Phyllis of Philistia

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PHYLLIS OF PHILISTIA

By Frank Frankfort Moore




CHAPTER I.

AN ASTRONOMER WITHOUT A TELESCOPE.

"After all," said Mr. Ayrton, "what is marriage?"

"Ah!" sighed Phyllis. She knew that her father had become possessed of
a phrase, and that he was anxious to flutter it before her to see how it
went. He was a connoisseur in the bric-a-brac of phrases.

"Marriage means all your eggs in one basket," said he.

"Ah!" sighed Phyllis once more. She wondered if her father really
thought that she would be comforted in her great grief by a phrase. She
did not want to know how marriage might be defined. She knew that
all definitions are indefinite. She knew that in the case of marriage
everything depends upon the definer and the occasion.

"So you see there is no immediate cause to grieve, my dear," resumed her
father.

She did not quite see that this was the logical conclusion of the whole
matter; but that was possibly because she was born a woman, and felt
that marriage is to a woman what a keel is to a ship.

"I think there is a very good cause to grieve when we find a man like
George Holland turning deliberately round from truth to falsehood," said
Phyllis sternly.

"And what's worse, running a very good chance of losing his living,"
remarked the father. "Of course it will have to be proved that Moses and
Abraham and David and the rest of them were not what he says they
were; and it strikes me that all the bench of bishops, and a royal
commissioner or two thrown in, would have considerable difficulty in
doing that nowadays."

"What! You take his part, papa?" she cried, starting up. "You take his
part? You think I was wrong to tell him--what I did tell him?"

"I don't take his part, my dear," said Mr. Ayrton. "I think that he's a
bit of a fool to run his head into a hornet's nest because he has come
to the conclusion that Abraham's code of morality was a trifle shaky,
and that Samson was a shameless libertine. Great Heavens! has the man
got no notion of the perspective of history?"

"Perspective? History? It's the Bible, papa!"

Indignation was in Phyllis' eyes, but there was a reverential tone in
her voice. Her father looked at her--listened to her. In the pause he
thought:

"Good Heavens! What sort of a man is George Holland, who is ready to
relinquish the love and loveliness of that girl, simply because he
thinks poorly of the patriarchs?"

"He attacks the Bible, papa," resumed Phyllis gravely. "What horrible
things he said about Ruth!"

"Ah, yes, Ruth--the heroine of the harvest festival," said her father.
"Ah, he might have left us our Ruth. Besides, she was a woman. Heavens
above! is there no chivalry remaining among men?"

"Ah, if it was only chivalry! But--the Bible!"

"Quite so--the--yes, to be sure. But don't you think you may take the
Bible too seriously, Phyllis?"

"Oh, papa! too seriously?"

"Why not? That's George Holland's mistake, I fear. Why should he work
himself to a fury over the peccadillos of the patriarchs? The principle
of the statute of limitations should be applied to such cases. If the
world, and the colleges of theology, have dealt lightly with Samson and
David and Abraham and Jacob and the rest of them for some thousands of
years, why should George Holland rake up things against them, and that,
too, on very doubtful evidence? But I should be the last person in the
world to complain of the course which he has seen fit to adopt, since
it has left you with me a little longer, my dearest child. I did not,
of course, oppose your engagement, but I have often asked myself what I
should do without you? How should I ever work up my facts, or, what
is more important, my quotations, in your absence, Phyllis? On some
questions, my dear, you are a veritable Blue-book--yes, an _edition de
luxe_ of a Blue-book."

"And I meant to be so useful to him as well," said Phyllis, taking her
father's praises more demurely than she had taken his phrases. "I meant
to help him in his work."

"Ah, what a fool the man is! How could any man in his senses give up a
thing of flesh and blood like you, for the sake of proving or trying
to prove, that some people who lived five or six thousand years ago--if
they ever lived at all--would have rendered themselves liable to
imprisonment, without the option of a fine, if they lived in England
since the passing of certain laws--recent laws, too, we must remember!"

"Papa!"

"Anyhow, you have done with him, my dear. A man who can't see that crime
is really a question of temperament, and sin invariably a question of
geography--well, we'll say no more about it. At what hour did you say he
was coming?"

"Four. I don't think I shall break down."

"Break down? Why on earth should you break down? You have a mind to
know, and you know your own mind. That's everything. But of course
you've had no experience of matters of this sort. He was your first real
lover?"

Phyllis' face became crimson. She retained sufficient presence of mind,
however, to make a little fuss with the window-blind before letting it
down. Her father stared at her for a moment, and there was rather a long
pause before he laughed.

"I said 'real lover,' my dear," he remarked. "The real lover is the one
who talks definitely about dates and the house agent's commission. As a
rule the real lover does not make love. True love is born, not made. But
you--Heavens above! perhaps I did an injustice to you--to you and to the
men. Maybe you're not such a tyro after all, Phyllis."

Phyllis gave a very pretty little laugh--such a laugh as would have
convinced any man but a father--perhaps, indeed, some fathers--that she
was not without experience. Suddenly she became grave. Her father never
loved her so dearly as when that little laugh was flying over her
face, leaving its living footprints at the corners of her eyes, at the
exquisite curve of her mouth. It relieved her from the suspicion of
priggishness to which, now and again, her grave moods and appropriate
words laid her open. She was not so proper, after all, her father now
felt; she was a girl with the experiences of a girl who has tempted men
and seen what came of it.

She spoke:

"It is a very serious thing, giving a man your promise and then----"

"Then finding that your duty to him--to him, mind--forces you to tell
him that you cannot carry out that promise," said her father. "Yes, it
is a very serious thing, but not so serious as carrying out that promise
would be if you had even the least little feeling that at the end of
three months he was not a better man than you suspected he was at the
beginning. There's a bright side to everything, even a honeymoon; but
the reason that a honeymoon is so frequently a failure is because the
man is bound to be found out by his wife inside the month. It is better
that you found out now, than later on, that you could not possibly
be happy with a man who spoke slightingly of the patriarchs and their
wives. Now I'll leave you, with confidence that you will be able to
explain matters to Mr. Holland."

"What! you won't be here?"

Dismay was in the girl's face as she spoke. She had clearly looked for
the moral support of her father's presence while she would be making her
explanation to the man whom she had, a few months before, promised to
marry, but whom she had found it necessary to dismiss by letter, owing
to her want of sympathy in some of his recent utterances.

"You won't be here?"

"No; I have unfortunately an engagement just at that hour, Phyllis,"
replied Mr. Ayrton. "But do you really think there is any need for me
to be here? Personally, I fancy that my presence would only tend to
complicate matters. Your own feeling, your own woman's instinct, will
enable you to explain--well, all that needs explanation. I have more
confidence in your capacity to explain since you gave that pretty little
laugh just now. Experience--ah, the experience of a girl such as you
are, suggests an astronomer without a telescope. Still, there were
astronomers before there were telescopes; and so I leave you, my beloved
child--ah, my own child once again! No cold hand of a lover is now
between us."

It was not until he was some distance down Piccadilly that it occurred
to him that he should have pictured the lover with a warm hand; and
that omission on his part caused him a greater amount of irritation than
anyone who was unaware of his skill in phrase-making could have thought
possible to arise from a lapse apparently so trifling.

It was not until he had reached the Acropolis and had referred, in the
hearing of the most eminently dull of the many distinguished members
of that club, to the possibility of a girl's experiences of man being
likened to an astronomer without a telescope, that he felt himself
again.

The dull distinguished man had smiled.



CHAPTER II.

HE KNEW THAT IT WAS A TROUBLESOME PROCESS, BECOMING A GOOD CLERGYMAN, SO
HE DETERMINED TO BECOME A GOOD PREACHER INSTEAD.

Phyllis sat alone in one of the drawing rooms, waiting until the hour of
four should arrive and bring into her presence the Rev. George Holland,
to plead his cause to her--to plead to be returned to her favor. He had
written to her to say that he would make such an attempt.

She had looked on him with favor for several months--with especial
favor for three months, for three months had just passed since she had
promised to marry him, believing that to be the wife of a clergyman
who, though still young, had two curates to do the rough work for
him--clerical charwomen, so to speak--would make her the happiest of
womankind. Mr. Holland was rector of St. Chad's, Battenberg Square, and
he was thought very highly of even by his own curates, who intoned all
the commonplace, everyday prayers in the liturgy for him, leaving him
to do all the high-class ones, and to repeat the Commandments. (A
rector cannot be expected to do journeyman's work, as it were; and it
is understood that a bishop will only be asked to intone three short
prayers, those from behind a barrier, too; an archbishop refuses to do
more than pronounce the benediction.)

The Rev. George Holland was a good-looking man of perhaps a year or
two over thirty. He did not come of a very good family--a fact which
probably accounted for his cleverness at Oxford and in the world. He was
a Fellow of his college, though he had not been appointed rector of
St. Chad's for this reason. The appointment, as is well known (in the
Church, at any rate), is the gift of the Earl of Earlscourt, and it so
happened that, when at college together, George Holland had saved the
young man who a year or two afterward became Earl of Earlscourt from
a very great misfortune. The facts of the case were these: Tommy
Trebovoir, as he was then, had made up his mind to marry a lady whose
piquant style of beauty made the tobacconist's shop where she served the
most popular in town. By the exercise of a great deal of diplomacy and
the expenditure of a little money, Mr. Holland brought about a
match between her and quite another man--a man who was not even on
a subsidiary path to a peerage, and whose only connection with the
university was due to his hiring out horses to those whom he called the
"young gents." Tommy was so indignant with his friend for the part he
had played in this transaction he ceased to speak to him, and went the
length of openly insulting him. Six years afterward, when he had become
Earl of Earlscourt, and had espoused the daughter of a duke,--a lady who
was greatly interested in the advance of temperance,--he had presented
George Holland with the living at St. Chad's.

People then said that Lord Earlscourt was a lesser fool than some of his
acts suggested. Others said that the Rev. George Holland had never been
a fool, though he had been a Fellow of his college.

They were right. George Holland knew that it was a troublesome process
becoming a good clergyman, so he determined to become a good preacher
instead. In the course of a year he had become probably the best-known
preacher (legitimate, not Dissenting) in London, and that, too,
without annoying the church-wardens of St. Chad's by drawing crowds of
undesirable listeners to crush their way into the proprietary sittings,
and to join in the singing and responses, and to do other undesirable
acts. No, he only drew to the church the friends of the said holders,
whose contributions to the offertory were exemplary.

His popularity within a certain circle was great; but, as Lord
Earlscourt was heard to say, "He never played to the pit."

He was invited to speak to a resolution at a Mansion House meeting to
express indignation at the maintenance of the opium traffic in China.

He was also invited by the Countess of Earlscourt to appear on the
platform to meet the deputation of Chinese who represented the city
meeting held at Pekin in favor of local option in England; for the
great national voice of China had pronounced in favor of local option in
England.

Shortly afterward he met Phyllis Ayrton, and had asked her to marry him,
and she had consented.

And now Phyllis was awaiting his coming to her, in order that he might
learn from her own lips what he had already learned from the letter
which he had received from her the day before; namely, that she found
it necessary for her own peace of mind to break off her engagement with
him.

Phyllis Ayrton had felt for some months that it would be a great
privilege for any woman to become the wife of a clergyman. Like many
other girls who have a good deal of time for thought,--thought about
themselves, their surroundings, and the world in general,--she had
certain yearnings after a career. But she had lived all her life in
Philistia, and considered it to be very well adapted as a place of abode
for a proper-minded young woman; in fact, she could not imagine any
proper-minded young woman living under any other form of government than
that which found acceptance in Philistia. She had no yearning to
startle her neighbors. With a large number of young women, the idea that
startling one's neighbors is a career by itself seems to prevail just at
present; but Phyllis had no taste in this direction. Writing a book
and riding a bicycle were alike outside her calculations of a scheme of
life. Hospital nursing was nothing that she would shrink from; at the
same time, it did not attract her; she felt that she could dress quite
as becomingly as a hospital nurse in another way.

She wondered, if it should come to the knowledge of the heads of the
government of Philistia that she had a yearning to become the wife of
a clergyman, would they regard her as worthy to be conducted across the
frontier, and doomed to perpetual expatriation. When she began to think
out this point, she could not but feel that if she were deserving of
punishment,--she looked on expulsion from Philistia as the severest
punishment that could be dealt out to her, for she was extremely
patriotic,--there were a good many other young women, and women who were
no longer young, who were equally culpable. She had watched the faces of
quite a number of the women who crowded St. Chad's at every service, and
she had long ago come to the conclusion that the desire to become the
wife of a clergyman was an aspiration which was universally distributed
among the unmarried women of the congregation.

She knew so much, but she was not clever enough to know that it was her
observance of this fact that confirmed her in her belief that it would
be a blessed privilege for such a woman as she to become the wife of
such a clergyman as George Holland. She was not wise enough to be able
to perceive that a woman marries a man not so much because she things
highly of marriage--although she does think highly of it; not so much
because she thinks highly of the man--though she may think highly of
him, but simply because she sees that other women want to marry him.

In three months she considered herself blessed among women. She was the
one chosen out of all the flock. She did not look around her in church
in pride of conquest; but she looked demurely down to her sacred books,
feeling that all the other women were gazing at her in envy; and she
felt that there was no pride in the thought that the humility of her
attitude--downcast eyes, with long lashes shading half her cheeks,
meekly folded hands--was the right one to adopt under the circumstances.

And then she saw several of the young women who had been wearing sober
shades of dresses for some years,--though in their hearts (and she knew
it) they were passionately attached to colors,--appearing like poppies
once more, and looking very much the better for the change, too; and
she felt that it was truly sad for young women to--well, to show
their hands, so to speak. They might have waited for some weeks before
returning to the colors of the secular.

She did not know that they felt that they had wasted too much time
in sober shades already. The days are precious in a world in which no
really trustworthy hair dye may be bought for money.

And then there came to her a month of coldly inquisitive doubt. (This
was when people had ceased to congratulate her and to talk, the nice
ones, of the great cleverness of George Holland; the nasty ones, of the
great pity that so delightful a man did not come of a better family.)

Why should she begin to ask herself if she really loved George Holland;
if the feeling she had for him should be called by the name of love, or
by some other name that did not mean just the same thing? Of course she
had thought a good deal--though her father did not know it--of love. She
had seen upon other people the effect of the possession of this gift of
love, how it had caused them to forget pain and poverty, and shame, and
infamy, and God, and death, and hell. Ah! that was love--that was love!
and she had hoped that one day such a gift of love would be given to
her; for it was surely the thing that was best worth having in the
world! Once or twice she had fancied that it was at the point of being
given to her. There had been certain thrilling passages between herself
and two men,--an interval of a year between each,--and there had also
been a kiss in an alcove designed by her dearest friend, Ella Linton,
for the undoing of mankind, a place of softened lights and shadowy
palms. It was her recollection of these incidents that had caused her
to fumble with the blind cord when her father had been suggesting to
her the disadvantages of inexperience in matters of the heart. But the
incidents had led to nothing, except, perhaps, a week or two of remorse.
But she could not help feeling, when that month of curious doubt was
upon her, that the little thrill which she had felt when one man had
put his arm around her for an instant, when another man--he was very
young--had put his lips upon her mouth--it was a straightforward
kiss--suggested a nearer approach to love than she had yet been
conscious of in the presence of George Holland. (He had never done more
than kiss her hand. Is it on record that any man did more when dressed
with the severity of the cleric?)

This was a terrible impression for a young woman to retain before her
engagement to a man has passed into its third month. Then she began to
wonder if all her previous ideas--all her previous aspirations--were
mistaken. She began to wonder if this was the reality of love--this
conviction that there was nothing in the whole world that she would
welcome with more enthusiasm than an announcement on the part of her
father that he was going on a voyage to Australia, and that he meant to
take her with him.

And then----

Well, then she threw herself upon her bed and wept for an hour one
evening, and for two hours (at intervals) another evening; and then
looked up the old published speeches made by a certain cabinet
minister in his irresponsible days, on a question which he had recently
introduced. Her father was bitterly opposed to the most recent views of
the minister, and was particularly anxious to confront him with his own
phrases of thirty years back. She spent four hours copying out the words
which were now meant by Mr. Ayrton to confound the utterer.



CHAPTER III.

THE BISHOP KNEW SOMETHING OF MAN, AND HE KNEW SOMETHING OF THE CHURCH;
HE EVEN KNEW SOMETHING OF THE BIBLE.

Her father when he came in commended her diligence. He read over those
damning extracts, punctuating them with chuckles; he would make an
example of that minister who had found it convenient to adopt a course
diametrically opposed to the principle involved in his early speeches.
He chuckled, reading the extracts while he paced the room, drawing upon
his stock of telling phrases, which were calculated to turn the derision
of the whole House of Commons upon his opponent.

Thus, being very well satisfied with himself, he was satisfied with her,
and kissed her, with a sigh.

"What a treasure you are to me, dearest one!" he said. There was a pause
before he added, in a contemplative tone:

"I suppose a clergyman has no need ever to hunt up the past deliverances
of another clergyman in order to confound him out of his own mouth. Ah,
no; I should fancy not."

Regret was in his voice. He seemed to suggest to her that he believed
her powers would be wasted as the wife of a man who, of course, being a
clergyman, could have no enemies.

"Dearest papa!" she cried, throwing herself into his arms, and sobbing
on his shirt front, "dearest papa, I will not leave you. I don't want to
be anyone's wife. I want to be your daughter--only to be your daughter."

He comforted her with kisses and soothing smoothings of the hair. No,
no, he said; he would not be selfish. He would remember that a father
was the trustee of his child's happiness.

"But I know I can only be happy with you, my father!" she cried; but
it was of no avail. He, being a father and not a mother, was unable to
perceive what was in the girl's heart. He considered it quite natural
that she should be a trifle hysterical in anticipating her new
life--that strange untraveled country! Ah, is there anything more
pathetic, he thought, than a girl's anticipations of wifehood? But he
would do his duty, and he fancied that he was doing his duty when he
put aside her earnest, almost passionate protestations, and told her
how happy she would be with the man who was lucky enough to have won the
pure treasure of her love.

What could she do? The terrible doubts of that month of doubting
broadened into certainties. She knew that she did not love George
Holland; but she had not the courage to face Philistia as the girl who
did not know her own mind. Philistia was very solid on such points as
the sacredness of an engagement between a man and a woman. It was a
contract practically as abiding as marriage, in the eyes of Philistia;
and, indeed, Phyllis herself had held this belief, and had never
hesitated to express it. So nothing was left to her but to marry George
Holland. After all, he was a brilliant and distinguished man, and had
not a score of other girls wanted to marry him? Oh, she would marry him
and give up her life to the splendid duties which devolve upon the wife
of a clergyman.

But just as she had made up her mind to face her fate, Mr. Holland's
fate induced him to publish the book at which he had been working for
some time. It came out just when the girl was becoming resigned to her
future by his side, and it attracted even more attention than the author
had hoped it would achieve.

The book was titled "Revised Versions," and it was strikingly modern
in design and in tone. It purported to deal with several personages and
numerous episodes of the Old Testament, not from the standpoint of the
comparative philologist; not from the standpoint of the comparative
mythologist, but from the standpoint of the modern man of common sense
and average power of discrimination; and the result was that the breath
of a good many people, especially clergymen, was taken from them, and
that the Rev. George Holland became the best-known clergyman in England.

He dealt with the patriarchs in succession, and they fared very badly at
his hands. He showed that Abraham had not one good act recorded to his
credit, and contrasted his duplicity with the magnanimity of the ruler
of Egypt whom he visited. He dwelt upon the Hagar episode, showing that
the adulterer was also a murderer by intention, and so forth; while no
words could be too strong to apply to Sara, his wife. Isaac did not call
for elaborate notice. He could not be accused of any actual crime, but
if he was a man of strong personality, he was singularly unfortunate in
having failed to impart to his wife any of that integrity which he may
have practiced through life. Her methods of dealing with him after they
had lived together for a good many years were criminal, considering the
largeness of the issue at stake as the result of his blessing. As for
Jacob, not a single praiseworthy act of his long life was available to
his biographer. His career was that of the most sordid of hucksters. Of
eleven of his sons nothing good is told, but Joseph was undoubtedly an
able and exemplary man; the only thing to his discredit being his utter
callousness regarding the fate of his father, after he had attained to a
high position in Egypt.