A New Dawn Over Devon Page 8

  “And you know nothing about her?”

  “Only that apparently both her mother and father are dead. But whether she has other family . . . we haven’t been able to learn. It sounds as though her father was murdered.”

  “Would you like me to make some inquiries?” asked Timothy.

  “Oh, I would be appreciative,” replied Jocelyn.

  “And her family name . . . is Conlin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you have no idea of the father’s name?”

  “None.”

  “Well, I will see if I can learn anything.”

  After about an hour Timothy and Jocelyn heard the girls’ voices climbing back toward them. A few minutes later Catharine’s head appeared, then Elsbet’s, and finally Amanda’s. Breathing heavily and perspiring from the climb, they threw themselves on the grass and blankets, where Jocelyn had a sumptuous cold lunch set out before them.

  “Mother, it looks delicious!” exclaimed Catharine. “I worked up an appetite down there.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Several caves and—”

  “It’s not so big as the one where I slept,” interrupted Elsbet.

  “Any hidden pirate treasure?” asked Timothy.

  “Only crabs and smelly sticky grass,” answered Elsbet.

  They all laughed as the girls dived into lunch. The mood quieted. Catharine was the first to rise back to her feet twenty or thirty minutes later. Slowly the others rose also and found themselves going their own ways. The urge to explore was still strong in Catharine, and before long she had disappeared again. As Elsbet began to walk after her, Jocelyn rose and followed. An undefined fear that she might wander off came over her. She did not want to leave their enigmatic guest alone. She hoped the setting might prompt their new friend to talk.

  Amanda’s thoughts turned inward. She rose also and walked in the opposite direction from her mother until she had gone some distance along the bluff.

  The high view of the sea reminded her of the Dover overlook where Ramsay had taken her. Soon she was engulfed in sad and painful reflections of the prodigal sojourn that had taken her to Vienna a year ago as the war had broken out, then to Switzerland and finally back to Devon. Would the memories ever stop haunting her?

  After walking some thirty or forty minutes along the bluff, and gradually encountering more rocky terrain, she turned back. In the distance she saw Timothy walking the way she had come two hundred yards away. She did not shy away from the encounter as she might have a year or two earlier, but continued forward, and gradually approached him. She smiled warmly as they met. Timothy paused, then turned and continued at her side.

  9

  Layers of Self-Insight

  They walked for a minute or two in silence.

  “I am always struck with how peaceful life seems to become once you get out of the city,” sighed Timothy at length. “I should definitely do it more often. This setting is so beautiful. There is something about the sounds and smells and sight of the sea that cannot help but get into your spirit.”

  Amanda nodded. After another several steps, Timothy spoke again.

  “You’ve been thinking about your father, haven’t you?”

  “How did you know?” replied Amanda softly.

  “For one who understands something of what you are going through, it is not difficult to see.” Timothy paused, then added, “My ears and heart are open if you would like to share your thoughts with one who also loved him.”

  Amanda nodded reflectively.

  “It will take me a long time,” she said as they went, “to fit everything together. There is so much to get used to, so many changes. More thoughts have been tumbling through my brain than I know what to do with. I’ve been such a slow learner.”

  She paused briefly, struggling to find the right words.

  “Please don’t think me stupid, Timothy,” she said. “I know it is a simple thing, but I think I am finally realizing how important it is what kind of person you make of yourself.”

  “I would never think you stupid, Amanda,” said Timothy.

  “But I have been. Maybe you are too kind to say it, but I can.”

  “We all have lessons to learn in life—myself no less than you,” said Timothy. “Truth comes to us in layers of deepening insight. We each have to reach the point, through the circumstances of our lives and through the consequences of our choices, where we are able to peel off successively more of those layers.”

  “That is a good description,” said Amanda. “But it feels like I’m peeling off my skin. It hurts to see what I have been.”

  “Some truth is painful,” Timothy agreed. “And what may appear a simple realization for one individual may represent half a lifetime’s struggle for another.”

  “But why should truth be painful?”

  “Because the uncovered layers bite deep into the heart and soul of each of us uniquely. And if there is sin to deal with in the process, the revelations hurt.”

  Amanda did not reply. That fact she knew only too well.

  “You are now learning truths,” Timothy went on, “that some men and women never discover. Do not think your growth insignificant because it comes now and did not come sooner in your life.”

  “But it would have been so much better had I begun the process long ago.”

  “In some ways perhaps. But there are other ways in which you may not have been ready for it until now. Who can say why? The story of your life is like no one else’s, as is mine, your father’s, your mother’s, Catharine’s, George’s, even little Betsy’s, whose story we don’t even know.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Don’t forget, even your father did not turn his face toward the Lord until his late thirties. We all must respond to God in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”

  “I see what you mean,” Amanda nodded.

  “And, too, I believe that everything occurs by God’s timing. Therefore, the development of your faith is in his hands. Your responsibility is to fall in with it now that it has come, exactly as your father and mother did when that moment of response came for them.”

  “Thank you, Timothy,” said Amanda. “You have always been so kind to me, more kind than I deserve. I will always regret how I used to treat you. I don’t know how you can stand me.”

  “Amanda, please, don’t even think it,” rejoined Timothy. “But tell me what you were reflecting on a moment ago when I met you.”

  “About what I used to be like,” replied Amanda with a sad smile.

  She paused briefly. Timothy waited.

  “When I was younger I always thought I wanted to make a difference,” Amanda went on, “to do great things, to change the world. That’s why I left home. But I was so naive and self-centered. I looked at Father and Mother after they became Christians and thought they were accomplishing nothing of value. Yet now I see how much influence they actually had in so many lives in the community.”

  “Not just in Devon,” added Timothy, “but in London as well.”

  “The outpouring of affection that I have seen toward my father since I came home, and toward Mother too, has been remarkable,” Amanda continued. “There’s no one who doesn’t have a story to tell about something one of them did.”

  “I’m certain it would be the same if you could question the men your father served with in Parliament.”

  “I never saw all that before. I don’t know how I could have been so blind all those years. It has made me realize that God’s way is different than I always assumed, upside down from how I used to look at things. I wanted to change the world by a massive stroke, like my joining the suffragette movement. What I find myself thinking now is that perhaps God would have people change it one little piece at a time, even if in ways that are invisible to others.”

  “A keen insight, Amanda. That was something your father certainly believed.”

  Amanda nodded. “He understood far more than I gav
e him credit for,” she said, “such as that the kind of person you are becoming is more important than what you do. That is the part of the world we are most supposed to change one little bit at a time, isn’t it?—ourselves.”

  They walked along for some moments in silence.

  “Our father taught us to think, and to think in big ways,” Amanda went on. “It was probably his greatest gift to George, Catharine, and me as we were growing up. So many snatches of conversation now come back to me, times when he would probe and question us.”

  “I can envision it even as you describe it.”

  “He always tried to stretch our minds and how we looked at things. Yet I used that gift to turn away from him. Not very logical, is it?”

  “Young people aren’t usually terribly logical in their responses.”

  “He gave me freedom to think and dream in ways many fathers don’t. He encouraged us to imagine possibilities, to look at every side of a question, even to disagree with him, in order to sharpen our brains and our thinking skills. My father was following God’s example, wasn’t he, Mr. Diggorsfeld—excuse me, Timothy—in the way God gave man free will. My father gave me free thought, so to speak, by training my mind when I was young. It breaks my heart to realize what I did with such a gift.”

  She turned away, eyes flooding with tears.

  “I thought one of your resentments,” Timothy probed, “used to be that he urged you toward Christian ideas. I thought you were angry at being forced to adopt his value system.”

  Amanda thought a moment.

  “Yes, I suppose I did resent that,” she said at length. “My mixed-up reactions still confuse me. At the time I thought he and Mother were trying to control every aspect of my life. I felt constrained by it.”

  “Yet now you are talking about the freedom and latitude he gave you?”

  “Freedom is the last word I would have used to describe it back then,” rejoined Amanda with a sad smile. “Yet now everything looks different. They really did give us freedom, didn’t they? But not the kind of freedom my immaturity wanted. I’m certain both George and Catharine would say it was a very liberating environment in which to grow up, while I found it constraining. The difference was because of me, wasn’t it? Not Mother and Father. I thought I was escaping their restraints by leaving home, when actually all I was doing was living out the consequences of my wrong use of that freedom.”

  “Might it be,” suggested Timothy, “that your father gave you intellectual and imaginative freedom by encouraging you to think in large and diverse ways, while in the area of attitudes, behavior, and how you treated others, he expected you to obey certain standards?”

  “That may be it exactly,” nodded Amanda, “the distinction between attitudes and behavior on the one hand, and the intellect on the other. My parents didn’t give us the same latitude ethically and behaviorally that they did creatively and intellectually. You’re right, they expected a standard of respect and gracious behavior.”

  “Does that seem so unfair to you now?”

  “Not at all,” replied Amanda. “Why I resented those restraints on my independence is hard to understand. As I look back, it seems that they were insisting on nothing more than common sense and normal kindness. All parents try to teach their children proper attitudes and behavior, don’t they? The problem with me was that I was so completely self-centered, so filled with selfish attitudes, that I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do.”

  10

  Visitor to the Parsonage

  As the Rutherford women and their two friends walked and explored at the coast, back at Milverscombe a visitor had arrived in the village and now walked toward the church. Though he had done his best to make himself look respectable, at first glance he did not appear to be a man whose dealings with houses of God had been particularly frequent. He made his way past a few tombstones without so much as a shiver or the moment’s compunction that would have been of great benefit with respect to his own eternal destiny, and soon arrived at the front door of the adjoining parsonage.

  Vicar Coleridge answered the sound of the door knocker himself.

  “Would you be the reverend, sir?” said the man standing in front of him, forcing a smile through thin teeth not of the whitest.

  “Yes, I am Stuart Coleridge,” replied the vicar. “And you?”

  “If you please, sir,” answered the man in a scratchy voice, “I would prefer keeping my name out of it for the time being. Let me just say that I am on an errand of mercy for a friend.”

  Vicar Coleridge had spent enough time amongst the humble folk of Milverscombe parish to recognize a wolf in sheep’s clothing when he encountered one. The slight squint of this man’s eye put him immediately on guard.

  “And how might I be of service to . . . uh, your friend?” asked the vicar.

  “If I might just have a look at your parish record books, Gov—er, Reverend, that is. Won’t take but a minute or two and then I won’t bother you again.”

  “I see,” nodded Coleridge. “I suppose there can be no harm in that. Come with me, then—they are in the church.”

  From the churchyard ten minutes later, Vicar Coleridge watched the man go. The moment he was out of sight on his way toward the station, the vicar hurried back inside the parsonage, grabbed his coat, walking stick, and hat, left the house again in the opposite direction, and made his way straight to Heathersleigh Hall.

  “Hello, Sarah,” he said when Sarah Minsterly answered the door. “May I please speak with Lady Jocelyn?”

  “I am sorry, sir,” Sarah replied, “they are at the coast.”

  “Oh . . . I see.”

  “Rev. Diggorsfeld came down for a visit, and they all went for a drive together.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, Sarah, I have important business to discuss with Lady Jocelyn. And I would like to see Rev. Diggorsfeld while he is in Devon. Would you please either have them come see me in the village, or send word to me when would be a convenient time I might call?”

  “I will tell them as soon as they arrive home, sir.”

  “Thank you, Sarah. Good day.”

  “Good day, sir.”

  11

  Invisible Scratches of Character

  Amanda and Timothy continued along the coastal bluff, and she smiled nostalgically.

  “When I came home briefly last year before leaving for the Continent,” she said as they went, “a strange thing happened. As I opened the door of the Hall, I was surprised at how easily it swung open. I suddenly realized the reason it didn’t squeak was because my father kept the hinges oiled. Then I remembered his always trying to make things the best he could. I never saw that I too was one of those things he was trying to make better. It wasn’t just things, though . . . he wanted people to be better too—himself most of all. He wasn’t trying to control or dominate me. He was trying to help me become a better person—a young lady of virtue and character.”

  Timothy nodded.

  “Now it strikes me,” Amanda went on, “that in a way his whole life was spent encouraging everything to be the best it possibly could—as I said, especially his own character. He loved the idea of people and ideas and things of all kinds reaching their potential. The heather garden, the front door, a machine he might be tinkering with, and his own family—he wanted things to be the best they could.”

  “Listening to you,” smiled Timothy, “is like listening to Charles himself. You have gained such insight into him. I never actually put words to it before, but what you say is exactly true. He wanted all of life, as you say, to reach its potential, because he believed such to be the reason God placed us on this earth, to grow into beings that reflect his nature.”

  “Why do you think he felt so strongly about that?” asked Amanda.

  “He was one of those who believed that there is a Master of men, a perfect Master who demands of them that they also shall be right and true men and women. It is not a popular view in these days of compromise and lukewarm faith where people
imagine that because God accepts them as they are, he does not mind that they never grow to be better. Your father’s was a view that people cannot readily understand, nor one that many Christians like.”

  “I used to resent it,” added Amanda. “Now it seems an honorable position for a man to hold.”

  Amanda smiled. “I thought of those silent hinges again just the other day,” she went on. “I realized that there are other reminders of my father like that, things, as you’ve said, that I can continue to learn about him if only I have eyes to see—”

  She stopped. It was obvious a thought had just come into her mind. Timothy waited. A smile slowly spread over her face. “I just remembered something I saw my father do that I never understood before. At last it makes perfect sense.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Timothy.

  “I must have been twelve or thirteen. I had already developed a nasty attitude by that time and was constantly grumpy. I don’t know how they stood to have me around. I came upon my father in his workshop sanding a piece of wood for a set of shelves he was making for the library. I was such a sourpuss, I don’t know why I was even in his workshop. But I disinterestedly asked him what he was doing, and he proceeded to lecture me, as I saw it then. He would use any incident to teach us and stretch our outlook. Every tiniest detail was filled with worlds of meaning for him, and he was constantly opening his mind to us about what he was thinking. Nothing was meaningless. His motto might have been: We ought to learn from everything. But back then I only saw it as him lecturing me and I hated it.

  “He said, ‘I’m trying to sand a scratch out of this board.’

  “I looked at it and could hardly see the scratch he was talking about. I said, ‘It looks fine to me.’ He stopped and pointed to the tiny spot he was working on. And it really was little and by most standards insignificant. So I said, ‘But no one will ever notice. I can hardly see it.’

  “Then he said, ‘God will know, even if no one else does.’

  “I remember thinking how ridiculous his words sounded. It seemed to me at the time that everything was God this and God that with him. I grew to resent God just as much as my father because he was always talking about Him.