Chapter Three
Tom Hearn’s father, Daniel, was a joiner and upholsterer in Hull, a well-respected man, farsighted and prosperous enough to have his two sons educated at the old grammar school at South Church Side on the Market Square.
From Tom’s earliest childhood, everyone understood that when he finished his studies, he would join his elder brother, Isaac, as an apprentice in his father’s workshop, and Daniel Hearn took some quiet pride and pleasure in the knowledge that when the time came for him to rest from his long labors, he would have two capable successors to continue the business just the same as before.
As it happened, though, when Tom was fifteen and ready at last to put down his quill and paper and pick up the adze and handsaw instead, despite his best and most sincere efforts, he did not take to the work.
He was not stupid or lazy—he did as he was told and tried his very best to accomplish each task in the approved manner—but it soon became clear that he was not naturally adept, and what his brother and others around him seemed to grasp immediately, almost by instinct, he had to have shown and explained many times before he could even begin to understand.
At around the same time that he realized, in this humbling fashion, his limits as a craftsman, Tom Hearn was also becoming, in the hours not set aside for daily labor, more and more absorbed by books and reading, and increasingly intrigued and engrossed by matters of religion.
The family worshipped every Sunday at Holy Trinity Church, paid their tithes and said their prayers in the usual ways.
As a child, Tom had never questioned this, but as he moved from youth into adulthood and began to read and think more deeply, he started to see the holy gospels and the message of Christ not as happy adjuncts to a life of bustle and prosperity but rather as a call to turn away from such things and toward the more profound and pressing matters of the soul.
At evensong as he sat there in the candlelight with pale sawdust still speckling his boots and trousers and his muscles still aching from the workshop, he would feel, as the choir’s voices rose up and floated in the air, a strange mixture of fear and joy stirring inside him, as if the world were cracking open and showing itself not as it appeared to the eyes of other men but rather as it truly was.
More than once as he knelt down to pray, he trembled and was brought close to tears by a sudden swelling up of new emotions and the burgeoning sense, sharp and vivid, of an ever-present enormity beyond reason or words.
Hearn was confused at first by these changes.
He knew he was somehow different from his friends, who, in the first flush of their manhood, were eagerly rushing toward the pleasures and excitements of the world, but he didn’t know what those differences meant or where they might point him.
It was only when the young curate William Car noticed Hearn’s increasing devoutness and began taking an interest—engaging him in conversations after worship and then lending him books and pamphlets to read—that Hearn began to imagine his life taking a different course from the one his father had plotted for him.
Even then, it took another eighteen months of struggling in the workshop, of confusion and self-questioning in the nighttime, of slow reading and long debates with William Car over the nature and responsibilities of a truly Christian life, before Tom Hearn had the courage and the confidence one evening, as they sat together in the parlor, to explain to his parents that rather than becoming a cabinetmaker as they had hoped and assumed he would, he wished to train for ordination as a minister in the Church.
His father responded initially with anger and disappointment, accusing him of folly and ingratitude, and it was only after a good deal of careful pleading and some wise and soothing words from his wife that he calmed down and began to see that having a minister for a son, although it had never been his intention, might be a source of some pride and even distinction in the town.
Eventually, after much heartfelt discussion and a wide consultation involving letters to the bishop and to William Car’s former tutors at Oxford, it was agreed that in preparation for the ordinand’s exam, Hearn would go up to York for three years to live and study with the Reverend Matthew Taylor, who was known to be both an excellent classical scholar and a sincere and hardworking priest. Once he was established there, under Matthew Taylor’s careful guidance, Hearn’s faith only deepened.
The more he read and understood of the Holy Scriptures and of the history of the Church in all its many forms, the more certain he became that he had taken the correct path and that nothing now could swerve him from it.
The intense unworldly feelings he had first experienced at Holy Trinity at evensong matured into a milder but more constant sense of grace and blessedness so that often, as he went about his daily business, whether assisting in the church, visiting parishioners, or studying alone in his attic room, he would sense God’s love pouring through him, pure and soothing, like morning sunlight through a bright pane of colored glass.
Hearn had been living with Matthew Taylor for nearly two years and had become a well-established member of his family and a familiar face to all who attended St. Cuthbert’s when the events occurred that were to shake and then destroy the faith that he had begun to believe was large and unbreakable.
One morning he received a letter from home with the news that his mother and younger sister, Esther, just nine years old, had both been taken ill with a sudden fever from which the doctors weren’t certain they could recover.
In a fearful rush, he took the next stagecoach to Hull, but he arrived at the house on Blackfriargate to find that he was too late.
The sight of their bodies lying there together like twin effigies on their truckle beds, with bruised eyes and gray lips, stagnant and lifeless, was terrible for him.
Almost as bad was the sight of his father, usually so vigorous and robust, sunken helpless in his chair with his head in his hands, sighing and groaning and bemoaning his hard fate.
Later that day, his brother took him aside and explained all that had happened—how quickly and ruthlessly the illness had struck and how the doctors had done all they could without avail.
“I can’t make any sense of it, Tom,” Isaac said.
“It doesn’t seem right. Why would God want to take them from us so suddenly?
” Hearn’s mind was in a turmoil, and he felt too sick to speak, but when he looked at his brother again, he saw from the eager expression on his face and the way he stared back, plaintive and beseeching, that the question was a real one and that Isaac was waiting impatiently for him to provide a satisfactory answer.
For the remainder of that visit, in the period leading up to the funeral and during the long days afterward, as friends and relations clad in mourning weeds came and went, and the pain of their losses ebbed and flowed as they forgot them, then remembered, then forgot and remembered again and again in a numbing and pitiless sequence, Tom Hearn played, as well as he was able to, the role that his brother and father required of him.
He had gone away from home, broken with family tradition, and dedicated himself to the religious life, so now in this emergency, despite his youth, they saw him as their natural comforter.
In the moments when their sadness or confusion became too great to bear, he was the one they turned to for reassurance and wisdom.
Rev. Horsfield, pastor of Holy Trinity, had advised them to have faith and not to give in to despondency, but his words, however well-meant, were just words.
Whereas Tom (so they told him more than once) was the living, breathing proof that such faith, even in the midst of calamity, was real.
Hearn was only twenty years old, not yet ordained, and it was a strain to hoist the weight of their sorrows onto his back.
But he did so gladly, even proudly, and it was only later, when he returned to York and tried to take up the old life of work and prayer and study once again, that he realized that in playing such a part, he had pretended to be much more certain than he was, and in doing so, by using his faith as a mere instrument or device, he had strained it so far that the comforts he had offered to his father and brother he could not afterward offer to himself.
Back in the attic room, when he opened his books again and turned to those passages that had always before seemed so dear and moving and endlessly rich, they now appeared, to his dismay, like frail constructions designed to obscure the horrid truths of human suffering and death.
At the same time as his faith began gradually to wane, then crumble, a new wave of grief for his mother and sister, much worse than the first, rose up and threatened to overwhelm him.
The thought of their blameless lives disappearing into a blankness staggered and scared him, and he could think of no way to redeem the nullity and meaninglessness that such a fate implied.
As these two feelings—doubt and grief—combined and intensified, his spirits sank ever lower and a dense gloom began to swallow him up.
Faced with the sheer, raw fact of death and without the strong shield of belief to protect him, he could find neither value nor purpose in his life.
Simple joys and pleasures no longer moved him, and although he continued to perform his usual weekly tasks of visiting the sick and leading the children in Sunday school, as he did so he began to feel more and more like a fraud and a mountebank.
Instead of sleeping or studying at night, he spent hours wandering aimlessly about the town, or lying on his bed staring up at the shadows on the ceiling.
Seeing how Tom Hearn suffered and realizing what the cause must be, Matthew Taylor did all he could to restore what had been lost. They prayed together each evening, and he encouraged Hearn in every way he knew to be resolute and to believe that God would not allow him to remain for much longer in this state of confusion and despair.
Yet despite such encouragements, and the similar attentions and kindnesses of others, Hearn’s condition did not improve.
The harder he tried to return to his old beliefs, the more ridiculous and childlike they seemed to him, until even the holy sacrament, the solemn ritual that had seemed before to possess an awesome and otherworldly power, became a dry and empty gesture, drained of all meaning.
Eventually, when it became impossible even to pretend any longer, Matthew Taylor explained with a heavy heart that he could not in good faith continue to prepare Tom Hearn for a vocation to which it seemed he was no longer suited, and therefore they must bring their arrangement to an end.
Hearn didn’t try to argue or resist this hard conclusion because he did not doubt it was correct—to ask for ordination while in such a state of disbelief would indeed have been a blasphemy.
Yet even so, to see his high ambitions utterly smashed was a dreadful blow that only served to deepen his gloom and add to his growing sense of hopelessness.
He returned to Hull and tried to explain to his father and brother as truthfully as he could what had happened, but they refused to understand it properly.
They thought he must have displeased Rev.
Taylor in some way by his behavior, that he had been sent away because he had committed some grave sin or misdemeanor that he dared not confess.
Daniel Hearn, after consulting with his friends, determined to ask Rev.
Horsfield to intercede on his son’s behalf, to write a letter to Matthew Taylor begging pardon and asking if, after a suitable period of punishment and contrition, he would take him back.
When Tom Hearn got wind of this plan and told his father that such a letter would be purposeless and ludicrous, they fell into a loud and impassioned argument.
Hearn called his father an ignorant old fool, and his father responded that his younger son was a sham and a wastrel and a disgrace to his mother’s memory.
Although they were clumsily reconciled the next day, Hearn knew that after all that had been said, he could not stay in the house any longer.
As a boy, he had often dreamed of leaving the safety and fastness of England for the excitement and adventure of foreign places, but now, tangled up in confusion and shame, he began to think of going to sea as his best means of escape, a way of putting the worst of his losses behind him and starting afresh on a new and different path.
He made inquiries in the sailors’ taverns on Humber Street, and after a week or so of asking and being rebuffed, he was offered a berth as a common sailor on the Mary and Elizabeth, a hundred-ton brig bound for Narva under the command of Captain Barnstable.
He made his preparations in secret and when the day came, left the house at dawn, leaving only a note folded by his bedside to explain where he had gone and giving the reasons.
As he walked to the harbor that early morning through the chill empty streets, over damp gray cobbles glittering with fish scales, he heard the bells of Holy Trinity chime out the hour and, remembering the great certainty and happiness he had felt sitting in the church barely four years earlier, he wondered whether, now that he had lost all faith and had only the stale and dusty provender of doubt to sustain him, he could ever know such simple joys again.