AN EREMITE OF TO-DAY.
THE recluse instinct survives in England, perhaps, better than in other countries these rushing centuries. " Every Englishman is an island," wrote Emerson sagely, in reference to the English love of keeping the home in surrounded and green
privacy, of keeping one's life guarded from intrusiveness. The privet hedge i3 for the individual what the guardian tea is for the nation. But the hermit unit is the family, not the individual, and so we feel a little critical of our rector, and wills a sigh wish him married.
Striding along the road, his coat-tails flying, his bands loosely clasped behind him, his gaze bent abstractedly on the people he passes, the rector is a striking figure. His great height, something Elizabethan in the cut of his clipped and pointed grey beard, his air of remoteness—which is leas an actuality than an impression— mark him as out of the common, would so mark him even in a great city. Along our country roads he is of course familiar, but yet makes the impression always of something rare and unfamiliar. We are on no give-and.take terms of little friendlinesses in daily life. Even those of us who have least penetration feel that his inner life is more real to him than the outward facts of existence, of which, indeed, he seems to be half the time unaware, and that the inner life of his parishioners is equally more real to him than their daily routine, and common joys and sorrows. As they for the most part are but dimly conscious of any other current than the obvious one of immediate need, this oddness of the :rector's
°Herta many of them uncomfortably, gives them a feeling almost of resentment.
Our rector's attitude to the children is u odd as the rest of him. When they see his long figure, his remote, clear glance in the street they are alarmed. Nor does his abrupt " Well, Mary—Ellen- Julia, how is the baby sister I " please little Miss Sophie Bennett, aged eight, the proud possessor of an infant brother whom the rector baptized not a week ago by the name of Royal Edward, in memory of an uncle lost in the ship of that name. But when lie "conducts "—in the thorough meaning of the term—the children's service at three o'clock every Sunday, he is a singularly beloved
person. No child would miss that hour in the week, end no child is afraid to go to church alone. They come flocking from all directions while the rector pulls the bell, even the smallest boys and girls who can scarcely speak plainly. Inside the church they settle in the pews like alighting birds, preening and fluttering. removing hats and shaking out curls and brief skirts. The rector. curiously, makes no mistake in their names on Sunday, and has a word for each—lifting a tiny one to a seat, finding a place where three little sisters may squeeze in together, piloting a May group to a pew. He sings the frost hymn with vigour, walking meanwhile up and down the aisle to see that every one is happy and comfortable. holding out a finger at the door to a late-comer, whom he carries in his hand as it were to a seat, righting an upside-down hymnbook for a small child pretending to read and anxious for the correct look of things, checking an ill-timed bit of fun among the boys-- all simply and sensibly. The service is short but has a special charm, a feeling of reality and vigour and a sense of comradeship, and the little story or talk is not a matter of talking down. The moat fidgety children are contented. A grave and friendly rector in a white surplice smiles at them, and they flock to his outel retched hand like birds, chattering and unafraid when they are (limbered- They carry away with them a simple lesson of the war, a little knowledge of what love of country can be, perhaps a groping and ohildish awareness of the love of God.
Yet the village does not love the rector. Neglect of any duty is never charged against him, but the fault they find with bias is that he is not married, and they resent that he lives—like a hermit of old—laborious days in the parish and his garden, broken by long walks and midnight study, and with no pleasures that they can see. He is solitary as regards family. He allows no woman to approach his house. At one period he had a housekeeper and she fell in love with him. All the village knew it before the rector. The fact that whenever Ire was in church, there also was Mrs. Bracket under his eye, seemed to him an exaggerated devotion. but not to himself. The discovery came one day when, after a week's absence, to returned unexpectedly, and let himself into his house to find Mre. Bracket fondling one of his old coals and weeping over it. "Oh, Sir," she sobbed is explanation, "when you are away I have nothing else to love !" The rector, cold with terror, got rid of her, and thereafter set his face against the sex. lie shouldered the entire burden of his own household manage- ment, cleaning, cooking, laundry, without assistance. If he wants information about supplies, Ile consults a shop-clerk in London, never a neighbour or a village wife. His bedroom, a corner of his study, and the kitchen are the only rooms its use. His cooking must be elementary, we gather, from the fact that ha once confessed to having stewed a pheasant in a casserole with eight onions—and was unable to eat it, to his distressed astoniah- inent. He does up his own surplieea, and they are beyond cavil He is shabby, but, unlike the anchorite of old, keeps to a fastidious personal regard. He has the look of the particular man—good linen and well-kept bands.
The village never ceases to hope that the rector may marry. It longs for a conventional rectory to observe, and imitate, and gossip over. It would welcome even a rector's wife who Was meddlesome. A dark and silent rectory with no one to answer belle or receive messages, a hermit parson of austere life, addicted to long hours of digging and planting in his fields and garden, and the homing of many candles at night—these are matters for perplexity. no cottagers are half ashamed of the rector, half envious of more normal parishes. Their occasional moments of pride—when some distinguished man site in our little, ancient church and is whiepered to be " a friend of parson's," or when they hear in souse vague way that parson's scholarship is held to bo wonderful—are few in
comparison with their days of fretting discontent. " Birth or death or a wedding, all you get out of the rector is., ' Quito so. quite so' !" Mrs. Parker complains with very little exaggemtion. " And an infant with croup, he has no idea what it means ! He's too far off from ordinary folk, having no family. Not that he hasn't beautiful words at times. The things he said when the last of my boys went with the colours—l've five serving—made me dry my eyes, I was that proud."
Discipline and solitude, a mind that lives habitually irr a lofty air and glows only in Alpine colours, without earthly Pus, take • man a little apart from the common toil of sun and earth. But in rare time of spiritual straggle the shadow of divinity, that may emerge in tears from any human soul, meets something divine and divinely tender in his. The rector has a few worshippers among the villagers who have met him, as it were, soul to soul. They cannot say why they give him allegiance, cannot answer the common murmur, but their worship is unquestioning.
The two bachelor brothers who live in the tiny farmhouse that
-- — was once a hunting-box of a Stuart King Bee something of the rector's less austere side. He will drop in at long intervals to Sunday supper and discuss the crops, and the war, and hunting. On a Sunday night he is tired, and likes to stretch out luxuriously before she blaze of apple-branches, smoking in silence. His friends understand and respect his silence, but if visitors should come the rector is never uncouth or dull. He can rouse himself almost genially to the kind of conversation about the parish and the county that is expected of him. Only his voice is odd and utunodulated in a room. It has become part of the church furniture, one might think, and is incongruous away from the pulpit or lectern.
Another age—perhaps even another faith in this age—might mould this eremite to an anchorite fanaticism. As things are, he will never go out into the wilderness, nor yet set fire in a market square to a heaped-up pyre of vanities. He is an eremite born ; but born also of the English habit of mind that is so suspicious of excess of zeal, of oddity, so worshipful of re acals--the middle course. England allows bins to be something of a recluse, for the English are a recluse nation. But England pulls him back from going over the border towards a Stylites life. Some day perhaps he will find himself more an Englishman than an eremite. Then he will
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