Where Love Illumines (Where There is Love Book 2) Page 12

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “Come, come. Let us not stand upon ceremony but sit in comfort.” Sir Richard sat back down at his desk, and Rowland sat in an upholstered chair nearby.

  His father was silent, so Rowland forged ahead. “I was denied orders, sir.”

  The silence hung heavy in the room. Sir Richard’s features were immobile. Then he clapped his hands together so sharply Rowland jumped. “Well, that’s fine. Sparke did quite right. Now that you’ve seen the error of your ways, you can renounce your enthusiasm and receive ordination from Bishop Exley. I’ll have a word with him about it—just a hint that youthful follies are to be readily forgiven. Your mother and I shall be very proud of you; you’ll rise high in the church once your foot is set on the right course. Shouldn’t be surprised to see you a bishop yourself someday.”

  Rowland looked at the floor. This reaction was far worse than if his father had burst out in anger. Slowly raising his head, he looked his father in the eyes. “No, Father, I do not renounce my belief in a personal God nor my determination to preach this gospel.”

  Now the anger Rowland had expected from the first came. “What! You mean to continue in this disastrous way? Have you no common sense? Are you all stubbornness? How bitter it is to have an ungrateful son—more bitter far than the sting of an adder.”

  “Please, Father, I am not ungrateful for all you have done for me. You’ve always been most generous. But neither can I be ungrateful for what God has done for me. Even with all you have provided, His mercy has been greater. I cannot refuse what He would have me do. ‘How can we escape if we refuse so great a salvation?’”

  Again Sir Richard was silent. Then he said, “I do not comprehend this—that my son should be openly counted among the publicans and sinners, one of the curiosities of the day. It is hard enough to have Richard and your sister Jane share this Methodistical bias, but they do so quietly, whereas you are making a public figure of yourself and leading others into your way.”

  “I hope so, Father. To lead others is my calling.” Rowland spoke the words quietly so as to give no hint of disrespect.

  “Leave me now. I shall speak further to you on this matter at a later date. Try not to upset your mother.”

  Rowland bowed and took his leave.

  The next day after breakfast, the summer sun shining on Shropshire’s green rugged hills drew Rowland to take a walk around Hawkstone’s fields and call on their tenants. He had gone only so far as the bottom of the field, however, when he realized word of his arrival had run ahead of him. A large number of his father’s tenants, as well as people from the village, had come to greet him.

  To Rowland a crowd in a field meant just one thing—a congregation to be preached to. So after a few minutes of chatting with folk he had known since childhood and inquiring after their various ills and numerous family members, he jumped up on a large boulder in a corner of the pasture.

  “Friends, if you will it, I shall preach to you.”

  A cheer went up from the crowd—a rare experience for a field preacher who was more likely to be egged or pelted with mud clods. “You allus told me yer stories when ye were a wee lad,” called an old shepherd bent over his stick. “And right fine stories they allus was, too. Tell us another now, lad.”

  The crowd agreed, and Rowland, who never read his sermons anyway, now found himself without even a Bible in his hands. He looked around for inspiration. Seeing the path across the sheep-dotted hillside which he had thought to follow for his morning ramble, he began, “Some of you may think I am preaching a rambling sermon, but if I should be able to reach the heart of a poor rambling sinner, I’m sure you’ll forgive me. My friends, you may ramble from Christ, but He will ramble after you and try to bring you back into His fold.”

  His hearers laughed at the homely allusion and called hearty encouragement to the speaker.

  But back in the study at Hawkstone House, the unusual sound met the ears of Sir Richard, who hastily dispatched a footman to bring young Richard to him. His heir arrived in a matter of minutes during which time more disturbing sounds reached the study, led by one clear male voice with exceptional carrying quality.

  “Richard, I wish you would tell me—whose voice is that assaulting my ears?”

  Richard was quiet and listened for a moment “Why, sir, that is Rowland preaching to the people in the neighborhood.”

  Sir Richard was not surprised. Nor was he pleased. “Go tell him to come to me.” Richard started to turn for the door. “Immediately!”

  Richard was no more than halfway across the wide green lawn when he could hear Rowland’s words distinctly. “I cannot fathom with my puny understanding the mystery of the divine decrees. I can only say with St. Paul, ‘O the depth of His riches!’ We know nothing—can any man tell me why grass is green?” Rowland drew a wide arc with his arm, encompassing all the emerald hillside. As his hand swept across the path, he saw his brother approaching. He knew instantly why Richard was coming, but he continued the thought he was developing. “Then let us leave all explanations and simply believe what God has revealed.

  “My friends, think on these matters for a moment, search your hearts, and we will speak more on the matter.” He turned to Richard who now stood at the foot of the rock.

  “Our father bids you come to him—immediately.”

  “What shall I do with the congregation?” Rowland directed Richard’s gaze to the crowd who now numbered close to fifty. “I cannot go unless you come up and finish my discourse.”

  Rowland jumped down from his granite pulpit, and Richard, with an amused grin at his brother, climbed up. Rowland walked quickly along the path, hearing Richard’s quieter voice urging the farm laborers to follow the Good Shepherd.

  Sir Richard was ready for his erring son. “You pray without the Book of Common Prayer, hold what are termed evangelical sentiments, and preach to a mixed multitude of people in unconsecrated places. Bishop Exley will never ordain you. I shouldn’t even ask him.” He broke off his colloquium as a new sound came through the open windows. “I hear some other person preaching. Who is that?”

  “I suppose it is Richard finishing my sermon, sir.”

  Sir Richard banged a fist on his desk. “Go immediately and tell him I command him to come at once to me.” Rowland took an obedient step toward the door. “And you come with him.”

  By the time Rowland reached the bottom of the field, however, Richard had finished and dismissed the congregation. When both brothers returned to the study their father continued the reprimand with doubled vigor. “You are degrading yourselves by preaching in the open air without so much as a proper pulpit.”

  Sir Richard paused for breath, and Richard dared a quick allusion. “But surely, Father, trained in the law as you are, you can see the precedent. Our sermon was on a mount, just as was our Lord’s example of field preaching.”

  Sir Richard’s mouth was open to continue his lecture, but his son’s shot was so apropos that no words came out.

  Rowland was quick to take up the advantage. “And, Father, our words were much appreciated. Old Molly from the dairy told me it was the finest preaching she had ever heard. I would have been much complimented if I didn’t know Molly has been stone-deaf these twenty years.” Sir Richard’s gape turned to the merest shadow of a smile. “And Crooke’s wife listened the whole time with a young lamb in her arms. It was impossible to tell which had the broader smile, she or the lamb.”

  Richard took up the story. “And as the lamb hasn’t yet grown any teeth and Mrs. Crooke has lost all of hers, they made a fine twin set.”

  Sir Richard relaxed into a smile. “Well, I am pleased that the people on my estate should be kept in good humor.”

  The sons, knowing when they had pressed their advantage far enough, bowed and retired.

  It was late that evening when the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel drive brought Rowland, Richard, and Jane to the front steps of Hawkstone House. Rowland was the first to recognize C
lement’s coach-and-four. “Here’s support for you, Jane. Our sister Elizabeth has arrived.”

  With a glad cry, Jane rushed forward to greet her sister. Elizabeth had hugged all her family members roundly before Rowland realized that the footman was handing another woman out of the carriage.

  Mary Tudway emerged, shaking the wrinkles from her blue traveling dress with one hand and holding a well-brushed Spit in the other. As Rowland stepped forward to welcome Mary, Spit saw his rescuer from the gutters of Bath and with a glad, shrill yap leapt from Mary’s arms straight to Rowland’s. Fortunately, Rowland was nimble in the catching, but the unexpectedness of it caused him to step backwards onto the hem of Elizabeth’s full skirt, adding a sharp tearing sound to the rest of the noisy greeting.

  “Sir, if you were not my brother, I should rap you severely for such an affront.”

  “I beg your pardon, sister, but it was your back.”

  It was not until after dinner, which the baronet always ordered served in midafternoon, that Rowland had opportunity to talk to Mary alone. “I am so pleased you have borne my sister company—both for her sake and my own. I had not hoped to see you for some time yet.”

  As he spoke, the words brought home to him more sharply than anything yet had done the unenviable position he was in. He had looked forward to this as the time to make Mary an offer. Here she was, unexpectedly, delightfully, at Hawkstone, holding his arm as he led her on a walk around the grounds, and he could speak of nothing but the landscape.

  It seemed now that he would be forever debarred from speaking what was in his heart. “Would you prefer to sit in the summer house or to visit the grotto?”

  “Oh, I should far prefer the grotto. And Elizabeth told me you have a hermit cave and a castle ruin. What a perfect setting for the Castle of Otranto!”

  Rowland laughed. “Yes, and the eminent Dr. Johnson would agree with you. After his visit here, he wrote to our father that he found Hawkstone quite marvelous. ‘It excels in the extent of its prospects, the awfulness of its shades, the horrors of its precipices, the verdure of its hollows, and the loftiness of its rocks. The ideas it forces upon the mind are the sublime, the dreadful, and the vast. Above is inaccessible attitude, below is horrible profundity. He that mounts the precipices at Hawkstone wonders how he came thither and doubts how he shall return. His walk is an adventure, and his departure an escape.’”

  Elizabeth clapped her hands. “Oh, sir, you have stimulated my appetite for adventure beyond all bounds. Lead the way, I pray.”

  They started with the grotto, a large oval cavern hewn in the rocky hillside behind the house. It had been cut far into the rock, and pillars chiseled in imitation of stalagmites and stalactites supported its winding recesses.

  “Can we go in?” Mary stood on a boulder on the downhill side of the stream issuing from the grotto and peered into the stone chamber.

  “If you are very careful. I did it often as a child. But I fear for your skirts.”

  “Oh, fah. What consequence are they when such an adventure offers?”

  Rowland leapt across the stream and extended his hand to Mary to steady her jump to the stone ledge forming the floor of the grotto. Her jump was strong, but she was not prepared for the slickness of the damp stone. As her feet slipped from under her, she gave a small cry and reached out to Rowland. His strong arms scooped her up and set her firmly on the solid rock. She clung to him. Nor did he release his hold on her but drew her closer. There was no resistance as his adored Mary settled in his arms. He dropped his head to hers, his lips in her hair, bared by the hat that had fallen to the rocks in the mishap. She smelled of lavender.

  “Mary—” He dropped his lips to her cheek, with every intention of going further to find her lips. But the sound of his own voice echoing in the rocky cave brought an awareness of the enormous impropriety of what he was about. And worse, the fact that he would likely never have the right to hold her so.

  “Mary.” He pushed her away from himself, retaining hold only on one arm to steady her. “Forgive me. I have in the past indicated to you my feelings, but I did not mean to—I would never—forgive me for—”

  Mary laughed. “La, sir. What a fuss you do make. Forgive you for rescuing your sister-in-law from a nasty fall on the rocks? What gentleman would beg forgiveness for such an act? Should I have preferred you to allow me to dash myself on the stones?”

  Rowland smiled his appreciation of her easing the situation, and they left the grotto and continued their tour on toward the Red Castle ruin. Only one tower and three walls of the keep remained of what had once been a mighty medieval fortress. Ivy grew over most of the fallen stones. Rowland cleared a space on a seat in what had once been the Great Hall and spread his linen handkerchief for Mary to sit on.

  But that activity accomplished, he could not bring himself to tell her what he must. Instead he asked, “And how are your family in Wells?”

  “All are well in Wells, sir,” she answered with a straight face, and Rowland laughed appreciatively.

  “And events?”

  “If I said as dull as ditch water, you would accuse me of deplorable humor, so I shall desist. The answer, however, would be quite accurate. For lack of anything else, I have returned to the activity I detest most in this world—making embroidered seat covers.”

  “Do you not read?”

  “Ah, yes, I have read and reread Humphrey Clinker. Its delightful descriptions of Bath only sink me deeper by making me miss the pleasures I once knew.” She turned aside and looked out over the evening-shadowed expanse.

  Rowland wondered if she were also missing Roger, but he only asked, “And is that truly the life you would choose, Mary?”

  A sigh escaped her. “I don’t know. I think so when I recall the pleasures. But at the time, I found it palled a bit. One must have something to do, however, and if I am required to accomplish any more needlework, I shall needs be clapped into Bedlam. Elizabeth has invited me to accompany her to London when they remove there, but it is months until Parliament opens.”

  “And in London you will seek more pleasures?”

  “What else is there? The opera, the theater, Ranelagh, and Vauxhall.”

  If Rowland had been depressed when he began this conversation, every word Mary spoke made his prospects look more dismal. “But, Mary, you could find occupation of more lasting importance.”

  She gave a brittle laugh. “La, what do you suggest, sir? That I take up field preaching?”

  A new idea struck him. “Mary, next week I go to preach to congregations near Welshampton and Ellesmere. Would you accompany me?”

  “If I don’t have to take my embroidery with me.”

  Her light answer would have been a happy conclusion to the conversation if there were not one more matter yet to discuss. “I shall be particularly glad of your company, Mary. You see, I may be obliged to spend a rather long time engaged in field preaching.”

  “Nonsense, Rowland. You have taken your degree. Will you not pass on to orders soon? I had thought you might already have done so. Maria, whose father is a canon, told me it is often done immediately upon taking one’s degree. What—”

  Rowland interrupted, “Yes, for all but one of our number it was so.”

  Rowland was becoming accustomed to the shocked silence that always followed this intelligence.

  After a moment Mary clasped her hands firmly together and said in a decided voice, “Then, sir, it is decided. You must abandon your irregularities. I did warn you it would be so. Now you must see—”

  Rowland’s voice was equally firm. “I did not expect that of you, Mary. It is the advice of a coward. When we are afraid and begin to shrink back, the devil knows he is gaining ground. I cannot bear flying away and turning my back—there is no armor given for the back.”

  “Are all who are not fanatics cowards? I don’t ask you to give up your religion or your preaching, just your enthusiasm.”

  Always fond of making his point by telling a story, Row
land’s eyes twinkled for the first time since the conversation had turned serious. “Because I am in earnest, men call me an enthusiast. But I am not a zealot; mine are the words of truth and soberness.

  “Three summers ago I was walking on yonder hill.” He pointed to the west where a rocky hill rose in the distance. “I saw a gravel pit fall in and bury three human beings alive. I lifted up my voice for help so loud that I was heard in the town below at a distance of a half-mile. Help came and rescued two of the poor sufferers. No one called me an enthusiast then.

  “When I see eternal destruction ready to fall upon poor sinners and about to entomb them irrecoverably in eternal woe and call aloud on them to escape, shall I be called an enthusiast now?”

  Mary gave no reply, but the furrow to her brow showed that she was considering his words.

  “When you come with me next week, you shall see and may judge the matter for yourself.” He extended his hand to escort her back.

  Mary was quiet on the return walk, like the thoughtful young woman Rowland had known her to be before the frivolities of Bath and Sarah Child’s example had turned her head to more worldly things. Rowland ached for the meditative companion she had once been to him. He knew that whatever turn her mind took, he would always love Mary Tudway, and he prayed that God might direct her mind and heart in ways no human being was capable of doing.

  Later, in her room, Mary knew a similar conflict. Rowland’s words made sense, and yet she could not accept them, could not think that his way was right. She wrestled with the matter until her head ached.

  Determined to find lighter amusement, she picked up Humphrey Clinker. After a few pages of silent reading she smiled at the servant girl’s letter to her friend back home:

  Oh, Molly! You that live in the country have no deception of our doing at Bath. Here is such dressing, and fiddling, and dancing, and gadding, and courting, and plotting—gracious!

  If God had not given me a good stock of discretion, what a power of things might not I reveal.