‘I will not excuse you; you shall not be excused; excuses shall not be admitted; there’s no excuse shall serve; you shall not be excused.’ — Henry IV.
WHEN Philip Debarry had come home that morning and read the letters which had not been forwarded to him, he laughed so heartily at Mr Lyon’s that he congratulated himself on being in his private room. Otherwise his laughter would have awakened the curiosity of Sir Maximus, and Philip did not wish to tell any one the contents of the letter until he had shown them to his uncle. He determined to ride over to the rectory to lunch; for as Lady Mary was away, he and his uncle might be tete-a-tete.
The rectory was on the other side of the river, close to the church of which it was the fitting companion: a fine old brick-and-stone house, with a great bow-window opening from the library on to the deep-turfed lawn, one fat dog sleeping on the door-stone, another fat dog waddling on the gravel, the autumn leaves duly swept away, the lingering chrysanthemums cherished, tall trees stooping or soaring in the most picturesque variety, and a Virginian creeper turning a little rustic hut into a scarlet pavilion. It was one of those rectories which are among the bulwarks of our venerable institutions — which arrest disintegrating doubt, serve as a double embankment against Popery and Dissent, and rally feminine instinct and affection to reinforce the decisions of masculine thought.
‘What makes you look so merry, Phil?’ said the rector, as his nephew entered the pleasant library.
‘Something that concerns you,’ said Philip, taking out the letter. ‘A clerical challenge. Here’s an opportunity for you to emulate the divines of the sixteenth century and have a theological duel. Read this letter.’
‘What answer have you sent the crazy little fellow?’ said the rector, keeping the letter in his hand and running over it again and again, with brow knit, but eyes gleaming without any malignity. ‘O, I sent no answer. I awaited yours.’
‘Mine!’ said the rector, throwing down the letter on the table. ‘You don’t suppose I’m going to hold a public debate with a schismatic of that sort? I should have an infidel shoe-maker next expecting me to answer blasphemies delivered in bad grammar.’
‘But you see how he puts it,’ said Philip. With all his gravity of nature he could not resist a slightly michievous prompting, though he had a serious feeling that he should not like to be regarded as failing to fulfil his pledge. ‘I think if you refuse, I shall be obliged to offer myself.’
‘Nonsense! Tell him he is himself acting a dishonourable part in interpreting your words as a pledge to do any preposterous thing that suits his fancy. Suppose he had asked you to give him land to build a chapel on; doubtless that would have given him a “lively satisfaction.” A man who puts a non-natural strained sense on a promise is no better than a robber.’
‘But he has not asked for land. I daresay he thinks you won’t object to his proposal. I confess there’s a simplicity and quaintness about the letter that rather pleases me.’
‘Let me tell you, Phil, he’s a crazy little firefly, that does a great deal of harm in my parish. He inflames the Dissenters’ minds on politics. There’s no end to the mischief done by these busy prating men. They make the ignorant multitude the judges of the largest questions, both political and religious, till we shall soon have no institution left that is not on a level with the comprehension of a huckster or a drayman. There can be nothing more retrograde — losing all the results of civilisation, all the lessons of Providence — letting the windlass run down after men have been turning at it painfully for generations. If the instructed are not to judge for the uninstructed, why, let us set Dick Stubbs to make our almanacs, and have a President of the Royal Society elected by universal suffrage.’
The rector had risen, placed himself with his back to the fire, and thrust his hands in his pockets, ready to insist further on this wide argument. Philip sat nursing one leg, listening respectfully, as he always did, though often listening to the sonorous echo of his own statements, which suited his uncle’s needs so exactly that he did not distinguish them from his old impressions.
‘True,’ said Philip, ‘but in special cases we have to do with special conditions. You know I defend the casuists. And it may happen that, for the honour of the church in Treby and a little also for my honour, circumstances may demand a concession even to some notions of a dissenting preacher.’
‘Not at all. I should be making a figure which my brother clergy might well take as an affront to themselves. The character of the establishment has suffered enough already through the Evangelicals, with their extempore incoherence and their pipe-smoking piety. Look at Wimple, the man who is vicar of Shuttleton — without his gown and bands, anybody would take him for a grocer in mourning.’
‘Well, I shall cut a still worse figure, and so will you, in the dissenting magazines and newspapers. It will go the round of the kingdom. There will be a paragraph headed, “Tory Falsehood and Clerical Cowardice,” or else “The Meanness of the Aristocracy and the Incompetence of the Beneficed Clergy.” ’
‘There would be a worse paragraph if I were to consent to the debate. Of course it would be said that I was beaten hollow, and that now the question had been cleared up at Treby Magna, the church had not a sound leg to stand on. Besides,’ the rector went on, frowning and smiling, ‘it’s all very well for you to talk, Phil, but this debating is not so easy when a man’s close upon sixty. What one writes or says must be something good and scholarly; and after all had been done, this little Lyon would buzz about one like a wasp, and cross-question and rejoin. Let me tell you, a plain truth may be so worried and mauled by fallacies as to get the worst of it. There’s no such thing as tiring a talking machine like Lyon.’ ‘Then you absolutely refuse?’ ‘Yes, I do.’
‘You remember that when I wrote my letter of thanks to Lyon you approved my offer to serve him if possible.’
‘Certainly I remember it. But suppose he had asked you to vote for civil marriage, or to go and hear him preach every Sunday?’
‘But ............