Part 30 (1/2)
Soon after this up came Hawes with a cheerful countenance.
”Well, parson, are you to manage the prisoners and I to preach to them, or are we to go on as we are?”
”Things are to go on as they are, Mr. Hawes; but that is nothing to me, I have discharged my conscience. I have remonstrated against the seventies practiced on our prisoners. COLD WATER HAS BEEN THROWN ON MY REMONSTRANCES, and I shall therefore interfere no more.”
”That is the wise way to look at it, you may depend!”
”We shall see which was in the right. I have discharged my conscience.
But, Mr. Hawes, I am hurt you should say I preached a sermon against you.”
”I dare say you are, sir, but who began it; if you had not talked of complaining to the justices of me, I should never have said a word against you.”
”That is all settled; but it is due to my character to show you that I had no intention of pointing at you or any living creature from the pulpit.”
”Well, make me believe that.”
”If you will do me the favor to come to my room I can prove it to you.”
The chaplain took the governor to his room and opened two drawers in a ma.s.sive table.
”Mr. Hawes,” said he, ”do you see this pile of sermons in this right-hand drawer?”
”I see them,” said Hawes, with a doleful air, ”and I suppose I shall hear some of them before long.”
”These,” said Mr. Jones, smiling with perfect good-humor at the innocuous sneer, ”are sermons I composed when I was curate of Little-Stoke. Of late I have been going regularly through my Little-Stoke discourses, as you may see. I take one from the pile in this drawer, and after first preaching it in the jail I place it in the left drawer on that smaller pile.”
”That you mayn't preach it again by accident; well, that is business.”
”If you look into the left pile near the top, you will find the one I preached against profane discourse, with the date at which it was first composed.”
”Here it is, sir--Little-Stoke, May 15, 1847.”
”Well, Mr. Hawes, now was that written against you?--come!”
”No! I confess it could not; but look here, if a man sends a bullet into me, it doesn't matter to me whether he made the gun on purpose or shot me out of an old one that he had got by him.”
”But I tell you that I took the sermon out in its turn, and knew no more what it was about until I opened it in the pulpit, than I knew what this one is about which I am going to preach next Sunday morning--it was all chance.”
”It was my bad luck, I suppose,” said Hawes a little sulkily.
”And mine, too. Could I antic.i.p.ate that a discourse composed for and preached to a rural congregation would be deemed to have a personal application here?”
”Well, no!”
”I have now only to add that I extremely regret the circ.u.mstance.”
”Say no more, sir. When a gentleman expresses his regret to another gentleman, there is an end of the grievance.
”I will take care the sort of thing never happens again.”