D. Broster - The Vision Splendid (D. K. Broster) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

Three years later, on his homeward way from the Continental tour which rounded off his time with his pupil, when choosing, at Brussels, a piece of lace for Horatia's approaching birthday (on which he had always given her a present), Tristram realised with a curious dismay that it was the eighteenth recurrence of this anniversary, that he had, of course, always intended to marry her, that applications for her hand might already have been made from other quarters – and accepted – and that he must get back at once. His charge was perhaps equally dismayed at the speed with which, next day, they resumed their homeward course.

They need not have hastened. If the disappointed lover had not been obliged to consider his mother's suddenly threatened health, it would have gone even harder with him than it did. She who had always tended now needed tending, and had her illness been voluntary her unrivalled instinct for consolation could not have hit upon a means more healing. Tristram took her away to Hastings, and there, after eight months, she died.

Doubly as the place was now painful to him, Tristram returned to Compton. His loss, however, had this effect, that it made intercourse with the Rectory more easy of resumption. Having sufficient means and no definite object for his energies he was thrown back upon himself. He had neither the money nor the inclination to stand for Parliament. His father's passion for the interests of the negro had not descended to him, but more and more the crying need of the English poor was forcing itself upon his attention. He would have liked to be able to take Orders and to immerse himself in activities in some growing town. As it was he found a shadow of consolation in studying the problem of Poor Law reform. He even wrote a pamphlet, "A remedy for the present distress," and, as a justice of the peace, he was active in the emigration schemes then so popular as a means of remedying the mischief caused by the insane administration of the Poor Law. But every day seemed emptier than the last. He saw Horatia frequently, but, disguise it as he might, this privilege was not entirely pleasurable. He had lost the mother to whom he was devoted, and now the Gospel according to Whately was beginning to fail him. Slowly and bitterly it came to him that the "manly, reasonable, moderate, not too other-worldly faith and practice" which had once satisfied him had done so only because he was young, and because things were going well with him. When he went in to Oxford to see Dormer, now in Orders and Fellow of Oriel, he came across Whately more than once, and felt the chill that one feels in meeting a person the glamour of whose influence has departed.

But more and more he found himself a constant visitor at Oriel, until, as a privileged person, he came to be almost included in the circle of Dormer's friends there. These, without, exception, belonged to the new Oriel school, who were in reaction from speculation to authority, and, like John Keble, their guide, boldly placed character above intellect. Dormer never argued with him now, yet, imperceptibly, the leaven worked.... In the end it was Tristram's own need and his feeling for the needs of others which made him able to cut himself away from all "liberal" trammels and to rank himself under the same banner with the friend who had waited long and patiently for such a change of mind. During the summer term of 1830 he told Dormer that there was now no reason why he should not be ordained.

He had told Dormer something else too – the something which he had been discussing this very evening with Mr. Grenville, the something which was engrossing his whole thoughts as he rode homewards under the infant moon – his intention of again asking Horatia to marry him. There had never been any other woman for him. He knew her very well; he was no stranger even to her faults – little flecks making more beautiful a beautiful flower, they seemed to him, for he had a profound belief in her, a sort of intuitive faith in the real, secret Horatia whom sometimes she seemed to delight in hiding up – the woman with a capacity for great things. And the more he knew her the more he desired her. The thought that, when the time seemed favourable, he was going to stake his happiness on another throw, shook him. It haunted his sleep that night in a harassing dream, relic of their conversation at supper, wherein he was feverishly trying to build up a dyke against a flood of water that poured and pushed upon it, and Horatia, dressed in the robes of the Provost of Oriel, was laughing at him and telling him not to be absurd, for the water had to come. Then, with her garden trowel, she had herself made a little breach in the bank, and at that a smooth wave had slipped over and carried her away, still laughing; and he woke, in a horror for which he could scarcely account, and lay wakeful till dawn.

(1)

There was a certain day in the year the advent of which always imbued the Rector of Compton Regis with an irritability quite foreign to his nature. It was that Sunday, usually occurring somewhere between Lammas and Michaelmas, on which his conscience obliged him to preach a sermon on eternal punishment.

The Rector was not sound on Hell, and he knew it. Every year he sought miserably for some formula which should reconcile what he felt with what he believed, and he sat this afternoon at his study table surrounded by old discourses on the subject, running one hand distractedly through his thick grey hair while the other held the pen of an unready writer. Every now and then his gaze sought help from his beloved little cases of Romano-British coins, or from the backs of Camden and Dugdale, and once, leaving his uncongenial task, he got up and wistfully fingered his latest acquisition, the brass piece of Allectus, which lay waiting to be put in its place with its numismatical peers.

The Honourable and Reverend Stephen Grenville was one of those persons, abounding in these islands, whose theories and practice do not match. He stood, outwardly, for the union on equal terms of Church and State, but in his heart he really assigned to the former a different and a superior plane. His antiquarian leanings, very plainly manifested in his study, were the cause alike of this inconsistency, and of the measure of sympathy which, despite himself, he accorded to the "Oriel young men" whose enthusiasm (a thing he feared and disliked) would, he considered, wear off in time, and whose attachment to the historical foundation of the Church commanded his entire approval.

Aristocrat and Tory, the best-born gentleman in the neighbourhood (and the least likely to lay stress on the fact), he was greatly respected, and with reason. No dissenting chapel reared its head in the parish, and there was not a single public-house. It was his custom to celebrate Holy Communion at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, and on the Sundays immediately following those feasts, and to baptise and catechise on Sunday afternoons. His reading in church was very impressive. He knew every one of his flock personally; he endeavoured always to do his duty as he conceived it, else had he not now been struggling, poor gentleman, with an uncongenial topic....

"Have you any letters for the carrier, dear?" asked Horatia, putting her bonneted head in at the door. Sounds of impatient boundings and whimperings behind her hinted at an accompanying presence.

The Rector abandoned Hell for the moment. "There is the letter to your Aunt Julia, my love. I had to keep it back to make some inquiries about railroads ... and then this sermon ... Where have I put it?" Rumpling his hair still more violently he reflected, and having searched among the litter on his table, found what he sought and gave it to his daughter.

"Try and have your sermon finished when I come back in an hour's time, there's a good Papa," suggested Horatia, kissing him. "I am sure what you said last year would do quite well. I shall go round by Five-Acres and back by the road."