A New Dawn Over Devon (10 page)

 10 
Visitor to the Parsonage

As the Rutherford women and their two friends walked and explored at the coast, back at Milverscombe a visitor had arrived in the village and now walked toward the church. Though he had done his best to make himself look respectable, at first glance he did not appear to be a man whose dealings with houses of God had been particularly frequent. He made his way past a few tombstones without so much as a shiver or the moment's compunction that would have been of great benefit with respect to his own eternal destiny, and soon arrived at the front door of the adjoining parsonage.

Vicar Coleridge answered the sound of the door knocker himself.

“Would you be the reverend, sir?” said the man standing in front of him, forcing a smile through thin teeth not of the whitest.

“Yes, I am Stuart Coleridge,” replied the vicar. “And you?”

“If you please, sir,” answered the man in a scratchy voice, “I would prefer keeping my name out of it for the time being. Let me just say that I am on an errand of mercy for a friend.”

Vicar Coleridge had spent enough time amongst the humble folk of Milverscombe parish to recognize a wolf in sheep's clothing when he encountered one. The slight squint of this man's eye put him immediately on guard.

“And how might I be of service to . . . uh, your friend?” asked the vicar.

“If I might just have a look at your parish record books, Gov—er, Reverend, that is. Won't take but a minute or two and then I won't bother you again.”

“I see,” nodded Coleridge. “I suppose there can be no harm in that. Come with me, then—they are in the church.”

From the churchyard ten minutes later, Vicar Coleridge watched the man go. The moment he was out of sight on his way toward the station, the vicar hurried back inside the parsonage, grabbed his coat, walking stick, and hat, left the house again in the opposite direction, and made his way straight to Heathersleigh Hall.

“Hello, Sarah,” he said when Sarah Minsterly answered the door. “May I please speak with Lady Jocelyn?”

“I am sorry, sir,” Sarah replied, “they are at the coast.”

“Oh . . . I see.”

“Rev. Diggorsfeld came down for a visit, and they all went for a drive together.”

“Ah, I see. Well, Sarah, I have important business to discuss with Lady Jocelyn. And I would like to see Rev. Diggorsfeld while he is in Devon. Would you please either have them come see me in the village, or send word to me when would be a convenient time I might call?”

“I will tell them as soon as they arrive home, sir.”

“Thank you, Sarah. Good day.”

“Good day, sir.”

 11 
Invisible Scratches of Character

Amanda and Timothy continued along the coastal bluff, and she smiled nostalgically.

“When I came home briefly last year before leaving for the Continent,” she said as they went, “a strange thing happened. As I opened the door of the Hall, I was surprised at how easily it swung open. I suddenly realized the reason it didn't squeak was because my father kept the hinges oiled. Then I remembered his always trying to make things the best he could. I never saw that I too was one of those things he was trying to make better. It wasn't just
things
, though . . . he wanted
people
to be better too—himself most of all. He wasn't trying to control or dominate me. He was trying to help me become a better person—a young lady of virtue and character.”

Timothy nodded.

“Now it strikes me,” Amanda went on, “that in a way his whole life was spent encouraging everything to be the best it possibly could—as I said, especially his own character. He loved the idea of people and ideas and things of all kinds reaching their potential. The heather garden, the front door, a machine he might be tinkering with, and his own family—he wanted things to be the best they could.”

“Listening to you,” smiled Timothy, “is like listening to Charles himself. You have gained such insight into him. I never actually put
words to it before, but what you say is exactly true. He wanted all of life, as you say, to reach its potential, because he believed such to be the reason God placed us on this earth, to grow into beings that reflect his nature.”

“Why do you think he felt so strongly about that?” asked Amanda.

“He was one of those who believed that there is a Master of men, a
perfect
Master who demands of them that they also shall be right and true men and women. It is not a popular view in these days of compromise and lukewarm faith where people imagine that because God accepts them as they are, he does not mind that they never grow to be better. Your father's was a view that people cannot readily understand, nor one that many Christians like.”

“I used to resent it,” added Amanda. “Now it seems an honorable position for a man to hold.”

Amanda smiled. “I thought of those silent hinges again just the other day,” she went on. “I realized that there are other reminders of my father like that, things, as you've said, that I can continue to learn about him if only I have eyes to see—”

She stopped. It was obvious a thought had just come into her mind. Timothy waited. A smile slowly spread over her face. “I just remembered something I saw my father do that I never understood before. At last it makes perfect sense.”

“Tell me about it,” said Timothy.

“I must have been twelve or thirteen. I had already developed a nasty attitude by that time and was constantly grumpy. I don't know how they stood to have me around. I came upon my father in his workshop sanding a piece of wood for a set of shelves he was making for the library. I was such a sourpuss, I don't know why I was even in his workshop. But I disinterestedly asked him what he was doing, and he proceeded to lecture me, as I saw it then. He would use any incident to teach us and stretch our outlook. Every tiniest detail was filled with worlds of meaning for him, and he was constantly opening his mind to us about what he was thinking. Nothing was meaningless. His motto might have been: We ought to learn from everything. But back then I only saw it as him lecturing me and I hated it.

“He said, ‘I'm trying to sand a scratch out of this board.'

“I looked at it and could hardly see the scratch he was talking about. I said, ‘It looks fine to me.' He stopped and pointed to the tiny spot he was working on. And it really was little and by most
standards insignificant. So I said, ‘But no one will ever notice. I can hardly see it.'

“Then he said, ‘God will know, even if no one else does.'

“I remember thinking how ridiculous his words sounded. It seemed to me at the time that everything was God this and God that with him. I grew to resent God just as much as my father because he was always talking about Him.

“Then he went on with his little spiritual lecture. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he realized that his words would come back and take root in me one day, so he just continued to teach me day after day, year after year, even though he knew I was paying no attention.”

“No doubt he prayed that such would be the case,” said Timothy.

“I wonder how much of my present change in outlook is due to his prayers for me through the years,” said Amanda sadly. “I owe him so much.”

She glanced away and blinked back a rush of tears. Again Timothy waited.

“In any event,” Amanda went on after a moment, “as I said, he continued to talk to me. It's amazing that I was so uninterested, yet his every word comes back to me now as if it happened yesterday.”

“What did he say?” asked Timothy.

“‘Amanda,' he said, ‘if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If God gives me a shelf to build, then that shelf deserves my best. Excellence isn't something to strive for so that people will notice, but so that our lives will reflect God's character. And as I have been sanding, I've thought how like this board I am myself—pretty good, a decently well-constructed board to all appearances . . . but with little scratches and blemishes and sins all through me that no one sees but God. Am I going to say that those little sins of attitude, those little imperfections of character, those little immaturities and selfish, un-Christlike ways of looking at things, don't matter because people passing me on the street don't see them? Of course not. You see, Amanda, I cannot be satisfied with scratches on my own character any more than I can the scratch on this board. There's no fooling God. So as I have been sanding away on this board, I've been thinking of how I need to place my own self under God's trusting hand, while he works away to remove the scratches and help me overcome
my
sins and make me the best man he can.'”

Amanda paused, and again smiled.

“That was my father, wasn't it, Timothy?” she said. “He was always trying to help people work on their scratches so that they would reflect God's nature.”

Timothy did not reply. Amanda glanced to her side and saw that he was quietly weeping.

“It is so moving to hear you speak of him,” Timothy said softly, his voice shaky. “Yes—what you say is true, that was your father. Listening to you—it is as if he is here with us. Such feelings welled up inside me as you were talking, I could hardly contain them. He is truly living on in you.”

“I'm not sure what to even think about what you say,” replied Amanda. “Now that he is gone, I miss him so much. I saw him as critical and presumptuous back then. It seemed he was always unsatisfied, but actually he just wanted things to be as good as they could. He was forever talking about the meaning of this or the implications of that, or what we ought to do about something else. I especially hated that he wanted
me
better. But all the while he was subjecting his own board to the most careful sanding of all, wasn't he?”

“If you could have been with us during many of our talks,” replied Timothy, eyes glistening, “you would know how very true that is. I have seen him literally weep for some trivial lapse in himself, as he saw it, in love or patience or kindness toward someone who did not even realize what Charles had done. I have seen him cry out to God for forgiveness for a sin no greater than allowing a brief flirtation with some worldly ambition to take hold in him. Things that most men would consider utterly insignificant would drive him to his knees begging God to strip from him every trace of worldly values. He had no interest in mediocrity. Christlikeness was his constant prayer.”

They continued to walk along in silence for two or three minutes, during which both were lost in poignant reminiscences of the man who had drawn their lives together.