Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Man of the Cloth

“I observe, however, that you trusted us to Mr. Sidmouth,” I interjected.

“True — but he would insist. And when Mr. Sidmouth insists, even / find myself overruled. Cholmondeley becomes decidedly bullheaded in the man's presence; there is no managing him. Lucy, dear, do fetch your uncle. He is turning quite purple. This heat and exertion cannot be good for him.”

Miss Armstrong smiled prettily in our general direction, and floated towards the gentlemen; I say floated because of the airiness of her cloud of green muslin, which was quite sheer, and draped to becoming effect across her full bosom. She is a well-grown girl — though petite, like my sister Eliza, and possessed of decidedly red hair, and the freckled complexion that so often accompanies it. But I detect some acid in my description of Lucy Armstrong, and must hasten to retract it. Freckles on the one hand, a pleasing figure on the other — of what importance are such? If I resent her youth and simplicity of manner, it is only because I remember possessing both myself, and fancy I can foretell Lucy Armstrong's future. When, indeed, I know nothing of her fortune, or prospects; merely assuming that both are slight, since she appears in the guise of poor relation dependent for her pleasures upon a spiteful maiden aunt and widower uncle. She might as easily have three thousand a year, and a bevy of suitors waiting to snatch her back to Bath. Much may preserve her from a state such as mine — growing old, unloved, and unprovided-for.

And yet I am only ten years her senior. Only ten years! — Of balls, and flirtations, and new dresses and fashions; of disappointments, broken hearts, and fading hopes. I shall be nine-and-twenty next Christmas; and Lucy only just embarked upon her ten years. I would not wish them to end as mine have done.

I was jolted from my reverie by the appearance of the gentlemen. Mr. Crawford walked somewhat slowly, as though fatigued, and had Miss Armstrong by his side; but to my surprise, Mr. Sidmouth quite monopolized my father's attention.

“… then you would agree with Bentham [37] Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is best known as a wealthy lawyer of the Georgian period who advocated Utilitarianism: the belief that society should be regulated by inherent principles, much as his rough contemporary Adam Smith (1723–1790) believed economies operated by self-evident market forces. Chief among these principles was that social action should produce the “greatest good for the greatest number”—a frankly democratic notion. Bentham attracted a coterie of “philosophical radicals,” who, by 1815, advocated universal suffrage in England. Reverend Austen is referring here, however, to a famous passage from Bentham's 1789 work, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and legislation. — Editor's note. , that the question is not ‘do animals reason,”but ‘do they suffer? my father enquired. I started, knowing him to be anything but a Benthamite, and hardly believing him acquainted with that gendeman's philosophy.

“I would.”

“Though that places the animals on a par with mankind?”

“I would say, sir, with Kant, that I cannot lay claim to the distinction of being Creation's final end. [38] Mr. Sidmouth is paraphrasing Kant The philosopher actually wrote that he was unable to find “any being capable of laying claim to the distinction of being the final end of creation.” (Critique of Judgment, 1790). — Editors note. These very fossils in Crawford's cliffs proclaim us but a stage upon Nature's great journey. We cannot but wonder if we shall be quarried ourselves, by some inhuman hand, millennia hence.”

There was a loud Tsk! of disapproval from Miss Crawford.

“You would not see them, then, as merely the confirmation of God's great design,” my father continued, “as a reflection of Man's infinitely greater powers?”

“Forgive me, sir — but I cannot.”

“Well, well! Very stimulating to be sure! We have been debating philosophy, my dears,” my father said, as the two men joined us. “I quite wish your brother James were here to make a third in the discussion. I rather fancy, being of the next generation of Austen clergymen, he might fall somewhere between the two poles of Mr. Sidmouth and myself.”

“You are determined in disagreement, then?” Cassandra enquired.

“As surely as Lucifer and St. Peter, my dear — though I meant no offence, Mr. Sidmouth, in the comparison.”

“As I assumed you to be pleading the part of Lucifer, my dear sir, none was taken.” There was a slight ripple of laughter, and Mr. Sidmouth began again with better grace. “I quite applaud your liberality, Reverend Austen. It is rare, indeed, to find a man of the cloth so open in his acceptance of what science tells us. For these very fossils must put paid to the Bible's notion of the world being formed in only seven days; the age of these cliffs, and their silent inhabitants, speak of thousands upon thousands of years’ passage before creatures like ourselves walked this earth.”

We were silent a moment, in gazing upon the chalk heights, and the excavations of Mr. Crawford's labourers; and it was then that Mr. Sidmouth turned to me, and took my hand. He turned over the palm, and pressed into it a fragment of rock, perhaps six inches across, with the barest impression of a life-form. A shell, it seemed to me; the remnant of a forgotten sea creature, curled like a ram's horn. The sensation of movement was palpable— whorling away within the rock for thousands of years, adrift in the seas of time.

“What is it?” I enquired.

“The rock is Blue Lias,” Mr. Sidmouth said. “Much of these Char mouth cliffs are formed of it.”

“And the creature?”

“An ammonite. Though a very small one. Crawford has others, full six feet across.”

I looked, and marvelled. (And I am still gazing at it, as I write — having propped the bit on the bedroom dresser at Wings cottage.) “Thank you,” I said, looking into Mr. Sidmouth's grave dark eyes. Our discord of the drive appeared entirely forgotten. “It is very beautiful.”

“There is something of eternity in it,” he said. [39] The search for fossils was well advanced along the Dorset coast by the time Austen visited it in 1804. A local schoolgirl, Mary Anning, would be credited with the discovery of the world's first ichthyosaur in the cliffs between Lyme and Charmouth in 1811, when she was just twelve years old. — Editor's note.

IT WAS SEVERAL HOURS LATER, AFTER THE CRAWFORDS’ EXCELLENT repast was consumed, and we had listened with as much sympathy as we could muster to Miss Crawford's sad history of her blighted romance with one Jonas Filch — who died of a fever, thus leaving his fiancee to wear black for the subsequent thirty years — that Cassandra and I persuaded Eliza to walk with us along the water. We had left poor Henry and Miss Armstrong in Miss Crawford's grip (while she recounted for their edification the good works she superintended as the head of St. Michael's Ladies Auxiliary), and coursed along the beach. We discovered, to our delight, a small cavern not far from the fossil site, its entrance marked with a cairn of stones; but Cassandra lacked the courage to venture inwards, and I would not go alone. I could look for no aid from Eliza's quarter— she was delighted with the cave's discovery, but too concerned with the possible ruin of her apparel to try its interior. “A cavern, Jane, as foetid and dank as Mrs. Radcliffe [40] Ann Radcliffe Is best remembered for the Gothic romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey. She was, along with her contemporaries Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, and Fanny Burney, one of the women novelists Austen read and admired. — Editor's note. should make it! Shall we venture within, at the very peril of our lives?”