Lark Rise to Candleford (34 page)

Neither of the curates mentioned ever spoke of religion out
of church. Mr. Dallas was far too shy, and Mr. Alport was too busy ministering
to peoples' bodies to have time to spare for their souls. Mr. Marley, who came
next, considered their souls his special care.

He was surely as strange a curate as ever came to a remote
agricultural parish. An old man with a long, grey beard which he buttoned
inside his long, close-fitting, black overcoat. Fervour and many fast days had
worn away his flesh, and he had hollow cheeks and deep-set, dark eyes which glowed
with the flame of fanaticism. He was a fanatic where his Church and his creed
were concerned; otherwise he was the kindest and most gentle of men. Too good
for this world, some of the women said when they came to know him.

He was what is now known as an Anglo-Catholic. Sunday after
Sunday he preached 'One Catholic Apostolic Church' and 'our Holy Religion' to
his congregation of rustics. But he did not stop at that: he dealt often with
the underlying truths of religion, preaching the gospel of love and forgiveness
of sins and the brotherhood of man. He was a wonderful preacher. No listener
nodded or 'lost the thread' when he was in the pulpit, and though most of his
congregation might not be able to grasp or agree with his doctrine, all responded
to the love, sympathy, and sincerity of the preacher and every eye was upon him
from his first word to his last. How such a preacher came to be in old age but
a curate in a remote country parish is a mystery. His eloquence and fervour
would have filled a city church.

The Rector by that time was bedridden, and a scholarly,
easy-going, middle-aged son was deputizing for him; otherwise Mr. Marley would
have had less freedom in the church and parish. When officiating, he openly genuflected
to the altar, made the sign of the cross before and after his own silent devotions,
made known his willingness to hear confessions, and instituted daily services
and weekly instead of monthly Communion.

This in many parishes would have caused scandal; I but the
Fordlow people rather enjoyed the change, excepting the Methodists, who, quite rightly
according to their tenets, left off going to church, and a few other extremists
who said he was 'a Pope's man'. He even made a few converts. Miss Ellison was
one, and two others, oddly enough, were a navvy and his wife who had recently
settled near the hamlet. The latter had formerly been a rowdy couple and it was
strange to see them, all cleaned up and dressed in their best on a week-day
evening, quietly crossing the allotments on their way to confession.

Of course, Laura's father said they were 'after what they
could get out of the poor old fool'. That couple almost certainly were not; but
others may have been, for he was a most generous man, who gave with both hands,
'
and
running over', as the hamlet people said. Not only to the sick and
needy, although those were his first care, but to anybody he thought wanted or
wished for a thing or who would be pleased with it. He gave the schoolboys two
handsome footballs and the girls a skipping-rope each—fine affairs with painted
handles and little bells, such as they had never seen in their lives before.
When winter came he bought three of the poorest girls warm, grey ulsters, such
as were then fashionable, to go to church in. When he found Edmund loved
Scott's poems, but only knew extracts from them, he bought him the
Complete
Poetical Works
, and, that Laura might not feel neglected, presented her at
the same time with
The Imitation of Christ
, daintily bound in blue and
silver. These were only a few of his known kindnesses; there were signs and
rumours of dozens of others, and no doubt many more were quite unknown except
to himself and the recipient.

He once gave the very shoes off his feet to a woman who had
pleaded that she could not go to church for want of a pair, and had added,
meaningly, that she took a large size and that a man's pair of light shoes
would do very well. He gave her the better of the two pairs he possessed, which
he happened to be wearing, stipulating that he should be allowed to walk home
in them. The wearing of them home was a concession to convention, for he would
have enjoyed walking barefoot over the flints as a follower of his beloved St.
Francis of Assisi, towards whom he had a special devotion twenty years before
the cult of the Little Poor Man became popular. He gave away so much that he
could only have kept just enough to keep himself in bare necessaries. His black
overcoat, which he wore in all weathers, was threadbare, and the old cassock he
wore indoors was green and falling to pieces.

Laura's mother, whose religion was as plain and wholesome as
the food she cooked, had little sympathy with his 'bowings and crossings'; but she
was genuinely fond of the old man and persuaded him to look in for a cup of tea
whenever he visited the hamlet. Over this simple meal he would tell the children
about his own childhood. He had been the bad boy of the nursery, he said,
selfish and self-willed and given to fits of passionate anger. Once he had
hurled a plate at his sister (here the children's mother frowned and shook her
head at him and that story trailed off lamely); but on another day he told them
of his famous ride, which ever after ranked with them beside Dick Turpin's.

The children of his family had a pony which they were
supposed to ride in turn; but, in time, he so monopolized it that it was known
as his Moppet, and once, when his elders had insisted that another brother should
ride that day, he had waited until the party had gone, then taken his mother's
riding horse out of the stable, mounted it with the help of a stable boy who
had believed him when he said he had permission to do so, and gone careering
across country, giving the horse its head, for he had no control over it. They
went like the wind, over rough grass and under trees, where any low-hanging bough
might have killed him, and, at that point in the story, the teller leaned
forward with such a flush on his cheek and such a light in his eye that, for
one moment, Laura could almost see in the ageing man the boy he had once been.
The ride ended in broken knees for the horse and a broken crown for the rider.
'And a mercy 'twas nothing worse,' the children's mother commented.

The moral of this story was the danger of selfish
recklessness; but he told it with such relish and so much fascinating detail
that had the end house children had access to anybody's stable they would have
tried to imitate him. Edmund suggested they should try to mount Polly, the innkeeper's
old pony, and they even went to the place where she was pegged out to
reconnoitre; but Polly had only to rattle her tethering chain to convince them
they were not cut out for Dick Turpins.

All was going well and Mr. Marley was talking of teaching
Edmund Latin, when, in an unfortunate moment, finding the children's father at
home, he taxed him with neglect of his religious duties. The father, who never went
to church at all and spoke of himself as an agnostic, resented this and a
quarrel arose, which ended in Mr. Marley being told never to darken that door
again. So there were no more of those pleasant teas and talks, although he
still remained a kind friend and would sometimes come to the cottage door to
speak to the mother, scrupulously remaining outside on the doorstep. Then, in a
few months, the Rector died, there were changes, and Mr. Marley left the
parish.

Five or six years afterwards, when Edmund and Laura were both
out in the world, their mother, sitting by her fire one gloomy winter
afternoon, heard a knock at her door and opened it to find Mr. Marley on her doorstep.
Ignoring the old quarrel, she brought him in and insisted upon making tea for
him. He was by that time very old and she thought he looked very frail; but in
spite of that he had walked many miles across country from the parish where he
was doing temporary duty. He sat by the fire while she made toast and they
talked of the absent two and of her other children and of neighbours and
friends. He stayed a long time, partly because they had so much to say to each
other and partly because he was very tired and, as she thought, ill.

Presently the children's father came in from his work and
there was a strained moment which ended, to her great relief, in a polite
handclasp. The old feud was either forgotten or repented of.

The father could see at once that the old man was not in a
fit state to walk seven or eight miles at night in that weather and begged him
not to think of doing so. But what was to be done? They were far from a railway
station, even had there been a convenient train, and there was no vehicle for
hire within three miles. Then some one suggested that Master Ashley's
donkey-cart would be better than nothing, and the father departed to borrow it.
He brought it to the garden gate, for he had to drive it himself, and this,
surprisingly, he was ready to do although he had just come in tired and damp
from his work and had had no proper meal.

With his knees wrapped round in an old fur coat that had once
belonged to the children's grandmother and a hot brick at his feet, the visitor
was about to say 'Farewell,' when the mother, Martha like, exclaimed: 'I'm
sorry it's such a poor turn-out for a gentleman like you to ride in.'

'Poor!' he exclaimed. 'I'm proud of it and shall always
remember this day. My Master rode through Jerusalem on one of these dear
patient beasts, you know!'

A fortnight afterwards she read in the local paper that the
Rev. Alfred Augustus Peregrine Marley, who was relieving the Vicar of
Such-and-such a parish, had collapsed and died at the altar while administering
Holy Communion.

If one of the women was accused of hoarding her best clothes
instead of wearing them, she would laugh and say: 'Ah! I be savin' they for
high days an' holidays an' bonfire nights.' If she had, they would have lasted
a long time, for there were very few holidays and scarcely any which called for
a special toilet.

Christmas Day passed very quietly. The men had a holiday from
work and the children from school and the churchgoers attended special
Christmas services. Mothers who had young children would buy them an orange
each and a handful of nuts; but, except at the end house and the inn, there was
no hanging up of stockings, and those who had no kind elder sister or aunt in
service to send them parcels got no Christmas presents.

Still, they did manage to make a little festival of it. Every
year the farmer killed an ox for the purpose and gave each of his men a joint
of beef, which duly appeared on the Christmas dinner-table together with plum
pudding—not Christmas pudding, but suet duff with a good sprinkling of raisins.
Ivy and other evergreens (it was not a holly country) were hung from the
ceiling and over the pictures; a bottle of home-made wine was uncorked, a good
fire was made up, and, with doors and windows closed against the keen, wintry
weather, they all settled down by their own firesides for a kind of
super-Sunday. There was little visiting of neighbours and there were no family
reunions, for the girls in service could not be spared at that season, and the
few boys who had gone out in the world were mostly serving abroad in the Army.

There were still bands of mummers in some of the larger
villages, and village choirs went carol-singing about the country-side; but
none of these came to the hamlet, for they knew the collection to be expected there
would not make it worth their while. A few families, sitting by their own
firesides, would sing carols and songs; that, and more and better food and a
better fire than usual, made up their Christmas cheer.

The Sunday of the Feast was more exciting. Then strangers, as
well as friends, came from far and near to throng the houses and inn and to promenade
on the stretch of road which ran through the hamlet. On that day the big ovens
were heated and nearly every family managed to have a joint of beef and a
Yorkshire pudding for dinner. The men wore their best suits, complete with
collar and tie, and the women brought out their treasured finery and wore it,
for, even if no relatives from a distance were expected, some one might be
'popping in', if not to dinner, to tea or supper. Half a crown, at least, had
been saved from the harvest money for spending at the inn, and the jugs and
beer-cans went merrily round the Rise. 'Arter all, 'tis the Feast,' they said; 'an't
only comes once a year,' and they enjoyed the extra food and drink and the excitement
of seeing so many people about, never dreaming that they were celebrating the
dedication five hundred years before of the little old church in the mother
village which so few of them attended.

Those of the Fordlow people who liked to see life had on that
day to go to Lark Rise, for, beyond the extra food, there was no celebration in
the mother village. Some time early in that century the scene of the Feast had
shifted from the site of the church to that of the only inn in the parish.

At least a hundred people, friends and strangers, came from
the market town and surrounding villages; not that there was anything to do at
Lark Rise, or much to see; but because it was Fordlow Feast and a pleasant walk
with a drink at the end was a good way of spending a fine September Sunday evening.

The Monday of the Feast—for it lasted two days—was kept by
women and children only, the men being at work. It was a great day for tea parties;
mothers and sisters and aunts and cousins coming in droves from about the
neighbourhood. The chief delicacy at these teas was 'baker's cake', a rich,
fruity, spicy dough cake, obtained in the following manner. The housewife
provided all the ingredients excepting the dough, putting raisins and currants,
lard, sugar, and spice in a basin which she gave to the baker, who added the
dough, made and baked the cake, and returned it, beautifully browned in his big
oven. The charge was the same as that for a loaf of bread the same size, and
the result was delicious. 'There's only one fault wi' these 'ere baker's
cakes,' the women used to say; 'they won't keep!' And they would not; they were
too good and there were too many children about.