Pride House: The Quest for Vainglory

  Chapter 31 Pride’s Satisfaction

  Everyone in Grace House was busy getting ready for the wedding, which would take place a year to the day after Pride’s marriage to Doubt. The ceremony was to be in the garden, so work there was given priority over work within the house. The building’s interior was, at any rate, a gargantuan task which would take years—no one could say how many. For now, the main rooms were being made presentable and the rest would have to wait.

  Wedding invitations had been sent only to Reason’s sisters Calm and Enjoyment, for no one else in the city cared about Reason, and certainly no one cared about the foreigners’ affairs. No one even knew that the residents of the house were quietly happy.

  Pride was happy as he ‘just added water’ to the pre-mixed cement in the wheelbarrow and began stirring it with a trowel. Humility had not assigned him the task of repairing the masonry in front of the house; he had barely suggested it. But somehow Mr. Orchard’s suggestions carried the force of commands in Grace House these days. Somebody had bought the mix and left it by the front door, propped in plain view against the wall; and Joy that morning had mentioned that, after a little more use in the garden, the wheelbarrow would be available. Honesty found and presented to him the only clothes he owned that were suitable for such work.

  Pride had nothing else to do.

  The front yard on such a day was so inviting, the example of the other hard-working household members so telling, and their cheer so infectious, that he found himself entering into the unfamiliar task (any task was unfamiliar to Pride) with heart. From up above through open windows came the sound of children’s voices. In his own heart and mind was the peacefulness he had longed for all last winter. He had found his place, his home, as a simple servant in the house he had so recently ruled. He was surrounded by the Orchards and other good and sincere people who constantly sought his welfare. The Lord of all, the perfect Father, had chosen Grace House to live in and bless. Nothing ought to, in the least, interfere with Pride’s happiness.

  And yet.

  Of course, it made no difference to him, but an uninformed outsider might say that Mr. Pride had lost all his prospects. Yes, he himself knew that he was saved for Heaven when the house would collapse and that this put him infinitely ahead of his misunderstanding friends and neighbors. But what did they see? A grubby Pride, reduced to servanthood in his own house.

  He had scarcely seen Arrogance since the arrest five months previously, and Selfishness, although he kept up his regular visits, now came only to mooch meals, gossip with Worry, and dispense doleful observations concerning Pride’s sorry state.

  Worry was still in the house by permission of Grace. The Ambassador had laid down rules that she was to be neither fed or listened to, but that she might stay on as a boarder and without Heavenly citizenship. After the collapse of the house, she would have to fend for herself. Nothing, of course, satisfied Worry; she did not like Grace’s arrangements or thank him for his clemency. On the other hand, nothing could persuade her to leave of her own accord. She sat in her room in fretful ease, immovable as a poor relation.

  She busied herself with little notes which were slipped under Pride’s bedroom door and which always warned him of the various and dire consequences of his subjection to the Heavenites. Far from destroying these notes, or showing them to anybody, Pride kept them safe; for if the advice was unsound, yet they seemed to him to be full of real sympathy.

  His neighbor Mr. Wag, who as a retired gentleman had nothing better to do than watch over other people’s business, had asked about the new household arrangements. Pride had admitted that since the arrival of the Orchards, he had been assigned a little bedroom on the second floor, while Ambassador Grace now occupied the master bedroom. Most of Pride’s expensive wardrobe had been sold off to meet some household bills. He was given a small allowance for personal expenses.

  Mr. Wag had looked on him with kindness; he forebore to speak; he pitied the poor wretch before him. Little had been said between them since that day, but much among Mr. Wag and the other neighbors.

  As he scraped the cement into the cracks, Pride wondered whether Mr. Wag might be watching him from next door and thinking him a deluded, shattered man. All was well with him, but how was he to convince Wag that all was well? How, when every appearance pointed otherwise?

  He came to the crevice where Doubt’s shoe had lodged and filled it.

  Anyone, he thought, could see that he was quietly doing something fine, improving the appearance and safety of the property. No one should sneer at honest work or fix his mind solely on the competition for money and clout that was the city dwellers’ chief activity. A quiet mind ought to be a man’s goal; but people must keep making comparisons and dispensing smart, worldly advice.

  “That’s the trouble with them,” he muttered. “They just won’t give a man credit for his spiritual advances. I’m much better than I was, but do they care about that? No, they make no place for me in their system. Not that I belong to their system anymore, anyway, but you’d think they’d show more sense.”

  He smoothed the cement over the crevice.

  Not that he cared for their system anymore, but if they all despised him, then how would he ever win any of them to the Lord? They all needed God as much as he. And he truly cared about their future, some of them. Fame Vainglory, for example.