was his mistress, and in return for the narrow shelter, humble fare,
and not quite too shabby garments she allotted him, he would perform
her hests--in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the house for
ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had never dreamed
of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of its unattainable
remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life or his position in it,
taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind of acceptance, and laying
no claim to courage, devotion, or even bare suffering. He had a certain
dull prejudice in favour of honesty, would not have told the shadow of
a lie to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, and yet was so uninstructed
in the things that constitute practical honesty that some of his opinions
would have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked reading the
prayers, for the making of them vocal in the church was pleasant to him,
and he had a not unmusical voice. He visited the sick--with some
repugnance, it is true, but without delay, and spoke to them such
religious commonplaces as occurred to him, depending mainly on the
prayers belonging to their condition for the right performance of his
office. He never thought about being a gentleman, but always behaved
like one.
I suspect that at this time there lay somewhere in his mind, keeping
generally well out of sight however, that is, below the skin of his
consciousness, the unacknowledged feeling that he had been hardly
dealt with. But at no time, even when it rose plainest, would he have
dared to add--by Providence. Had the temptation come, he would have
banished it and the feeling together.
He did not read much, browsed over his newspaper at breakfast with a
polite curiosity, sufficient to season the loneliness of his slice of fried
bacon, and took more interest in some of the naval intelligence than in
anything else. Indeed it would have been difficult for himself even to
say in what he did take a large interest. When leisure awoke a question
as to how he should employ it, he would generally take up his Horace
and read aloud one of his more mournful odes--with such attention to
the rhythm, I must add, as, although plentiful enough among scholars in
respect of the dead letter, is rarely found with them in respect of the
living vocal utterance.
Nor had he now sat long upon his stone, heedless of the world's
preparations for winter, before he began repeating to himself the poet's
Æquam memento rebus in arduis, which he had been trying much, but
with small success, to reproduce in similar English cadences, moved
thereto in part by the success of Tennyson in his O mighty-mouthed
inventor of harmonies--a thing as yet alone in the language, so far as I
know. It was perhaps a little strange that the curate should draw the
strength of which he was most conscious from the pages of a poet
whose hereafter was chiefly servicable to him-- in virtue of its
unsubstantiality and poverty, the dreamlike thinness of its reality--in
enhancing the pleasures of the world of sun and air, cooling shade and
songful streams, the world of wine and jest, of forms that melted more
slowly from encircling arms, and eyes that did not so swiftly fade and
vanish in the distance. Yet when one reflects but for a moment on the
poverty-stricken expectations of Christians from their hereafter, I cease
to wonder at Wingfold; for human sympathy is lovely and pleasant, and
if a Christian priest and a pagan poet feel much in the same tone
concerning the affairs of a universe, why should they not comfort each
other by sitting down together in the dust?
"No hair it boots thee whether from Inachus Ancient descended, or, of
the poorest born, Thy being drags, all bare and roofless-- Victim the
same to the heartless Orcus.
All are on one road driven; for each of us The urn is tossed, and, later
or earlier, The lot will drop and all be sentenced Into the boat of eternal
exile."
Having thus far succeeded with these two stanzas, Wingfold rose, a
little pleased with himself, and climbed the bank above him, wading
through mingled sun and wind and ferns--so careless of their shivering
beauty and their coming exile, that a watcher might have said the
prospect of one day leaving behind him the shows of this upper world
could have no part in the curate's sympathy with Horace.
CHAPTER III.
THE DINERS.
Mrs. Ramshorn, Helen's aunt, was past the middle age of woman; had
been handsome and pleasing, had long ceased to be either; had but
sparingly recognised the fact, yet had recognised it, and felt aggrieved.
Hence
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