to one another, asked each other no questions. I only know I love him, and I'm sure he loves me. We have neither of us gone beyond that stage for the present." " Doesn't that seem to you unwise? " her fa- ther asked with the voice of parental prudence. " We mustn't be precipitate," Olive answered with the wisdom of youth. " We haven't thought about these things yet. But of one thing I am sure. Cecil will not go back any more to Te- muka." "Are you certain of that? He seemed so set upon it." "Yes; that was before. And it didn't really mean that he wanted himself to go back to Temuka; it meant, he was afraid to stop here any longer; because he knew beforehand in his heart what was coming." " This is very foolish, Olive. You are en- gaging yourself to a man without a chance of marrying." " It would be foolish, with some men. But not with him. I feel quite sure of him. He is better than rich. If he has nothing, that will only be a spur to exertion." An hour later, in the drawing-room, Olive told Tom so, plainly. She was not in the least shy of him now. Perfect love casteth out fear; 134 in: INCI and she was far too much in love to think of anything else save what she needed to tell him. "Do you think I can ever do anything?" Tom asked once more. I'm sure of it," Olive answered with an o flowing confidence that inspired him in turn. Yu would have done great things already if you hadn't been wasted on a Pacific Island. You e been set to teach savages when you were fit for much higher \vork. What you have to do now is to begin a crusade here, at once, in New South Wales against this traffic that you I that almost killed you. You mustn't go back to Temuka Papa can arrange all that He pulls the wires of the Society. You ni- si op here and organic You will be serving the mi i<>n far better so than by returning to ' And Papa can settle with the Society at home " " at home " meaning England " that you shall be engaged upon this work in- stead of the oth " But am I fit for work in . \ustr Pom asked. " Remember. I am only a wild man of the sea. I ha\ laid myself out for a civilised congregation." 1 hen what you have to do now is to lay yourself out for it. You can do that if you try: you must know it yourself as well as I know it. CROSSING THE RUBICON. 135 You can fit yourself for anything. It is only your modesty that prevents you from seeing it." Tom gave a slight sigh. " But it will be years," he said, " such years, before 1 can ever hope" Olive waved her capable hand. " What does that matter? I can wait years for you if neces- sary. But it will not be necessary. You will be asked to take some big church soon; I feel quite certain of it." Her very voice inspired him with unwonted confidence. He began to think better of himself than ever before. If Tom Pringle was loyal to anything in his future life, he was loyal to Olive. He admired, respected, and loved her intensely; he had reason to love her; for it was she who had made him. But when the terrible doubt came at last, and he saw his own act in ecclesi- astical colours, he used often to console himself with the thought that it was not altogether his own fault that he had become a false clergy- man; it was Olive who did it, unwittingly, inno- cently. Olive had made up her mind that he was to advance in the Church, not for filthy lucre's sake, but because she believed in him; because she loved him; she was sure he could do great things, and therefore she made him do them. " Surely," he thought to himself often, 136 Til! 10P. >me allowance will be mad my life is judged, for the magnitude of the temptation, the concatenation of events, for the inevitable- ness of my action." He did it all, he knew, not wholly for mere love of Olive, but partly for love, and partly because he saw no other way out of an impossible situation. Ho since Olive had decided that a clergyman he was to be, and a town clergyman at that, he must honestly set to work to pre- pare for his vocation. He must fit himself for position. And Tom Pringle's habit was to do with his heart whatever he undertook. So that very morning saw him seated at a table in Mr. Strong's study, with Cecil Glisson's Greek Testament spread out before him, flanked by Pearson on the Creed, Liddell and Scott's Lr con, and a large blank note-book. As yet, to be sure, Tom had no of his own on the nature of holy orders; or to be more strictly irate hi wen- a Bailor's; but he had a honest dogged British determination that if he were really Cecil Glisson, and a parson to boot, he must do his work like a man, and prove himself a labourer worthy of his hire. You will think, no doubt . the two points of view inconsistent. But that is possibly because i are not an able-bodied mariner. OF J>r PART II. ENGLAND. CHAPTER XV. THE PALACE, DORCHESTER. THE Bishop of Dorchester sat at his dinner table with Sir Edward Colbeck. It was a cool June evening, after a clear westerly-blowing day, and countless throats of nightingales were dis- coursing vespers in the grounds of the Palace. The Bishop had a dignified, clean-cut face, with a philanthropic expression that was not entirely professional. Mrs. Glisson sat opposite him, calm, sedate, matronly, her beautiful smooth hair just beginning to be touched with no unkindly hand of time by the gentle grey of comely middle age. Evelyn faced Sir Edward. It was a family party. Dorchester Palace is not, as many ill-informed people suppose, in Dorsetshire. The house stands in a bight of the chalk downs on the banks of the Thames, near the Oxfordshire town of the same name; its beautiful grounds slope down 137 138 THI 'iOP. to the water's edge with a smooth declivity of green English turf, broken here and there by tall flowering clumps of rhododendron and azalea. It has no wi: HISHOP. tinian abbey. It's mostly thirteenth century, and ist restored it. But earlier still, of course, this Oxfordshire Dorchester was a place of great importance. It ranks as one of our earliest Er lish cathedral towns. In a certain sense/' the I Bishop poised his two hands before him with the finger-tips meeting " I may be said to oc- cupy the chair of Birinus." He said it with the conscious air of a man who imparts to his hearer a striking piece of information. " Oh, indeed? " Sir Edward murmured, pour- ing out a second glass of port. " That's very interesting/' The native curiosity overcame him. hough, now I come to think of it/ 1 IK \\ on, eying the port with the light through it, " who or what was Birinus? " Evelyn looked up at him mischievously. " Oh f Sir Edward/' she said, " you don't know what you've let yourself in for. When once Papa gets started upon the subject of Birinus, we know that the history of Dorchester in six volumes is bound to follow, with digressions on the dio- ceses of Winchester and Lincoln, and the v; ous sees into which they have been divid When you said. ' That's :v; y interesting/ in such a voice of conviction. Papa thought you knew all about Birinus already, and was going to let THE PALACE, DORCHESTER. 141 you off. Now you fly straight into it, as Big- wood says about the partridges when Mr. Wat- son shoots, and you'll have the whole subject in the regulation six volumes." Mrs. Glisson looked across at her daughter with gentle reproof in her eyes. " Evelyn dear," she said softly, " Papa knows so much more than anybody else about the history of the church that visitors are naturally glad to hear all about it from him." " Besides," Sir Edward interposed, " now the question has been raised, I really want to know about this fellow Birinus who made the chair the Bishop is sitting in. I'm fond of old furni- ture. I suppose he was some mediaeval Chip- pendale or Sheraton." The Bishop coughed slightly. " When I said I sat in the seat of Birinus," he answered, look- ing sideways with a repressive glance at Evelyn, who was disposed to laugh, " I employed a meta- phor: I did not mean it literally but figuratively. Birinus, in point of fact, was the first bishop of Dorchester; or, to be more strictly accurate, the first bishop in Dorchester; for bishoprics at that time were tribal rather than local; there was a Bishop of the West Saxons, not a Bishop of Wessex nor a Bishop of Winchester; there was a Bishop of the Kentings, not a Bishop of Kent I4 2 Tin : NIAL uisiiop. nor a Bishop of Canterbury; there was a Bishop of the Mercians, not a Bishop of Mercia nor a Bishop of Lichfield. In the Anglo-Saxon lan- guage " Evelyn made a wry face " a bishoj is oftenest described as a bishop-stool a literal translation, of course, of see, the Latin So when I say that I sit in the chair of Birinus, I mean merely to convey that I occupy in a sense the pastoral direction of the same diocese, or part of i " Ah, I see," Sir Edward answered, glancing sympathetically at Evelyn. He began to per- e the nature of her objection to starting the Bishop on mediaeval history. But the Bishop was started now, and was not to be easily stopped. " Dorchester," he contin- 1, putting the forefingers and thumbs of both hands together once more in a sort of leaf-shape above his finger-glass, " Dorchester, you will recollect, was the original capital of the \Y< Saxon kings; this Oxfordshire Dorchester, Dor- chest er-on-Thames, not in Oxfordshire then, for neither Oxford nor counties as yet existed. It a the royal city of Cynegils," "I beg your pardon," Sir Edward ejaculated. " Cynegi the Bishop repeated blandly, " the first Chris- tion king of the West-Saxons. In 635. yon n be aware, the Pope sent Birinus. a Xortli Italian THE PALACE, DORCHESTER. 143 monk, to convert the West-Saxons, about forty years after St. Augustine of Canterbury had con- verted the Kentishmen. Now, Cynegils had his court here at Dorchester; so to Dorchester ac- cordingly Birinus came; and unless I mistake, he baptised the English king over yonder in the* Thames, at a spot close to that large clump of rhododendrons which we planted last autumn. Baptism by immersion was then still universal; Baeda the Venerable Bede, as people call him nowadays mentions no other method/' "We planted white rhododendrons/' Mrs. Glisson interposed, " as a memento of the fact white being of course the symbolical colour of baptismal regeneration." " There's such a funny little picture of the baptism of this king with the dreadful name/' Evelyn put in once more, " in an illuminated missal Papa has upstairs in his library. It shows the old gentleman and his nobles all undressing on the bank with the ladies as well and such a funny little bishop, in a mitre and a dalmatic or whatever you call it, standing on the river shore with two fingers up, like this, blessing them. It is so comical." " And that illumination," the Bishop added, " has fortunately enabled me to identify the pre- cise spot pointed out by tradition as being the 144 II1: IJISHOP. scene of the admission of the people of V into the Christian church. It was drawn from nature by an Augustinian monk of this very abbey about 1430, and it clearly points to the bank just below the clump of white rhododendrons as being the actual place where Birinus adminis- tered the sacrament of baptism. It is a very precious document." (If the Bishop had a fault, it was a faint deficiency in the sense of humour.) " Dear me! " Sir Edward murmured, begin- ning to yawn. " How very interesting! " When a man says'" How very interesting! " t wice over in the same conversation. wii>hop of the \Vest- Saxons; and tl -Saxons at that early age held the whole Thames valley. Their kingdom ended as far as the Severn. But later, Wulf- here of Mercia drove them across the Than and annexed all what was afterwards known as Oxfordshire. Owing to that conquest, the \\ Saxon kings retired to Winchester, which came thenceforth their capital. Indeed, when the kings of \Vessex grew into kings of England in the person of Edgar not as is usually hut in- correctly stated of Egbert " at this point the Bishop made a rhetorical pause so as to lay e>; cial stress on his own pet hobby " \\inche illy the capital of the whole count " U that so?" Sir Edward exclaimed, not knowing exactly what remark was expected of him, and fingering tl -eal on his heavy gold watch-chain. The chain and the istcoat that formed its background were the salient points of Sir Edward's physiognomy. " Oh, yes." the Bishop answered, warming up to his subject; " Winchester was the capital of England, not only under Alfred, but even ur William the Conqueror. It was but slowly sup seded by London, or rather by Westmin- to the importance of Edward the Con- fessor's minster. In that sense, then, that he is THE PALACE, DORCHESTER. ^7 still the representative West-Saxon Bishop, my dear friend at Winchester is the successor of Birinus. Then again, Dorchester was afterwards the seat of the Mercian bishops from Wulfhere's conquest till 1073 or was it 1074? I forget the exact date, but at any rate, some time in Wil- liam the Conqueror's reign; when Remigius re- moved the see to Lincoln. In that sense, there- fore, Dr. Blenkinsopp is really the successor of Birinus, or at any rate of the historical bishopric of Dorchester." "I see," Sir Edward answered with a mute look of appeal to Evelyn. But Evelyn only smiled a familiar little smile and expanded her hands as who should say, " You would rush into it. If you get it all now, you've only yourself to blame. Don't say I didn't warn you." " I need hardly add," the Bishop went on, " that not one stone of the existing cathedral dates back to the days when Dorchester was still an old Saxon bishopric. The minster which Remigius deserted for the Roman hill of Lin- coln was no doubt a wooden one. But the site had always ecclesiastical importance; and in the later middle ages, when the Thames became the main highway of Plantagenet England, the Au- gustinian monks built the beautiful church over which I am now permitted to preside " he ut- 148 TH1 it BISHOP. tered that word " permitted " with a touch of something more than conventional episcopal modesty; " the greater part of it being of the thirteenth century, as you can see for yourself by glancing out of this window." Sir Edward rose and looked at it casually. He could see nothing of the sort; for his knowl- edge of architecture was a negative quantity; but he contented himself with saying in a tone of cheap conviction: " Dear me, you don't say so." " And when the crying need for an increase in the episcopate began to be deeply felt/ the Bishop went on. quite unconscious of his ru er's boredom. " it was natural that a site so long connected with the Church in one form or an- other, and possessing so splendid an old his- torical building, should be chosen as the s< of one of the new dioceses. I urged it myself: I ocated the division of the diocese from the beginning; I always said, long before it occur to me that anybody could consider me worthy to occupy a place on the episcopal bench. * Dor- chester is the proper seat for the new bishop.' ' "Oh, but he did much more than that. Edward." Mrs. Glisson put in with wifely x< " he made the bishopric. Cecil never thought of himself or his own comfort. He went up and THE PALACE, DORCHESTER. 149 down the country preaching like an apostle; and he collected all the funds with his magnetic elo- quence. Then they offered him the see; but he didn't want to take it. He said his heart was more at home among his poor people in the Black Country: he would not desert his chain-makers. Now, you know you did, Cecil. But the Prime Minister insisted; and in the end he took it." " After promising me, Olive, you must re- member," the Bishop continued, " that he would transfer me to Wolverhampton as soon as that projected diocese is constituted. I made this one for Reading, you see, Sir Edward, with its enormous biscuit factories; I take an interest in my people there; but my heart is always with the puddlers and the chain-makers." " And he was killing himself at Cradley," Evelyn put in; " and if he hadn't been sent here to vegetate by the Thames for a year or two, in peace, he'd have died in harness. I told the Prime Minister so, and he said to me: ' Miss Glisson, I know your father. He's a willing horse, and will work himself to death. He needs a curb, not a spur. We'll give him Dorchester for a year or two to quiet him. He'll have to rest there, comparatively, and it will do his health good. By and by, if he's good, he may go back to his chain-makers. Or at least, we'll promise Or TTTF 150 him that he shall, to pacify him.* For my \ ] hope we shall stop here always. I just love this dear place; and I don't want to go back to that beastly Cradley." The Bishop smiled. " My dear," he said not unkindly, " I cannot be expected to regulate the acceptance or rejection of the work cut out for me by your personal preferences. I must go wherever I think I can be most useful." " Papa's so dreadfully in earnest." K added. ** He takes bishoping seriously. If I e a l>i-hop, I'd go in for chasubles. But IV es it out in episcopal sion. He's so full of its being a man's duty, however he gets thrown into any walk of life, to do the best he can in it." The Bishop's brow clouded. " Yes," he re- peated slowly; "however he gets thrown into it. If chance makes you a sailor, be a sailor with a will. If chance makes you I mean, if Pr< dence makes you a bishop, by whatever strange steps, be a bishop with a will, and try to make the best of it ." ' Xow, Cecil dear, I will not let you say, * by whatever strange steps," Mrs. Glisson inter- rupted. " There never was anyone so absurdly modest as my husband. Sir Edward. He 1 risen in the Church purely l>y dint of his own hard THE PALACE, DORCHESTER. jj! work and his devotedness of purpose; and he always talks as if he were there by chance, and had dropped into a bishopric through a hole in the ceiling. Isn't that so, Cecil? " The Bishop started. He was in a deep reverie. Her words had roused again that eternal re- morse. Could no amount of well-doing atone for the way he had climbed into the fold by stealth like a thief in the night? After thirty years of outer conformity and hard work for the office he had assumed by chance, was he not yet a clergyman? CHAPTER XVI. PERPLEXITY. "CECIL is in a brown study. Mrs. Glisson remarked in an undertone to Sir Edward He often gets so. I sometimes think he has worked too hard in both ways, at clerical work and in his library." They had strolled out into the garden through the open French window, and Mrs. Glisson was pacing the lawn, hatless, in the warm June twilight. " You know, my husband had not the usual advantages of a university edu- cation; and when he began to take seriously to cler >rk other than missionary work, I mean he felt the want of deeper knowledge. The consequence was, being a very thorough man, he set about studying hard at theological literature: and he worked in so many ways to- gether at the Fathers, you know " " I beg your pardon/* Sir Edward put in. in- terrupting her and looking puzzled. " The I there? What Fathers: Mr- :iiled. She had helped her ] PERPLEXITY. !-j band so long in his editions of Jerome and Cyril that patristic literature was to her quite familiar. " Oh, the Fathers of the Church, you know," she answered with a little apologetic wave of her hand towards the figure of the retreating Bishop, who stood gazing at the spot where Birinus had baptised the gentleman with the unpronounce- able name. " My husband is much interested in them St. Augustine and St. Ambrose and St. Gregory, don't you know; he has worked much at all of them. But then, at the same time, he was working at his Comparative Grammar of the Melanesian Languages, and at his evangelising labour among the Queensland immigrants, and at so many other things. Then again later, when he was doing so much for the Cradley chain- makers, he was also engaged on his Epistles of St. Cyril. People will tell you it was his Cradley work that got him made Canon and then Bishop; but Mr. Gladstone told me himself one main rea- son for his appointment was that he thought so highly of my husband's Hellenistic Concordance to the Synoptic Gospels." 'That was extremely gratifying!" Sir Ed- ward exclaimed, with heavy dignity, beginning to think the Bishopess almost as serious as the Bishop. The Bishopina, indeed, was the only member of the family he could quite comprehend. NTAL BI \\'hat sort of Gospel a synoptic might be he hadn't the faintest notion. A> lie remarked to Lady Colbeck the moment he got safe home again, Matthew. Mark, Luke, and John were good enough for him, and he didn't much care to know any new ones. " Papa does work too hard," the Bishopina put in. She was of a mundane nature. " IT what makes him so moody. He's the dearest father any girl ever had; but sometime> \\hen I go into his study in the morning, to ask him some question, he's sitting there mooning, with Cyril or somebody open on the table before him, and looking up at the ceiling, as if he was waiting inspiration, so that he doesn't even know I'm there till I've spoken three times to him." I le seems unduly absorbed/' Sir Edward ad- mitted. " Such an onerous position." " Too many irons in the fire, poor de Evelyn responded with youthful frankness of criticism. To a bishop's daughter, even a bishop is human. Rococo, but human. " I think you said he began life as a mission- ary," Sir Edward interposed. " Odd beginning for such an end. Not exactly the place most our bishops come from." He was an emphatic man, and he rapped out his remarks witli inanu- iring jerkiness. PERPLEXITY. T j5 Mrs. Glisson sat down on the garden seat and began a glowing account of dear Cecil's early dif- ficulties and how by earnestness, energy, and pure singleness of spirit he had gradually overcome them. She did not add that whatever he had done she had helped him to do; that was not Olive Glisson's way; she worshipped her hus- band, and she gave him the glory. " He's not an ornamental bishop," she said. " He has worked hard all his life. And now I'm afraid his hard work is beginning to tell upon him." " He wants rest," Evelyn put in. " Sir Ed- ward, I wish he could have accepted your invita- tion to go yachting to Norway." " I'm not so sure of that," her mother an- swered. " On a yacht, he would have been idle. I often fancy, Evelyn, Papa is best when he has most to do. Since we've been here at Dor- chester and he has had time to think, it seems to me he has worried much more than he used to do at Cradley. The chain-makers were good for him. He is happiest when he is bearing other people's troubles. If he feels he is doing good, that makes him happiest of anything." Meanwhile, the Bishop, strolling slowly by himself, had paused by the brink, with his gait- ered legs in the episcopal attitude of close atten- tion, and was gazing into the baptismal stream ii 156 THI u. BISHOP. of I.irimis. He was trying hi> best to fix his at- tention upon those schools at \Vallingford. They re sorely needed. And he loved to do good, as Olive had said of him. Two lines of an Eliza- bethan dramatist often seemed to help him; Ford put them into Jane Shore's mouth, but they served for him equally: " Although my good can not redeem my ill Yet to do good I will remember still." He sat down by the brink, where Birinus had stood so many centuries before, and gazed again into the water. The long reflection of the trees on the opposite bank fell half across the ri\ Something that night made it all come back to him: he seemed to see his past life in the flickers of the beech-trees. He thought how he had gone away from Sydney, with Mr. Strong's com- mission, to preach down the labour traffic in all the t..wiis of Australia. He thought how Oli\ strength of character had helped him to do it. He recalled those crowded days, when he poured fort ins of eloquent denunciation on Sun- days and holidays, and gave up his nights to dili- gent study of Greek and of the Melanesian tongue he was supposed to have learned long before at Tcmnka. Then the rest recurred in all its long order. PERPLEXITY. I57 He saw himself working hard to make a home for Olive as soon as he thought he was enough of a parson to bear the daily scrutiny of a par- son's daughter. How eagerly he had thrown himself into the task of denouncing the horrors he had seen with his own eyes; how he had worked with a will not to disgrace the name he had taken upon him by so strange a set of acci- dents! He succeeded at last in his efforts at breaking down the worst evils of the hateful slave-traffic, and then was appointed Government inspector and chaplain to the immigrants in Queensland. Sent to England finally, five years after he married Olive, he had come in fear and trembling, on a missionary trip, alarmed at every turn lest in London or Liverpool some sailor who had been a shipmate might see and recognise him. But gradually, these earlier terrors wore away. His metamorphosis was too complete. Twice he had met shipmates who gazed at him and went their way, unsuspicious; it was clear they never dreamt of recognising Tom Pringle the seaman in the close-shaven, clerically dressed man who stood before them. His missionary trip was an immense success; his native gift of eloquence excited attention in England; and his own Society interested itself in finding him a parish in the Black Country, where 53 TIM \l. BISHOP. it thought he might be more useful to it than in Queensland or Sidney. Cecil Glisson as he now called himself accepted the change with a cer- tain passive calm which had become habitual with him since his total loss of his own person- ality. Eager always to escape from his torturing thoughts by plunging into work, he had thrown himself body and soul into the service of the chain-makers, and had succeeded in greatly al- leviating the hardships of their condition. He had preached the gospel of a fair wage, and had not been so studious of literary grace as of convincing his hearers. So, step by step, Olive always assisting, he had worked his way up, without thought of self, to a canon ry and a bish- opric, rather by honest hard work than by culti- vating what is known as clerical influence. Yet at eacli upward step, his life grew c more and more unendurable to him. Had he been a really bad man. like r.lackburne. the P.nc- caneer Bishop of the eighteenth century, he uld not have felt it so deeply. Had he \n a complete unbeliever, he might only have been impressed by the moral wrong of his dec tion. But what made it wr>t was that he now in essence a churchman and an ecclesiolo- gist. At the outset, to be sure, the Tom Pri:. PERPLEXITY. 159 who was now practically no more had possessed just an ordinary sailor's modicum of Christian doctrine. In a vague and careless way he had passively accepted the religion of his fathers, without concerning himself much as to its de- tails or its formularies. He thought it was all true, but that it was the business of clergymen. Still, he was by nature a hard worker; and once turned by chance into the outer show of a par- son, a parson he had become, to all intents and purposes, save those of the sacerdotalist. His standpoint was now that of the historically minded Anglican. He was never one of those modern philosophic clergymen who generously condescend to patronise Christianity. He be- lieved and trembled. And the very fact that intellectually he took a serious view of the priest- ly functions made the knowledge that in reality he was not a priest at all more and more alarm- ing to him. So he stood gazing at the trees that flickered in the water where Birinus had introduced Chris- tianity into Wessex with a vague sort of wish that Birinus could come back with a private or- dination to remove secretly the blot on his own episcopal scutcheon. " Let us go back to the Bishop/' Mrs. Glis- son said, looking towards him. " I never like to l6o THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. leave him alone when he falls into one of these reveries." They strolled back, still talking. " Yes, it is an unusual career," Mrs. Glisson said. " Few bishops have seen so many varied phases of 1 But then, my husband is so clever, so earnest, so hard-working. You should have seen the way he rode all round Queensland, from station to station, looking after his blackfellows." And could he speak their language?" Sir Edward asked, as they reached the spot where the Bishop was standing. He had the usual < aggerated respect of half-educated men for mere linguistic attainments. The Bishop answered for himself, looking up suddenly from his dream at the touch of his wife's hand. "Oh. yes. I spoke their language quite fluently; I speak it still. I learnt it while I \ labouring among them in Northern Queensland." " But you knew it before, Cecil," Mrs. Glisson interposed, correcting him. " You spoke it, of course, on Temtika " The Bishop's face flushed fiery red. He sel- dom allowed himself these verbal slips, though he avoided them as far as possible by vague generali- tics; for a lie direct was intensely distasteful to him. " Ah yes, on Temuka." he answered. " Yes of course on Temuka. But then, though the PERPLEXITY, X 6i language is essentially the same throughout all the islands, the dialects differ so much, you know. It's all a question of dialect." And he looked up appealingly. " He was a missionary at Temuka," Mrs. Glis- son went on, " before I met him. Evelyn has told you the story of his capture and his mar- vellous rescue from the piratical labour vessel. Most romantic, isn't it?" " But Papa will never talk about Temuka," Evelyn put in once more, in her irreverent man- ner. " A bishop has never a Past, of course, or I should almost believe Papa's Past was on Te- muka. He so carefully avoids saying anything about it. My own belief is, he was glad to get away from it." " Evelyn, my dear, how can you talk so? " Mrs. Glisson exclaimed, horrified. " Why, he was longing to get back, and if I hadn't insisted that he mustn't waste the great talents which Providence had given him on a single small island hide them in a napkin, so to speak I believe he would have gone back and lived and died there." " That's just it," Evelyn insisted, with a mis- chievous voice she was no respecter of bishops " That was his Past, you may be certain. She was waiting for him on the island. Having got j62 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. rid of the Past with a violent effort, and married you, dear, he naturally doesn't care to dwell u; the subject. I always notice he declines to say much about anything that occurred before he first met you, Mother. Isn't that so, Daddy?" And she looked up at him quizzically. For K lyn. you will perceive, was a very modern young lady. The Bishop's face wore an anxious expression as he stooped down and kissed her. " My child," he said evasively. " if you rattle on like this, Sir Edward will think I have failed egregiously in one main apostolic requirement in a bishop, * One that ruleth well his own house, having his chil- dren in subjection with all gravity/ You are distinctly lacking in gravity, Evelyn." He said it half playfully, but Mrs. Glisson a shadow of pain cross his face, and hastened to turn aside the comer-Nation into some lighter .nnel. She called attention to the copper beeches. Jfet, you have a lovely place here/' Sir ward admitted, tiring uft" his pompous common- places with a ponderous air of profound on nality. " Nature is very charming. Her work- are all so complete. Their minuteness! their beauty! A shell now! or a flower! The perfec- tion of her smallest handicraft, it often strikes r. PERPLEXITY. T 6^ Mrs. Glisson, contrasts marvellously with the roughness of man's best productions. A frag- ment of Manchester piece-goods under the micro- scope, for example " The Bishop turned upon him suddenly. " It , is the imperfection of nature that oftener puz- zles me" he said with a real sense of mystery. " Her cruelty, her tyranny, her armed emphatic lawlessness. Look at that fly in the twilight joyous, airy, unconscious of fate: and, swoop, it has disappeared into the gaping beak of a swift. A little thing, you say. Yes, but why should it suffer at all? The origin of evil has troubled the theologians: it is the origin of suffering that troubles me. How can a beneficent and om- nipotent Being permit, even for a time, this reign of pain, of physical agony, of mental torture? I cannot understand it that what revolts man's moral sense should be permitted, nay carefully provided for, by man's Maker! " Sir Edward looked up sharply. He was posi- tively shocked. That a bishop should permit himself to think like this! And that he should presume to see two sides of a question! Sir Edward didn't like it: for he had always been a fervent admirer of the commonplace. CHAPTER XVII. TO GO OR NOT TO GO. WHEN the Bishop was left alone with Mr> Glisson that evening, the watchful wife saw at once from his face that something had gone wrong with him. She could read his expression like an open book. ' Well, Cecil/* she asked, ' what wax this business of Sir Edward's that is troubling you. darling? " The Bishop sighed deeply " I knew it would come/' he replied in a sad slow voice. " Sooner or later, I knew it would come. They have writ- ten more than once; and as I refuse by letter. they've now sent clown a personal ambassador to speak to n Who have sent?" Mrs. Glisson asked. The Bishop paused again for a second. Then he jerked it out with a wrench. " Why. the I .i ver; x M A ( >i | >hanage. They want me to go down and open a new school for them." " Well/ 1 Mrs. Glisson answered quietly. ' Why don't you say ycsf " 164 TO GO OR NOT TO GO. 16$ The Bishop gave a hasty gesture of dislike and despair with one hand. " If you knew how I hate that place, Olive! I can't bear to go near it." " I know that, Cecil. And though I can never imagine why, I won't bother you any more to tell me the reason. You feel it: that is enough for me. Still, couldn't you make the effort just this once? Perhaps if you went there you would find it wasn't as bad after all as you ex- pected. Do try, for my sake, Cecil." And her hand sought his soothingly. " Olive, when you talk like that, you don't know how you lacerate me! I can't bear not to do what you ask me in this way. And yet I can't go. You haven't a notion how I shrink from it." "I have, darling; I see it: but I feel you ought. Cecil, I don't like even to hint such a thing to you, it is so wholly different from your real character; but doesn't it strike you that if you persistently stop away, people will imagine you're ashamed of having been brought up at an orphanage? / know, of course, that such an idea could never enter your dear head; but the world doesn't know it, and it will think you snob- bish." The Bishop snapped one hand impatiently j66 'I' HE IN'CIDI NTAL BISHOP. again. " The world, the world!" he said with an unwonted touch of irony in his t ; he dear, good world! For each of us, some hundred or so of foolish and ill-natured gossips! Have I ever minded the world? Do I care what people think? Have I ever cared what people thought about anything? Am I not here to-day just cause I have always persistently disregarded what the foolish world cackled, and gone straight for what I believed to be right and justice? " Yes, I know that, dear; nobody k better than I do: you fought for the chain- makers against rank and capital, when everybody said you were ruining your prospects; and > answered: ' Let them be ruined, hut be just to the chain-makers' Nobody respects you for all that as I respect you. < you are too proud to acknowledge your connection with the itution that brought you up. that will surely tend to lessen your intluence for good in the dio- cese and the country. Think of all that, darling. While you were only a canon, I never urged bard; but now that you are a bishop, I do think you ought really to make an effort and go to TO GO OR NOT TO GO. I6 7 them. The orphanage is naturally proud of hav- ing produced a bishop; you should let people see you are not ashamed to own it." The Bishop folded his hands on his apron, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes wearily. Strange to say, it was not at first that the deception had cost him dear, but at last. The longer he lived, the higher he rose in life, the more earnestly he strove to do such good as he could in his false position, the more terribly did the dead past rise up and accuse him. His own innate truthfulness and honesty were his worst enemies now. A wickeder man would have gone down to the orphanage boldly and brazened it out with lies; but the Bishop shrank from lies with an honest shrinking. It wasn't merely the fear of detection that disturbed him. Who, after all these years, was likely to know into what manner of man the Cecil Glisson of the orphanage might by this time have devel- oped? No; what he really dreaded was the de- ception and the pretence. He could not bear to go down to the place where he had never lived, and pretend to remember the things he had never seen. So he leaned back in his chair and murmured feebly, once more: " If you knew how hateful it all was to me, Olive, you would never ask me." i68 THI: INCH . :OP. \ t your better judg- ment." It's not my better judgment; it's my feel- ings, Oli " Well, against your feelings, then, Cecil." TO GO OR NOT TO GO. 171 The Bishop paced the room, agitated. He reflected for some minutes. Then he made up his mind. " Perhaps you're right, dear," he said slowly, bending over her and kissing her. " In- deed, when are you not right? I see abstention lays me open to a^painful misconception. I sup- pose I must go; though few things have cost me such a wrench of late years. . . . It's a most painful visit to pay. But, Olive, I will pay it. You may tell Sir Edward to-morrow morning I've reconsidered my determination, and will run down next week, if Providence permits, to open the new school at the Liverpool orphanage." It would cost him dear, but he could not bear to differ from Olive. 12 CHAPTER XVIII. LOVE UP TO DATE. NEXT morning at eleven, a little above Day's Lock, a tall young man in a Canadian canoe sat paddling about disconsolately. He had the ir- resolute, dispirited, watchful air of one who has come to time to an appointment and finds the other party to the bargain absent. His face at once betrayed the undergraduate. But he was a nice-looking specimen of that aggressive class, in an Oxford blazer; and he kept paddling to one side of the river and then to the other, glancing first at his watch and then up and down stream with the unmistakable look of a person who says to himself: " Why doesn't she come? I'm sure I made no blunder about the hour." He continued reconnoitring the side-streams for several minutes together, and then, evidently dejected, ran himself into a thick bed of iris- lea\ he bank, and assumed an attitude of profound melancholy. Suddenly, another canoe shot quick round the corner, and a young girl 172 LOVE UP TO DATE/S^ '73 approached, paddling well and deftly with an air of assured mastery of the craft. She was a slight, dark girl, with abundant black hair; not exactly pretty, but with haunting eyes, and a wistful gipsy air that was better than prettiness: she wore a loose pink blouse and a hat with wild roses. The man's face and attitude altered at once as she appeared. In a moment, he was alert, attentive, eager, smiling. He paddled out to meet her down a backwater to which it was evident they were both well accustomed. The girl's face w 7 as aglow. They came up with one another under shelter of a mass of tall purple loose-strife, which hid them from observation from the field beside them. " Well, Alex, you thought I w r as never com- ing, I suppose," she broke out, drawing close to him. " Now, don't look at your watch; it was all my fault. You said half past ten. But I couldn't get away earlier. It's just this beastly bishoping. A certain Sir Edward Colbeck, who is something or other in iron or cotton down in Warrington or elsewhere, came to the Palace last night to persuade Daddy he ought to go some- where and open something he doesn't want to open oysters, or orphanages, or ginger-beer or something; and Mums w r as on Sir Edward's side; she's always in favour of Daddy fulfilling his duty 174 Tin AL BISHOP. in that station of life, etc., etc., as per the Church Catechism; and Daddy said no, but Mums stuck to it like a leech: and the upshot of it is Daddy's going, of course; so there's an end of it. But after breakfast, Mums said: * Kvelyn, you must take Sir Edward through the grounds; ' and I tried to cry off; but Mums was Mind as a 1 it's the way of mothers; and I couldn't get a\ And Sir Edward's a bore; and he talked on and on, and made himself middle-aged agreeable. And the consequence was, I couldn't give him the slip till just this moment; and if Munis finds I've gone off now, she'll be in a state of mind about it; because she wants me to keep Sir Edward from \ _c Daddy while he's seeing these people about the clergyman at Reading who ha> run away from his parish. So that's why late. And you mustn't blame me for it. but set it down to the bothering old diocese." Alex gazed at her admiringly as she turned on him with a defiant air. " I couldn't l>lanu for anything, darling," he >aid; "and of course I see it wasn't yur fault. But I'm happy r come. I was so afraid you couMif t away at all; and I'd taken a pony-cart over from Oxford, of course the last time. I'm afraid, for I'm dead broke now, and can't afford any more pony-carts over this term, let alimc the Schools LOVE UP TO DATE. 175 beginning on Monday. And it would have been horrid to miss you.' 7 Evelyn drove her canoe a little farther into the loose-strife. The purple clump rose round them like a thicket, screening them effectually both from the river-side and the shore. " Well, here I am, at last/' she ans\vered, with a bewitch- ing smile, for she zvas bewitching when she was not provoking. " I managed to give Sir Edward the slip while he was talking to Mums; and off I darted to the canoe, and I've paddled down so fast that I've no doubt by this time I'm unbe- comingly hot; but I dare say you'll excuse it." She zvas hot, but tempting. The undergradu- ate drew his canoe quite close to hers, and exe- cuted a manoeuvre which only persons accus- tomed to Canadian canoes can permit themselves with impunity. He leaned over the edge, caught Evelyn in his arms, and clasped her tight for a moment. The sound that followed is one for which typography has as yet no symbol. Evelyn flushed rosy red and recovered equilibrium with some little difficulty. " There, you wicked boy," she said, "you've nearly upset me!" But she did not seem seriously displeased for all that, nor did she withdraw her canoe with more than a formal protest. Alex Thornbury stood off at paddle's length j;6 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. and surveyed her. As she sat there, flushed with itement, in the first full flower of opening womanhood, she looked as beautiful as her moth- er had looked thirty years before, but with a stranger and more elusive type of beauty. Her great weird eyes thrilled him. She had the con- scious pride of youth, too, which sat on her not ungracefully; and her air was high-bred, though IKT phrases were so modern and sometimes so slangy. In one word, she was the typical Ibsen- the high-spirited over-strung girl of the later nineteenth century a type which our mothers would have considered unladylike, but which our sons agree in finding most pleasantly piquant. You must make the most of me to - Evey," he said, with the quiet presunr an assured lover; " for I shan't be able to come at all next week. I shall be in the Schools all the ninations, don't you know; and then, as I shall be sitting over papers all day long, from nine to five, there won't be a chance even if I walked over to see you." "You could come in the evenings, couldn't you?" Evelyn asked in response, gazing eagerly and wistfully. Alex shook his head. " No, that won't work.' he answered. " Out of the Schools at nl Hall, and didn't get LOVE UP TO DATE. ^7 any dinner, I couldn't be over here much before eight or nine. Then it would be late for you to get out; and besides, I should have to be back in college by eleven. I'm gated this term at eleven you know, on account of that row about the Tutor's window. So it wouldn't be pos- sible." Evelyn pouted just enough to look engaging. " What a nuisance," she cried. " Shall I have to go a whole week without seeing you? " "It is a deprivation, isn't it?" Alex an- swered. "You conceited boy! You shouldn't take that for granted. Though it's true, for all that:" And she nodded at him deliciously. Alex coloured to the ears. " Oh, I didn't mean for you," he said. " I'm not so coxy as that. I meant for myself, darling. But there's really no help for it. Besides, you know, I ought to do well in the Schools; our future depends upon it. Unless I get a good class, there'll be no chance of our marrying for oh, ever and ever so long." " What has coming to see me got to do with that? I thought a woman's love was supposed to be an incentive isn't that the word they al- ways use in novels? an incentive to a man to do his very_ best in everything.* You' horrid crea- THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. ture " but she drew a little nearer again " \ ought to say that you feel coming here inspires you; that it stimulates your efforts; that you'd willingly walk over every night by moonlight and see me at all risks, in order to be able to answer the questions ten times better in the morning. There, don't do that again; oh, Alex. take care; if you pull me so far I'm sure I'll go ovc: " No, you won't/' Alex answered, releasing her, after an interval which I can only represent by a series of full stops. " But you know very 1 you're talking nonsense. The driving-power of love is as true as gospel; it's made me read this term every minute of my time when I n't coming over here; it's made me read like a steam engine, if steam engines do read: I m read before as I've read since you've been so s\\ to me. Still, -the driving power has its liir. must be applied scientifically. You know as 1 as I do that if I come over and see you every night. I won't be able to think of a blessed thing all next day except how much I love you. Now no use telling the examiners in Greek 1 < ameters, ' I love Evelyn Glisson; she's the dc est, sweetest, provokingest girl that ever \ i.' They'd only remark in their bleak way that wnMi't the piece set for translation into tra LOVE UP TO DATE. ! 79 senarii and that ' provokingest ' was ungram- matical though it's true, for all that." " Oh, Alex, don't; you hurt my arm so!" " Still, you must see for yourself it's no good trying that way. I've got to go into the Schools all day, and read up the subject for the next morning all night. That's the way the driving- power of love acts on me, Miss Glisson. (I call you Miss Glisson by way of variety.) It makes me work like a horse for your sake, Evey." " But Mr. Beddingley was saying a man in examination ought never to read at night. He ought to throw it all off, as soon as the day's work is over, and go out on the river. I call that common sense. And / should think that for throwing it all off there's nothing on earth to equal " " When was Beddingley over here?" " Oh, my, who's jealous now? Mr. Bedding- ley was over here yesterday, sir, by Mums's in- vitation. Such a good young man, Mr. Bed- dingley! So very well connected! His uncle's a judge; and haven't you observed that judges' nephews invariably marry into bishopy families? There, I've done it again! Mums says I mustn't say bishopy, but episcopal; you know, she hasn't found out yet that bishops are out of date: she 180 THF IN tells me bishof away the A >rds to that effect; is unbecoming my father's (laugh- but, do I look episcopal?*' And to do her justice, she certainly didn't. No; you look a charming heathen. What did Beddingley want: " " Me, I suppose; though I didn't ask him. Mums thinks I'm incorrigible; but even / don't say to a young man when he calls: ' Pray what have you come for? ' I hate BeddingU 'nit's not episcopal. It's not even Chris- tian. You should love your enemies. And Mr. Beddingley isn't an enemy; he says he's a friend of yours. He's an excellent young man. I know that for certain, because Mums is always tel me so. ten times a day. He will go into the church, the church loves the middling and as soon as he's old enough, and in priest's orders, the Lord Chancellor will stick him into a nice living. He will deserve it, Mr. Beddingley. There's an oozing goodness about him that sh at a glance^ he's cut out for a parson. He will marry a wife after his own pattern, and become tin of ten assorted offspring, all con- genially and stupidly commonplace. He will in- terest him-elf in foreign missions and in men's rheumatism. He will make contribu- LOVE UP TO DATE. iSi tions to theological literature. I hate such young men. There! who says I'm episcopal?" " Oh, Evey, if Mrs. Glisson could hear you? " " She hears me often enough, dear old Mums. She thinks it's original sin coming out in me. Not that she really minds. Mums is no more bishopy at heart than Daddy and I are. And Daddy is only an incidental Bishop. But she has more sense of the dignity of the episcopal position than we. You see, she was brought ug in a clergyman's family; while I was brought up in Daddy's; and he's no clergyman. It did him heaps of good being among the blackfellows when he was young took a lot of the starch out of him." Alex gazed admiration again. " Do you know, Evey," he said, looking hard at her, " I love you for your lawlessness. You're the incar- nation of an age of revolt. I am eo glad you never went to Cambridge. It would have spoilt you utterly." " Oh, I don't think even Cambridge would have made much out of me. It would have run off me like water off a something-or-other's back. A duck, is it? thank you. Resist the higher edu- cation, and it will flee from you. When Daddy first spoke to me about going to Cambridge, I said ' Get thee behind me, Girton,' and it gat INCIDENTAL BISHOP. thec behind me; at least, that was the last I heard of it." You provoking angel, I do declare, I love you more " " Now, no Georgey-porgeying! I won't be Georgey-porgeyed. I'm sure little Beddingley would always Georgey-pori; Then Beddingley doesn't interest you?" Silly boy to ask such a thing. He disinter- ests me altogether. There, don't look so critical. We say ' disinterested/ so I suppose we can say say ' disinterests me/ That's logical, isn't it? Women are always logical." You wouldn't like to marry a parson?" "Oh, my. what a question! Don't you see me doing it : Wai I cut out to teach in a Sunday school and to organise Dorcas meetings? \Vhy. Dorcas herself died of it bored to death. I pect, and sorry enough to be resuscitated for a second edition over again of the same sort of clulness. I wouldn't many a parson if there n't another man left alive on earth. I'd sooner run away with with a dentist or an or- ganist." " It's all very well laughing at organists, but wha; : think /';;/ to turn to when ken my degree? I shall probably be a schoolmaster. Remember, we can't marry till LOVE UP TO DATE. 183 I've got on enough to ask a bishop's bless- ing." Evelyn grew suddenly graver. " Well, I had an idea the other day," she said, looking .wise. " If only I dare tell Daddy not that I'm afraid of Iiim, of course; but there's Mums to t think of. It's this; they say Daddy is the only bishop in the whole batch whose recommendation for an Inspector of Schools is not a positive disadvantage to a candidate. But Daddy's such a favourite at the Education Office, or whatever they call the place, that if he recommends a man they almost always appoint him. Now, my idea is that after you've taken your degree, I should present you to Daddy one day and say: ' Dads, this is the man I'm going to marry; and we've got nothing to marry on; and we object on principle to long engagements, as wearing to the feelings; and we want you to get him an Inspector-of-Schoolship.' Rather noble, isn't it?" " Intensely noble," Alex answered with alac- rity. " As noble as a Marquis; and Marquises, you know, are always Most Noble. In fact, an idea worthy of your intelligence, Evey. The worst of it is, I must get a First for that; and I'm so terribly weak in my Politics, I'm afraid." " Politics? why, what have politics got to do with it?" Evelyn exclaimed, surprised. "You nil-: INCIDENT IGF. 1't mean to say they won't i;i\ey>u a Fir>t be- cause you're a thingumbob, do yoi Alex smiled. " No, not because I'm a thing- umbojb," he answered. " Thingumbobs, as such. are eligible for the highest offices in the uni- -ity, just the same as what-you-may-call But I mean Aristotle's Politics, don't you kn< one of the books one has to take up for greats. And I'm so beastly bad at it." " Oh. you'll pull through," Evelyn responded, with a girl's confidence in her lover's ability to do anything that is expected of him. You'll get a First all rijjht. Mr. Beddingley said terday: 'There's no doubt about Thornhury. He's safe of h ; he's read so hard since Christmas.' And I knew what had made you; so there, sir." " But, Evelyn. I say, that's a splendid idea about the Inspectorship of Schoo " / said, Inspector-of-schoolship, which I aure to think much more neat and appro- priai " So it is, of course; it's the right idiom, ob- usly; only, idioms are generally made by idiots, and when a clever person like you strikes out the right one offhand, one's afraid to use it. But, Inspectorship or Schoolship, it's a noble c must work that, you know; why, then, LOVE UP TO DATE. 185 we might get married in rather less than no time! " "Really?" " Yes', really." " Then, my dear old boy, go in and win! Get a First, and it's done, as conjurors always tell one. Daddy and the Education Office won't know what it is to have a quiet night till they've given you the appointment. I'll nobble Sir Na- thaniel: he's a dear old friend of mine. Church schools; schedule C; oh, I know all about it; I've been looking it up to-day in Daddy's School Manager's Assistant, a Complete Digest of the Education Act and the Revised Code, for the Use of the Unmitigated Old Bores who sit upon the Committees. I dare say I haven't got the title ' with textual accuracy,' as Daddy would say; but it's near enough for all practical pur- poses." And she looked up at him saucily. She had taken off her hat. He ran his hand through her hair. " I love you, Evey," he said. " I wonder why I love you! " She laughed a pleased laugh. " Interrogate your consciousness!" He paused and reflected. " I think," he said, "it is, because you're a double acrostic." CHAPTER XIX. THE EPISCOPATE STOOPS. THE episode of the opening was fixed to take place on the following Tuesday. By Thursday of the week before the date arranged for it. the poor harassed Bishop, turning things over in his mind, this way and that, arrived all at once at notable resolution. It was clear he could not go down to the orphanage where according to the authorities he had been bred and taught, without the slightest idea what manner of place it was. He must sally forth on an exploring pedition to Liverpool, incog., before trusting himself to make a speech of effusive gratitude and misplaced humility at the opening of the new school where he had never been educat But what a sordid, what a hateful, what an undignified necessity a necessity that revolted all the manhood within him; for whatever else he was, the man who had once been Tom Prin- gle remained a man to the end, in spite of his apron. He had preached down coal-mines, and 1 86 THE EPISCOPATE STOOPS. 1 87 chummed with chain-makers, and helped pud- dlers at their work, and fought drunken navvies, and shown himself in fifty unconventional ways a muscular Christian. But this surreptitious creeping about in disguise, like a thief or a de- tective, was wholly repugnant to him. Still, he had made his bed and he must lie on it. Or rather, as he said bitterly to himself more than once, a chance moment had made it, and a life- time must lie on it. He opened the study door with a consciously furtive air, ill-disguised under a pretence of trans- parent candour, for he was a mighty poor dis- sembler. " Watkins," he said to his servant, in the most casual voice he could summon, " do you happen to have kept that old suit I used to wear at Cradley for visiting the chain-works? " " Yes, my lord; it's in the box-room." ' Then bring it out, Watkins, and pack it in my Gladstone bag." His look was guilty. " I'm going down to Birmingham." Birmingham was on the way, and he must change there to get on the North Western for Liverpool. He salved his conscience as usual with one of the verbal subterfuges he despised and hated. ' Yes, my lord. And what else shall I put in?" The Bishop paused. " The usual things for 13 188 THE INCIDENTAL IU>HOP. one night/* he answered, hesitating. " And a coloured tie, if I have any. Xo. no; I shan't want one/' he continued, reflecting after a mo- ment that it was safer to buy one than to i; himself away to his own man-servant. " Just the Cradley suit and the usual night things, \\ kins." Yes, my lord/' Watkins answered stolidly. He was too much accustomed to the eccentrici- ties of " the slumming bishop," as his clergy called him, to feel or express much astonishment at these episcopal vagaries. " And Watkins, tell Rees I shall want to be driven to the station to catch the 11.30. And when Mrs. Glisson comes home, say I was sud- denly called away on pressing business connected with this forged orders question." That was, s, too true. He need not tell a lie this t though the case of forged orders which called him away had nothing to do with the clergyman at Reading." "Yes, my lord," Watkins answered in the same impassive voice the colourless voice of the trained man-servant who would answer " x , my lord." if you told him the moon was made of green cheese or commanded him to cut off the head of liU grandmother. With infinite loathing, the Bishop took the THE EPISCOPATE STOOPS. 189 next train to Birmingham. On his way thence to Liverpool, he managed to secure a solitary first class compartment; and during the longest un- broken run, changed his clothes in the carriage in terror, reappearing with a very workmanlike suit in place of his gaiters, and substituting a crush .felt hat for his episcopal head-gear. Arrived at Lime Street Station, he felt his difficulties thicken round him. It would be dan- gerous to proceed too openly to the orphanage, for if he let himself be seen, he might be recog- nised again in his episcopal dress on Tuesday. On the other hand, it would not do to skulk about too clandestinely with the air of one who would escape observation, and so run the risk of being apprehended by the police in his present masquerade on a charge of loitering with intent to commit a burglary. He split the difference; drove to a third-rate hotel, instead of the one he meant to patronise on Tuesday; and then lounged quietly round, with the aid of a map, to the place where the orphanage was marked as existing. It would have been a disagreeable task for anybody; for a bishop, it was insupportable. In his working-man suit, he felt like a mountebank. The sense of skulking about those buildings in order to assume a familiarity with them which he did not really possess, was almost more than K,O 'nil: INCIDENTAL UI.MIOP. his honest heart could endure. For after all, his heart was still honest. He was a truthful man, utterly warped and turned aside from n proper nature by one lasting error. 1 1 e hoped, indeed, to avoid a lie direct, which soul hated; but he hardly saw how he could suc- ceed in avoiding a certain amount of prevarica- tion. " Ah, here's the old school-room," he must say, with a tone of conviction and of ancient ac- quaintance; "and here's the dormitory. This is where the boys used to play rounders on half holidays; and that's the window erected in mem- ory of the three poor fellc re killed in the Crimea." All these details he must get up beforehand as far as possible; and to get them up he had but his unaided intelligence. To ask questions, he felt, would be absolutely fatal. The town hummed with affairs, but the Bishop dis- regarded them. He made his way straight to a straggling suburb. He found the building, a gaunt brick block upon a windy hill-top, standing a mile or t from the centre, in a forbidding garden, with the ;al desolate air of a great British charity. Its mien ami aspect were strictly utilitarian. The gates stood open, thank heaven, and he wall, in. unchallrr.-cd. As always happens on such occasions 'tis a human peculiarity tin- THE EPISCOPATE STOOPS. igr was behindhand, and all hands were impressed into the service making diligent efforts to get the building ship-shape for the date of the open- ing. It is the humour of contractors to put off everything till the last moment. Accustomed as he was to see his own name and office pla- carded, it still gave him a strange start to-day to read the notices on the gate, in large red type, " The New School House will be opened on Tuesday, June the 27th, by the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Dorchester." He feared to enter. If anybody were to see him now and then recognise him next week, what an appalling dis- closure ! However, whatever else the Bishop was, he was a brave man, and he pushed his way in boldly. It was not his habit to quail or whimper. He walked round the building with a certain assured air in his upright carriage which secured him from enquiry. Even at the worst of times the Bishop respected himself. This was the old school-room, then; not a doubt about that; he could hear the hum and buzz of voices inside, the unmistakable drone of boys repeating rote- lessons. He measured it with the eye, length, breadth, and height, and observed its relation to the surrounding buildings. Then he scanned the bricks curiously. Yes, he should say from 1 9 2 the colour they inu-t h: n laid for more than thirty years; probably forty; so that the room must have been there in the other Cecil Gliss< time; for since Cecil Glisson had been his own name now for more than a quarter of a century. he had grown to regard its original owner as merely " the other one." Was he right in judging that this school-room l so old, though? Liverpool is a smoky place, and brick would discolour there quickly. These walls were certainly newer than those just to the right of them; not quite so new as those to the left beyond. A mistake on this matter would not indeed quite conclusive, for so many ad passed since, but, to say the least of it. suspicious. The Bishop recalled the blun- ders of the Tichborne claimant. He looked care- fully from this point of view at every part of the building, except that now in progress. The i itcntionally out of consideration, so that they mii^ht strike him with as much un- familiarity by comparison as possible. Presently, he drew near the workmen's chief hut. The clerk of the works was there, holding a plan in his hand. The Bishop approached him and murmured in his suave episcopal manner: " Mi-ht 1 l>e permitted to glance at it? " " Certainly, sir." the clerk d; and that THE EPISCOPATE STOOPS. 193 sir struck cold into the Bishop's heart; he had expected rather to be addressed as mate, for he was clad as a working man on the borderland of the class a foreman or its equivalent and he was dimly aware that his voice had bewrayed him. " Thank you so much," he continued, try- ing his hardest to be gruff; but it was all in vain; for even Tom Pringle had had a soft and pecul- iarly gentle manner of speech, which was one of the first points Olive had noted and admired in him. And now that he was a bishop, his tones had the correct episcopal silveriness. The clerk of the works pointed out some of the details. The Bishop pretended to look and listen; but his eyes were really elsewhere on other parts of the plan. For as good luck would have it, this was a small-scale elevation of the entire buildings, old and new, with their junctions of passages. More still, it had in its corner a ground plan of the orphanage, marking in red, blue, and black figures the dates of the various successive layers, so to speak. The Bishop glanced at these hastily, and took them in at a glance. Necessity is the mother of memory as well as of invention. He never knew before how well he could take in and carry away a plan; in two minutes, he had committed the whole thing to the tablets of his brain, and was prepared to recognise every part Till ; I-1IOP. or not, exactly in pro; as it ai or post-dated the real Cecil Glisson's sojourn in the institution. " Thank you immensely/' he said with a genu- ine sigh of relief to the clerk; for he had learnt from this chart by how little he had avoided one tremendous pitfall; the dubious school-room had not been there in Cecil Glisson's day at all; it ^ the middle one in time of three success buildings; and it was begun in the year alter Cecil Glisson went to the Theological College. Thank heaven, that particular Theological Col- lege had wholly failed in the struggle for < istence between seminaries of budding parsons, and was now a retreat for decayed licen- t nailer-; and therefore he would never be called upon to gush over an apocryphal stay in that building, at any rate! So he said, " Thank you immensely," with a real touch of gratitude. " Not at all. sir/' the clerk answered, staring hard at him from head to foot, and beginning to wonder whether or not this smooth-voiced stranger was a gentlemanly burglar or a swell- mob pickpocket. The Bishop ventured on a question. " Shall you be here on Tuesday? " he asked nervously after a moment's hesitation. THE EPISCOPATE STOOPS. '95 The clerk stared again and hesitated in turn. " Not inside," he answered. That was a relief, anyhow. Yet the Bishop began to wonder whether it would not be well for him to contract a sudden indisposition and telegraph regrets at the last moment to the committee. For the clerk had taken stock of him with a most sus- picious scrutiny. He returned to his shabby hotel not a little perturbed in soul. He was not quite sure that this unpleasant visit had not rather increased than lessened his difficulties. OF THB TJNIVERSITY CHAPTER XX THE LION'S MOUTH. WORRY kills. As a matter of fact, through fatigue and worry, the Bishop was very far in- deed from being well on the succeeding Monday. His head swam ominously. "Olive, dear/' he said to his wife \\hen he got up in the morning, " I'm really afraid, after all, I shall have to telegraph and disappoint those erpool people. I feel really ill, more than a passing headache. I don't believe I shall be up tor \Vell, of course, dear, if you're unable to go, i mustn't go," Mrs. Glisson answered, with a luminous platitude. " But at least we might set out and get as far as Liverpool. Then you could see how you are to-morrow. We can sleep to- lit at the Adelphi; the Adelphi's so comfort- able: and if you're no better in the morning, ran write and explain. Still, your little ailment will probably pass off: you know your head is almost always better for the change of a journ< 196 THE LION'S MOUTH. 197 The Bishop groaned; but there was nothing for it but to obey. He was an obedient husband. He went to Liverpool, and, strange to say, felt better next morning, with the usual incredible incalculability of nervous troubles. And when the dreaded hour arrived, he opened the new school with great solemnity and dignity. For- tunately, he had little to say about the institu- tion, himself, or his own supposed connection with it. The Mayor and the others did that part of the speechifying: they dilated on the pleasure it gave them to see that a Spiritual Peer in Dr. Glisson's exalted position had come originally from their own institution; they enlarged upon the fact that the Lord Bishop of Dorchester, in all his glory, was not ashamed now to own his indebtedness to their Orphan's Home; and they pointed the usual fallacious moral that every boy there present that day had it open to him to pur- sue a similar career of usefulness which might lead him at last, if not to so conspicuous and honoured a position, at least to high posts in the Church and Commonwealth. It is annoy- ing to any man to have to sit still and hear him- self thus publicly belauded; to the Bishop, under the circumstances, it was an unspeakable ordeal. Every now and again he caught Olive's eye and gave a profound sigh of impatient resignation. 1 98 Till Olive encouraged him silently. Without that wifely aid. he almost believed he must h:r in his place and protested openly. For himself, when it came to his turn, the Bishop did little more than briefly allude to the much too kind and flattering things which the Mayor had said about him; and then passed on to a short and obviously heart-felt phrase about his ceeding unworthiness. That was one of the little traits that had made Dr. Glisson the most popular of bishops; his real modesty was undeniable; consciousness of his false claim sa him at every turn from the besetting episcopal of self-complacency. To the orphanage he referred in safe generalities only; it was his sU iding direct falsehood. He said, with his silvery intonation, that e\ boy who had been educated in that Home mut always look back to his sojourn there with pleas- ure and gratitude. If any inmate who owed his career of usefulness to the Institution win-re they assembled was ashamed in after life of the sheltering school which had made him what he was. that inmate showed a mean and contemptible spirit. Lads educated under this roof had recalled their boyhood with pride and delight beneath the -plendours of : Southern Cross and amoni; iving palms and THE LION'S MOUTH. 199 tree-ferns of the Pacific. (For he remembered what the real Cecil Glisson had told him.) No tie save the tie of parent and child could be closer than the link which bound the pupils of that school in almost filial piety to the Home that had proved itself a father to the fatherless. And never in a long life had he felt more pro- foundly thankful to have discharged the part he had been called upon to play than he should feel that night when he returned once more with the memory of this duty fulfilled to his home at Dorchester. He added a few general moral and religious platitudes the inevitable stock- in-trade of an episcopal orator : and then, amid much applause, and with the usual cere- monies, he solemnly declared this institution open. He did not, however, return that night to Dorchester Palace. Mrs. Glisson was so much alarmed at the strain he had obviously endured that she would not allow him to try the journey back after the fatigue of the ceremony and the accompanying banquet. They remained at the Adelphi, for the Bishop would never consent on such occasions to accept private hospitality. In- deed, the watchful wife began to fear she had done wrong in urging him to come at all; what- ever was the reason, she said to herself, it was 200 TH1 iOP. perfectly clear that Cecil could not bear to re- turn to Liverpool. In the evening, after dinner, they went into the comfortable drawing-room of the hotel; Mrs. Glisson fancied it might cheer Cecil up to li a little distracting talk with the strangers he met there. An American liner had arrived that day; and among the guests were not a few of her passengers. The Bishop sat on a sofa t r \ to make conversation with one or two of these. Both parties, however, were distraught; the Bishop, by the events of that day of Purgatc the Americans, by the novelty of the episcopal gaiters, and the strange apparition of the episco- pal apron, both which they surveyed with i: sistible amusement. At last, one stranger strolled up and sat close by the Bishop. He was a solid-looking ruddy- haired man, with a farmer- like air. and when he spoke, the Bishop recognised at once the familiar Canadian accent of his boyhood. He had In it twice or thrice during the intervening ye; nay, more, he had even passed unrecognised among people whose names at least he had known at Brantford. But to-ni^ht. the coincidence v particularly distasteful to him. He was i about to say: "Olive, my dear, I think I shall go upstairs." \\hen the new-comer leaned across THE LION'S MOUTH. 2OI and began conversation abruptly: " The Bishop of Dorchester, they tell me? " The episcopal neck gave a faint inclination of assent. " Well, you were Dr. Cecil Glisson, before you were made a bishop, I fancy/' the stranger con- tinued. Something vaguely familiar about the voice and face made the Bishop falter. " I was/' he answered tremulously. " Then you must have met my poor cousin Tom Pringle," the Canadian went on, uncon- scious of the bomb-shell he was so carelessly let- ting drop: "he sailed on the John Wesley." The room swam round the Bishop. He grew white and red alternately. Olive came to the rescue at the very nick of time. " It was a most painful episode in my husband's life," she put in softly. " The memory of it never ceases to dis- turb him to this present day. It almost killed him. You know he was shot by the captain of the John Wesley; and he had been tenderly nursed, before the explosion, by your cousin, Tom Pringle." " Oh, I know about all that," Hiram Pringle answered for the Bishop now recognised his cousin after thirty-five years of absence. " I made lots of inquiries about poor Tom in Aus- 202 TH1 (OP. ia. He was blown up in the explosion, the same time that you were. Only, he didn't come to again. Well, Bishop, any way, I'm glad to meet you." He used the familiar Canadian mode address which was the only one he knew. " I 13 fond of Tom, and I should like to hear from i anything you can tell me about the poor fellow's last voyage." What was the Bishop to do? Under t trying circumstances, he could not seem cold and cruel toward the dead sailor who was sup- posed to have tended him carefully through a severe illness and probably to have died through his devotion to duty and his unwillingness to join Bully Ford and his comrades. In five min- utes he found himself launching forth on a touch- ing tribute to his own dead self; extolling own tenderness, his care, his womanly nursing; making a hero and a martyr out of the very Tom Pi-ingle who sat there that moment in a falsely- ned episcopal garb, hating himself inwardly couanlice and deception. Tom Prin- gle why the Tom Pringle who signed articles on the John \\ a moral innocent com- pared with the black heart of the Cecil Glisson who .re his b The ruddy-haired man listened to him with real emotion. " Poor old Tom," he mused, with THE LION'S MOUTH. 203 tears in his eyes, in spite of all the years; " he was a real good sort. Many's the time he and I played truant from school to go fishing for black bass and hunting mink in the creek the creek down by Brantford let me see, what did we call it?" It was on the Bishop's tongue to answer " Little Cataraqui Creek," but he pulled himself up in time, and held a prudent silence. " And you have prospered in this world, I suppose," he ventured to say at last, in his bland clerical voice, seeing that Hiram had the air of a man of money. "Oh, pretty well," his cousin answered; "pretty well: I've made my pile: though you mustn't think, either, my cousin Tom was no more than a common seaman by birth because he was sailing as one when you happened to meet him. Tom was a better scholar than me, and a good-looking fellow, too: he might have been a gentleman if he hadn't chosen to run away to sea like a foolish young donkey. He had plenty of brains, Tom had. Yes, I've done pretty well for myself; gone into the lumber trade on the Upper Ottawa, and got tolerable concessions. I don't want to boast, but I ought to be worth to-day, say my million dol- lars." 14 204 IH: :op - Two hundred thousand pounds! " the Bish- op echoed, with perhaps more alacrity than to be expected from a man who ought by his own account never to have set foot on the Ameri- can continent. " That's a very large fortune. Well, perhaps your cousin Tom, if he had stopped in Canada, might have done as well in the end. There's no accounting for the wonderful dis- pensations of Providence." "Though, mind you," Hiram interpo-r !. 1 think so well of Tom that I wouldn't think bet- ter of him not if he was wearing that pair of gaiters you have on this minute." The Bishop reddened again; but fortunately Olive set his confusion down to what she con- sidered an unsuitable allusion to the episcopal leggings. Hiram scanned him from head to foot, with a slow long stare. " You're not unlike him cither," he said. Then for a second a queer feeling came over him. He was just about to ,i'ld slowly: "Why you are Tom Pringle " when the absurdity of the identification burst upon him all at once, and he conteir himself with saying : 4i You might be his brother The Bishop marked the look and the 1 tating manner. He dared not risk it any longer. THE LION'S MOUTH. 205 " We were considered like one another on the John Wesley," he admitted stiffly. Then he rose and shook,his cousin's hand. " Well, good night, Mr. Pringle," he went on, as cordially as he could manage. " I I am glad to have met you." Oh, appalling falsehood! "I cannot fail to cherish the most friendly feelings towards any relation or friend of poor Tom Pringle, whom I remember with affection and gratitude and and Olive, my dear, give me your arm. I I feel far from well. Mr Pringle must excuse me. And the sun was so hot! This day has been too much for me! " Olive helped him to his room. He waved his hand to Hiram. Once safely upstairs, he broke down utterly. He sat on the side of the bed and cried like a baby. Olive blamed herself bitterly for bringing him there against his* will. His nerves were out of gear. She decided she would never again urge him to take part in one of these horrid distasteful functions. After all, she thought, he was quite right. She applied his own favourite test. The apos- tles never attended the laying of foundation stones with masonic honours. But as he sat there that night, the Bishop made up his mind. This must cease for ever. He could not go on living this lie for a lifetime. 2o6 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. Each day that passed made the role more hate- ful. While he was a mere country parson, it had been easier to carry it off; but now, his very conspicuousness made his irksome task harder. CHAPTER XXI. A QUESTION OF ORDINATION. A WEEK or two later, there was a dinner party at the Palace; a clerical dinner party; what Evelyn irreverently described in her own curt dialect as " feeding the diocese." Evelyn was a " sport " in an episcopal family. Her language was based on the undergraduate model: her ideas were surreptitiously derived from yellow French romances. Throughout the whole of dinner, Evelyn's manner had been uneasy. A Canon of Christ Church was among the guests, fresh over from the House. Evelyn asked him at dessert, hav- ing bottled up her eagerness so long with diffi- culty, whether the class-list in Greats was out yet. Oh, yes, out this afternoon, the Canon answered. Evelyn wondered, unconcernedly, who had got Firsts. "Two Christ Church men," the Canon believed. " I forget their names." Evelyn's anxiety controlled itself ad- . mirably. 207 208 THE INCIDLNIAL BISHOP. That's the worst of a secret engagement, she thought to herself; you can't even have a tele- gram. Still, where would the fun of an engage- ment come in if it weren't secret? A girl who has the misfortune to belong to an episcopal household is hard put to it for romance; and lyn, for all her slanginess, was essentially ro- mantic. The excitement of secrecy was wortli to her mind even the consequent necessity for foregoing a telegram. " Do you happen to remember whether Mr. Beddingley of Oriel got a Second? " she inquired in the same unconcerned tone. " He comes here sometimes." Why a Second, Evelyn? * the Bishop asked. " You prejudge the case, my child. It would have been kinder to ask whether he had got a nlcln't it?" i shrugged her shoukU ntly Second would be good bizz for poor little Bed- dingley/' she answered. " He's an excellent young man," Mrs. Glis- son interposed, not even venturing to object to an clement in a young lady's vocabulary. " He has such very high principles." " I haven't measured them." Kvelyn rotor "so I don't know exactly how high they run; but if they're more than i; five, they must A QUESTION OF ORDINATION. 209 stick up above his head, which would be uncom- fortable for walking." " My dear," her father interposed, " you are unjust to young Beddingley. He is precisely the sort of man I should choose by prefer- ence to assist me in the arduous work of a dio- cese." " Cut out for an examining chaplain," Evelyn responded with a snap. " That's just how I measured him myself. He was born examining. But the Canon hasn't told us whether he got his Second." " I forget whether his name was in the list," the Canon answered, pressing his lips together with a dubitative air, as when one judges an un- known vintage. " Beddingley; Beddingley; no," he shook his head; " I can't recall him." " Then there was a Mr. Thornbury of Mer- ton whom I met at the Dean's," Evelyn contin- ued, with a carefully casual manner which Mrs. Glisson noted as a sure mark of much more active interest. " He was going in this term. Such a jolly young man. He won the hundred yards at the 'Varsity grinds. Do you happen to know whether he got a First? " " Why not a Second? " Mrs. Glisson asked mischievously. Evelyn betrayed herself by a faint blush. 2io 'IHi : N PAL I " Because he's really cle\ e answered. " and probably has principles several inches short- er than Mr. Beddingley's. At least, he's six inches taller; so perhaps on what Daddy calls the law of compensation, he may make up in height for what he lacks in principles. For my I prefer them to take it out th I can never understand why people are so dead stuck on principles." And she looked about her defiantly. "Thornbury? " the Canon repeated, rolling the name on his palate, as one rolls an. uncer- tain port, to see whether he recognised it. " Thornb liMrnbury? < M" Merlon, did say? Yes, I think he got a Third: in fact, I recall it now, Thornbury of Merton." But Evelyn was not looking or listening. Suddenly her eyes had wandered at a bound from the table and across the lawn; and 1 fixed themselves on a fluttering white object that flickered strangely above the green of the rho- dodendrons. She knew that sign well. It \ Alex Thornbury, creeping close in his canoe under the garden bank, and giving her the signal that he was there to meet her. In a second, she had forgotten the strawber- ries on her plate, and was full of the adventure. Her own handkerchief fluttered unobtrusively A QUESTION OF ORDINATION. 2 II in reply. She must slip out somehow and learn from Alex himself whether or not he had really taken a Third in the Schools and thereby wrecked his chance of an inspectorship. " What are you doing about Greenslade of Reading? " the Canon asked, changing the sub- ject abruptly. The Bishop's face grew dark. Two vertical lines marked his broad forehead. " Greenslade of Reading," he repeated. " Ah, it's a very sad business. One cannot help being grieved at it. It appears there can now be no shadow of doubt that the poor fellow was never ordained at all. His ordination letters have turned out on ex- amination, I regret to say, to be a complete forgery." " I'm sorry you've introduced the question, Canon," Mrs. Glisson broke in. " I've never known the Bishop so distressed and absorbed about anything since we came to Dorchester. It has been a terrible blow to him." " He was such an excellent clergyman, you see," the Bishop continued. " Or rather, one thought him so. There was hardly a man in the diocese whom I respected and trusted more than I did poor Greenslade." ".It's a shocking disclosure," the Canon as- sented, helping himself to burnt almonds. " A 212 THE INCIDENTAL HI-HOP. most shocking disclosure. 11 client Ma- deira." lie interesting question to my mind," a ntry rector put in. "is this: how about the lity of the marriages he celebrated?" Evelyn rose with sham dignity. " Oh, if youVe going to discuss the validity of marriage," she observed in a mock serious voice, " this is no place for me. The episcopacy I can sta to-day is a social figment. But not tin- marriage question. I draw a line there. 1 think I had better go out into the garden." And she seized the opportunity. Mrs. Glisson breathed freely. "The marriages are valid." the Bishop v on, not lu Kvclyn's parenthesis. "That point has been decided for us already by the law courts. I have looked up the precedents and I I nid the case is fully provided for. A marr alid if solemnised in a church l>y the lie facto incumbent, or by any person who has been ac- cepted as a clergyman by the bishop of the dio- cese, and whom the parties involved have both fide priest in holy orders of the C'hnrch of England." Yes; legally," the rector assented: he a close cson, thin-lipped, austere, with a v anced cassock and a stiff white collar. A QUESTION OF ORDINATION. 213 " That is a question for the law. But ecclesi- astically and sacramentally? That's the point for our consideration. What I ask is this Can the Church regard such persons as in any true sense married? " The Bishop's lips were white. His voice fal- tered. " I cannot allow the word ' sacramental- ly ' to pass without protest," he interposed, di- verging to a side issue. " Marriage has never been admitted as a sacrament by the authorita- tive voice of the Church of England." But the rector was not to be turned aside. " I waive that point," he said tartly; " though I do not allow that I unreservedly accept your lordship's correction. But, omitting the word sacrament, the important question for us as churchmen is this a question for churchmen of all shades of opinion, sacramental or evangelical; are couples married by this man Greenslade, who was never a priest, or even a deacon, to be con- sidered as married at all, in the Church's sense? or are they not rather to be regarded as living together in a legalised union, a meretricious union, in the same way as if they had merely been married, or rather united (for I cannot con- sent to call it marriage) by civil contract before a registrar? " The Bishop paused. " It is a very grave 214 problem," he .v . with ti tion, for a bishop must n< e a categor answer about anything on earth without ing to himself some chance of hedging. " I ild not care to decide it offhand without d deliberation." "In my opinion," the rector observed with decision, " such couples are living in unconscious they ought certainly to be remarried at once by an ordained clergyman. The bond in which they remain is a purely human one." " I don't quite see that." the Canon ir. posed. He was a safe Moderate. " You are pushing the doctrine of priestly sanction one gree too far. Surely the children born already of such marriages are lawful children? " 1 ful yes before the law; but born in Christian wedlock, no. The union, though un- fortunate, is obviously not a Christian marriage. I would call such persons innocent but irregul; The Bishop deliberated. His manner v distraught. " May we not say," he began, rais- ing one didactic forefinger, " that here we must distinguish between the fact and the intention? The persons who unfortunately presented them- selves to be married by our friend Greenslade I i: this unhappy man who has so deeply disappointed our \pectations presented A QUESTION OF ORDINATION. 215 themselves under the belief that they were being married by' a bona fide priest of the Church of England. Their intention being thus ecclesi- astically and formally correct, they are surely guiltless as laymen in the matter. Many of them may never chance to hear that Greenslade was not a priest at all; and such persons cannot, I should say, be considered as anything other than truly married. Charity, my dear sir, charity! Do not let us substitute an ecclesiastical figment for the plain fact that these people have con- formed as far as they were able to the rules of the Church, and so have been as nearly married as they could manage. The intention, after all, is not the intention everything? " But the rector was not to be silenced by mere episcopal opinion. His reverence for bish- ops was greater in the abstract than in the con- crete as often happens with members of his school of thought. " I do not say such people are living in open sin," he answered, bristling up. " That would be ignoring, as your lordship suggests, their innocence in intention. Or rather, I would put it, they are living in sin, but with innocent ignorance of the fact; and to com- mit a sinful act not knowing that you commit it leaves the nature of the act in itself un- changed, though it may of course excuse the 2ifi Tin person. I would not assert that such people are actually doing wrong; but I do assert that the moment they discover the true state of the case, it becomes their bounden duty as members of the Church to put themselves right by gett remarried at once or, to speak more correctly. by substituting a regular and canonical marriage for the irregular and really impious ceremony in which they have unwittingly and unwillin taken part." " It would no doubt be safer/' the Canon ad- mitted. He preferred constitutionally to be on the safe side. " Put it t! 'the rector went on, warm- ing up to his subject. " Suppose, for argunu sake, a person understood to be a bishop, and acting as such, were found some day to be in ty a pretender " \\ II he Bishop exclaimed, giving a sudden start from his chair and turning white with emotion. A bishop in forged orcU " I put the case argument! gratia, my lord," rector went on, still blandly, though taken led way hi> diir. 1'apti-ts are almost as exacting as bishops; and between the two, the upper nn< when he chose with a very effective candour which committed him to nothing, while it flat- tered his companion with a sense of belonging to the inner circle. The Bishop discussed for ten minutes or so the affairs of the Church schools in the diocese of Dorchester, which were the object of his v: AN OFFICIAL INTERVIEW. 233 Sir Nathaniel listened; assented; stifled a yawn; smiled genially; was cordial in generalities, and when it came to particulars would give his best consideration (but no immediate answer) to all practical suggestions the Bishop had to urge upon him. He was suave and non-committing. " By the way/' he said at last, turning over some papers .listlessly, " there will be a vacancy, I see, for a junior examiner in" your district by Christ- mas. It is strictly irregular; but I ask between ourselves. I ask for information merely; it being my duty to make things as comfortable as I can for all parties concerned, without, if I may be excused the expression, making hay of the public service. Now, is there any candidate or any existing inspector whom you would particularly like to see transferred to your circuit? Because, if so, we make it a rule never to be influenced in the slightest degree by the private wishes of any- body and more especially of bishops; but we might consider the person in the ordinary rota- tion; and if he happened to be in all respects by far the most suitable public servant we could find for the place, and if we felt disposed to risk appointing him, the fact that you desired to have him there at your side, might possibly not be allowed to tell against him. I say, it might pos- sibly not; and on the other hand it might pos- Till iOP. y l>c fatal to his chance- < rnment government. So if you care to hazard it. and will mention anyone, this department will en- deavour to forget the person's name at once, and will appoint entirely in the public int I understand that, of course/' the Bishop answered in his guileless w \nd I shall not be surprised if I find my candidate is not ap- poini " Nor if yon find he is," Sir Nathaniel interposed, smiling. " \Ve are impartial, recollect, im-partial. These things cut L "Oh, certainly," the Bishop said, smiling in turn, he knew not why. " Well, what name? " the Secretary went on, glam ide at the clock. ' His name? " the Bishop answered: " oh. name I forgot is Alexander Thornbury. He has just taken his degree First in Greats at Oxford. His college Merton. And I ought to inform v<>u at once, lest I should seem to hold back the fact at the outset, that he has got him- self engaged, without my consent, to my daugh- ter Evelyn." The great man laughed. " But has obtained that consent ex post facto?" he chimed in. AN OFFICIAL INTERVIEW. 23? " That is about the true state of the case, Sir Nathaniel." " Well, so far as it goes, that circumstance does not seem to tell against him. If you are prepared to entrust him with your daughter's happiness, ex post facto or otherwise, you have probably confidence in his abilities and his honour." " At any rate, Evelyn has," the Bishop re- sponded with the parental dutifulness of the nine- teenth century. " Miss Evelyn is a young lady of great dis- crimination," the Secretary observed. " I trust so," the Bishop assented. Sir Nathaniel reflected. " His name is down? " he queried at last. "Yes; but only since a week ago." " Well, if this department were going to ap- point him at all," the Secretary continued, in an abstracted voice, " it had better be soon. Delay is dangerous. Is the engagement an- nounced? " " No," the guileless Bishop answered prompt- ly. "But why?" Sir Nathaniel stroked his chin and looked across at his caller with a comical air of amuse- ment. " Well," he answered slowly, " if I were you, I would not announce it, till after some- 16 236 THE INCIDKNTAL BISHOP. body or other has been appointed to this vacar, We must avoid a job. Whoever happens to be appointed, it would be quite in the natural course of events that your daughter should thereat by chance be thrown in with him, and proceed to fall in love with him, or he with her, which- ever is the fashionable phrase of the moment. Therefore, I ad ir daughter to wait I speaking unofficially, without involving the de- partment and only to get herself engaged to whatever person we may happen to appoint, a we have appointed him. If we were to do any- thing else, don't you see, there might be a sus- picion of jobbc " But my dear -ir. ' the Bishop c: inn- ing 11 P- " >' ou know E\ don't mean to say you suppose she is the sort of girl \ could fall in love to order with whatever young man you may happen to send Sir Nathaniel gazed down at him through his pince-nez with a pitying smile, as one might gaze at a specimen of a rare and interesting but almost extinct animal. " My dear Bishop/' he said at last, fingering the ends of his moustache do not understand official language yet; and my belief you never will, either. You are a very difficult man to whom to do a service. Here I positively putting myself into a position that AN OFFICIAL INTERVIEW. 237 might endanger the administration all through my personal feeling of liking for yourself giv- ing away the show, so to speak creating a pos- sible public scandal and telling you so as plain- ly as a public servant can dare to tell it in these degenerate days all because I consider a recom- mendation from you worth ten reams at least of ordinary testimonials; and you refuse to under- stand! Oh, you unsophisticated person! Please go away and inform everybody but Miss Glisson how I assured you as I do now assure you that nothing save merit on the part of the can- didate can ever be taken into consideration by this department; and tell Miss Glisson that I send her my kindest regards my very kindest regards it used to be ' love ' and ' Evelyn/ I recollect, when she was smaller and that only a sense of public duty prevents my being able to make the slightest concession in favour of any candidate in whom she happens to be interested. But a sense of public duty renders it quite im- possible for me. She will understand, if you don't. She's a sensible girl, and she knows what a man means when he tells her his intentions in painfully plain and most unofficial language." " I'll write your message down, I think," the Bishop said, taking out his note-book. " You said, ' Tell Miss Glisson ' " 233 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. >h no, you w<>n 't ! " Sir Xathaniel answered, with an uncontrollable fit of laughter, seizing his hand and pencil. "Put up that note-book! I'm not going to let you say you took down my very words, my ipsissima verba, in writing. This is a private and wholly unofficial interview. I will shorten my message and spare your mem- ory. Tell your daughter that if she looks in the Times daily for the next >i\ weeks >he will find out whether or not her protege is appointed. Re- mark that I say prottgi. Bear that word in mind. For, if you venture to say fiance, you upset the governor The Bishop returned to Dorchester bewil- dered; officialdom was one of those things he could not understand, though he had written a book on the Comparative Grammar of the Me- lanesian Languages. But when he told Evelyn, word for word, as far as he was able to remember, what the Education Office had said, she laughed and kissed him, and answered: "There's a dear old Dad; Alex has got the appointment ! " And though the Bishop couldn't for the life of him make out how Evelyn knew, he was sure she v right ; and he was relieved when -lie added: " I'm I won't mention it to anybody, and we'll keep the engagement dark; and when next I see thaniel I shall set his mind at rest \>y telling AN OFFICIAL INVERVIEW. 239 him I'm determined not to wreck so admirable a Government. " These things are hidden from the wise and prudent, the Bishop thought, and revealed (in our days) to babes and sucklings! CHAPTER XXIV. SUCH SWEET SORROW. " WELL, good bye, Evey; it's dreadful to say good bye; but there's no way out of it. I can't stop at Oxford after all the men have gone down; and I've got no money to go to London and live, as I should like to, running down here twice a week. So I must just go home till work turns up someulu Parting made Evelyn almost old-fashioned in her tenderness. " It's so far, Northuml land," she said wistfully. * I do wish it v nearer. But I shall write to you every day. Alex; and it won't be so very long. Oh. I can't think why your people go and bury themselves in Northumberland! " " Nor can I. It's out of the world. You can't get from there anywhere. But beggars and parsons can't be choo-- " People ought to be able to live where they d. p.." Kvelyn exclaimed with emphasis. the depth of her emotion almost justifying her miti- 240 SUCH SWEET SORROW. 241 gated profanity. "And a country rectory, too! I know the horrid holes. There's one comfort, anyhow you'll have lots of time for writing to me." " Oh, won't I just! Evey, I'll write you such letters as long as that. And I'll leave no stone unturned to get work immediately." " Oh, as to work, I'm not a bit afraid. Sir Nathaniel says positively you shall have the first appointment he can find to give you." " But your father told me just the opposite; he said Sir Nathaniel assured him it was impos- sible nowadays to make interest with govern- ment departments, and that nothing but merit could be considered in filling up public appoint- ments." " You silly boy! you're just as bad as Daddy! How innocent you men are! Isn't it precisely the same thing? What was language made for? " "To say, 'What a darling you are, Evey!' And lips were made to kiss you with. When you call me a silly boy, I always feel it's the highest compliment. Isn't it funny to think that thou- sands and thousands of lovers have said just the same things to one another in their time as you and I say now? and yet, you and I are never tired of saying them." THE INCIDKMAL lilSHOP. " I don't think they can have said quite such nice things," Evelyn faltered, with a mi>t in her es. Just the very same, I'm told; but, Evey, they couldn't have felt them as you and I feel the: " Oh, dear no," Evelyn cried, clenching her little fists hard. " Fancy Daddy and Mums ever having talked like this or held hands as we do. But people were different in those days, I sup- pose. And yet, I don't quite know; for Romeo and Juliet was written ever and ever so long ago; I was reading it last night: and Romeo and Juliet talk much the same as we do." " That's rather a compliment to us, E isn't i: Rude boy; you shouldn't say so." "Another f..r that. Thank you. Well, I wUh I was sure Sir Nathaniel really meant it. But your father gave me quite the opposite im- pression. And it was your father who saw him." " But he's written to me," Evelyn cried. "Look here; this is his letter. He couldn't speak plai: Alex took it and read "Mv DEAR Miss GLISSON: (It was * Evey ' once. Ah, these cruel years; how they rob us SUCH SWEET SORROW. 243 of everything!) Well, I am sorry to have to write and disappoint you. Your father tells me there is a young Oxford man (I forget his name) whom you desire to see appointed to an in- spectorship in your district. Now, if I were not a government servant, I should hasten at once to oblige a lady. Unfortunately, however, placed as I am, it is impossible for me, consistently with the rules of the service, to exert any personal in- fluence in favour of any particular candidate. Ap- pointments are made by the department entirely by merit. No doubt, your protege has merit; and if so, his chances will be as good as anyone else's. But not otherwise. Government is government. " We hope to be on the river shortly, when my wife promises herself the pleasure of bring- ing the electric launch round to Dorchester, and will ask you to go for a few picnics with us. Meanwhile, I am, with it used to be, love, " Yours most sincerely, " NATHANIEL MERRITON." Alex scanned it dubiously. " Well, I can't say/' he said in a disappointed tone, " I see any- thing in it of the nature of a promise/' "Oh, you ineffable goose!" Evelyn ex- claimed. " What could he say plainer, unless he wrote ' I will make a job of it and appoint your 244 TR1 man, if he's as ignorant a- a turkey-cock 1 ? Though why turkey-cocks should he more ig- norant than any other birds I haven't the faint- est conception. But look here he underlines \ 1)\ merit/ And he says, ' no doubt your protege has merit; if so' What could be clearer than that without absolutely rendering hin Me to be sent to the Tower, or what- ever else they do nowadays with wicked mi- ters? And then he puts: ' It was /::ry once/ And he goes out of his way to tell me Lady Mer- n will call with the electric launch. Why. he's a dear, Sir Nathaniel! If I had him here tl minute. I do declare, I'd just throw my ar right round his neck and kiss him! " In that case. I have no reason to regret his absence ." There you are with your horrid little sneer- ing Oxford epigrams. I know that style, sir. Little Beddingley can talk like that. But, AI you're going away; so I'll forgive you anything/' " And -me he'll appoint me? " " Sure? A gun isn't in it. I know he means it. Before Christmas, too. And then, Alex " She nestled up to him. 14 x :nen are not in such a hurry, know." Alex put in maliciously. " You />n long engagements! " SUCH SWEET SORROW. 245 " I said ' moderately long/ And then, you weren't going away. Just think, I shan't see you, perhaps, till Christmas! But I shall write to you every day. Oh, dear, oh dear; Dorchester will seem so unfurnished without you!" " Well, good bye, Evey. I think we ought to say good bye now. I must catch that last train; and I have to take an official farewell of your mother in the drawing-room. She's been awfully good, as mothers go, to let us have such a nice long time out here alone together. Moth- ers never were young, you see; they don't know how we long to be left to ourselves. But she's good, as mothers go. I must go back to her." " Good bye, darling; good bye! You are such a dear. I wish you weren't such a dear; I wish I'd taken little Beddingley for I could say good bye to him for ever and never mind it. But you, Alex, oh dear, I don't know how I'm ever to get on for six months, six whole months without you!" CHAPTER XXV. THE CLOUDS THICKEN. ALL that evening, the Bishop sat close in his study. He was consulting books books, books, books, innumerable. It was a question of conscience he was engaged in resolving. And how resolve it? What reparation could a n make for such a sin as he had committed? For years he had shirked it; now, he could shirk it no longer. He must escape at last from thU faKe position in the best way possible. His first idea was to make reparation for his ng by bringing down upon himself some fit- ting punishment. Suppose, for example, he were to forge a cheque in such a way that it was cer- tain of detection? Then he would doubtless be tried, found guilty, and duly imprisoned. Rut, what difficulties in the In the first pli if the signature was obviously false, all the world would merely say poor Dr. Glisson had gone mad; and instead of punishing him. they would pack him off to a comfortable private asylum, 246 THE CLOUDS THICKEN. 247 with all the consideration his age and rank sug- gested. Or, even if he succeeded, he would be punished, not for the wrong he had really done, but for a wrong he had only formally and peni- tentially committed. No, the cheque was use- less. It shirked the real difficulty. He must in some way atone for his own actual crime; and the only true atonement implied confession. Confession! There was the horror. He could have borne it for himself; but Olive, Olive! How could he ever let her know that all his life with her, all his life since the very first day he met her, was a deception and a falsehood that he was not Cecil Glisson but Tom Pringle the sailor that he had never been a clergyman that everything she believed about him was lies, lies, lies, from the very beginning? All the rest of the world counted for nothing to him now; but to let Olive know that the man she had loved, believed in, trusted never existed at all oh, it was more than he could even endure to think of. And behind this dread of disillusionment for Olive rose another terrible spectre which he feared to look upon. A professional spectre. He was not, he had never been, a priest at all. Yet you cannot live for thirty years as a priest, you cannot hold the cure of souls and rise to be a 248 THI: INCH-: bishop, without gr \ degrees thoroughly ecclesiastical in your ideas and i Tom ecil Glisson, whatever he called him- self for even to himself he had half forgot by this time his own original name was now in all essentials, save the spiritual ones recog- d by high sacerdotalists, an Anglican bishop. He thought and felt and saw things bi>hop-\\ And his terrible responsibility came home to him that night with a bishop's acquired professional sentiment. He magnified his office the office that was not and had never been his; he knew he had been instrumental in ordaining false priests who thought themselves true ones; in rying couples who in the eyes of the Church e never married; in upsetting in a thousand ys the organisation of Christianity in hi ous parishes and his present diocese. His of- fence was rank. He was an interloper and a fraud; he had caused many men to sin unwit- tingly; he had polluted and distorted the true vam of the means of grace; his guilt before was great and unutterable. He was not ire that he had not committed that un- forgivable sin on which he had preached in time more than one eloquent sermon. He stood abased before elf-convicted offender. Yet deep as was his sense of that ecclesi- THE CLOUDS THICKEN. 249 astical wrong, his feeling of shame before Olive was profounder even now than his consciousness of wrong before the eyes of the Almighty. Om- niscience knew always the full extent of his criminality; Olive did not. Omniscience could allow for the chain of accident; but how confess to Olive the long-continued deception? Indeed, in his heart of hearts, it was not the sense of sin at all that oppressed the Bishop; it was the sense of a deep wrong done to others. Like all greater natures, when brought face to face with the consequences of their acts, 'twas not forgiveness for himself that he asked, but some chance of making reparation to others, some loophole of escape from the injustice he was doing them. If he broke Olive's heart, what mattered forgiveness? if he caused others to go astray, what could personal repentance avail to repair that evil? Nay rather, would it not com- fort him to hide his head in nethermost hell that night if only so he could undo the harm he had done to his innocent Olive? All night long, he tossed and turned on his bed, unable to sleep, unable to dismiss this ap- palling torment. He stood at the parting of two impossible ways. He could no longer go on as he had been going for years; he could not yet turn aside and own the truth to Olive. 250 THI AL BISHOP. Early next morning, distracted with doubt, before the first cart rumbled over the bridge, he rose and dressed himself. He eat no breakfast, in his present fierce mood it was a sort of cold comfort to him to mortify the flesh but started on foot for the railway station, whence he took the first train of the day to Oxford. Dr. Littlemore of Oriel was a saintly man the last survivor of the famous group which had included Now man, Pusey, and Keble. To Dr. Littlemore he would go, then, and lay before him, under the seal of confession, this difficult question. He arrived, all breathless, at the gates of Oriel. It \\as still early in the day, and the doc- tor had not breakfasted. His servant doubted whet her he could yet see anyone. But the Bishop was urgent. This was a question of dis- ; could Dr. Littlemore give him an inter- immediate He was ushered into a formal oak-panelled study. Presently, the great casuist crept in, a little white-haired, ferret-faced man, thin, spare, and bent, with ascetic features, and keen grey eyes that even in age had not lost their sharp- ness. He shook the Bishop's hot hand. Full of fierce emotion, the Bishop fell on his knees at once before the great confessor, and ask THE CLOUDS THICKEN. 251 whether the father would receive a confession, treating it, whatever came, as sacrosanct and inviolable? Dr. Littlemore, with a fox-like smile, an- swered at once and unhesitatingly: " Yes, if it were murder." " But if it were a sin against the Church a sin against the Holy Ghost?" the Bishop cried, with his livid white face uplifted. " A sin that may have caused many to go astray? Would you keep it secret still, under the seal of confes- sion? " The confessor hesitated. " If it were some- thing the suppression of which entailed danger to souls," he answered slowly " I hardly know as yet: give me time to consider. The point is one which has not practically occurred to me." He suspected that unbelief had overcome the Bishop. " I cannot give time," the Bishop answered, trembling with anxiety. " I must have an an- swer now. Will you hear me, and keep my se- cret?" " I will," Dr. Littlemore replied after a short pause for thought. " It is best to hear. A man in your position in the Church would not come to me thus were it not for some grave and urgent reason." 17 THE INCIDINIAL i:i>HOP. The Bishop knelt before him like a little child, in a fervour of repentance, and poured forth in one wild flood the whole story of the secret that he had caged in his own breast for so in;my years of gnawing silence. He told all. without the slightest attempt at palliation or self-vindication. He explained the whole suite of accidents that led to the deception, inde but the deception itself he acknowledged with- out reserve or excuse. He made things if any- thing rather worse than they were instead of making them better. A fever of penitence and self-abasement was upon him. He longed to utter the whole truth, to have it out for once, to gain a moment's sympathy, or if not sympa- thy at least a hearing, from some fellow-creature. The one person to whom under any other cir- cumstances he would have poured forth every- thing irally Olive; and Olive was now the one person on earth to whom it was most impossible he should let out one word of it. Dr. Littlemore listened with an and horrified face. The shock was unutterable. To the tremulous old priest, this was the worst crime the heart of man could conceive, a sin of the deepest blackness against the majesty of heaven. More than that, it was a sin the far- reaching consequences of which were beyond cal- THE CLOUDS THICKEN. 253 dilation. Theft and murder were nothing to it. It was a conspiracy against souls. Men and women were living in unblessed unions, uncon- secrated hands were dispensing the sacramental mysteries, endless confusion had crept into the divine order of things, all because this one man had rashly dared to constitute himself what only the organised voice of the divine Church itself could suffice to make him. He had sinned the sin of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Dr. Little- more almost waited to see earth open wide and swallow him up visibly as it swallowed up the pretenders to the office of Aaron. At the end, he shut his eyes and remained long silent. Words failed his emotion. The Bishop bent his awed head and awaited judg- ment. " The first question for me/' the casuist said at last, speaking slowly and deliberately, with deep suppressed feeling, " is, ought I to have promised to keep your secret? Shall I do right in allowing a man who is not even a priest to continue fulfilling episcopal functions? " The Bishop brushed away that question with one conclusive phrase. " Whatever comes, I am done with all that; I will never again act either as priest or as bishop/' " Even so," the old man faltered, his lips too grown white, " am I doing my duty by the irch of God in concealing the fact of such e irregularities? " The Bishop bowed his head. " That is for you," he said, " to answer, Father." They sat long in counsel. Dr. Littlemore prayed, exhorted, deliberated. But slowly the Bishop began to perceive that they two were attacking opposite problems. The casuist was thinking mainly of how he could save this erring soul by confession and repentance. The Bishop cared nothing for his individual soul his soul might answer for i ij-doing, and welcome, if only he could save Olive from that terrible dis- illusion. It was not eternal torment for him- self he dreaded; he could welcome eternal tor- ment like many other brave men; but a mom of fierce suffering, of incredible horror for the man he had loved and deceived and wor- shipped was more than he could face: his whole soul shrank from it. I cannot tell my wife," he cried; " I cannot tell my wife! What becomes of myself, here or hereafter, I care very little; let Heaven punish my sin: but 1 mut duty was to save his own THE CLOUDS THICKEN. 255 soul, and after his own, the souls of others. That a person in a fever of repentance should wholly disregard his own future welfare seemed to him incredible. But the Bishop was built on broader lines. " Let my soul burn for ever, in burning hell, if such atonement is needful," he cried with passionate self-abandonment: "what is my one poor soul to Olive's happiness? " They wrestled together for an hour. At the end of that time, the Bishop went forth, no more relieved in mind than when he entered. The saintly man had suggested no way out of this hopeless difficulty, save the one hateful way of telling Olive which made the difficulty. Telling the world as well that was easy enough to do; but telling Olive also; that was far more impos- sible. CHAPTER XXVI. AT BAY. WHEN he returned to Dorchester, Mrs. Glis- son noticed his worn and drawn expression. He had the face of a man who has spent the night in fighting wild beasts at Ephesus. His mouth I rigid; deep wrinkled lines marked the cor- ners of his eyes; his lips were ashy pale; his check was colourless. She asked anxiously what was wrong. He put her off with an evasive answer. No, he was quite well; it was only this question of forged orders that was troubling his peace; he / get to the bottom of it. He had consulted the Fathers, and would consult them further. Now the question was once raised, he could have no peace as bishop of this diocese till he felt he had settled it. He salved his conscience at the DM time by saying to himself that tl lit- erally true; it was indeed a question of forged orders or their equivalent that disturbed his spirit. 256 AT BAY. 257 His confession, he found, had brought him no nearer the end. For 'twas not of repentance, of forgiveness, of his own poor soul that he thought, but of restitution, of reparation for the wrong he had done, and of Olive. An assur- ance at that moment that his sin was forgiven would have availed him little. The wrong not the sin it was that troubled him. Forgiveness of his sin would have left Olive untouched. Olive's disillusion was the one dread that haunted him. He shut himself up in his study once more, and locked the door behind him lest anyone should chance to come in and disturb him. Then he seated himself by his desk, buried his head in his hands, and proceeded to think out this in- soluble problem. * The longer he thought of it, the more insolu- ble it grew. He could only arrive at one conclu- sion for the moment. Never again from that day forth would he perform any clerical or epis- copal function. He was done with lying, and with acting out the lie. How to carry out this resolve he had no clear conception; but the re- solve was there. For Olive's sake, he shrank from revealing what he ought to reveal that he was not and never had been really a clergyman. But at least he could refrain in future from add- 258 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. ing to his wrong-doing, and from extending the possible field of evil by ordaining men who were not canonically ordained and by confirming chil- dren without proper authority. That meant, of course, that he must resign his see: " His bish- opric let another take " rang in his ears per- petually. And when he reflected (in his honestly pro- fessional way) what " a sphere of usefulness " the bishopric afforded him, he was truly sorry for it. But give it up he must. That was the one thing certain. Though it struck him as curious, for all his humility, that he, the one bishop who l>een even a priest, should be the only man on the bench then strenuously engaged in fighting the battle of the poor, the unemplo\ the downcast, the miserable. He would li been a good Christian, but for the misfortune of umstances; what a pity that circumstances must deprive God's poor of their chief protector in the English episcop.r More than that, he must give up at once every advantage he had gained from his false position. That meant poverty for Olive and E lyn, of course; but Olive could bear poverty bet- ter than disgrace; and as to Evelyn, why Evelyn would shortly marry, and then But would Evel\n marrv? When he came AT BAY. 259 to think of it, her marriage depended upon young Thornbury receiving that problematical appoint- ment at the Education Office. And his receiving that appointment was dependent again upon the Bishop's recommendation. But the recom- i mendation was effective only because Sir Na- thaniel believed that he, Tom Pringle or Cecil Glisson, was and would continue to be Bishop of Dorchester. Supposing to-day he were to write to Sir Nathauiel that he was about to re- sign his office and let another man take his bish- opric, would Sir Nathaniel still think it desir- able to appoint young Thornbury? Nay; if this change of front was to be effective at all, must he not try from this moment forth to prevent any new step being taken on any hand which could add to the sum of his unauthorised action? A recommendation to the Education Office was not in itself, to be sure, an episcopal act; but it had been made by him as bishop; and not having taken effect as yet, it must be nipped at once, at whatever hazard. The Bishop, however, did not act precipi- tately. Episcopal training militates against pre- cipitancy. He sat long in an absorbed attitude before he proceeded to write that irrevocable letter. But at last he wrote it. Nor did he give away his case and his cause all at once. He 2 6o THE IN r irF.NTAI. BISHOP. wrote, not as one might have expected, in a tur- moil of remorse, but carefully, calmly, deliber- ately, guardedly. He left loop-holes of esca he abstained from saying the worst with too abrupt an insistence. He explained to Sir Na- thaniel that since their last interview a consider- able change had come over his convictions. He felt he could no longer be Bishop of Dorchester. " Do not ask," he wrote, " what private reasons have moved me to this tardy resolve. I have not yet made them public, nor do I know whether I shall ever make them public. But the resolve itself exists. It is absolute and imperative. You will conjecture as your first guess that my faith haken; in these days of growing doubt, that I natural inference. But it is nevertheless a wrong one. My o n\ ictions as to the fundani tal truths of the constitution of the universe main unaltered. Purely personal and jni causes lead me to feel I can no longer fulfil the office of bishop. You will ask, once more, why I make you in particular the first confidant of this strange determination. I answer, because yor ie person of whom, as Bishop, I last asked an official favour. Under all these circum- stai I cannot persist in my recommendation of Mr. Alexander Thornluny >f Merton Coll for an Inspectorship of Church Schools in the AT BAY. 2 6l diocese of Dorchester. I ask you, therefore, so far as I am concerned, to cancel this recommenda- tion; though I feel it would be wrong in any other way to interfere with Mr. Thornbury's nat- ural chances." He is an able young man, whose merits are wholly outside the present ques- tion." He read the letter over many times before dispatching it. It did not say enough; and yet it said too much. He realised that to send it was to commit himself irrevocably. Yet he would send it for all that; and to make sure of its going, he would even adopt the unusual course of carrying it out himself to the neighbouring post-box for he was, as you will have perceived, an unconventional bishop. Strange to say, for one of his office, he had no petty pride. He looked about him for a stamp. There were none on the desk. He unlocked the door and called out softly: " Evelyn!" " Yes, Daddy," Evelyn answered. Her unconcerned girlish voice smote the Bishop to the quick. Could she have answered so blithely if she knew why he called her? The thought made his voice unusually solemn. " My child," he said in an austere tone, " I want a penny stamp." He said no more than that, but his accent and his look fairly terrified Evelyn. 2 62 THE INCIDKNTAL BISHOP. Why, Papa, what's the matter?" she cried, looking hard at him. His face was twitching. Nothing, nothing, my child," the Bishop answered hastily. " That is to say, nothing ph ical. I have been troubled, as you know, Iv lyn, about this this question of forged orders; and it has caused me, I confess, much mental agony. I have been writing a letter, my dear, which I wish to post myself; and I want a penny stamp for it." He spoke with confusion, in a hesitating which struck Evelyn as doubtful. She snatched up the letter, as it lay, face downward, on the blotting-book. "Why, it's to Sir Nathaniel!" she exclaimed eagerly. Ye-es," the Bishop admitted, trembling, " it is to Sir Nathaniel." Evelyn's face flushed fiery red. " This is my business," she said, leaning t and suddenly ring it open. " Papa, Papa, you haven't said anything foolish? " I don't know, Evey," the Bishop answered, thankful this time to circumstances. " I have said what was inevitable." rlvn read the letter all through, and then laid it down, white-faced. In a second, she real- ised that this \vas a very serious matter. For Evelyn was no fool. Then, as often happens AT BAY. 263 with girls of her sort, so great a crisis brought out all the latent gentleness of her heart, con- cealed as a rule under a purely conventional garb of outer flippancy. She was not angry; she was not indignant. She merely bent down a very sobered face and kissed the poor soul- wearied man twice, tenderly, on the forehead. " If you must send it, Papa," she said slowly, " you must send it." " I must send it, darling," her father an- swered, finding suddenly the relief of tears. " But, oh, Evey, your mother! " Evelyn looked at him with a bursting heart. " I don't know what it means," she answered. " But it means something very bad. And it will kill Mother." " She believes in me so," the poor man burst out, almost yielding up his secret. " She ought to believe in you," Evelyn an- swered with pride: "for we all believe in you, and we have somebody worth believing in. Daddy, Daddy, I have sometimes made fun of your scruples, but, darling, in my soul I have always honoured them. I have a father and a mother I can respect from my heart ; and I know you can have done nothing Mother and I could be ashamed of." She flung her arms round his neck and kissed THE INCID1.NTAL BISHOP. him, passionately. But just at that second, such a declaration of faith, made from a full heart in a moment of emotion, was the very worst blow the poor wavering Bishop could have received. If only she had reproached him! He wiped his brow and held her off from him, trembling, as though afraid lest he should pollute her. My child, my child," he cried, in his agony of self- abasement, " you lacerate me, with your kind- ness. You are wrong; you are wrong. I have done things to plunge your mother and yourself into shame and misery. You could be angry with me and sin not." I don't believe it," Evelyn answered stoutly, o Bishop groaned. " But it is true," he reiterated. " Yet, Evey, for heaven's sake, cl let your mother know it. I didn't mean to tell yon; but if she were to know, it would kill her; it would kill her." "She doesn't know; she shall never kn Evelyn cried. " And whatevt r it ix it i^n't true; I know that beforehand. You didn't do it; I w you couldn't; or if you did it. it was riijht and good, though all the world and all the churches as well were to rise and say it \ anathema maranatha. I know you well enough to know this, dear Daddy that whatever you do is right, right, right; and that even if I AT BAY. 265 thought it wrong till I knew you had done it, I should see it was right when I could know and understand exactly how you came to do it." The Bishop rose, agitated. Her faith in him almost seemed to justify him to himself. He took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. " My child," he said, quivering, " if you knew all, I think you would forgive me. You would see how it was forced upon me by a strange con- currence of circumstance. But your mother your dear mother who has trusted me so long and believed in me so fully, how can I ever tell her? " "She is an angel!" Evelyn cried. "And I have behaved like a little beast to her all my life. I see that now. Mother, dear Mother she must never know. Tell me, if you like; but never tell Mother. I can bear anything; I am strong enough and young enough, and I know I shall understand. But Mother, who trusts you her trust is not like mine; she trusts you because she thinks you are incapable of doing the things she believes to be wrong; / trust you because I know that even if you did the things I once thought wrong, it is you who have done them. And that makes them all right. It guarantees them, so to speak. You know I care nothing for your rules and your laws. It is the man I 266 THK INCIM IOP. c for. Not what a man doe>. l>ut what IK stamps him. If a man whom I know to be as good as you does anything that seems I know there must be a difference in the way he does it. That's all very modern and wicked, I dare say, but it's the way I'm built. So you can tell me all. Whatever it is, I know beforehand I shall sympathise." The Bishop sank into his chair, covered his face with his hands once more, and burst out with a low wai! I am not a clergy- man. I was never ordained at all. I am a mere pretender." rlyn bent over him wildly, caught him hard in her arms, and kissed him with a sudden flood of desperate tears. " Is that all?" she (1, half laughing. " Only that, dear Dadd\ "/*///" the Bishop exclaimed, aghast, draw- ing back, and staring at her. " What do mean by all? Isn't that bad enough. I Evelyn hugged him in her relief. "Oh, if that's all," she ans\ ! rawing her breath, " 1 don't mind about that. I thought it was much rse: something really dreadful, don't \ know something that would ha. <-d and killed dear Mother something about someone else you understand what I mean, Daddy!" The Bishop stared at her in surprise. He AT BAY. 267 did not realise that her mind had turned at once, as a woman's mind always turns at the vague suggestion of impending evil, to woman's worst bugbear superseded affection. Evelyn had jumped at the conclusion that there was a woman in it somewhere. A mere ecclesiastical doubt w r as to her quite trifling. " This is worse, darling, worse," the Bishop cried, shaking his head solemnly. " Evelyn, I am not in orders at all. I may have sinned the unforgivable sin, who knows? Not that I mind for that, but for your mother, darling." Evelyn hugged him again wildly. " Oh, that's nothing," she answered; " let the unfor- givable sin go: " for she had truly said that she was not bishopy. " If it's only that, I don't care a pin. I was afraid it was much worse a pre- vious marriage, perhaps; or another woman; one reads about such things in books: though even then, I should have known it was you, and understood everything: and we might have man- aged to keep her away for always from dear Mother. But if it's only false orders, it was ac- cident, of course. I don't need you to explain; I know about it all in my heart already." The Bishop began to tell her in a very few words the tale of the John Wesley. Evelyn lis- tened to his story with evident impatience. 18 THI AL BISHOP. " Don't bother about details, dear," she cr 14 \\"c must only think now about sparing Moth- er. You have written that letter, and you had better post it. It will ease your mind, I dare say. Never mind about Alex. \Ye can wait. I'll get you a penny stamp, and then I'll run out with it." The Bishop clutched it hard. " No, no," he said; " you won't, my child. I shall post it my- self. I won't trust it to anybody. I have begun this matter, and now I shall pull through with it." elyn noted the way he clutched it, and her suspicion deepened. " Very well, dear," she an- iTed. " I'll get you the stamp; and then, you and I will go out and post it together." The Bishop felt relieved even by this partial confession. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. When Evelyn returned with the stamp, she found him still gazing, with his eyes on vacancy, and muttering to himself incoherently: "the sin of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. They and all that appertained to them went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them; and they perished from among the congregation." CHAPTER XXVII. EVELYN ACTS. As they returned from the post, Evelyn caught sight suddenly of a well-known figure, in a grey tweed suit, hurrying up from the railway station. She started in surprise and rushed up to the wearer of the suit, excited. " Why, Alex! " she exclaimed, forgetting to be flippant. " And without telegraphing beforehand to tell me you were coming! " " I didn't know I could manage it, darling, till I passed through Birmingham. It was a close fit of two trains, and I was afraid of disap- pointing you. But I'm on my way to town, to see Sir Nathaniel Merriton. He has written to make me an appointment for an interview. So I expect it's all right unless, of course, when he sees me, he doesn't like the look of me." " He couldn't help liking the look of you unless he was a donkey; which he isn't, I know, but a dear; a second class dear, you stupid; the 269 THE INCIM BISHOP. middle-aged sort of dear that you needn't look like that over." " But, Evey, what's the matter? You've been crying, I can see, and you look so wor- 1." Evelyn drew him down towards the ri behind the bushes of the shrubbery, where she sank on a garden seat, and burst into tears im- mediately. The very unwontedness of such con- duct on her part, as the modern young lady, made it only the more impress " Darling," she exclaimed, all her bravado failing her, " a dreadful thing is happening; and nobody else knows. I'm so glad you've come, to help me and advise me. This bother about the parson at Reading who wasn't in orders at all is unhinging Daddy's mind. I don't know what has happened to him. He thinks he isn't a clergyman himself at all. I'm afraid to leave him one minute alone, for fear he should tell Mother. So far, he has told no one but I believe; but this morning he's full of it. He ran over to Oxford before breakfast, like a mad- man, and came back quite flurried. He's firmly convinced he has done the same thing him- and committed the sin of Korah, Dathan, and A-\\hat'-hi--name." Alex took her hand in his. " Dearest," he EVELYN ACTS. 27 1 whispered very low; " and I thought I was com- ing to make you so happy." " So you do, Alex; so you do; I love to have you with me: but, it's so dreadful about Daddy. And do you know what he's just done posted a letter to Sir Nathaniel to say that he withdraws his recommendation. '' Alex whistled to himself. " That's bad," he answered. " We must counteract that. Though I suppose of course he gave the real reason." "Yes, in part; but not quite as badly as he gave it to me. Not so definitely I mean. He dealt more in generalities. But I can see his mind is going; I've been afraid of it for weeks. I never knew him worry, not even over the chain- makers' strike at Cradley, as he's worried over this business. And he came to me this morning with the wildest story. Oh, quite an absurd story!" " About himself? " " Yes. He says he isn't himself at all, but some other person. A common sailor. You know, there was a man blown up by those pirate people in the Pacific somewhere when Daddy was nearly killed; I've heard the story so often that I forget the details and it told upon him terribly at the time, I've heard Mums say, so that he could never be induced to allude to it 272 THi \L BISHOP. afterwards. Well, that was one thing that un- hinged his mind a little once; and now, this other thing coming up, he's gone back to that again, 1 declares he isn't himself at all, that his name ifl never Cecil Glisson, and that he's really this dead sailor, Tom Pringle or something." \\ hat an extraordinary idea! But, Evey, you ought at once to see a doctor." " It would break Mother's heart. And then, the disgrace of " But you can't keep it all to yourself. Other people must know soon. And the trouble is too much for you. You must have advice about When do you go up to town? " To-morrow morning, darling. I suppose I can sleep here? " " Of course. Oh, I am so glad you came. Yes, I'll do as you say. I'll go up with you to- morr " But your mother " " Mother or no; this is no time to stand upon trifles. "Besides, chaperons are abolished: Madge e an anachronism. I'll go with you, Alex; and I'll see Sir Nathaniel." " Evey, you're sure it's a delusion? You're sure he has fancies? It can't be true? You see, we mustn't force his hand, drive him into a confession, must we? " EVELYN ACTS. 273 " Alex, do you think I don't know my own father better than that the dear darling? Why, he couldn't tell a lie, not if his life depended on it. Even now, in this delusion, he never thinks of himself; he thinks only of the effect upon me and Mother. It's just a freak of conscience. He has brooded on the wickedness of this man at Reading so long that he begins to believe he's done the same himself. But he couldn't do it, poor dear; he's a vast deal too innocent. Why, he couldn't go on with it for two days together. He'd let it out in half an hour; he could never keep up a great organised deception. Though if he'd really done it, it wouldn't much matter either; for whatever he does, it's his nature to , do it for sufficient reasons." " Evey, what faith you have! You are a true woman." " Faith in the men I love, Alex; yes, faith to the very end. Not faith that they'll never do wrong; I don't care for that kind; but faith in them still even if I know they have done it. I told him so just now. It doesn't matter to me whether it's true or not, so far as that goes. He's still himself. And do you think something he once did before I was born is going to blot out the memory of all these years that I have lived and known him the memory of what he is and always has been? 1 should think of him the same if you could prove to me this minute that he committed a murder in New South Wales thirty years ago. I should say: * Poor dc what could have driven him to do it?'" CHAPTER XXVIII. OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. BY the first train next morning, Evelyn went up to Paddington. In these latter days of the decline and fall of the chaperon, on which she had insisted, her mother did not even attempt to prevent her. The bicycle has entailed a gen- eral decadence of chaperonage. She went openly with Alex, and accompanied him to the door of the Education Office. There, she sent up her card to Sir Nathaniel, with the pencilled words "A. T. is here also; but he can wait. My need is urgent." In a few minutes, a Private Secretary with a most official face, a big black moustache, and a languid drawl, came down to the waiting room. " Sir Nathaniel will see you at once," he drawled out. Very pale and trembling, Evelyn followed him up to the great man's sanctum. As soon as the door was closed, Sir Nathaniel leaned back in his revolving chair, folded his hands before him, and stared hard in her face with 275 276 THE INCIDENTAL BISHOP. comical resignation. <>u are bent upon making a job of it? " he murmured slowly. " You mean to turn out the Government! A; are, my dear young lady, that this action of irs makes the appointment of your protege let us call him your protege still it preve complications absolutely impossible? " Evelyn half broke down; tears floated in her eyes. "Oh, Sir Nathaniel." she burst out, I haven't come about that. I've come about Papa. A terrible thing has happened. Have you read his 1. " God bless my soul, no," the Secret ed, astonished. " Is it as bad as all tl He turned over a great pile of corresponds that lay littered in front of him. " Here it he said. " unread. Tutnell told me it was im- portant; but I haven't had time to glance at it." He skimmed through it hastily. Then his face grew gr; Well, what does thi- m he asked, with a dim ini^ivini:. It seemed to 1>ode evil. He half suspected what Kvelyn herself had fancied an open scandal. Could the Bishop have run away with some other man's housemaid? " "Papa wrote that letter," Evelyn said, schooling herself to talk calmly, " under the in- fluence of well, very intense emotion. I saw OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 277 it when he had finished; and I'm afraid Sir Nathaniel, help me out with this, do; I'm afraid he wrote it in a fit of delusion." " Clearly," Sir Nathaniel answered with the promptitude of an official whose business it is to explain away everything. " Well, that's all," Evelyn said, and glanced up at him tearfully. She looked so much prettier, so much ten- derer, so much more womanly that day, in her simple morning dress with her tearful eyes, than he had ever before seen her that Sir Nathaniel was touched. He rose and moved over toward her. Then he laid one hand on her shoulder and took hers in the other. He was a kind old friend, and Evelyn let him hold it. " My poor child," he said, in a voice of un- wonted softness, " that is enough. I see it clearly now. This trouble about that rascal at Reading has told upon his overworked brain. But we may set all straight yet. Does Mrs. Glisson know of it? " " No," Evelyn answered. " Thank Heaven, no." She had grown into a woman at once. " And I want to spare her," she went on. " If she knows, it will kill her. Daddy has been every- thing in the world to Mother. Nobody has heard but myself. I only tell you because he 278 'nil !OP - ic that letter. I want you to take no I ami I want you to advice me what to do about it." Sir Nathaniel took counsel with his watch. He was accustomed to acting with prompt it r. N young Thornbury here now? " he asked. s. He came up to town with me/' Nathaniel hummed and hawed, and beat a devil's tattoo with his fingers on the table. " Ilr mustn't Stop/ 1 he answered, after a delib- era Under the circumstances, it tild be impossible for me to see him to-day. Let me think; he must go; but where can he ou later? Say at the confectioner's at the bottom of Regent Street. You know it. I suppose. That will do. won't " Perfectly. red. The great man wrote three lines and pi,: them in an envelope. Then he rang a hand-bell. " For Mr. Thornbury," he said; " in the waiting room below; to cancel appointment." The Private Secretary took it and nodded. " Now, look here, Evey," Sir Nathaniel went on " I may call you Evey, mayn't I, as I'm t going to disappoint you? You are a voting lady who thoroughly understands official 1 guage." " I trust so," Kvelyn answered with a faint access of hope. OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 279 " Yes, you do/' the man of office said, clinch- ing it. " And you also understand official neces- sities. Most girls are born fools; you happen to belong to the opposite category. You will see at once that your coming here this morning with Mr. Thornbury and trying to see me was extremely ill-timed. In point of fact, fatal. Therefore I should like to assure you categoric- ally that before you arrived last night in fact I had already made up my mind not to appoint Mr. Thornbury, but another person. To that resolution I must adhere. Do you thoroughly comprehend me? " He looked her full in the face. His eyes met hers. Evelyn glanced at them from under her eyelids with unwonted timidity. Even her ir- reverent soul was awed for the moment by the gravity of the situation. " I I think I follow/' she faltered dubiously. " I'm not quite sure that you do," Sir Na- thaniel answered, laying his hand again gently on the poor child's shoulder. " I'm sorry to dis- appoint you, Evey; but exigencies of state, you know: the service is the service, and the country is exacting. Therefore, your friend must not expect this appointment." Evelyn lifted her eyes timidly. " Oh, thank you/' she said with a very short gasp. THE INCIPFN'I Sir Nathaniel froze. " There is nothing at all to thank me for; quite the contrary," he an- swered. Evelyn smiled in spite of herself. "Then thank you for nothing," she broke out with a spice of her usual devilry. " That's better; that's better! Now we un- derstand one another. You will break it to young Thornbury unofficially, of course? That's cellect excellent. Evey, you're one of the most intelligent and sensible girls I know. If you were a man, I think I would appoint you my pri- vate secretary. You have a head on your shoul- der hank you again, Sir Nathaniel." The official smiled coldly. But the corner of his eye belied his mouth. It was almost human. Well, ha that point for evr he said dryly, " and made it quite clear that noth- ing can be dor :nay as well get on to the other business. Stop; one moment; before we pass on, tell Thornbury that he had better say nothing about it. I think I shall now delay the it for a fortnight, in order to make enquiries about suitable persons. You may tell him not from me. but as a private hint from yourself, that you believe the other man will receive the post, let us say in ten days or so." OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 2 8l Evelyn nodded her head. " Oh, thank you, thank you." " Not at all," Sir Nathaniel continued. " I wish you wouldn't say thank you. It's embar- rassing, very. Such a compromising word. If Tutnell happened to come in, he might foolishly suppose I had been promising you something. And it is against our principles in this office ever to make any promises to anybody." " I will take care not to countenance such a foolish misconception," Evelyn replied demurely. " That's well," the official went on. " Now, let us talk about your father. This is bad news, Evey. I'm distressed to hear it." Evelyn broke down again, this time sobbing outright. Sir Nathaniel leant over her in com- ical agitation. " My dear child," he cried, " my dear child, not that, whatever you do! Suppose somebody were to come in? So very unofficial! " Evelyn did her best to dry her eyes, not quite successfully. Sir Nathaniel bent over her, and tried to soothe her. After a while she grew calmer, and told her little story as well as she was able, suppressing part, but mentioning enough to let the Secretary judge the gravity of the situation. He listened attentively; then he said at last: "Of course this is all delusion. His letter to me shows even that he had not THE INCIDKM AI. I:I>HOP. fully made up his mind at the moment when he wrote, what particular form the delusion should take. It is vague and general. But I don't think there is cause for any serious alarm. Your fa: is not a man of the insane temperament. He systematically overworked himself, and may ]\ a passing attack like this, due to nothing more than disordered nerves. But he will never go mad; you may take my word for it. " " You think not?" EveK -rasping at this ray of hope with profuse gratitude. " No, certainly not," the man of experience answered. " Remember. I was a doctor m\ before I went into politics; and I can tell you one thing about madness that may comfort you. anity is a disease of the selfish temperament. It occurs only or almost only among the self- centred. Go to an asylum any day and hear what the patients have to tell you; it is I, I, I, from beginning to end. Never some other p son. 7 am the Queen of England, / am the prophet Mahomet, 7 am the Archbishop of Can- terbury. / have come into a large sum of money, :n in the depths of mi- ' titminn. / am beini; persecuted \>\ the police, 7 am the . tim of a conspiracy which haunts me every win But not one patient is ever thinking. That man there is the Emperor of Germany: that woman OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 283 is the wife of the prophet Mahomet; my friends are being persecuted; my son or my cousin has come into an immense fortune. It is all as per- sonal as personal can be; no love, no sympathy, no thought for others." " That's not in the least like Daddy/' Evelyn answered with conviction. " Whatever is the matter, he is always the same the most unselfish of men. He thinks about Mums, about me, about the chain-makers, about his poor people, till I sometimes feel inclined to say: ' Oh, bother the poor, Daddy; do remember that you too have a soul to save and a body to take care of! ' Even since this began I can see it's the mar- riages he has performed and the people he has ordained that most of all trouble him. He never thinks of himself; he thinks about the scandal and the disgrace to the episcopacy, and the way dear Mother would be horrified to learn it." ' Then you may be sure it will pass," Sir Nathaniel said with promptitude. " That is not serious madness. Madness has only two springs: one is selfishness, pure piggish selfishness: the other is like unto it stolid family placidity. A man of varied interests never goes mad. And I'll tell you what you'd better do; you'd better get Yate-Westbury to run down with you acci- dentally, and report upon your father. Stop a 19 THI '^ r.i>HOP. nun Sir Nathaniel consulted his \\-atch once more. "Shall I? Yes, han- it all. I :,///; I can talk out the deputation in twenty minutes. Sheer politeness will do it: agree with them all round, and commit myself to nothing. The deputation withdraws, much pleased with its re- ception. There's a train at a quarter to three. I could catch that, I think. I know Yate-West- bury. I'll go round and drag him away, patients or no patients. Your father's condition is clearly critical; and such a man as he is worth many sparrov -atients are mo jackdav estlmry must come. I'll meet raddington. Now. off to your disap- pointed friend, and break the news to him gently that he must give up all hopes of obtaining pectorship! " lie bowed her out with a soft touch on the shoulder ii minutes later Ev< I lunching with afe in Regent with r ' \\V11. Nathaniel's the t clear, bar one. that ever v been jr : to me. And b ie, officially . T mean, in official ttTVCy that in f Dadily's letter you should 1- the inspectorship before the end of a fortnight." CHAPTER XXIX. THE BISHOP TURNS. THEY travelled down to Dorchester together Sir Nathaniel, Yate-Westbury, Evelyn, and Alex Thornbury, the only four people, save old Dr. Littlemore, who had learned the secret of the Bishop's delusion. The great specialist was very consoling, on the way, to Evelyn. He made light of the dan- ger. It was arranged that he should assume the part of a person who had come down in search of a building site somewhere near the river, and should be introduced to the Palace by Sir Na- thaniel, who was supposed to have met him casually at the station. This would prevent un- necessary alarm on the patient's part. But Yate- Westbury echoed Sir Nathaniel's own opinion as to the Bishop's state of mind. He made Eve- lyn retail to him her father's symptoms; then he leaned back at last on the padded cushions of his first class carriage and answered with easy conviction: *" Oh, there can't be much the mat- 285 2 86 ' IH1 - INCIDENTAL BISHOP. ur with him, Miss Glisson. It doesn't take them so. Not that way madness lies. A passing h u-rical illusion, perhaps; no more. He'll get 1 ter of it soon with rest and change a month in the Engadine. Dismiss the trouble from your mind for the present. I'll tell you more about it after I've had a chat with him." At the station, they separated. Evelyn and Alex walked up by themselves to the Palace; Sir Nathaniel and Yate-Westbury drove after tl in a fly twenty minutes later. Might they see the Bishop? The Bishop, much perturbed, came out into the drawing-room to see them. Sir Nathaniel played his part like a diplo- matist that he was. He had run down to call upon the Bishop about that little matter of the letter, which had somewhat disquieted him; but at the same time, he had happened to meet at the station his friend Mr. Augustus Egerton, a North Country manufacturer "you know the firm Wells, Egerton, and Backhouse," he in: posed in a stage aside who was looking out for a place on the river where he could build a bunga- low and a suitable boat-house for his electric launch. lie wanted some pretty reach within easy distance of Oxford. "I've ventured to bring him along with me," he said, " knowing that you were a good authority as to this part THE BISHOP TURNS. 287 of the country; and besides " confidentially, in another stage whisper, " the diocese of Dor- chester, you know: no large industrial towns rich men are not abundant; so if you fixed him here betimes, you might see the completion of the new transept." The Bishop turned to him with a troubled far-away smile. " Thank you," he said slowly, " thank you. I have much to think about. But stone and mortar are the least. And the transept is not just now my first object." They strolled out upon the lawn through the open window. Yate-Westbury began asking some perfunctory questions as to land and houses and depth of water in-shore for steam launches to approach, which the Bishop answered in the same pre-occupied manner. It was clear his mind was not in the subject. But gradually they drew apart round the far end of the shrubbery. There, close to the spot where Birinus had baptised the first Christians in Wessex, the Bishop dropped into a seat, and to Yate-Westbury's immense sur- prise, turned with sudden fierceness on his un- expected visitor. " This is a plot," he said bit- terly. " A mean, lying plot. An attempt against my sanity. I know you, sir: I know you. Eve- lyn should not have done this. It is a wicked conspiracy." THE INCIDENTAL RT>H The specia 1 him hard. His mind shaken at first from the decision he had given beforehand to Miss Glisson. Conspiracy a plot? Surely the very vocabulary of madness! \Vhy, how do you mean?" he asked in his most honeyed and candid manner with the mock candour of the mad doctor, transparently artificial. The Bishop astonished him by flaring out his answer at once Yes. a conspiracy, I tell you; and I am not well pleased that my daugh should have contrived it. She is driving me to bay, and heaven only k .it mi -fortune may come of it for my poor dear \\ife. to spare whom I would gladly die in torture. Ah. think I don't know you; hut I do. very well. I -aw through this tiling the moment Sir Xa- thaniel introduced you just now under an as- sumed name. You are not Mr. Egerton; you are Dr. Yate-\Yeury. the B| -m in-an- ity. I sat with you nine months ago on the same platform at a meeting in St. James's Hall; and I have seen you u niu-t stop," she - quietly It'- Utur for Daddy, and better for Mums too. You have reassured our inimls: and whatever is the matter with him, he's not at So you had better wait on and see how he is in the morning." It was a gloomy dinner party. The cloud brooded over them all. Evelyn and Alex m; ain pretence of keeping things lively; and the man of politics tried to engage the Bishop in talk about the progress of events in that eternal East, which resembles the poor in being alw. with us. But nothing could dispel the di THE BISHOP DECIDES. 295 gloom that had settled on the Bishop. He ate his dinner in silence, conscious of doom, and with the fate of thousands of souls weighing clown his conscience. Worst of all, he had still the deadly problem of Olive. As she sat and faced him, with her calm middle-aged comeliness, as beautiful in his eyes that evening as when he saw her first on the verandah at Sydney, he could not conceive how he was ever to break the truth to her. That he had never been; that she had never married him; that all their life together was a lie and a delusion! No wonder he shrank from that terrible confession, that the man she had loved, had honoured, had married, was ut- terly non-existent, and that in his place stood a mendacious run-away sailor, masquerading as priest, as bishop, and as philanthropist. That he was all these save in the accident of ordination was nothing to the purpose. He was too ecclesiasticised himself, and had too much trained his wife to the ecclesiastical standpoint, for that to matter to either of them. The Bishop retired early. He went to his own room, not because he hoped for sleep, sleep was now a rare visitor but because he thought it easier at least to be alone than to make the hateful pretence of talking about trifles when his soul was elsewhere. He locked his 296 THE BIS1 door and knelt down to pray. finally or by in>tinct a religious man. prayer had become to him with time a professional reality. He had grown devout by mere clerical habit. It was his nature to throw himself vividly into all that he undertook. He had never allowed the irregu- larity of his manner of entering the fold to inter- fere with his whole-hearted acceptance of the priestly position once he was within it. He had always prayed; of late, indeed, he had prayed without ceasing. He acknowledged to heav as he acknowledged to himself, the wrongfnlness of his dea too honest in soul to palter with omnipotence: but he trusted that the Searcher of hearts, in whom he fully believed, knowing all, would make allowance for the sub- tlety and strength of the temptation. It without fear, therefore,, that the Bishop th; himself on his knees before the Throne of Grace; he wax praying from his heart, an earnest pi. for others; and that prayer he felt sure the worst of men might pray without sin at so fateful a ttS. He did not pray for himself, for forgiveness, for heaven, for some way out of his difficulties. He was utterly oblivious of his own salvation. He prayed for Olive; he prayed for Evelyn. 1 !r wrestled with his Lord that his innocent wife THE BISHOP DECIDES. 2 97 and child might be spared this humiliation. For himself, he had sinned, and he was willing to ex- piate that sin with whatever punishment Eternal Justice might see fit to inflict upon him; but he prayed, with trembling lips, that the sins of the fathers might not be visited on the children, that the innocent wife might not suffer for the guilty husband. He prayed with a solemn dread, for he remembered only too well that his was the sin of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and that Korah, Dathan, and Abiram had been swallowed alive by the earth, not themselves alone, but with all that appertained to them. Yet he wrestled none the less, with great drops of perspiration stand- ing on his brow. He begged hard to be pun- ished to the utmost of his sin, both here and hereafter, if only these little ones might not suf- fer with him. It was a terrible expiation. He endured it like a man. His one thought throughout was that he must save his beloved ones. Hour after hour he prayed on, with feverish eagerness. Then slowly, out of the darkness, a gleam of light came to him. He saw it visibly stealing over the tower of the Cathedral. Day was dawning, and hope dawned with it. He knew not why he had this sudden sense of unaccountable relief this strange feeling that 298 TII} son : yet be well with him. \Y that is to say, rather, with Olive and Kvelyn. But he did feel it for all that; a curious instinct which seemed to tell him he was doomed himself that his body should pay in endless torture for his sin but that Olive and Evelyn should be spared that last misery of a broken idol. For a while he was calmer; something in his head made him feel light and at peace. He did not sleep, indeed, or desire to sleep; but he lay back in his easy chair, closed his eyes, and thought more nly. Had his prayer been answered? Were Olive and Evelyn to be saved from this ex- posure? All night he had sat and watched by the open ifl the light grew clearer above the Cathedral tower, his heart grew happier each moment. He knew not why, but he had confi- dence that his prayer had been heard. Yet he dimly conscious too that he must in ion. And how could he make reparation e only by confession? And how could he confess save by ruining Olive's life for her? If he could but s i She kissed him passionately. So did Olive. Then he fell back and said no more. Five min- 9 later, the heavy breaching ceased. Olive hid her face in her hands. K\ elyn stooped again and kissed the lips of a man who, whatever his sin. had died heroically. Sir Nathaniel drew Yate-Westbury aside into the passage. "Under these circumstances," he said, " it is unnecessary for anybody to inquire THE BISHOP DECIDES. 305 whether the story which you and I alone know, and that very partially, was true or a de- lusion." 44 Oh, certainly," Yate-Westbury answered. " I shall tell Mrs. Glisson and her daughter that he died from nervous strain, resulting in paraly- sis; and that the strain was due to his excessive anxiety about the affairs of his diocese." Evelyn came out to them, in tears. " Mother need never know," she said, " what troubled him in his last few days." "Nobody will ever know," Yate-Westbury an- swered, lying like a gentleman and a Christian. " There was nothing in it. I am convinced it was all premonition of this paralysis, acting upon an abnormally excited brain. He had been wor- rying over this question of the pretended orders; and it killed a frame already weary with much toil for others. Your father was a good man. We could more easily have spared half a dozen stock bishops." "Then you don'' believe it was true?" Eve- lyn cried, herself half doubting. The specialist perjured himself like a man. " Not one word of it! " he answered. Evelyn broke down utterly. " Oh thank you," she cried. "Thank you! I am so glad for Mother. Though myself, I should have loved 3 o6 'in; .lOP. him just the same, no matter what he had done. He was my father, Sir Nathaniel, and the best and sweetest father any girl ever had. I should have believed in him if he had committed a dozen murders. I should have known they were right because he did th- END. LIBRARY OF kAJ (VJ F THE UNIVERSITY 'JF CALIFORNIA i Hm a " TY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA TV OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA