The Bishop's Delusion

Chapter I. Angela

She was a nice little thing. She was uot only nice, but she was good ; she was as good as gold. Angela Latham was not a beauty ; she had what was better, far better than beauty, real goodness, and the tenderest heart in the world. The wife of the Vicar of Mansel Lucy could not think, she used to say to her intimate friends, what she should do without her. It would be like losing her right hand to lose Angela, who knew ever so much more about the parish than she knew herself. Angela had lived at the Vicarage ever since she was grown up — she was "grown up" years before most girls — she had lived there since she was seventeen, and she was now four-and-twenty. At an age when most girls are still in the school-room, Angela Latham was installed as governess, nursery governess, in the Vicar's family, and she had been on promotion ever since.

She was still governess — not in the nursery — to the Rev. Mark Peploe's girls ; the girls had grown up in these seven years, and one of them was " out," and the boys who were in the nursery had gone away to a public school. Angela's duties were no longer confined to the school-room. She spent the greater part of her time now in Mr. Mark Peploe's study, writing his letters, copying out his notes, and some people — ill-natured people — used to say, writing his sermons. She had been his amanuensis for more than three years, and she knew more about his papers and his correspondence than he knew himself. When she was not engaged in copying the Vicar's illegible manuscripts, that no one else could decipher, Angela was occupied with parish work. She visited the sick, read ANGELA, to the old people, and taught the children ; besides cutting out little garments at the mothers' meetings, collecting the pence and keeping the accounts of the parish clubs.

She was a good all-round worker, but her strong point was temperance work. She wore a bit of blue ribbon sewn on to the front of her black gown ; sewn on in a most conspicuous manner. You couldn't fail to see that bit of blue ribbon the first moment you saw Angela Latham. It matched her eyes, which were soft and rather sad and would have been pretty if they had not been fringed with such pale lashes. She was a little fair woman, with no features to speak of, and pale, sandy hair. A colourless, un interesting little thing, but as good as gold. Her father had been a clergyman of the Church of England, and for some misdoing he had been suspended, and after having broken his wife's heart, he had gone away in disgrace and died abroad. He had left two little girls behind him, Angela and Mary, who had been educated at the expense of some charitable friends at a Clergy Orphan School.

Mary was a nurse now in a London hospital, and Angela was a person of very great importance at Mansel Lucy. Mrs. Mark Peploe never could understand how she could have kept Angela so long, how it was that somebody had not found out her worth years ago and carried her away. So many curates had come and gone while Angela was at the Vicarage, and not one of them had ever fallen in love with her, or shown the slightest inclination to carry her away. Perhaps they did not see with the same eyes as the Vicar's wife. Mrs. Peploe's heart used to beat with anxiety on the arrival of each fresh curate ; she had a presentiment that a curate would come some day and carry her treasure off, and then there would be nobody to write the Vicar's letters and do the work of the parish. She breathed quite freely when the Rev. Noel Daintry came to Mansel Lucy ; she was cpiite sure that there was no cause for anxiety now.

The new curate was a black inan. He was a delightful black man, and he was an ANGELA. 13 excellent curate. A gentleman, an M.A. of Cambridge, a scholar, an apostle of the temperance cause. He wore a bit of blue ribbon in his buttonhole, and he had a blue marker in his Bible, and his sermon-case was of blue silk. He preached temperance sermons, and sang temperance hymns, and gave temperance addresses at the Band of Hope meetings, and told little temperance stories. It was his devotion to the temperance cause, the cause that was so very near her heart, that drew Angela Latham and the black curate together. They were naturally thrown a great deal into each other's society in their parish work. They managed most of the meetings between them, and they visited the same people, and met continually in the schools.

It was very soon remarked in the parish that Angela and Mr. Daintry were seen a great deal together, but very few people ventured to suggest that the black curate would ever have the presumption to become a suitor for the lady's hand. Public opinion was fairly emphatic on this question. Every one ridiculed the idea of Angela marrying a black man. It would be too outrageous. Whoever heard of a white woman, a lady, doing such a terrible thing ? The last person to hear anything of the gossip of the place was Angela. She was so used to being mixed up with curates that it never occurred to her that some people were making ill-natured remarks about her. Besides, she had never had a lover in her life, and if this young man's manner was different from the other curates, and his voice was softer when he spoke to her, she had no precedent to judge from ; she only put it down to his colour and his race.

The Rev. Noel Daintry was of African extraction, a great, big, burly black man, with the broad features and woolly hair of his race, but with gentle, gazelle-like eyes, and a voice soft and tender as a girl's. He was a distinctly interesting black man. He was a delightful study. He could answer in his person so many vexed questions. He could settle at once the ANGELA. question of heredity in its moral aspect. He was quite an object lesson. The Vicar was the only person in the parish who regarded him from this point of view ; perhaps because he was acquainted with the facts of his early history, and had certain data to go upon. It was a very interesting history. Noel Daintry had been brought over to England twenty years ago by a missionary whose name he bore. He had purchased the boy of his mother for the price of a bag of mealies, to save him from being sold into slavery, and he had brought him over to England and educated him as a gentleman.

Martyn Daintry had been dead now for some years, but he had left a sum of money in the hands of trustees to complete the edu cation of the boy he had adopted, and to fit him to go back in due course as a missionary to his own people. Noel had no antecedents to speak of; no generations of ancestors exercised in the fear of God, and in the practice of virtue and self-control. He was the offspring of a savage and degraded race. In the face of all this he was a gentleman, a polished English gentleman of scholarly tastes ancl temperate habits. The Vicar, regarding him as an object lesson, looked for the mental traits as well as the physical characteristics of his race in vain. Even the peculiarities of voice and manner were conspicuous by their absence. The black curate had that peculiar quality of voice that betokens culture, and his manner was perfect.

This was all the more remarkable as he had not been brought over to this country until he was seven years old. He had passed the first six years of his life amid savage surroundings. He could not have forgotten those early years, although they had left no trace — no visible trace — behind. If it hadn't been for his woolly hair — he wore it short ancl parted down the middle — and his complexion, his African origiu might hardly have been suspected. His thick lips — if they were thick — were concealed beneath a becoming moustache, and his features, ANGELA, though broad, were unusually fine and in telligent, and he had a capital forehead. He was a splendid specimen of what religion and culture can do towards elevating the negro race. People, when they got used to him, remarked that he had really got a refined face, and that he was not so very black after all.

His complexion was not that dreadful ivory black that goes with wiry woolly hair, and wide features, and thick lips. It was a fine brown blackness that admitted of shades of colour, not that dreadful smutty black that has no variety. His forehead was lighter than the rest of his face ; his forehead ancl chin, and his high cheek-bones, and the palms of his hands, people remarked, were quite light in colour. " Perhaps it was with washing them so often," the girls at the Vicarage used to say, when they made their little jokes about the curate. "If he persevered they might get quite white in time." Angela always checked her pupils when she overheard their foolish remarks. B " There is nothing in the colour to be ashamed of," she would say sharply ; " he is the same flesh and blood as we are. Colour, like beauty, is only skin - deep.

He has higher qualities than many white men, and he is a scholar and a gentleman." Angela always stood up for Noel Daintry in the parish. She could not understand that prejudice about his colour. " God makes no difference," she used to say. " He made the souls of black and white both alike. We are all the same in His sight. It is a reflection on His work, His beautiful, perfect work, to make a distinction. For my part, I love all — all — black men." It was a beautiful sentiment. Perhaps this speech of Angela's was repeated to Mr. Daintry, and it gave him courage. It gave him courage to say what had long been in his mind, and that he had not found courage to say before. He was taking Angela back to the Vicarage after a choir practice ; it was a lovely June night, and they had loitered on the way.

ANGELA, 19 There was nothing to hurry for. It was a quite perfect June night, and the air was full of the sweet scents of early summer. The hawthorn was whitening the hedgerows, the sweet pink briar roses were blooming in the lane, and the air was full of the amorous songs of the nightingales in the branches overhead. Angela and the black curate had walked the whole length of the lane in silence, and they had reached the Vicarage gate. He ought to have said " good-bye " at the gate and gone back to his lonely rooms in the village. He said good-bye, and took Angela's little soft white hand in his, but he did not give it up to-night as he usually did. He stood by the gate, holding it between his two black palms ; and standing there, in the sweet, dusky June twilight, he told his tale. He told it exactly as a white curate would have told it.

His colour made no difference in the telling. Angela forgot that he was black, that he belonged to another race, as she stood there b in the sweet summer dusk, listening to the old, old story that he told as if he had genera tions of culture behind him. It was not exactly the way in which the braves of his tribe were wont to woo their ebony brides. His wooing was distinctly opposed to the traditions of his race. He carried poor Angela quite away with his earnestness — his earnestness, and tenderness, and chivalrous devotion. No one bad ever whispered a word of love in her willing ears before, and there had been heaps of curates at Mansel Lucy in those seven years. They had all come and gone without a word — without a tender word — and this curate had only been here three short months, and he was brim ming over, he was literally quivering with tenderness.

What answer could Angela give him ? The torrent of his eloquence carried her away ; his impassioned words thrilled her with a strange, new, delightful sensation. He was her first lover, he was teaching her the very alphabet of love ; she forgot all about his colour, she only remembered that he was ANGELA. 21 the best and the cleverest man she had ever met — and he loved her. He had chosen the best possible time for his declaration. If he had made it at noon day her answer might have been different. We are all creatures of circumstance. The time and the season were propitious ; they could not have been better chosen. A June night, the favouring dusk, the wood-pigeons cooing in the branches, and the nightingale making the twilight palpitate with his strange, sweet song. There was only one answer that Angela could give.

She gave it, blushing to her finger-tips, and the curate pressed the little warm, white hand that was trembling in his big, dusky palms to his lips. " My angel ! " he murmured. " My angel ! " Any other lover would have taken her in his arms, and have kissed her not unwilling lips, but Noel Daintry had had no experience in kissing ; it did not come naturally to him. It was not an instinct of his nature. There was no hereditary custom transmitted to him by his black ancestors to give this con ventional expression to his feelings. Perhaps they had other methods of ex pressing their devotion, quite as reasonable, and less embarrassing ; only, if he had em ployed any of these methods, Angela would not have understood him. Angela was very thankful that he had been quite content with kissing her hands ; perhaps if he had taken her in his arms on that first night, she might have changed her mind.

Who can say ? If her black lover had taken her in his arms at that critical moment she would have been able to estimate more accurately the true state of her feelings, and the value of repulsion — the quite natural repulsion of two opposite races — and this veracious story would probably not have been written.

Chapter II

A DUSKY WOOER. Everybody in Mansel Lucy congratulated Angela on her engagement. Nobody expressed the least surprise. It had all fallen out as every one had expected. People had got so accustomed to Noel Daintry's colour that it made no difference. They had ceased to remark it. It is astonishing how soon one gets accustomed to things. A personal de formity in a new friend after the first few days or weeks of acquaintance ceases to be noticed. A cast in the eye, a positive squint even, gray hair, baldness, stammering, and every other defect, when one once gets used to it, ceases to be remembered. The people at Mansel Lucy had long ceased to remark that the curate was black. Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that he had ceased to remember it himself. He had grown so accustomed to see a black face in the glass smiling back at him whenever he happened to look into it, that he had ceased to observe the colour.

It had made no difference to him in life. It had never stood in his way. He had done quite as well in the University and in the Church as if he had had the purest blood in England in his veins. He had taken a First Class in a Tripos, and he had passed with distinction his Bishop's examinations. If he had been a white man with generations of culture behind him, the result would have been quite satisfactory. Society had been indulgent to him. It had thrown wide its doors to him, and re peated the verdict of the University and the Church. It had never hinted to him that his colour was a disability ; it had rather invested it with a charm. Unless he had been the most modest of men — and modesty is not the most prominent characteristic of his race — he could not have divined that a white woman would have been anything but honoured by his choice.

He might have done better, he told him self, in a worldly point of view ; he might have made the offer of his dusky hand and heart to the Vicar's eldest daughter, or to the Baronet's widow up at the great house. He did not doubt that either of these ladies would have accepted him, but they were not to his taste. He preferred Angela. Agnes Peploe was dark-haired, and had sparkling brown eyes and a brilliant com plexion ; and Lady Wybrow, widow of Sir Peter Wybrow deceased, was a stout, florid lady with forty summers and the largest rent-roll in the county. Against the attrac tions of these ladies he had set the poor little commonplace charms of the Vicar's governess. He had not hesitated in his choice, al though Lady Wybrow had shown a decided preference for him, and Miss Agnes had painted his likeness.

His heart had gone out at once to the little white-faced governess. Perhaps it was her white face and her pale sandy hair that had won him. There is no accounting for taste. Every one has an ideal of his own, and Noel Daintry's ideal was a colourless complexion, and pale eyelashes, and sandy hair. It came nearest to the vision he had conjured up in his mind from his earliest years of the angels, the beautiful white-robed angels that his soul worshipped. Angela in her white summer frock, singing in the village choir, seemed to him the realisation of his beatific vision. " My angel ! my angel ! " he murmured, as he dropped his black face into the folds of his surplice. He asked Angela to become his wife the next day, and as he went back from the Vicarage gate in the sweet, dusky June night with her promise thrilling in his ears, he told himself that he had met the guardian angel of his life.

Perhaps he had. Everybody was very nice about his en gagement. The Vicar told him that he was a very lucky fellow, that he had made a capital choice. Angela was exactly cut out for a missionary's wife ; he couldn't have found a better helpmeet if he had searched the country over. Everybody in the village, even to Lady Wybrow, congratulated him, and said it was a most suitable match ; they were made for each other. The Vicar's wife wept when she tendered the curate her con gratulations. He was robbing her of a treasure; she did not know how she should fill Angela's place. All this was very satisfactory. At least, it was satisfactory to Noel Daintry. Lady Wybrow did ask Angela if she were quite sure that her affection for her lover were strong enough to overcome the objection to his colour ; if she were quite sure of herself.

Angela came away from the great house angry and indignant. She had not the slightest objection to his colour — in fact she preferred it, she had told her ladyship rather warmly. Sure of herself, indeed ! The Peploe girls raised the same question, only they put it in another way. " Oh, Angy, Angy, you can't reaUy love him ; you can't feel for him as — as you would feel for a white man ! " her old pupil Agnes said, with her arms around her, and looking at her with a strange pity in her bright face. " His colour makes no difference," Angela said indignantly. "Why should I love him less for being black ? I should be the basest and meanest of creatures if — if I let his colour make any difference. He has the noblest heart in the world ! Love does not look on the outward appearance ; it looks on the heart !

" After this there was nothing more to be said. It was to be a short engagement. Noel Daintry had only come to Mansel Lucy for six months ; at the end of that time he was to leave England for his native land. He was to return to Africa to convert his country men. A great work was before him, a stupen dous work that white men had attempted and failed in for many scores of years. Perhaps their methods were at fault. They had not gone to work in the right way ; they had not sufficiently considered the prejudices and the weaknesses inherent in the national character. They had expected too much, and they had not been tolerant of failure. They had looked for the virtues of a higher civilisa tion in a nervous, highly strung, vain, emo tional, weak-willed race. They had clung to the belief, through all these years of failure and disappointment, that a veneer, a thin veneer of civilisation and Christianity had changed, or would change, the entire nature of their converts ; and they had learnt to their dismay, when any sudden temptation pricked the black skin, that the old savage nature still lurked beneath it.

It was not the fault of the people if their teachers, when they looked for strength, found weakness ; they were true to the hereditary traditions of their race. With a deeper in sight into the national character, and with newer methods, Noel Daintry was going back to the land of his birth full of confidence in his mission — and in himself. He was quite ready to convert, not only his father's house, but the whole Dark Continent. He had everything in his favour. He was full of enthusiasm and sympathy, he had special knowledge, and he had not forgotten the language. This last was not the least of his qualifica tions. He could speak Swahili, the language that is spoken by vast tribes on the Congo, perfectly, and he still remembered the hymns in his native tongue that he used to sing when a boy beneath the cloudless African sky.

He had already taught Angela these hymns of his childhood, and she sang them like an angel. She had a sweet, soft voice that made the horrible sounds of this uncouth tongue almost harmonious. She was picking up the language, too, learning it eagerly in her spare moments. She had not many spare moments now, but she was an apt pupil. Was it not the language of love ? Noel Daintry was a model lover. He was one of those delightful ideal lovers we are always hearing about, who woo the happy objects of their devotion on their knees. When they get up, these ideal lovers, they go away ; at least, they are always supposed to go away. There is no relapse. They do not get up slowly from that abnormal attitude when their ardour has abated, and resume the more prosaic position of everyday life. They go away.

Noel Daintry wooed Angela as it were on his knees. There was no other name for de scribing his devotion and reverence for the woman he loved. But he was never likely to be guilty of the meanness of going away. He remained on his knees. His ardour was not likely to cool ; it was not the sort that cools. There were no tender passages in his love to diminish its ardour — they do not occur in the loves of black races ; there were no sweet, privileged familiarities to break down the reverence that was the special feature of his love for Angela. He had ac quired a great many English ways ancl customs ; he might have lived in London all his life, and his father before him, for his beautiful manners and his conformity to English customs. But he had not acquired the conventional way of making love.

It is not a matter of habit ; one can only acquire it by actual experience. And Angela was his first love. His ignorance was pardonable. His de votion was quite touching, the girls used to remark, as they watched him going up the aisle of the church in his white surplice. He had no eyes for anybody but Angela. He didn't look down at the ground, as curates are expected to do, when they fold their hands in a beautiful attitude, and walk meekly up the aisle between the pews, with all the congregation looking on. He folded his black hands over his white surplice — perhaps it looked whiter by the contrast — and kept his big, moist, trustful eyes fixed on those choir seats in the chancel where Angela sat in her white. He read the service beautifully, and he put more earnestness into the prayers than any of the white curates had done before him, but he looked at Angela all the time.

The reading, and the praying, and the preaching the beautiful sermon that he took days and nights to prepare, were all for Angela. There might not have been any one else in the church. When the service was over, he would walk back with her to the Vicarage gate — he was allowed to walk back with her — and he would carry her hymn-book, and look down at her with his big, serious eyes, with that mute eloquence of love in them that is independent of colour. There was not much conversation between them during these walks home. Angela was conscious that all the congregation were watching them, and that the Vicarage girls were giggling behind, and making all sorts of ridiculous remarks. Noel Daintry was too happy to speak. He was content to walk silently by Angela's side, carrying her hymn-book clasped between his black hands, or her umbrella, or her sunshade, or anything he could get hold of, holding it out before him in a way that used to send the boys at the Vicarage, when they happened to be home for their holidays, into convulsions.

He hadn't got the way of carrying things like a white man ; unless it was that he could not show enough reverence for anything he was permitted to carry which belonged to Angela. He was not always dumb, though he seldom o spoke of his love. It was too sacred a thing to talk about. When he was not teaching her hymns in his native tongue, he was talking about his work. He was so anxious to return to Africa. A party of English missionaries had met with sad disasters in the interior. They had managed to penetrate some distance into the interior, not many miles from Noel Daintry's birthplace — a party of seven picked men. They had started full of high hope, in the vigour of youthful life and strength, and they had been struck down, one by one, by fever. Of the seven who had started full of enthusiasm for the great work of planting Christianity and civilisation — they must ever go side by side — in the midst of a barbarous people, two returned at the end of six months, invalided, and five, alas ! five, were left behind.

They had fallen by the roadside, before they had entered the vineyard. Not one short labouring day had been theirs. Humanly speaking, it had been a great waste of life. No one was more moved when the news of failure and disaster came to England than Noel Daintry. " It is no use sending white men to Africa," he said to Angela ; " they will never stand the climate. They must be born to it. It will take generations to inure them to it ; aud — and there must be the native element in it. It must be a mixed race." "Yes," Angela faltered, holding her breath. " The white race alone will never be able to live there, not for any time, only for a year or two, and to come back broken in health. The hope of the future for Africa is a mixed race." It was his pet theory, a mixed race ; the only salvation he saw for his poor savage countrymen.

He did not see any reason why the superfluous white women in England should not be drafted off to Africa. They could be spared. It would be better for those who were left behind ; and there would be a great work before them. It never once occurred to him that there could be any innate repulsion between men and women of opposite races. He judged a from his own experience. Angela had fluttered to his side like a little white dove ; she had raised no obstacle ; she had only waited to be asked. He was quite sure that he had discovered a panacea for all the woes of his down-trodden native land — a mixed race. No more waste of life ; no more misplaced, misdirected efforts. Those raised on the soil would best know the needs of the soil. There would be no more mistakes, no more failures. Angela and he were going out to show the world what could be done; to provide an object lesson to all the missionary societies.