God and the Wedding Dress

by Marjorie Bowen

“Those I did not heed. But I rode myself to Bakewell and saw you, three nights ago, though you did not see me, coming in your cups out of The Talbot, with a poor dancing woman on your arm.”

  “I prepared some actors for the shows up here”; the young man made his excuses with ill will. “Do you expect me to be ever saying my prayers at home?”

  “Bessie loves you,” said Mr. Mompesson. “If she knew this, all her world would fall into confusion.”

  “Who is to tell her? Who is to make mischief over a little harmless merriment?”

  “Not I, John, not I. Harmless? I do believe it has no great harm, but ill manners breed mischief fast enough.”

  “This is a time of licence,” interrupted the young man shortly. “I am no profane fellow or a scoffer. But I tell you, sir, neither will I live as that snivelling Round-head would have us. I mean Thomas Stanley. This place is quiet for one of my parts. I mean to travel, to get some post with the Lord Lieutenant.”

  “Jack, I have nothing against your ambitions; the Peak is quiet, too, for Bessie — nor would I be straitlaced. But these levities and debaucheries…”

  “When Bessie has me fast,” put in John Corbyn, with a sudden smile, “let her hold me if she can — do you doubt that she can? I love her as she loves me. But no more of this preaching, sir. I had my belly full from the dissenter. I marvel that you allow him to lurk about the place. I cannot stir abroad but he is at my bridle, telling me of my foul life. As if a cup of ale and a wench on the knee were damnation.”

  Mr. Mompesson was offended, for he did not like to be compared to the ranting Puritan whom he disliked, nor to think that Thomas Stanley had taken on himself to rebuke one whose morals and behaviour were in the Rector’s charge. John Corbyn saw his vexation and took advantage of it to say:

  “Why do you not set the constable on him? Nay, have the soldiers in from Derby, as they did for the Quakers…”

  “Some like the man and he does good, too,” replied Mr. Mompesson. “He shall not be apprehended on my charge, but we digress…”

  “From the sermon that you would read me?” John Corbyn spoke with forced frankness. “Sir, I know it all and you must look upon me as a sensible, religious man, until you have proof that I am a rogue.”

  “I did not say rogue…”

  “No, for you gave up your sword when you put on the gown and bands,” said the young man with a wry smile, “therefore you go gently and I must respect you for a clergyman. But were we of a quality as we are of an age, I doubt not that we should come to high words.” He turned aside and stared down into the fish-pond, where the big mullet came, gaping with blue-gey mouths, to the stone rim.

  ‘He dislikes me,’ thought Mr. Mompesson, ‘and it is my fault. I have not handled this carefully.’ He was turning away, feeling self-rebuked and grieved, because there would never be, he thought, any real quarrel between Bessie’s lord and himself, when the young man called after him in an unpleasant mocking fashion.

  “Ask Bessie herself what mischief she has on hand. Is she in debt for finery, does she gamble? She had five pounds from me, and won it from me with kisses. Is that your training, sir?”

  Mr. Mompesson was amazed; a sharp denial he checked with difficulty; he saw in the steady, angry grey eyes of John Corbyn that he spoke the truth — he remembered the boxes of patterns, the glistening fopperies that had of late been strewing the Rectory furniture. “Your money shall be returned to you, sir,” he said quickly.

  “Do you think I would take it?”

  “Since you have told me you gave it,” replied Mr. Mompesson, with rising colour, “I am at liberty to believe that you would accept its return.”

  “You had not heard unless you had angered me. I defy you to tell Bessie…?”

  “That you betrayed her?” interrupted the Rector bitterly. “You need not fear, sir. I value her peace of mind that rests on my faith in you.” He checked himself, this would soon be a quarrel, a scandal, perhaps the ruin of poor Bessie’s marriage; he turned away miserably through the thickening gold of the late afternoon and heard John Corbyn laugh behind him as he went.

  *

  The young Rector felt weary with that nervous, restless fatigue which comes from a dissatisfied mind and ill-adjusted labours; he had been quiet during supper and the young women had cheerfully rallied him on his humour. Now he sat alone in his little library or study, awaiting with distaste the arrival of the uncouth miner, Sythe Torre.

  ‘I am in the wrong place,’ he thought gloomily. ‘I am fitted for none of these things — neither to manage my own wife and her sister nor to control John Corbyn nor to overcome Thomas Stanley nor to understand and help my savage parishioners — what use can I be to this man Torre? A bold ruffian, what does he want of me? What am I? A fine gentleman? A recluse? Why am I thus cloudy and languishing?’

  He looked round the room still unfamiliar to him and mean, compared to the painted chamber he had enjoyed for nearly five years at Rufford Park, though Kate’s care had done much to make it handsome. A tapestry that was the gift of Sir George Savile hung against the long wall opposite the window; worked in indigo blue and deep green worsted, it represented Moses raising the Brazen Serpent. In front of this was a fine Chinese cabinet on a gilt stand, and lining the short walls, save for the door, cases of books; Mr. Mompesson had a valuable collection of classical authors and some modern treatises; he himself had beeswaxed the shining tooled calf and sepia-inscribed vellum covers, and it gave him pleasure to see the purple, green, and scarlet silk ties hanging below the spines.

  Before the window, curtained in a saffron yellow damask, stood the writing-table where the Rector sat, and in the corner was a brass bracket clock, while either side of the window was a small portrait by a Dutch painter: one of Mr. Mompesson’s father, painted on his visit to the Brownist Colony at Leyden, the other of his wife, a pale young woman holding an African pink.

  Mr. Mompesson’s desk was handsomely finished, the standish, hour-glass, and candlesticks were in silver, the Bible and Prayer Book were lavishly bound and mounted with the same gleaming metal.

  The reading-lamp, of sparkling crystal and silver-gilt, set close to his hand, was neatly trimmed; quills, packets of paper, tapers, sticks of wax and binding cords for packages, all lay in readiness for the Rector’s sermons or his correspondence.

  His deep chair with arms was deeply cushioned with saffron velvet heavily fringed, and on the cloth that hung over the back were worked in Kate’s fine stitching the Mompesson arms, argent, a lion rampant, sable, charged on the shoulder with a mullet of the field: with the curious crest of a bouget, or Crusader’s desert water-carrier, with a string assure, tasselled of the first. Above, in uneven letters was the motto that Kate had found difficult to embroider: ‘Mon juge est Dieu seulement.’

  Mr. Mompesson had taken considerable pains to make the room that he had found bare and forbidding into some likeness of the luxurious chamber that he had occupied at Rufford Park. But though he had succeeded in impressing his parishioners — far more than he wished — with his gentility and his wealth, the apartment remained, to him, mean and even distasteful.

  William Mompesson tried to compose his thoughts; he was deeply vexed with himself that they should be so agitated. He had no reason to be disturbed or forlorn; he reminded himself of his bountiful blessings — his youth, his health, his easy life, his wife, and children, his opportunities for usefulness, the many pleasures he had, from his books, Seneca, Plautus, Lucian, to his beehives and his apple trees.

  But content cannot be hastily summoned, nor serenity be put on by making a resolution to be serene.

  The young Rector was deeply troubled; he could neither adjust his affairs with man nor, and this was the deeper grief, with God. He had from his early youth accepted Christianity as taught by the Church of England, he was absolutely loyal to the religious teachings that he had imbibed with such enthusiasm.

  William Mompesson, sensitive and conscienti
ous, was not the man to enter the ministry for a piece of bread or to accept with grateful facility the mere symbols of a religion. As a Christian priest he knew that he must accept the tremendous fact of God, and God’s holy Angels, and the Devil and his loathsome demons, and allow these to guide both his spiritual and his material life.

  He had the temperament of a mystic, but worldly matters had impinged upon his secret communings, which had in his youth approached ecstasy, with his Maker. Indolence, worldly ease, even doubt, had crept in like the little foxes that eat the vine. The elegant conversation of Sir George Savile, his wide intelligence, and gently mocking wisdom that were not, for all his protestations, wholly subservient to Christian doctrines, had done something to disturb his chaplain’s faith.

  Then had come the sharp, poignant, bitter-sweet love of the flesh for Catherine and the joys of his union with her, the birth of his children, and his own studies in the classics, which had engaged him so deeply. He had felt blotted and corrupted by these sensual pleasures.

  All these things seemed to put clouds between him and God. The priest began to fear his own mind and his own power of reasoning; he dreaded to feel that through the intellect the Devil tempted men of his temperament. He feared his own easiness and indolence, which at times approached sloth; he winced before his own love and liking for the activities of his life. He knew that he should look upon all these as vain joy, vain grief, vain care, and have all his soul fixed on eternity.

  But this attitude of mind and soul was not easy to attain. William Mompesson feared, too, his own inner arrogance, which he could by no means subdue and which made him sense himself to be the superior of these rude, gross people, over whom he had been set, and that he was put apart from them. Indeed, when, as in this moment of solitude in his study, he looked into his own heart, he saw mirrored there nothing but fears, uncertainties, and doubts.

  There were specious arguments he might have employed, such as: ‘Go thy way, thou hast done no wrong’: ‘Live pleasantly, dream deeply, and let all else slide’: or ‘Who has complained about thee? Thou art fortunate, a worthy man in a safe place.’

  Such fallacious comforts could not soothe him, nor could he derive contentment from dwelling on his felicity. He knew that his present discomforts in Eyam were but temporary, and with the aid of Sir George Savile and the Earl of Devonshire he might easily, say in a year or two, be sent to some other cure. He might contrive, even, to go to London and become chaplain again in a great house, where the lucky world’s gorgeous mask and glittering store would be spread before him, his Kate, and his children.

  There he might have, for the asking or the intriguing, all the latest modes of pride and lust.

  Yet this hope did not allure him, though ambition stirred in him often enough. It was indeed as distasteful as the rude solitude of his mountain fastness. Every prospect that rose before him seemed equally abhorrent. He would not be here among this coarse peasantry whom he did not understand or like, he would not be amidst the temptations of the glitter of the great cities, he wished to resist the snare that came from the gilded idleness in a vain, glorious lord’s mansion.

  What, then, did he want? — he would neither be recluse nor man of the world nor nobleman’s servant nor plodding citizen nor industrious scholar. Something of all these qualities there was in his nature.

  But above them all was this desire to be at one with his God.

  He laid his hands out on the desk and looked at them, ashamed of their delicate make. Womanish hands they appeared in the yellow light of the carefully trimmed lamp, too fine for the uses of anything but indolence.

  “Lord,” he said out loud, “what is Thy will with me?”

  But these were words only, and he felt that they did not go upwards to the all-triumphant splendour, for he was vexed because of little troubles — the five pounds that Bessie had borrowed from John Corbyn, Kate’s absorption in the approaching wedding festivities, the coming wake that would provoke a licence he would not be able to restrain.

  Then the problem of Thomas Stanley, a man whom he respected yet did not like, whom he was protecting, half-willingly, against the Law, whom perhaps he should deliver to the Law, for the man was a heretic, an outcast from and a derider of the Church.

  Mr. Mompesson’s troubled reverie approached anguish, and prayer broke from his lips that God would relieve the weight about his heart. And then, when the door opened slowly, he was startled at his own seriousness and wondered why this discord had brought him, for no good reason, to so low a state.

  It was Jonathan Mortin who entered, his confidential body servant, who had been with him at Rufford Park, and who had very willingly come to Eyam with his master, since that was near his native place, Bakewell.

  Jonathan Mortin was a well-trained, quiet man, who had effaced his own personality, as a servant in a great gentleman’s house. Mr. Mompesson liked him without being familiar with him, and trusted him without having ever probed into his character.

  Ann Trickett, who was Kate’s woman, and helped her with the children, had also come from Rufford Park, Buxton was her birthplace, but there were Tricketts in Eyam. It was not the least of William Mompesson’s comforts that these two staid and faithful servants had followed him into the strange place and freed him from the necessity of employing the villagers, who to him were like foreigners, for anything save the roughest work.

  “It is Sythe Torre, sir,” said Mortin; “he declares that you promised to see him.”

  “It is true,” said the Rector, collecting his idle shames swiftly. “Bid him come up.”

  When the servant had withdrawn, the young man clenched his hands on the desk, and his eyes and brows narrowed into a frown of self-contempt.

  ‘Why do I dread to see this fellow? Why am I so unequal to this that is but a small part of my task?’ He turned in his chair so that he faced the door, and putting out that fair right hand, the delicacy of which he had himself despised, on the silver-bound Bible, composed himself for the interview.

  He had not the least inkling of what this man would want of him, but he experienced an unpleasant sensation when the miner slowly and sullenly entered the library, for he remembered the bad character the man had, and he was oppressed by his physical stature.

  Sythe Torre was accounted in Eyam a giant; he was well over six feet and of enormous proportions. His massive sloping shoulders, short thick neck, small head with the flat back, were characteristics of strength that Mr. Mompesson had seen in antique statues. The Derbyshire miner, indeed, much resembled a bust in the possession of Sir George Savile, which purported to represent the Emperor Maximus. Here were the same blunt, brutal features, the compact dark curls, the heavy jaw outlined by a crisp beard, the deep-set eyes, and the retreating forehead.

  The miner was in the prime of life, Mr. Mompesson judged him to have no more than thirty years? His strength and industry earned him good money in the lead mines, but he was not very frequently occupied there, he preferred the upper air. Besides farming his own small piece of land on the outskirts of the village, he took long holidays from his toil when he travelled about the Peak district, wrestling, throwing the javelin, fighting with the quarter-staff, and exhibiting other feats of strength at local fairs.

  The Rector had heard ugly stories of the giant, who was reported to be cruel, ruthless, and blasphemous, but his crude stone dwelling, largely built with his own hands, sheltered a silent wife and sickly son, to whom he was reported to be obstinately attached.

  Without speaking and taking no notice of the Rector’s suggestion to him that he sat, the giant stood, glancing with his small sly eyes around the room, noticing the tapestry, the furniture, the books, with childish curiosity.

  He had made, Mr. Mompesson noted, some attempts to compose his dress for this interview. His coarse and soiled shirt was caught together with a ribbon at the neck, his grey-green coat had been brushed and a pair of clean white woollen stockings drawn up over his worn, patched
breeches.

  The Rector controlled his impatience and waited for this strange member of his strange flock to speak. He wondered if the fellow had come to ask for work, perhaps he was unemployed as a result of some quarrel at the mines — but when Sythe Torre spoke, he showed at once that he had come on spiritual matters.

  Looking at the Rector and thrusting his thick finger into the coarse ribbon at his neck, he said:

  “Would a murderer be damned, sir, save he make repentance?”

  This was no problem to the Rector, who answered directly:

  “Every sinner would be damned unless he made repentance, unless he believed.”

  “Ay,” said Sythe Torre, with a deep sigh, “ay. That’s what Mr. Thomas Stanley told me, and he’s a holy man.”

  “Do you go to him?” asked Mr. Mompesson quietly. “Are you in his charge? Do you term yourself a dissenter?”

  The giant shifted uneasily from foot to foot; he appeared awkward, bewildered, and yet desperately earnest about some vital matter, his dialect was thick and offensive to the ear of the gentleman who listened to him so gravely.

  “I don’t know these fine terms, sir,” he said sullenly. “I come to you about a plain matter. Mr. Stanley’s a man of God, too, isn’t he? Well, I asked him. He said — damned and lost, burned for ever.”

  “No one can tell you otherwise,” replied Mr. Mompesson sternly. “None but a madman would think it possible to sin and escape punishment. What is this talk of murder? How does it concern you, Sythe Torre?”

  “That’s not my business to be telling you, nor your business to ask, sir,” replied the man, servile and yet hostile too. “I thought it was a point you could make clear to me.”

  “I have made it clear to you,” replied the Rector. “I could enlighten you on other matters, would you come to church. I do not think I have seen you there since my ministry began. I hear you indulge a black self-will, that your lusts disorder into crime.”

  “I don’t understand the church,” replied Sythe Torre, looking on the ground. “I don’t understand half the things you say. Mr. Stanley told me…”