Part 19 (1/2)
”I hope not,” she answered. There was a strange light on her face, like that of a sunless sky on a deep, shadowed well. ”But I am a little alarmed about him. He has suffered much of late. Ah, Mr. Wingfold, you don't know how good he is! Of course, being no friend to the church--”
”I don't wonder at that, the church is so little of a friend to herself,” interrupted the curate, relieved to find her so composed, for as he came along he had dreaded something terrible.
”He wants very much to see you. He thinks perhaps you may be able to help him. I am sure if you can't n.o.body can. But please don't heed much what he says about himself. He is feverish and excited. There is such a thing--is there not?--as a morbid humility? I don't mean a false humility, but one that pa.s.ses over into a kind of self disgust.”
”I know what you mean,” answered the curate, laying down his hat: he never took his hat into a sick-room.
Dorothy led the way up the narrow creaking stairs.
It was a lowly little chamber in which the once popular preacher lay--not so good as that he had occupied when a boy, two stories above his father's shop. That shop had been a thorn in his spirit in the days of his worldly success, but again and again this morning he had been remembering it as a very haven of comfort and peace. He almost forgot himself into a dream of it once; for one blessed moment, through the upper half of the window he saw the snow falling in the street, while he sat inside and half under the counter, reading Robinson Crusoe! Could any thing short of heaven be so comfortable?
As the curate stepped in, a grizzled head turned toward him a haggard face with dry, bloodshot eyes, and a long hand came from the bed to greet him.
”Ah, Mr. Wingfold!” cried the minister, ”G.o.d has forsaken me. If He had only forgotten me, I could have borne that, I think; for, as Job says, the time would have come when He would have had a desire to the work of His hands. But He has turned His back upon me, and taken His free Spirit from me. He has ceased to take His own way, to do His will with me, and has given me my way and my will. Sit down, Mr. Wingfold. You can not comfort me, but you are a true servant of G.o.d, and I will tell you my sorrow. I am no friend to the church, as you know, but--”
”So long as you are a friend of its Head, that goes for little with me,”
said the curate. ”But if you will allow me, I should like to say just one word on the matter.”
He wished to try what a diversion of thought might do; not that he foolishly desired to make him forget his trouble, but that he knew from experience any gap might let in comfort.
”Say on, Mr. Wingfold. I am a worm and no man.”
”It seems, then, to me a mistake for any community to spend precious energy upon even a just finding of fault with another. The thing is, to trim the lamp and clean the gla.s.s of our own, that it may be a light to the world. It is just the same with communities as with individuals. The community which casts if it be but the mote out of its own eye, does the best thing it can for the beam in its neighbor's. For my part, I confess that, so far as the clergy form and represent the Church of England, it is and has for a long time been doing its best--not its worst, thank G.o.d--to serve G.o.d and Mammon.”
”Ah! that's my beam!” cried the minister. ”I have been serving Mammon a.s.siduously. I served him not a little in the time of my prosperity, with confidence and show, and then in my adversity with fears and complaints. Our Lord tells us expressly that we are to take no thought for the morrow, because we can not serve G.o.d and Mammon. I have been taking thought for a hundred morrows, and that not patiently, but grumbling in my heart at His dealings with me. Therefore now He has cast me off.”
”How do you know that He has cast you off?” asked the curate.
”Because He has given me my own way with such a vengeance. I have been pulling, pulling my hand out of His, and He has let me go, and I lie in the dirt.”
”But you have not told me your grounds for concluding so.”
”Suppose a child had been crying and fretting after his mother for a spoonful of jam,” said the minister, quite gravely, ”and at last she set him down to a whole pot--what would you say to that?”
”I should say she meant to give him a sharp lesson, perhaps a reproof as well--certainly not that she meant to cast him off,” answered Wingfold, laughing. ”But still I do not understand.”
”Have you not heard then? Didn't Dorothy tell you?”
”She has told me nothing.”
”Not that my old uncle has left me a hundred thousand pounds and more?”
The curate was on the point of saying, ”I am very glad to hear it,”
when the warning Dorothy had given him returned to his mind, and with it the fear that the pastor was under a delusion--that, as a rich man is sometimes not unnaturally seized with the mania of imagined poverty, so this poor man's mental barometer had, from excess of poverty, turned its index right round again to riches.
”Oh!” he returned, lightly and soothingly, ”perhaps it is not so bad as that. You may have been misinformed. There may be some mistake.”
”No, no!” returned the minister; ”it is true, every word of it. You shall see the lawyers' letter. Dorothy has it, I think. My uncle was an ironmonger in a country town, got on, and bought a little bit of land in which he found iron. I knew he was flouris.h.i.+ng, but he was a churchman and a terrible Tory, and I never dreamed he would remember me. There had been no communication between our family and his for many years. He must have fancied me still a flouris.h.i.+ng London minister, with a rich wife!
If he had had a suspicion of how sorely I needed a few pounds, I can not believe he would have left me a farthing. He did not save his money to waste it on bread and cheese, I can fancy him saying.”
Although a look almost of despair kept coming and going upon his face, he lay so still, and spoke so quietly and collectedly, that Wingfold began to wonder whether there might not be some fact in his statement.