The Bishop's Amazement

Introduction

. Will My Friend the Publisher oblige by beating the drum of advertisement ? I thank you, sir. Ladies and Gentlemen : — I respectfully beseech your hearing. I am bound for Balsora, which, as all the world knows, is the home of adventure. In Balsora anything may happen. The ladies there are so beautiful that one falls in love with them at first sight, and so bounteous and faithful that no true lover sighs in vain. Adventures swarm in every corner of that astonishing city, and I am in the secrets of all the adventurers. It is there that virtue is always rewarded, and that vice is invariably punished. In Balsora a man needs but have a bold and honest VI

INTRODUCTION.

. heart, and the daughter of the Grand Vizier is ready to go to the Mosque with him, with a great sackful of the most valuable jewels and a train of many camels all laden with sequins. There are the sturdiest kind of villains to be found, but their plots end in defeat, and they exist only to be beaten for the delight and edification of the good. There is nowhere a people so truculent and remorseless as you may find in Balsora ; nowhere a people so gentle and magnanimous. The mothers of the whole world adore the children of Balsora, whose innocent charm is beyond extolling. And the comedians of the city have in per fection, " that beautiful laugh, swollen with frank gaiety and jolly satire," the rarity of which, among modern people, has been so earnestly lamented by the French poet. You observe, ladies and gentlemen, the strip of carpet I hold up for your inspection.

It is, at this moment, of the smallest dimen sions, but it is of magic quality. It is the original Flying Carpet, by whose aid the owner may transport himself whither he will, and carry with him any of his friends and acquaintance who may choose to accompany

INTRODUCTION.

. him. Like any other idler, kind friends, I must live by my business, but the charge for a place on the Flying Carpet is a light one, and there is room for everybody. Ready for Balsora, Balsora, Balsora ! Who goes to Balsora ? By no means, courteous sir. I am neither so silly nor so ungrateful. I do not for an instant profess that there are not other carpets in the world, but a great many of their owners have of late given up the trip to Balsora. For instance, your own. You are so kind as to offer me a hill-top journey. I thank you, but I am going to Balsora. And you, too, sir ! I am obliged, I assure you, and remember delightful journeys in your com pany. If you were going my way, I know of no better magician to travel with, but of late I do not like your stopping places, or the comrades to whom you introduce me there.

With all good temper, sir, but with all firm ness, I will not go to Christminster. I am bound for Balsora. And you, venerable stranger, whom I seem to know by your foam of hair and whisker, and your rather angry spectacles ! Most estimable Rose de

INTRODUCTION.

. Norvege, you have no passport to Balsora, and it is thither I am going. What ? Are we all here ? All the voyagers to Balsora ? Is it a conclave ? My jolly Gentleman of France, save a place for me on your next journey. And you, friend Sherlock, you shall make no trip without me. And Hola ! good comrades from beyond the Cheviots ! 'Tis up with the Bonnets o' Bonnie Dundee, in Balsora ! Any message gin a body meet a Stickit Minister pondering Auld Licht Idylls beside the Bonnie Briar ? Any message for the laird, you darling Trilby fellow ? And thou, sombrely rufous, tiled with soft felt ! when next shall Mona's Isle shake anchorage, and float majestic, Balsora wards, — no carpet but a country ! Ha, ha ! brave lilter of the Barrack Room. My love to Brugglesmith ! God bless you. By Heaven, gentlemen, you make me proud of my trade !

But I must look to business. Will it please you, ladies and gentlemen, to step on to the carpet ? There is room for all. Your grace will not be blacked by the chimney-sweep, nor floured by the baker. There is ample

INTRODUCTION.

. space, and a first class reserved compart ment for every member of the expedition. For the last time, kind friends. Balsora ! Who's for Balsora ? Away ! * * * # We are, as you observe, in the London quarter of the great city of adventures, which includes, I may as well tell you, an exact replica of every city, town and village in the habitable globe. We are in the street called Regent Street, and the time is half-past two on a summer after noon. Look ! The roadway is full of equipages, and the footpath is thronged with passengers, for the season is at its height. In all the enormous crowd there is not a man, a woman, or a child who does not trail a thread. These threads are of all sorts of material, and of all colours, and all degrees of fineness. Some are of gold and yet as light as gossamer.

Some are of hemp and heavy. Some are of iron and are heavy or light according to the strength and character of the persons who draw them. In and out go the members of the X

INTRODUCTION.

. crowd, up and down — idle, bustling — lordly, shabby — cruel, kind — handsome, ugly — wealthy, poor — changing, changing, changing always, and yet, at any two given minutes, almost the same to look at. The threads they carry with them, they take up, as you know, at their cradles, every man Jack and every woman Jill, and until they are broken off short at the edge of the grave they never cease to trail them. The threads ceaselessly weave a pattern, and it is of them that my carpet is woven. Now, whom shall we follow ? Naturally, the folks who have the best story. I choose for one that fellow with the dyed hair and eyebrows and moustaches, who draws the cord of hemp behind him. And I will have that handsome young gentleman with the trailing silken string of many colours, by which I know him for a loyal lover.

And that pretty girl with her floating thread of gold. And the Bishop of Stokestithe yonder, in his shovel hat and apron ; and that^awful tramp — do you see him ? — in his amazing dunghill relic of a hat, with stringof burned packthread.

INTRODUCTION.

. They are all going different ways, but their threads are entangling with each other. They are beginning to weave a pattern which I can guess will be curious. V. THE BISHOP'S AMAZEMENT.

Chapter I

How many hundreds of pretty girls have walked down Regent Street ? How many thousands ? How many tens of thousands ? In the London season, of a sunshiny afternoon, you may see them by scores of scores ; dark or fair, short or tall, slight or stately. I make bold to beheve that there is no thoroughfare in the world where one may refresh heart and eyes with the sight of so much girlish beauty. And there is no beauty so bright, so whole some and healthy and honest as the beauty of the British girl. Of course our charming cousins of all the Colonies, and of the great American Republic are meant to be included. The English-speaking people of the world can make this one boast in safety — their daughters are the fairest among the daughters of men. I was saying this, or something very like it, to my young friend Tom Finch, as we walked along Regent Street together on an afternoon in the mid-May of 1894.

I have said it all, or something very like it, to a good many people, for it is a favourite boast of mine, and one of the few results of many travelled years. "Yes, sir," I said, aroused perhaps to unusual enthusiasm by my own eloquence. " This happy pavement has been trodden by hundreds of thousands of the prettiest girls in the world." " It has," said Tom ; " and here is the prettiest of them all." The lady thus flatteringly indicated was smiling and blushing with her gloved hand in his, less than half a minute after he had spoken. Tom stood hat in hand, with his close-cropped, well-groomed head uncovered. He, as well as^the girl, was blushing. Perhaps I do not bear out the extravagant encomium he had just spoken. Possibly there have been prettier girls. Her features were not very regular, but she had that complexion which you only see in young women of our own race, and in flowers — the sweet pink of health, the live rose white of purity.

She was as lithe as a willow shoot, or the stalk of a lily. Her eyes were as candid and brave and simple as a boy's. I know no more satisfying look — no honester, sincerer. They were very beautiful in form and colour as well, and as to her lips and teeth, " to speak of coral and pearl is to libel the beauties of flesh and blood and ivory." I borrow that phrase from an earlier scribe with thanks and compliments. I have often thought it true. Altogether, if the lady did not quite realize my young friend's belief, she made a very charming approach to it ; and if I did not fall headlong in love myself I had my excuses in the fact that I am fifty, and that my eldest boy has begun to take that branch of the family business off my hands. I had the honour of an introduction to this dehghtful girl, and I learned that she was the daughter of my old acquaintance, the Bishop of Stokestithe.

I meant no harm to the peace 3 B of mind of that stately ecclesiastic when I suddenly discovered that I had business, and took a hansom to the club and cut in for a hand at a rubber of whist. I like Tom — I hope he will always allow me to like him — and I was in his confidence already, and, to tell the plain truth about the matter, I had no sympathy with the Bishop. So long as Tom's uncle, Sir Alured Finch, kept single — and he was well over sixty years when he married — the Bishop made Tom welcome. Tom was going to be a baronet, and to inherit a very handsome fortune, and Lucy Durgan and he had been formally engaged, with the consent of the young lady's father. Now the baronet had a direct heir — Tom had nothing in the world except his own bright brains and manly nature, and a start of three hundred a year to help him on — his nose was out of joint, as people say, and his lordship had shown him the palace door, and had told him it was his Christian Duty to stop henceforth on the outside of it.

The young man thought otherwise, and flatly declined to make the promise the elder gentleman tried to exact from him. He came straight to town and straight to me, from the scene which had been acted between them. " I told him," said Tom, who was for the moment very much harder on his lordship than he had a right to be, " that I was the man he had thought worthy to marry his daughter. I'm not " (he said in paren thesis). " Nobody is. But I didn't tell him I wasn't. I told him that I hadn't changed, and I didn't mean to change except for the better. Lucy and I had already talked the matter over, and had agreed to wait. She had promised that no earthly thing should divide us. She told me " — he blushed scarlet, and stammered a good deal at this point in his oration — " that she cared for me, and that she'd stick to me.

Lucy's a brick. She's the pluckiest girl I ever knew, and she's as loyal as Bayard's sword, and I've no fear on that side, and her father may go his own way, and except that she'll suffer a good deal, poor thing, it makes no difference. I tell you, sir, I'm going to prosper. I'm going to knock a golden chip or two from some odd corner of this old planet. Old Durgan " — that was the way in which he spoke of the Bishop — " wanted me to promise that I wouldn't try to see her, wouldn't write to her, would just quietly sit down and see my hopes slaughtered. I told him, No, sir. I told him that I had offered Lucy her freedom, and that she had laughed at the idea. I told him that we meant to stick to each other, and that I would take my dismissal from her lips, and from nobody else's. Let her tell me that we are to part, and I'll obey in a minute.

Until she does, I'm her lover and her servant and her plighted husband, and I'll fight to make a home for her, and make it, and carry her off to brighten it and keep it sacred to me till I die, and I'll do it in spite of all the bishops that ever raised the price of starch ! " On the whole I sided with Tom, but I made him write a letter in which he expressed repentance for certain things he had said in the heat of temper. " It's a fact," he admitted, " that I put my foot in it once or twice. I wasn't respectful." The letter was sent, and a very stiff and laborious answer came back, and the right reverend gentleman sent his daughter to her aunt ; and for a year she had lived at Bruxelles and on the Riviera, and had sent reams upon reams of letters to Tom, who wrote reams upon reams to her, and this Regent Street encounter was their first real meeting since the lamentable shindy at Stokestithe.

Tom, indeed, had only seen her to bow to once since her return. I got the whole story out of him no later than that evening. It would be better to say that he got the whole story into me ; for I was no more than the receptive barrel into which the narrative was poured. Tom said that he must talk or burst. I begged him not to burst, and he accepted the alternative. Lucy was, by Jingo, the jolliest girl. She was the pluckiest girl. She hadn't changed a hair. She wouldn't change. She didn't know how to be disloyal. It wasn't in her nature. Wasn't she a pretty girl? Did I ever see a prettier ? I mentioned my wife, who is three-and-forty, and Tom howled with laughter for a few seconds, and then looked horribly embarrassed, and begged my pardon with painful contrition. It was an awkward moment — for Tom, and I told him, with becoming gravity, that a quarter of a century earlier I would have tried to thrash any man who had behaved in that way.

I have said already that I like Tom. Most people like him. He boasts a bit, and thinks a good deal of himself, but he is as honest as the day — a kindly, generous, impulsive honourable lad of four-and-twenty. The world will knock the conceit out of him, as it does with everybody more or less, and in the meantime it is the only fault he has, and never takes an offensive form. As a matter of fact, it is not much more than the result of youth and health and high spirits, and a most perfect and abounding hope. He means to get on. He hasn't a doubt that he can vanquish the world and make his way. He adores the Bishop's daughter. He has the grace to acknowledge with all his heart that she is too good for him. This is an excellent sign in him. A man who hasn't got it in him to worship a woman at one time of his life is never good for anything.

I like his walk — strong, elastic, resolute. I like his face, with its breezy, boyish look. I like his young enthusiasm, and his big talk, THE BISHOP'S AMAZEMENT. which is perfectly sincere. I like his hatred for cant and worldliness, for coldness of heart and selfishness, and cowardice, and all base things. I like his respectful deference to superior years — in which the Bishop thinks him wanting, I have no doubt — and his courtesy to old women and plain women. I like to see him flash, and hear him thunder at any of the thousand and one things which excite his wrath. I like to see him breaking off in the middle of one of these diatribes to play at bears under the table with the invaders from the nursery. There is no harm in Tom. There is no great harm in any young dandy of four-and-twenty who is truly and unaffectedly fond of little children.

And so I am in a measure backing Tom against the Bishop, and it is in part owing to this fact that I am able to tell this very curious and remarkable story as if I had been an eye-witness to it all. " Tom," said Lucy, when I had left them, " take me somewhere to luncheon. Let it be somewhere where we can be quiet and have a long talk. I have hundreds of things to say." Tom led her to a fashionable restaurant, THE BISHOP'S AMAZEMENT. which was very quiet at that hour. He ordered a nice little meal for the lady of his heart, and she consented to a single glass of champagne, and Tom drank the rest of the small bottle for his share of the repast. They sat at an end table in a half recess, with palms and flowers about it. I know the corner, and I am sure it must have suited their purpose perfectly.

There was nobody but a single waitress in the room beside themselves, and she only came when she was summoned. And when the glove was stripped from the little rose-leaf of a left hand the girl parted one finger from the rest, and held it up before him, blushing but proud, and with a pretty courage in her eyes. There was Tom's engagement ring on it, where he had set it eighteen months before. We may very well suppose that Tom kissed the ring and the hand that wore it, if the waitress happened to be at the other end of the room at that moment. They make a very agreeable subject for observation in that sheltered little corner ; two loyal and warm hearted young lovers who have been parted for a year, and have been at war with authority, and have suffered a good deal, as young folks know how to suffer.

I am not an incendiary or a revolutionist, but I applaud this particular rebellion. This good lad and this dear little girl have been allowed to love each other. They have had the paternal blessing. They have had all sorts of warranty and authority for their honest love. And now cold worldly prudence preaches treason to the girl's heart. " He was a good match once. He is not a good match any longer. He has lost the bright hopes he was taught to cherish almost from his cradle : now throw him over. Take this moment of his discouragement to tell him that the one creature he loves and honours is a cold-blooded and heartless little person who thinks more of a good establish ment than of anything else in the world." Do you wonder if she thinks this wicked and cruel ? Do you wonder if her heart fires, in a passionate tender revolt against that worldly cynicism ?

Do you wonder if he thinks her a pattern of constancy, and loves her all the better for it ? They sat there for one heavenly, happy hour, and forgot the luncheon, and changed vows again, and discussed Tom's plans, and then walked on air back into Regent Street out of that exquisite fairyland of a restaurant, and as their feet touched the pavement they came face to face with the Bishop. Tom and the girl turned white, and the Bishop turned purple, and Lucy's aunt, who sat beside her brother, the Bishop, in the carriage, went a yellowish grey. Tom raised his hat and the Bishop scowled at him with great sternness. Lucy advanced to the carriage and said quite quietly, — " I've been lunching with Mr. Finch. Don't you remember Mr. Finch, Papa ? " For the Bishop stared at Mr. Finch's salute with a severity of astonishment, and gave no answer to it.

" You had better get into the carriage, Lucy," said Mrs. Justice Raimond. " I am driving home." " Mr. Finch will see me home, dear," said Lucy. " Not on this occasion," said her father. " It is long since I had an opportunity of conversing with Mr. Finch, and I have something of importance to say to him." Miss Lucy, who had recovered her colour, put out her hand to Mr. Finch, and said, " Good-bye, Tom, dear." On this cue Mr. Finch answered, cheerfully, " Good-bye, darling." Mrs. Raimond stiffened with a shock, as one stiffens who takes an overdose of a very strong tonic, and Lucy's father looked at her with an anger which made him speechless. The carriage had halted only because of a block in the traffic, and now moved on again, bearing away Miss Durgan, and leaving her father on the kerbstone.

The Bishop, who is slim and of middling stature, is, nevertheless, a man of the most dignified bearing. He is one of those people who can be intolerably courteous, and can make politeness as cold and cutting as an east wind. He had walked but a few steps when he was able to bring himself to a point below zero. " We are not far from Portland Place," he said. " Portland Place is usually very quiet, and we shall probably be able to talk there without interruption, Mr. Finch." Mr. Finch inclined his head in respectful assent, and they walked on together until they escaped from the lounging, sauntering crowd, and came on that Sahara of flagstone and macadam, which lies in silence so near it. " When last we exchanged opinions, Mr. Finch," said the Bishop, " I told you with great distinctness that I could not sanction your meeting with my daughter."

He paused as if in expectation of an answer, but Mr. Finch gave none, save by a very slight inclination of the head. " I made that state ment as definite and clear as it was in the power of any words of mine to make it." Mr. Finch again inclined his head. The Bishop rose inwardly to a point very much above zero, but he iced himself on the outside. " Will you be good enough to tell me, Mr. Finch, if I failed to make my wishes intelli gible ? " " You made your desire quite clear, sir," said Tom, being forced into speech by this plain question. " Then, Mr. Finch," pursued the Bishop, " will you be good enough to tell me why I find you still intruding yourself upon my daughter's society ? " "Your lordship does not find me intruding," said Tom. " It is not my way to intrude." "I will not chop words with you, sir," replied the Bishop.

" I have requested you to cease to pursue my daughter. A man of honour, Mr. Finch, is apt to obey an intima tion of that kind." " A man is not generally said to ' pursue ' the lady to whom he is engaged to be married," Tom said. He had an instinct that the Bishop would lose his temper, and he saw how needful it was that he should keep his own. " Miss Durgan is my promised wife, sir." " I had hoped, sir, that we had done with that nonsense," said Miss Durgan's father. " If you will permit me, sir," Tom answered, "with all respect, and with every desire not to annoy you, it is not nonsense, but a most serious fact, and it is very far, indeed, from being done with." It cost the father a tremendous struggle, but he got down again below zero before he answered : " With whatever authority, with whatever weight may belong to me as her father, I forbid you, Mr. Finch, to sustain my daughter in rebellion."

The lad's heart had been sweeter to him than honey. It turned as bitter as wormwood, as it had no earthly right or reason to do, for he was sure of Lucy, and he was on the winning side. " Miss Durgan became engaged to me with your lordship's consent," he said. " No action of mine has made me less worthy of her regard, or of yours, or of any living creature's. It seems that there are two sorts of men of honour in the world, and that they have different codes of conduct. I, it appears, am not a man of honour because, being held to my word, I abide by it. I shall abide by it until I am released." " You are released, Mr. Finch," said the Bishop curtly. " I release you." " It is not in your power to release me," Tom answered, and they walked silently after this for perhaps a hundred yards. " Mr. Finch," said the Bishop, after this pause — he spoke with a portentous gravity.

" I will set before you a fact upon which I will request you to ponder. I have received a c THE BISHOP'S AMAZEMENT. distinct undertaking from my daughter that she will not marry without my consent." " She told me so," said Tom, " this after noon." " And knowing that," pursued the Bishop, " you persist in your conduct ? " " Miss Durgan told me more, sir," answered Tom. " What further ? " asked the elder. " She told me she'd never marry anybody else." And at that such a glow from her loyalty shot through him that he warmed even to her father, and for a minute took a genial tone. " Look here, sir, I don't see any use in quarrelling. Lucy will wait and I shall wait, and work whilst I am waiting. I believe you're a better sort of fellow than you think you are, and when I've made a position you'll forget all this unpleasantness."

This was, beyond all doubt, the moment at which the Bishop became inexorable. To be told that he was a better sort of fellow than he thought himself was an affront to which he would not have submitted as a curate. Incredible as it may seem, bishops have once been curates. He would have frozen the insolent person who had dared so to speak to him when he was parson of his parish. As a rural dean he would have thought the thing impossible. And now he was a bishop, and this young man said it coolly, and smiled in saying it, and did not die beneath his gaze. " Your manner," he said, " sir — your man ner is insolent. I decline to continue a controversy conducted in such terms. I forbid further intercourse with my daughter." He turned away and walked a step or two, and then came back again. " I forbid it, sir. I forbid it."

Then he went away and did not come back again, and Tom stood stock still, staring after him in a mixture of anger, and trouble and bewilderment. He had no notion of what was meant by the charge of insolence. I never knew a young man who had a better-developed bump of veneration, but somehow the Bishop of Stokestithe had never seemed venerable to him. Right away at the extreme end of Portland Place he saw the father of his beloved pause to shake hands with somebody, but only for an instant. The somebody came nearer, and proved to be a very military person, who looked rather over-tailored and vulgar, Tom thought. He sported a magnificent mous tache, which he caressed as he walked, and he glanced at the young man as he went by, and looked back at him. Tom turned round just in time to catch the stranger in this act, and it made him remember that he had been standing on the same flagstone for a matter of some five or six minutes.

He sauntered on in the same direction as the swaggering military gentleman who had shaken hands with the Bishop. He did not guess it — nobody ever does guess it — but he was at a strange turning point in his career. He would never have given the military gentleman a second thought if it had not been for that backward glance of his, and would not have known him again. But it was essential to his prosperity (as things turned out) that he should know him, and so the Fates put a mark upon him — a mark so strange and curious in its way that it was not to be forgotten. Tom strolled on, with down-bent head, trailing the point of his umbrella along the 19 C pavement, and thinking mournfully how little he had done to bring himself nearer to Lucy. He had been called to the Bar, to be sure, but he had not earned a penny in his life so far, and a fellow couldn't ask a bishop's daughter to a share of six pounds a week.