Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

“Harry,” my wife said, with a shade of solemnity, “I am almost ashamed of you for the first time. And I will punish you by telling you the truth. Do you think I had nothing of that sort to get over when I began to find that I was thinking a little more about you than was quite convenient under the circumstances? Your manners, dear Harry, though irreproachable, just had not the tone that I had been accustomed to. There was a diffidence about you also that did not at first advance you in my regard.”

“Yes, yes,” I answered, a little piqued, “I dare say. I have no doubt you thought me a boor.”

“Dear Harry!”

“I beg your pardon, wifie. I know you didn’t. But it is quite bad enough to have brought you down to my level, without sinking you still lower.”

“Now there you are wrong, Harry. And that is what I want to show you. I found that my love to you would not be satisfied with making an exception in your favour. I must see what force there really was in the notions I had been bred in.”

“Ah!” I said. “I see. You looked for a principle in what you had thought was an exception.”

“Yes,” returned my wife; “and I soon found one. And the next step was to throw away all false judgment in regard to such things. And so I can see more clearly than you into the right of the matter.—Would you hesitate a moment between Tom Weir and the dissolute son of an earl, Harry?”

“You know I would not.”

“Well, just carry out the considerations that suggests, and you will find that where there is everything personally noble, pure, simple, and good, the lowliness of a man’s birth is but an added honour to him; for it shows that his nobility is altogether from within him, and therefore is his own. It cannot then have been put on him by education or imitation, as many men’s manners are, who wear their good breeding like their fine clothes, or as the Pharisee his prayers, to be seen of men.”

“But his sister?”

“Harry, Harry! You were preaching last Sunday about the way God thinks of things. And you said that was the only true way of thinking about them. Would the Mary that poured the ointment on Jesus’s head have refused to marry a good man because he was the brother of that Mary who poured it on His feet? Have you thought what God would think of Tom for a husband to Martha?”

I did not answer, for conscience had begun to speak. When I lifted my eyes from the ground, thinking Ethelwyn stood beside me, she was gone. I felt as if she were dead, to punish me for my pride. But still I could not get over it, though I was ashamed to follow and find her. I went and got my hat instead, and strolled out.

What was it that drew me towards Thomas Weir’s shop? I think it must have been incipient repentance—a feeling that I had wronged the man. But just as I turned the corner, and the smell of the wood reached me, the picture so often associated in my mind with such a scene of human labour, rose before me. I saw the Lord of Life bending over His bench, fashioning some lowly utensil for some housewife of Nazareth. And He would receive payment for it too; for He at least could see no disgrace in the order of things that His Father had appointed. It is the vulgar mind that looks down on the earning and worships the inheriting of money. How infinitely more poetic is the belief that our Lord did His work like any other honest man, than that straining after His glorification in the early centuries of the Church by the invention of fables even to the disgrace of his father! They say that Joseph was a bad carpenter, and our Lord had to work miracles to set the things right which he had made wrong! To such a class of mind as invented these fables do those belong who think they honour our Lord when they judge anything human too common or too unclean for Him to have done.

And the thought sprung up at once in my mind—“If I ever see our Lord face to face, how shall I feel if He says to me; ‘Didst thou do well to murmur that thy sister espoused a certain man for that in his youth he had earned his bread as I earned mine? Where was then thy right to say unto me, Lord, Lord?’”

I hurried into the workshop.

“Has Tom told you about it?” I said.

“Yes, sir. And I told him to mind what he was about; for he was not a gentleman, and you was, sir.”

“I hope I am. And Tom is as much a gentleman as I have any claim to be.”

Thomas Weir held out his hand.

“Now, sir, I do believe you mean in my shop what you say in your pulpit; and there is ONE Christian in the world at least.—But what will your good lady say? She’s higher-born than you—no offence, sir.”

“Ah, Thomas, you shame me. I am not so good as you think me. It was my wife that brought me to reason about it.”

“God bless her.”

“Amen. I’m going to find Tom.”

At the same moment Tom entered the shop, with a very melancholy face. He started when he saw me, and looked confused.

“Tom, my boy,” I said, “I behaved very badly to you. I am sorry for it. Come back with me, and have a walk with my sister. I don’t think she’ll be sorry to see you.”

His face brightened up at once, and we left the shop together. Evidently with a great effort Tom was the first to speak.

“I know, sir, how many difficulties my presumption must put you in.”

“Not another word about it, Tom. You are blameless. I wish I were. If we only act as God would have us, other considerations may look after themselves—or, rather, He will look after them. The world will never be right till the mind of God is the measure of things, and the will of God the law of things. In the kingdom of Heaven nothing else is acknowledged. And till that kingdom come, the mind and will of God must, with those that look for that kingdom, over-ride every other way of thinking, feeling, and judging. I see it more plainly than ever I did. Take my sister, in God’s name, Tom, and be good to her.”

Tom went to find Martha, and I to find Ethelwyn.

“It is all right,” I said, “even to the shame I feel at having needed your reproof.”

“Don’t think of that. God gives us all time to come to our right minds, you know,” answered my wife.

“But how did you get on so far a-head of me, wifie?”

Ethelwyn laughed.

“Why,” she said, “I only told you back again what you have been telling me for the last seven or eight years.”

So to me the message had come first, but my wife had answered first with the deed.

And now I have had my revenge on her.

Next to her and my children, Tom has been my greatest comfort for many years. He is still my curate, and I do not think we shall part till death part us for a time. My sister is worth twice what she was before, though they have no children. We have many, and they have taught me much.

Thomas Weir is now too old to work any longer. He occupies his father’s chair in the large room of the old house. The workshop I have had turned into a school-room, of the external condition of which his daughter takes good care, while a great part of her brother Tom’s time is devoted to the children; for he and I agree that, where it can be done, the pastoral care ought to be at least equally divided between the sheep and the lambs. For the sooner the children are brought under right influences—I do not mean a great deal of religious speech, but the right influences of truth and honesty, and an evident regard to what God wants of us—not only are they the more easily wrought upon, but the sooner do they recognize those influences as right and good. And while Tom quite agrees with me that there must not be much talk about religion, he thinks that there must be just the more acting upon religion; and that if it be everywhere at hand in all things taught and done, it will be ready to show itself to every one who looks for it. And besides that action is more powerful than speech in the inculcation of religion, Tom says there is no such corrective of sectarianism of every kind as the repression of speech and the encouragement of action.

Besides being a great help to me and everybody else almost in Marshmallows, Tom has distinguished himself in the literary world j and when I read his books I am yet prouder of my brother-in-law. I am only afraid that Martha is not good enough for him. But she certainly improves, as I have said already.

Jane Rogers was married to young Brownrigg about a year after we were married. The old man is all but confined to the chimney-corner now, and Richard manages the farm, though not quite to his father’s satisfaction, of course. But they are doing well notwithstanding. The old mill has been superseded by one of new and rare device, built by Richard; but the old cottage where his wife’s parents lived has slowly mouldered back to the dust.

For the old people have been dead for many years.

Often in the summer days as I go to or come from the vestry, I sit down for a moment on the turf that covers my old friend, and think that every day is mouldering away this body of mine till it shall fall a heap of dust into its appointed place. But what is that to me? It is to me the drawing nigh of the fresh morning of life, when I shall be young and strong again, glad in the presence of the wise and beloved dead, and unspeakably glad in the presence of my God, which I have now but hope to possess far more hereafter.

I will not take a solemn leave of my friends iust yet. For I hope to hold a little more communion with them ere I go hence. I know that my mental faculty is growing weaker, but some power yet remains; and I say to myself, “Perhaps this is the final trial of your faith—to trust in God to take care of your intellect for you, and to believe, in weakness, the truths He revealed to you in strength. Remember that Truth depends not upon your seeing it, and believe as you saw when your sight was at its best. For then you saw that the Truth was beyond all you could see.” Thus I try to prepare for dark days that may come, but which cannot come without God in them.

And meantime I hope to be able to communicate some more of the good things experience and thought have taught me, and it may be some more of the events that have befallen my friends and myself in our pilgrimage. So, kind readers, God be with you. That is the older and better form of GOOD-BYE.