Part 50 (2/2)
”Indeed!--that makes a considerable number of Christian souls. And what, sir, may be the method and the principle of your religious instruction?”
”I take all my boarders, sir, to church twice every Sunday; and they read from the Bible twice a week. In addition to which, we have family prayer night and morning.”
”Then it is as I feared, Mr. Marsh,” replied the vicar: ”you altogether neglect, both for your pupils and yourself, sir, my nine o'clock Sabbath evening lecture in the church, together with the Tuesday evening's expounding and the Thursday evening's church lecture. This is awful negligence, sir; it is a terrible tempting of the Lord!”
”I think, Mr. Cartwright,” replied the poor schoolmaster, colouring, ”that I shall be able to explain to your satisfaction my reasons for not attending your evening lectures. Some of my boys, sir, are almost grown-up lads: I have two hard upon seventeen, and I need not tell a gentleman like you that there is a deal of caution necessary at that age to keep lads out of harm's way. I have had the character of sending home very good, sober, decent lads; and this, I think, has done me more service in getting scholars than even my writing and book-keeping. But perhaps you don't know, sir, and I am sure I don't wish to put myself forward to tell you--but the truth is, Mr. Cartwright, that these late meetings, which break up quite in the dark, do bring together a great many disorderly people. 'Tis an excuse, sir, for every boy and girl that is in service to get out just when they ought to be at home, and altogether it is not quite the sort of thing I approve for my boys.”
”But when I tell you, Mr. Marsh,” replied the vicar with much dignity, ”that it is the sort of thing which I approve, for all the girls and boys too who live under my ministry, I presume that you do not intend to persevere in your very futile, and I must call it, impious objection. If you, sir, paid the attention that you ought to do to the religious object of the meeting, your impure imagination would not be quite so busy about its moral consequences. I am sorry to tell you, Mr. Marsh, that you are splitting on the rock which sends more wrecked and wretched souls to h.e.l.l than any other peril of this mortal life, let it be what it may.”
”Well, sir,” replied the schoolmaster mildly, ”I must make up my account between G.o.d and my own conscience, and trust to his mercy to overlook my deficiencies.”
”Overlook your deficiencies?--poor deluded man!--Do you really hope that the Lord will pardon the clinging to works, and neglecting to hear his word?--Do you really doubt that Satan stands ready at the door to seize your soul, and bear it in his poisoned claws to everlasting torture?--Do you really doubt this, Mr. Marsh?”
”Indeed I do, sir.”
”This is terrible!” cried the vicar, starting up and attempting to stop his ears. ”Such blasphemy cannot be listened to without sin. I leave you, sir, and I will shake the dust off this your carpet from off my feet. But remember this,--I am your pastor and master, appointed to be the minister and guide of all the souls in my parish. As for your soul--I have no hope left for it: it must, and it will have its portion among the condemned, and will exist only to burn in unspeakable tortures for ever.--I have spoken, and you know your doom. But not so is it with the young persons committed to your charge; though, alas! the peril in which they now abide is sore to think of. Nevertheless, I will neither leave them nor forsake them as long as hope is left that a single brand can be s.n.a.t.c.hed from the burning. Wherefore hear me!--This day is Thursday; let me this night see yourself, and every boy abiding in your house, in the gallery which you occupy in the church, or I will set to work to weed the vineyard. Yea! I will cleanse it root and branch from the corruption and abomination of you and your boys. Poor wretches, that you are labouring and striving to prepare for the kingdom of h.e.l.l! But I speak sinfully in joining you and them together! and may the Lord forgive me, as I will strive to atone for it. I will clear the vineyard of you--but not till I have separated your boys from you. They shall be saved,--by my hand shall they be saved; and when I shall have effected this, you may perchance, while enjoying the leisure that will be your portion, remember this day, and value at its worth the wisdom which made you brave a minister of the evangelical church. Have I softened your hard heart, Mr. Marsh? Will you bring your school to my lecture this evening? Say 'Yes!' and you are forgiven.”
”No, sir, I will not!” was the quiet but firm reply of the good man.
Not another syllable was spoken on either side; but well did the vicar of Wrexhill keep his word. Public estimation and private good-will appeared for a time to resist all the efforts he could make to persuade the villagers, and the farmers round about, that Mr. Marsh was a very impious and dangerous man, and one whom it was dangerous to trust with their children. They knew better; they knew that he was honest, pains-taking, intelligent, patient, and strictly attentive to his religious duties. But constant dropping will wear away a stone; and constant malevolence, kept in constant action, by one who was not very scrupulous as to the truth or falsehood of any statement that tended to produce the effect he wished, at length began, like rust upon steel, to cover and hide its true colour and its real brightness. One by one his daily scholars fell away from him,--one by one the neighbouring farmers came with some civil reason for not finding the sending their boys so likely to answer as formerly; and one by one his distant patrons found out the same thing: so that soon after the vicar's marriage he had the great delight of hearing that Mr. Marsh was sent to prison because he could not pay his rent, that his furniture was seized for taxes, and his tidy little wife lying ill of a brain fever at a small public-house near the prison, with her children starving round her.
The sort of inward chuckle with which the prosperous vicar received this bit of village gossip from his valet has no letters by which it can be spelt;--it was the hosannah of a fiend.
The supplying Mr. Marsh's place in Wrexhill was one of the things that now demanded Mr. Cartwright's immediate attention; and notwithstanding the many delicious temptations to idleness which surrounded him, his love of power, stronger even than his love of luxury, led him to hunt for and to find an individual to fill the situation, whose perfect obedience to his will made the dominion of the village school worth counting among the gratifying rights and immunities of his enviable position.
Many of the country families, partly from curiosity, and partly from respect for the owner of the Park, let him be who he would, paid their visits, and sent their invitations with an appearance of consideration very dear to his heart, particularly when it chanced that this consideration proceeded from persons blessed by bearing a t.i.tle. As to his domestic circle, it went on rather better than he expected: if not a happy, it was a very quiet one. Helen drooped, it is true, and looked wofully pale; but she seldom complained at all, and if she did, he heard her not. Rosalind was very wretched; but a host of womanly feelings were at work within her to prevent its being guessed by any. Even Helen thought that she had a wondrous portion of philosophy so speedily to forget poor Charles, and so very soon to reconcile herself to the hateful dominion of the usurper who had seized his place. But Helen knew not how she pa.s.sed the hours when no eye saw and no ear heard her.
Neither did Helen know the terrible effort she had made to redeem the folly and the pride shown in her answer to Charles, the first and only time that he had ever ventured to disclose his love. Had Helen known this, and the manner in which this offer of herself had been refused, she would have loved, and not blamed the resolution with which the heart-stricken Rosalind hid her wound from every eye.
f.a.n.n.y was gloomy, silent, and abstracted; but Mr. Cartwright only thought that the poor girl, having been pa.s.sionately in love with him, was suffering a few natural pangs while teaching herself to consider him as her father. But all this was so natural, so inevitable indeed, that he permitted it not to trouble him: and, in truth, he was so accustomed in the course of his ministry to win young ladies, and sometimes old ones too, from the ordinary ways of this wicked world, to his own particular path of righteousness, by means of a little propitiatory love-making, that the moans and groans which usually terminated this part of the process towards perfect holiness among the ladies had become to him a matter of great indifference. Notwithstanding his long practice in the study of the female heart, however, he did not quite interpret that of f.a.n.n.y Mowbray rightly. He knew nothing of the depth and reality of fanatic enthusiasm into which he had plunged her young mind; nor could he guess how that pure, but now fettered spirit, would labour and struggle to reach some vantage-ground of a.s.surance on which to rest itself, and thence offer its unmixed adoration to the throne of grace. He had no idea how constantly f.a.n.n.y was thinking of heaven, when he was talking of it.
Of Henrietta he never thought much. She had given him some trouble, and he had used somewhat violent measures to bring her into such outward training as might not violently shock his adherents and disciples. But all this was now settled much to his satisfaction. She combed her hair quite straight, never wore pink ribands, and sat in church exactly as many hours as he commanded.
Mr. Jacob was, as usual, his joy and his pride; and nothing he could do or say sufficed to raise a doubt in the mind of his admiring father of his being the most talented young man in Europe. That Jacob was not yet quite a saint, he was ready to allow; but so prodigiously brilliant an intellect could not be expected to fold its wings and settle itself at once in the temperate beat.i.tude of saints.h.i.+p. He would come to it in time. It offered such inestimable advantages both in this world and the next, that Jacob, who had even now no objection to an easy chair, would be sure to discover the advantages of the calling.
The wife of his bosom was really every thing he could wish a wife to be.
She seemed to forget that there could be any other use for her ample revenue, than that of ministering to his convenience; and so complete was the devotion with which she seemed to lay herself and all that was hers at his feet, that no shadowy doubts or fears tormented him respecting that now first object of his life, the making her will.
But though thus a.s.sured of becoming her heir whenever it should please Heaven to recall her, he took care to omit nothing to render a.s.surance doubly sure. Not a caress, not a look, not a tender word, but had this for its object; and when his ”dearest life” repaid him with a smile, and his ”loveliest Clara” rewarded him with a kiss, he saw in his mind's eye visions of exquisite engrossings, forming themselves day by day more clearly into--”all my estates, real and personal, to my beloved husband.”
Thus, beyond contradiction, every thing seemed to prosper with him; and few perhaps of those who gratified his vanity by becoming his guests, guessed how many aching hearts sat around his daily banquet.
CHAPTER V.
THE VICAR AT HOME.
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