Eli's Children: The Chronicles of an Unhappy Family. George Manville Fenn
himself that his wild oats were sown, and that now he was about to make a position of substantial basis for himself.
It was a strange thing, and as if a curious kind of clairvoyance made him prophetic, for the Rev. Eli Mallow went home, and that evening busied himself over his next Sunday’s sermon, involuntarily choosing the parable of the Prodigal Son, and not waking up to the fact of what he had done till he sat there in his study reading the manuscript over by the light of his shaded lamp.
“Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” he muttered in a low voice, as, with the manuscript in his hand, he sat gazing straight before him into the darker part of the room, and then became silent.
“And took his journey into a far country,” he muttered again, in the same dreamy abstracted manner, and then there was a longer pause, followed by a deep sigh.
The Rev. Eli Mallow rose slowly from his seat, and, with an agonised look in his face, walked up and down the room for some time before sinking back into his chair.
“And there wasted his substance with riotous living.”
It did not seem to be his voice that spoke in the silence of that room; but he knew it was his that exclaimed piteously as the king of old—“Ah, Cyril, my son, my son!” Again there was absolute silence in that room, till, quoting once more from the parable which he had made the subject of his discourse, the Rector said softly—
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”
“Yes, and I should forgive him,” he continued, after a pause. “I do try to practise as I preach. Poor Cyril! poor wilful boy. I pray heaven that my thoughts have been doing thee wrong.”
There was a gentle smile upon his lips then as he took the manuscript of his sermon and tore it up into very small pieces before consigning it to the waste-paper basket.
“No,” he said, “I must not preach a sermon such as that: it is too prophetic of my own position with my sons;” and as we know this prodigal did return penniless, having worked his way back in a merchant brig, to present himself one day at the rectory in tarry canvas trousers, with blackened horny hands and a reckless defiant look in his eyes that startled the quiet people of the place.
He made no reference as to his having wasted his substance; he talked not of sin, and he alluded in nowise to forgiveness, to being made as one of his father’s hired servants, but took his place coolly enough once more in the house, and if no fatted calf was killed, and no rejoicings held, he was heartily welcomed and forgiven once again.
He was his mother’s favourite, and truly, in spite of all, there was forgiveness ready in the father’s heart. As there was also for Frank, who after some years’ silence had suddenly walked in at the rectory gates, rough-looking and boisterous, but not in such a condition as his brother, who had quite scandalised the men-servants, neatly clad in the liveries, of which a new supply had come from London, greatly to the disgust of Smithson in the market-place, who literally scowled at every seam.
Part 1, Chapter XVI.
At the King’s Head.
“What I say is this,” exclaimed Jabez Fullerton. “Justice is justice, and right is right.”
“Hear, hear!” murmured several voices, as Mr. Fullerton glanced round the room, and drew himself up with the pride of a man who believed that he had said something original.
“I hope I’m too good a Christian to oppose the parson,” he continued, “and I wouldn’t if it had been Mr. Paulby, but it’s time we stopped somewhere, gentlemen.”
“Hear, hear!” again; and several of the gentlemen addressed took their long pipes from their mouths to say it, and then, replacing them, continued to smoke.
“Ever since parson has been back he has been meddling and interfering. First he kills poor old Sammy Warmoth. Broke his heart, he did. Then he makes Joe Biggins saxon, a man most unfitted for the post, gentlemen. I say a man most unfitted for the post.”
“Hear, hear!”
“Chap as is always looking at you as if he wanted to measure you for a coffin,” said Smithson, the tailor.
“Natural enough,” said the Churchwarden, chuckling; “you always look at our clothes, Smithson, eh?”
“Ay, I do, Master Portlock, sir; but I don’t want you to die for it. I want you to live and grow stout, and want new suits, not a last one.”
“Stiff, hard suit o’ mourning, eh, Smithson, made o’ wood?”
“Yes, sir, well seasoned; ellum, eh?”
There was a general laugh at this lugubrious joking, and Fullerton tapped impatiently with his pipe-bowl upon the table.
“I say, gentlemen, a most unsuitable man,” he continued.
“Who would you have had then?” said Churchwarden Portlock.
“Why Thomas Morrison, the wheelwright,” said Fullerton, “if you must have a churchman.”
“Yes, a good man,” was murmured in assent.
“Then he must be pulling the church all to pieces, and quarrelling with the curate, and refusing to bury his dead. We wouldn’t have refused to bury our dead at chapel, gentlemen.”
“Not you,” chuckled Portlock. “You’d like to bury the lot of us, parson and all.”
“Gentlemen, this is begging the question,” said Fullerton, with plump dignity, and he settled his neck in his white cravat. “What I say is, that I have no enmity against the parson, nayther have you.”
“Nay, nay,” said Warton, the saddler, who had the rectory pair horse harness on his mind, the new double set, that he saw, by the name on the packing-case, came from Peak’s; “we only pity him. He has plenty of trouble wi’ those two boys of his. I hear the Bad Shilling’s come back now.”
“Ay, he’s back,” said Smithson. “I’ve got a pair of his trousers to mend. One never gets anything to make. Up at thy place last night, wasn’t he, Master Portlock?”
The Churchwarden nodded.
“Nice boys!” said Smithson. “Dessay the father was like ’em, for the girls really are nice, like their mother.”
“Then he was twice as hard as he need be on Jock Morrison,” continued Fullerton, who would finish. “Fancy sending a man to gaol for three months just when his brother’s got a death in the house.”
“Fair play,” cried Portlock. “The bairn died afterwards.”
“Well, maybe it did,” said Fullerton, “but he needn’t have been so hard on the poor bairn’s uncle. Why not give him another chance? He’s no worse in his way than the parson’s boys are in theirs.”
“Boys will be boys,” said Smithson, who wondered whether that pair of trousers to mend might result in an order for a suit.
Fullerton was impatient, and cut in almost before the tailor had finished.
“Clergymen’s all very well in their way, gentlemen, but the dismissing of old schoolmasters and appointing of new ones don’t seem to me to be in their way, especially where there’s governors to a school.”
“Parson’s a governor too,” said Warton, the saddler.
“Ex officio?” said Tomlinson, the ironmonger, who kept the bank.
“Of course, of course,” acquiesced Fullerton, who had not the least idea of what