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Ebook has 1765 lines and 87148 words, and 36 pages

PHYLLIS OF PHILISTIA

AN ASTRONOMER WITHOUT A TELESCOPE.

"After all," said Mr. Ayrton, "what is marriage?"

"Ah!" sighed Phyllis. She knew that her father had become possessed of a phrase, and that he was anxious to flutter it before her to see how it went. He was a connoisseur in the bric-a-brac of phrases.

"Marriage means all your eggs in one basket," said he.

"Ah!" sighed Phyllis once more. She wondered if her father really thought that she would be comforted in her great grief by a phrase. She did not want to know how marriage might be defined. She knew that all definitions are indefinite. She knew that in the case of marriage everything depends upon the definer and the occasion.

"So you see there is no immediate cause to grieve, my dear," resumed her father.

She did not quite see that this was the logical conclusion of the whole matter; but that was possibly because she was born a woman, and felt that marriage is to a woman what a keel is to a ship.

"I think there is a very good cause to grieve when we find a man like George Holland turning deliberately round from truth to falsehood," said Phyllis sternly.

"And what's worse, running a very good chance of losing his living," remarked the father. "Of course it will have to be proved that Moses and Abraham and David and the rest of them were not what he says they were; and it strikes me that all the bench of bishops, and a royal commissioner or two thrown in, would have considerable difficulty in doing that nowadays."

"What! You take his part, papa?" she cried, starting up. "You take his part? You think I was wrong to tell him--what I did tell him?"

"I don't take his part, my dear," said Mr. Ayrton. "I think that he's a bit of a fool to run his head into a hornet's nest because he has come to the conclusion that Abraham's code of morality was a trifle shaky, and that Samson was a shameless libertine. Great Heavens! has the man got no notion of the perspective of history?"

"Perspective? History? It's the Bible, papa!"

Indignation was in Phyllis' eyes, but there was a reverential tone in her voice. Her father looked at her--listened to her. In the pause he thought:

"Good Heavens! What sort of a man is George Holland, who is ready to relinquish the love and loveliness of that girl, simply because he thinks poorly of the patriarchs?"

"He attacks the Bible, papa," resumed Phyllis gravely. "What horrible things he said about Ruth!"

"Ah, yes, Ruth--the heroine of the harvest festival," said her father. "Ah, he might have left us our Ruth. Besides, she was a woman. Heavens above! is there no chivalry remaining among men?"

"Ah, if it was only chivalry! But--the Bible!"

"Quite so--the--yes, to be sure. But don't you think you may take the Bible too seriously, Phyllis?"

"Oh, papa! too seriously?"

"And I meant to be so useful to him as well," said Phyllis, taking her father's praises more demurely than she had taken his phrases. "I meant to help him in his work."

"Ah, what a fool the man is! How could any man in his senses give up a thing of flesh and blood like you, for the sake of proving or trying to prove, that some people who lived five or six thousand years ago--if they ever lived at all--would have rendered themselves liable to imprisonment, without the option of a fine, if they lived in England since the passing of certain laws--recent laws, too, we must remember!"

"Papa!"

"Anyhow, you have done with him, my dear. A man who can't see that crime is really a question of temperament, and sin invariably a question of geography--well, we'll say no more about it. At what hour did you say he was coming?"

"Four. I don't think I shall break down."

"Break down? Why on earth should you break down? You have a mind to know, and you know your own mind. That's everything. But of course you've had no experience of matters of this sort. He was your first real lover?"

Phyllis' face became crimson. She retained sufficient presence of mind, however, to make a little fuss with the window-blind before letting it down. Her father stared at her for a moment, and there was rather a long pause before he laughed.

"I said 'real lover,' my dear," he remarked. "The real lover is the one who talks definitely about dates and the house agent's commission. As a rule the real lover does not make love. True love is born, not made. But you--Heavens above! perhaps I did an injustice to you--to you and to the men. Maybe you're not such a tyro after all, Phyllis."

Phyllis gave a very pretty little laugh--such a laugh as would have convinced any man but a father--perhaps, indeed, some fathers--that she was not without experience. Suddenly she became grave. Her father never loved her so dearly as when that little laugh was flying over her face, leaving its living footprints at the corners of her eyes, at the exquisite curve of her mouth. It relieved her from the suspicion of priggishness to which, now and again, her grave moods and appropriate words laid her open. She was not so proper, after all, her father now felt; she was a girl with the experiences of a girl who has tempted men and seen what came of it.

She spoke:

"Then finding that your duty to him--to him, mind--forces you to tell him that you cannot carry out that promise," said her father. "Yes, it is a very serious thing, but not so serious as carrying out that promise would be if you had even the least little feeling that at the end of three months he was not a better man than you suspected he was at the beginning. There's a bright side to everything, even a honeymoon; but the reason that a honeymoon is so frequently a failure is because the man is bound to be found out by his wife inside the month. It is better that you found out now, than later on, that you could not possibly be happy with a man who spoke slightingly of the patriarchs and their wives. Now I'll leave you, with confidence that you will be able to explain matters to Mr. Holland."

"What! you won't be here?"

Dismay was in the girl's face as she spoke. She had clearly looked for the moral support of her father's presence while she would be making her explanation to the man whom she had, a few months before, promised to marry, but whom she had found it necessary to dismiss by letter, owing to her want of sympathy in some of his recent utterances.

"You won't be here?"

"No; I have unfortunately an engagement just at that hour, Phyllis," replied Mr. Ayrton. "But do you really think there is any need for me to be here? Personally, I fancy that my presence would only tend to complicate matters. Your own feeling, your own woman's instinct, will enable you to explain--well, all that needs explanation. I have more confidence in your capacity to explain since you gave that pretty little laugh just now. Experience--ah, the experience of a girl such as you are, suggests an astronomer without a telescope. Still, there were astronomers before there were telescopes; and so I leave you, my beloved child--ah, my own child once again! No cold hand of a lover is now between us."

It was not until he was some distance down Piccadilly that it occurred to him that he should have pictured the lover with a warm hand; and that omission on his part caused him a greater amount of irritation than anyone who was unaware of his skill in phrase-making could have thought possible to arise from a lapse apparently so trifling.

It was not until he had reached the Acropolis and had referred, in the hearing of the most eminently dull of the many distinguished members of that club, to the possibility of a girl's experiences of man being likened to an astronomer without a telescope, that he felt himself again.

The dull distinguished man had smiled.

HE KNEW THAT IT WAS A TROUBLESOME PROCESS, BECOMING A GOOD CLERGYMAN, SO HE DETERMINED TO BECOME A GOOD PREACHER INSTEAD.

Phyllis sat alone in one of the drawing rooms, waiting until the hour of four should arrive and bring into her presence the Rev. George Holland, to plead his cause to her--to plead to be returned to her favor. He had written to her to say that he would make such an attempt.

She had looked on him with favor for several months--with especial favor for three months, for three months had just passed since she had promised to marry him, believing that to be the wife of a clergyman who, though still young, had two curates to do the rough work for him--clerical charwomen, so to speak--would make her the happiest of womankind. Mr. Holland was rector of St. Chad's, Battenberg Square, and he was thought very highly of even by his own curates, who intoned all the commonplace, everyday prayers in the liturgy for him, leaving him to do all the high-class ones, and to repeat the Commandments.

People then said that Lord Earlscourt was a lesser fool than some of his acts suggested. Others said that the Rev. George Holland had never been a fool, though he had been a Fellow of his college.

They were right. George Holland knew that it was a troublesome process becoming a good clergyman, so he determined to become a good preacher instead. In the course of a year he had become probably the best-known preacher in London, and that, too, without annoying the church-wardens of St. Chad's by drawing crowds of undesirable listeners to crush their way into the proprietary sittings, and to join in the singing and responses, and to do other undesirable acts. No, he only drew to the church the friends of the said holders, whose contributions to the offertory were exemplary.

His popularity within a certain circle was great; but, as Lord Earlscourt was heard to say, "He never played to the pit."

He was invited to speak to a resolution at a Mansion House meeting to express indignation at the maintenance of the opium traffic in China.

He was also invited by the Countess of Earlscourt to appear on the platform to meet the deputation of Chinese who represented the city meeting held at Pekin in favor of local option in England; for the great national voice of China had pronounced in favor of local option in England.

Shortly afterward he met Phyllis Ayrton, and had asked her to marry him, and she had consented.

And now Phyllis was awaiting his coming to her, in order that he might learn from her own lips what he had already learned from the letter which he had received from her the day before; namely, that she found it necessary for her own peace of mind to break off her engagement with him.

Phyllis Ayrton had felt for some months that it would be a great privilege for any woman to become the wife of a clergyman. Like many other girls who have a good deal of time for thought,--thought about themselves, their surroundings, and the world in general,--she had certain yearnings after a career. But she had lived all her life in Philistia, and considered it to be very well adapted as a place of abode for a proper-minded young woman; in fact, she could not imagine any proper-minded young woman living under any other form of government than that which found acceptance in Philistia. She had no yearning to startle her neighbors. With a large number of young women, the idea that startling one's neighbors is a career by itself seems to prevail just at present; but Phyllis had no taste in this direction. Writing a book and riding a bicycle were alike outside her calculations of a scheme of life. Hospital nursing was nothing that she would shrink from; at the same time, it did not attract her; she felt that she could dress quite as becomingly as a hospital nurse in another way.

She wondered, if it should come to the knowledge of the heads of the government of Philistia that she had a yearning to become the wife of a clergyman, would they regard her as worthy to be conducted across the frontier, and doomed to perpetual expatriation. When she began to think out this point, she could not but feel that if she were deserving of punishment,--she looked on expulsion from Philistia as the severest punishment that could be dealt out to her, for she was extremely patriotic,--there were a good many other young women, and women who were no longer young, who were equally culpable. She had watched the faces of quite a number of the women who crowded St. Chad's at every service, and she had long ago come to the conclusion that the desire to become the wife of a clergyman was an aspiration which was universally distributed among the unmarried women of the congregation.

She knew so much, but she was not clever enough to know that it was her observance of this fact that confirmed her in her belief that it would be a blessed privilege for such a woman as she to become the wife of such a clergyman as George Holland. She was not wise enough to be able to perceive that a woman marries a man not so much because she things highly of marriage--although she does think highly of it; not so much because she thinks highly of the man--though she may think highly of him, but simply because she sees that other women want to marry him.

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