THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE

JUNE, 1871.

THE VALLEY OF POPPIES.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "CHRISTOPHER KENRICK" AND "THE TALLANTS OF BARTON."

CHAPTER I.

SUMMERDALE-IN-THE-WATER.

AM the Perpetual Curate of Summerdale-in-theWater. A few years ago I gave to the world a fragment of my autobiography. It consisted of only a few short pages. Some of my friends are anxious that I should extend the narrative. I hope a reverie which seemed fresh and interesting when confined to one chapter may not become monotonous by extensive multiplication. My first impressions of Summerdale were filled with dismal forebodings.

The silence which almost made itself heard, the dead calm which the senses could feel, depressed me to the very soul. I could hardly breathe. I was hemmed in, shut out from all the world, an exile without hope, a prisoner having no chance of reprieve. The three bells of the old church that chimed on Sundays were funereal. VOL. VII., N.S. 1871.

B

The moss-grown village was the grave of dead hopes and aspirations. Oblivion had cast her mantle over the valley. It was the sleepy hollow of fairy tales, the lost village, the border-land of life, the Valley of Poppies. I persisted in seeing the image of Somnus in a stone saint over the church porch. The son of Erebus and Nox had set up his black-curtained throne of feathers in that crumbling edifice. It was his cavern. When I entered it I should see the Dreams standing by him.

A few weeks' experience dispelled the darkest of these images, but silence and sadness still peopled the village with gloomy shadows. I was not good enough nor pure enough for an anchorite, to settle down and devote heart and soul unto one service. Not pure enough; I might better say not sufficiently repentant and believing; not firm enough in my faith, not submissive and resigned. I chafed against the imaginary barriers of my prison. The score of sleepy people who sat and nodded through the morning service provoked my melancholy and did not excite my zeal. The Squire on the hill was a continual thorn in my flesh. His riches rebuked my poverty. I hated him because he had been successful in the battle. His horses trampled upon the memories of my past life until the dust of them choked me. I revenged myself now and then in a sermon upon Dives and Lazarus. The Squire did not come to church regularly, but the family pew was always occupied, and I knew that my sermons were discussed over dinner. I was asked to dine Sunday after Sunday. It flattered my pride to refuse every invitation to feast at the rich man's table. I would rather have died of starvation than humble myself to eat of the crumbs with Lazarus. My heart was full of bitterness. Jasper, Melchior, and Balthazar had no charm for me. They had neither myrrh, nor

frankincense, nor gold for the fortune-scourged curate. I had remembered their names, and sung my Jubilate Deo in the old days, but had never been exempt from the falling sickness. I was indeed a miserable sinner.

All this was in the early days of my fall, when I turned my back upon the world, because I had no choice but to run. I had fought and struggled in the conflict. Nothing daunted, I had set my lance in rest, and plunged into the battle, fighting, not with the sword of the spirit, but with the weapons of the flesh. into wisdom and soberness. My father had me educated for the Church. cathedral city. They called the place Wulstan. "Poor, pretty, and proud," is the motto which satire has ordained for the people of

Youth is hard to mould made a mistake when he He was an artist in a

this western land. I call to mind the charm of my boyish life in the dull old town before I plunged into the battle beyond. Of this anon. My father, I say, was an artist in that same cathedral city. He was proud, and eventually came under the narrowness and vanity of the clerical influence. I must be educated for the Church; and so I was, heaven forgive me!

But I am wandering from Summerdale, where I came when the battle was at an end-over for good, so far as I was concerned. I had fought and lost, done battle with the foe and been defeated. I fled and came to Summerdale. Those first hot days of my disappointment are long since past, and I sit by the river and thank God that I came here to be at rest. The chimes which were funereal just after the battle, are now tender, gentle music to my soul, and the moss on the fountain is not softer than the quiet, peaceful path of my life. Some of the select few who nodded over my first sermon have dropped away quietly to their rest. The Squire is gray and gentle now. He sits with me in the porched doorway of the hall, and talks of his early days. His horses no longer lacerate my early hopes. Indeed, there is a mild chestnut cob which carries me now and then to the country town, but these are very rare occasions, and I come back again, with thankfulness and gratitude, to the slumbering river and the mosses of Summerdale-in-the-Water. Fucundi acti labores. I am not a scholar in the general acceptation of the term. I know little Greek and less Latin. That was one of the reasons why I was overcome in the fight. Some men have a faculty for languages: I was not born to be learned in this direction, but I know the Fathers almost by heart nevertheless--Hippolytus, Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Theophilus, Clementine. I regarded this exercise as a duty when I found my mind more than usually occupied with the holiday books of fancy and imagination. Summerdale is just outside the world, on the borders of life, at the outskirts of the battle-field. I sometimes catch faint sounds of the din of the conflict. The blare of the trumpet and the rumble of the drum now and then reach me, on the wings of the western wind. Occasionally brother soldiers who have been wounded in the battle, friends of the old days, comrades in arms, find their way to Summerdale. They come back to me at long intervals; come back with changed faces and changed manners; come back when their dreams are over, baffled, broken, defeated. Rarely indeed do any but the confounded find me out; the maimed and wounded; they who have fainted by the way and fallen; the deserted of fortune. The rich and victorious have lived out of the old ways. They have gone beyond

the old associations. They have been triumphant. They have acquired power. The world is at their feet, subdued, vanquished, overcome, so far as their limited wisdom understands victory. These warriors are not for Summerdale. They forget the Perpetual Curate who rode forth with them in the fray, pushed on by the same hopes, stimulated by a kindred ambition.

No, it is in the hour of defeat that my old acquaintances and friends come back to me. When they have a fall, they think of the retreat outside the world, and its gray-bearded exile. A fellow feeling jogs their memory, and they "hunt me up" as they call it. When finance has hit them; when the bishop has died without promoting them; when they have sent their last picture to be rejected at the Academy; when their books have failed; when the woman they loved has proved unfaithful; then they think of the old days, the old friends, the schoolboy companions, the college chums, of early dreams and early hopes, and of other men who have suffered. Then, remembering the Perpetual Curate of Summerdale-in-the-Water, they "hunt him up," to shake hands again, and re-fight their battles over his winter fire, or recount their strange, eventful histories in the sunlight of the valley, while the bees hum a soft and lulling accompaniment to the more pathetic passages of their personal stories of the battle.

CHAPTER II.

STRANGE, EVENTFUL HISTORIES."

STRANGE is the news which these friends of my youth bring out of the world, from the battle-field of life.

I see the Times now and then, many days after publication. It is a romance to me. Its strange stories are like events I have read of in other days. The journal is a despatch from the war. I note its list of killed and wounded, and I look up from its blurred and blotted columns to gaze upon the long winding river, and think of the land that lies beyond. But my friends who hunt me up, they are waifs and strays of the fight itself. They have been in the conflict, and that recently. They know all about the marches and countermarches, the sieges and capitulations. They have encountered the giants single-handed. They have seen the sons

of Cœlus and Terra, and can describe their horrible features. They have measured clubs and swords with them. Marvellous are the stories they tell. Sometimes I think my poor wounded friends multiply their foes, as Falstaff did; but it is long since

I was bruised in the wars, and twenty years of Summerdale is no more than a week in the world. How they talk, these crushed friends of my youth. Their metaphors are often as confused as their stories. Cardinal Perron might have found in them materials for another treatise. One man is full of Scylla and Charybdis, turning the fight into a naval encounter instead of a war on land; another talks of Arges, Brontes, and Steropes; another of Pluto and Mammon; another of Satan and the fiends; another of Fortuna and Fate, and Scylla and Charybdis, all in a breath. Circe is on some lips, and I listen to stories of the Grand Passion with a heart whose beating is quickened by my own never-to-be-forgotten memories.

Lately there came to me two men who had been maimed and lamed in the financial storm which raged in the great world. I knew it had been; for I saw accounts of social wrecks and disasters in the Times. I had read notices of the panic, and had been called upon to describe to the best of my knowledge what a panic was. My little handful of parishioners had heard that there was a panic in London, and there had been a serious discussion among them as to the nature of the beast. Arthur Masters knew what the panic was. He was the first of my two friends who hunted me up after the storm. He had been educated for the Church, but he was always fond of figures; he was great in arithmetical calculations, had notions about the currency, and finally, instead of digging and delving into the mysteries of theology, he plunged into finance. Two years ago he was worth a hundred thousand pounds; a week since, when he sat by my side at Summerdale, he was not worth as many pence. Had he been content with a hundred thousand pounds, he might have possessed that vast sum now. He wanted two hundred thousand, and he is ruined. He confessed it all to me. He had fought for too much, and now he is gray and short of breath, and seeks for the rest that will not come.

He never sought me when he was victorious; but I do not tell him this. He has been forced aside into the byway of life, and that is how he finds me out. I remember him when he was a bright curly-headed fellow, the pride of a fond mother, and the admiration of a host of pretty girls. When I fell in the fight and was pushed aside, I saw his brougham driving down to the House of Commons. At least, I think I saw it; but the time wears out so rapidly, and Summerdale is fruitful in fancies. Masters thought he would like the old village-my slumbering Valley of Poppies. The crumbling stocks beneath the elms and the daws up in the church