A Close Run Thing

anticipation of soaking in that big leaden tub had sustained him throughout the march north from Toulouse; and the happy memories were now too vivid to dismiss willingly, for he knew that once downstairs he must confront the grief for his brother that was being so bravely, and privately, borne by his family. At length he went down to his father’s study; and there, for the first time, they met as men of equal consequence, the accident of his brother’s death having removed, so to speak, the enfolding wall which his father and mother had long ago built. They talked of the pain, the waste, the memory. And, after tears, some smiles and even a little laughter, the vicar of Horningsham poured his son a large glass of sherry and fixed him with the same piercing gaze he had known as a child. ‘Matthew,’ he said firmly, ‘John’s death must be of no moment to you beyond that which is one brother to another. The obligations that are placed upon you are no greater than were his, and John was making his own way in the world.’

‘It is perhaps too early for me truly to know my feelings, Father,’ replied Hervey with an appreciative smile, ‘but I should not want to leave my profession if there were no necessity.’

‘I am glad of it, and glad, too, that you speak of the Army in such terms: I think it, indeed, an honourable profession. At least, that is, a profession in which honourable men may serve.’

‘Just so, Father, but it is difficult not to feel the shadow of John’s worthier calling.’

‘And in that you reveal still your simplesse,’ said the vicar of Horningsham, shaking his head. ‘John’s was not a higher calling but a different one.’

There was a knock at the door, and Hervey’s mother entered with Elizabeth. And there followed a conversation of the utmost warmth and intimacy concerning John’s virtues as a son, brother and human being. Of his qualities as a priest, said his father at length, they knew a little, but more would be forthcoming that evening when they would receive a visitor who had known John in that calling.

Dinner was late — past two — and the fast before the next day’s patronal feast of St John the Baptist was prematurely, but formally, abandoned at the grace. Hereafter began Hervey’s own inquisition. Campaigning was what his mother expected to hear of, and she would allow no other conversation. But his was, necessarily, an incomplete account, and perhaps a somewhat sentimental one thereby, for without the carnage and bestiality it could only be thus, and any essay by him into those horrors would have been repugnant in that company. It was, however, pleasing to a mother swelled with pride, and a father wishing some consolation for another son’s death. But the Reverend Thomas Hervey’s spirit was stronger than the flesh: he stayed with the account until Salamanca and then succumbed to the comfortable feeling induced by the safe return of his remaining son and the celebratory claret, an Haut-Brion of pre-war vintage (the blockade’s having prevented, in any case, newer being obtained).

Elizabeth stayed longer with the account but absented herself, regretfully, as Dover was reached in order to be about her weekly business in Warminster’s workhouse. Hervey walked with her to the stables where Towle had the ageing barouche ready.

‘Matthew, I have seen enough of distress these past five years in the town to know — well, perhaps to have a presentiment at least — of the miseries of war. You were all consideration itself at dinner but you must remain patient with us,’ she said, ‘and especially so this evening with Mr Keble, who was a dear friend of John’s at Oxford. Mr Keble himself is a dear man and, by all accounts, an exceptional one — John was always speaking of him. He was a scholar at only fifteen, and a fellow of John’s college before he was twenty. He has fine degrees in divinity and mathematics, and has won prizes for poetry. He is to be made deacon next year and was to have joined John’s parish as second curate. Father already thinks of him as if he were our John, so like him is he. And, I confess, also do I.’

Hervey smiled at once. ‘I am delighted to hear it,’ he replied, and with such emphatic stress on the participle that Elizabeth looked at him askance. There was no time, however (and it was perhaps as well), for her to enquire why his delight should be so pronounced, and she left him instead to his fancy that one day she and Edward Lankester would meet, and that she might thereby become wife to that noblest of soldiers. No man could hope more for his sister, and Elizabeth, he felt sure, would in the event share that opinion.

‘What of religious observance in the Army, Mr Hervey?’ John Keble asked as they began supper that evening, a collation which included the vicar of Horningsham’s favourite neat’s tongue in aspic, and Mrs Pomeroy’s revered frigize of chicken and rabbit.

‘Well,’ began Hervey, startled somewhat (he would rather, even, have faced questions about the commissary system, for, bad as that was, he considered the commissaries marginally more effective than the chaplains), ‘it is better than when I first joined,’ he suggested, hoping that this might be enough. It was a vain hope.

‘Indeed? How is it now, then?’ Keble continued.

‘In truth, Mr Keble, it is not at all good. It varies greatly from regiment to regiment depending on the colonel, but also on the chaplain — we now have one to each brigade. This is the Marquess — or the Duke, rather, as he has been elevated since Bonaparte’s defeat — this is the Duke of Wellington’s doing. Prior to this campaign we had no chaplains — well, very few. They are not on the whole of the quality you will see at Oxford, though.’

‘And it will be no housling ministry, I warrant. Do they celebrate the Holy Communion with any regularity and frequency?’

Elizabeth looked anxiously at her brother, who understood her meaning at once.

‘As a rule, no,’ he replied patiently, though he might easily have omitted the qualification and simply answered with the negative.

John Keble shook his head.

‘They do preach and pray with the wounded,’ he added in a halfhearted plea in mitigation.

‘And Methodists?’ Keble continued. ‘I have heard that they make converts.’

Hervey’s father huffed loudly. ‘Mr Keble, to my shame, we have here in Horningsham the oldest dissenting chapel in England!’

‘It is nonsense to speak so, Father,’ smiled Elizabeth. ‘You and the minister get on like houses on fire!’

‘Indeed, we do,’ replied the old man chuckling, ‘though only when we avoid any mention of religion. On the whole it is better that way with men of God! But I would sooner spend an evening in the company of the old Jesuit from Wardour. He does not quote scripture at me the while, and we may have gentlemanly conversation about such matters of doctrine that are unknowable, and which therefore we may discourse upon without acrimony.’

‘And with good claret,’ chuckled Mrs Hervey.

‘This latter is very sage, sir,’ John Keble acknowledged; and then, with a smile so full that his face was wholly transformed, added ‘as is yours, ma’am.’

‘They are not my words, however, Mr Keble,’ sighed the Reverend Thomas Hervey, ‘but dear Archbishop Laud’s.’

‘God rest his soul,’ said Keble before turning back to Hervey to press his point. ‘But, as to these Methodists, I would think that the meeting of soldiers in their cantonments to sing psalms, or to hear a sermon read by one of their comrades, is in the abstract perfectly innocent; indeed, it is laudable, but I think it might become otherwise.’

‘And I think that is precisely what the duke believes, too,’ agreed Hervey, surprised by Keble’s evident grasp of the requirements of good order and military discipline, ‘but I wonder why the established church makes no greater impression.’

Keble was quick to answer, though with more sadness in his tone than enthusiasm. ‘The Church has, I believe, in many quarters turned its back on its true origins. The best men do their duty faithfully but without fervour; the worst … well, let us say they are free from the tumults of conscience.’

‘But what of the Claphamites, Mr Keble?’ Elizabeth interjected. ‘They do their duty with fervour and confront their consciences squarely, do they not? And see what good deeds they do!’

‘Oh, a worthy movement, Miss Hervey, but fired by Protestant fervour.’

‘And is that to be denounced, then?’ she challenged, with some perturbation.

‘By no means, Miss Hervey,’ he replied, seemingly stung by her rebuke, ‘but the Church of England was not conceived in Protestantism: it is Catholic and reformed. Is that not what we affirm in the creed?’

Elizabeth looked to the head of the table. ‘Father, what is your opinion in this?’

The vicar of Horningsham spoke with unusual animation. ‘Mr Keble is wholly accurate upon this point, my