CHAPTER XLVI



When he was in his third year a magazine was founded at Cambridge, the
contributions to which were exclusively by undergraduates. Ernest sent
in an essay upon the Greek Drama, which he has declined to let me
reproduce here without his being allowed to re-edit it. I have
therefore been unable to give it in its original form, but when pruned
of its redundancies (and this is all that has been done to it) it runs
as follows—


“I shall not attempt within the limits at my disposal to make a
résumé of the rise and progress of the Greek drama, but will confine
myself to considering whether the reputation enjoyed by the three chief
Greek tragedians, Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, is one that will
be permanent, or whether they will one day be held to have been
overrated.

“Why, I ask myself, do I see much that I can easily admire in Homer,
Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Theocritus, parts
of Lucretius, Horace’s satires and epistles, to say nothing of other
ancient writers, and yet find myself at once repelled by even those
works of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which are most generally
admired.

“With the first-named writers I am in the hands of men who feel, if
not as I do, still as I can understand their feeling, and as I am inter-
ested to see that they should have felt; with the second I have so
little sympathy that I cannot understand how anyone can ever have
taken any interest in them whatever. Their highest flights to me are
dull, pompous and artificial productions, which, if they were to appear
now for the first time, would, I should think, either fall dead or be
severely handled by the critics. I wish to know whether it is I who am
in fault in this matter, or whether part of the blame may not rest with
the tragedians themselves.

“How far I wonder did the Athenians genuinely like these poets, and
how far was the applause which was lavished upon them due to fashion
or affectation? How far, in fact, did admiration for the orthodox
tragedians take that place among the Athenians which going to church
does among ourselves?

“This is a venturesome question considering the verdict now generally
given for over two thousand years, nor should I have permitted myself
to ask it if it had not been suggested to me by one whose reputation
stands as high, and has been sanctioned for as long time as those of
the tragedians themselves, I mean by Aristophanes.

“Numbers, weight of authority, and time, have conspired to place
Aristophanes on as high a literary pinnacle as any ancient writer, with
the exception perhaps of Homer, but he makes no secret of heartily
hating Euripides and Sophocles, and I strongly suspect only praises
Æschylus that he may run down the other two with greater impunity.
For after all there is no such difference between Æschylus and his
successors as will render the former very good and the latter very bad;
and the thrusts at Æschylus which Aristophanes puts into the mouth of
Euripides go home too well to have been written by an admirer.

“It may be observed that while Euripides accuses Æschylus of being
‘pomp-bundle-worded,’ which I suppose means bombastic and given
to rodomontade, Æschylus retorts on Euripides that he is a ‘gossip
gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag-stitcher,’ from which it
may be inferred that he was truer to the life of his own times than
Æschylus was. It happens, however, that a faithful rendering of
contemporary life is the very quality which gives its most permanent
interest to any work of fiction, whether in literature or painting, and
it is a not unnatural consequence that while only seven plays by
Æschylus, and the same number by Sophocles, have come down to
us, we have no fewer than nineteen by Euripides.

“This, however, is a digression; the question before us is whether
Aristophanes really liked Æschylus or only pretended to do so. It must
be remembered that the claims of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,
to the foremost place amongst tragedians were held to be as incon-
trovertible as those of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto to be
the greatest of Italian poets, are held among the Italians of to-day.
If we can fancy some witty, genial writer, we will say in Florence,
finding himself bored by all the poets I have named, we can yet believe
he would be unwilling to admit that he disliked them without exception.
He would prefer to think he could see something at any rate in Dante,
whom he could idealise more easily, inasmuch as he was more remote; in
order to carry his countrymen the farther with him, he would endeavour
to meet them more than was consistent with his own instincts. Without
some such palliation as admiration for one, at any rate, of the
tragedians, it would be almost as dangerous for Aristophanes to attack
them as it would be for an Englishman now to say that he did not think
very much of the Elizabethan dramatists. Yet which of us in his heart
likes any of the Elizabethan dramatists except Shakespeare? Are they in
reality anything else than literary Struldbrugs?

“I conclude upon the whole that Aristophanes did not like any of the
tragedians; yet no one will deny that this keen, witty, outspoken
writer was as good a judge of literary value, and as able to see any
beauties that the tragic dramas contained as nine-tenths, at any rate,
of ourselves. He had, moreover, the advantage of thoroughly
understanding the standpoint from which the tragedians expected their
work to be judged, and what was his conclusion? Briefly it was little
else than this, that they were a fraud or something very like it. For
my own part I cordially agree with him. I am free to confess that with
the exception perhaps of some of the Psalms of David I know no writings
which seem so little to deserve their reputation. I do not know that I
should particularly mind my sisters reading them, but I will take good
care never to read them myself.”


This last bit about the Psalms was awful, and there was a great fight
with the editor as to whether or no it should be allowed to stand.
Ernest himself was frightened at it, but he had once heard someone say
that the Psalms were many of them very poor, and on looking at them
more closely, after he had been told this, he found that there could
hardly be two opinions on the subject. So he caught up the remark and
reproduced it as his own, concluding that these psalms had probably
never been written by David at all, but had got in among the others by
mistake.

The essay, perhaps on account of the passage about the Psalms, created
quite a sensation, and on the whole was well received. Ernest’s friends
praised it more highly than it deserved, and he was himself very proud
of it, but he dared not show it at Battersby. He knew also that he was
now at the end of his tether; this was his one idea (I feel sure he had
caught more than half of it from other people), and now he had not
another thing left to write about. He found himself cursed with a small
reputation which seemed to him much bigger than it was, and a
consciousness that he could never keep it up. Before many days were
over he felt his unfortunate essay to be a white elephant to him, which
he must feed by hurrying into all sorts of frantic attempts to cap his
triumph, and, as may be imagined, these attempts were failures.

He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed,
another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and
that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further
ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of
ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to
study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses
one’s mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a
little note-book kept always in the waistcoat pocket. Ernest has come
to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out,
for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and
universities.

Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in
whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike
themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the
parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything
must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor, again,
did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and another
begins, nor yet how closely this is paralleled in the difficulty of
saying where a life begins or ends, or an action or indeed anything,
there being an unity in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite
multitude in spite of unity. He thought that ideas came into clever
people’s heads by a kind of spontaneous germination, without parentage
in the thoughts of others or the course of observation; for as yet he
believed in genius, of which he well knew that he had none, if it was
the fine frenzied thing he thought it was.

Not very long before this he had come of age, and Theobald had handed
him over his money, which amounted now to £5000; it was invested to
bring in 5 per cent and gave him therefore an income of £250 a year. He
did not, however, realise the fact (he could realise nothing so foreign
to his experience) that he was independent of his father till a long
time afterwards; nor did Theobald make any difference in his manner
towards him. So strong was the hold which habit and association held
over both father and son, that the one considered he had as good a
right as ever to dictate, and the other that he had as little right as
ever to gainsay.

During his last year at Cambridge he overworked himself through this
very blind deference to his father’s wishes, for there was no reason
why he should take more than a poll degree except that his father laid
such stress upon his taking honours. He became so ill, indeed, that it
was doubtful how far he would be able to go in for his degree at all;
but he managed to do so, and when the list came out was found to be
placed higher than either he or anyone else expected, being among the
first three or four senior optimes, and a few weeks later, in the lower
half of the second class of the Classical Tripos. Ill as he was when he
got home, Theobald made him go over all the examination papers with
him, and in fact reproduce as nearly as possible the replies that he
had sent in. So little kick had he in him, and so deep was the groove
into which he had got, that while at home he spent several hours a day
in continuing his classical and mathematical studies as though he had
not yet taken his degree.



CHAPTER XLVII



Ernest returned to Cambridge for the May term of 1858, on the plea of
reading for ordination, with which he was now face to face, and much
nearer than he liked. Up to this time, though not religiously inclined,
he had never doubted the truth of anything that had been told him about
Christianity. He had never seen anyone who doubted, nor read anything
that raised a suspicion in his mind as to the historical character of
the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testaments.

It must be remembered that the year 1858 was the last of a term during
which the peace of the Church of England was singularly unbroken.
Between 1844, when “Vestiges of Creation” appeared, and 1859, when
“Essays and Reviews” marked the commencement of that storm which
raged　until many years afterwards, there was not a single book published in
England that caused serious commotion within the bosom of the Church.
Perhaps Buckle’s “History of Civilisation” and Mill’s “Liberty” were
the most alarming, but they neither of them reached the substratum of
the reading public, and Ernest and his friends were ignorant of their
very existence. The Evangelical movement, with the exception to which I
shall revert presently, had become almost a matter of ancient history.
Tractarianism had subsided into a tenth day’s wonder; it was at work,
but it was not noisy. The “Vestiges” were forgotten before Ernest went
up to Cambridge; the Catholic aggression scare had lost its terrors;
Ritualism was still unknown by the general provincial public, and the
Gorham and Hampden controversies were defunct some years since; Dissent
was not spreading; the Crimean war was the one engrossing subject, to
be followed by the Indian Mutiny and the Franco-Austrian war. These
great events turned men’s minds from speculative subjects, and there
was no enemy to the faith which could arouse even a languid interest.
At no time probably since the beginning of the century could an
ordinary observer have detected less sign of coming disturbance than at
that of which I am writing.

I need hardly say that the calm was only on the surface. Older men, who
knew more than undergraduates were likely to do, must have seen that
the wave of scepticism which had already broken over Germany was
setting towards our own shores, nor was it long, indeed, before it
reached them. Ernest had hardly been ordained before three works in
quick succession arrested the attention even of those who paid least
heed to theological controversy. I mean “Essays and Reviews,” Charles
Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” and Bishop Colenso’s “Criticisms on the
Pentateuch.”

This, however, is a digression; I must revert to the one phase of
spiritual activity which had any life in it during the time Ernest was
at Cambridge, that is to say, to the remains of the Evangelical awake-
ning of more than a generation earlier, which was connected with
the name of Simeon.

There were still a good many Simeonites, or as they were more briefly
called “Sims,” in Ernest’s time. Every college contained some of them,
but their headquarters were at Caius, whither they were attracted by Mr
Clayton who was at that time senior tutor, and among the sizars of St
John’s.

Behind the then chapel of this last-named college, there was a
“labyrinth” (this was the name it bore) of dingy, tumble-down rooms,
tenanted exclusively by the poorest undergraduates, who were dependent
upon sizarships and scholarships for the means of taking their degrees.
To many, even at St John’s, the existence and whereabouts of the
labyrinth in which the sizars chiefly lived was unknown; some men in
Ernest’s time, who had rooms in the first court, had never found their
way through the sinuous passage which led to it.

In the labyrinth there dwelt men of all ages, from mere lads to
grey-haired old men who had entered late in life. They were rarely seen
except in hall or chapel or at lecture, where their manners of feeding,
praying and studying, were considered alike objectionable; no one knew
whence they came, whither they went, nor what they did, for they never
showed at cricket or the boats; they were a gloomy, seedy-looking
conférie, who had as little to glory in in clothes and manners as in
the flesh itself.

Ernest and his friends used to consider themselves marvels of economy
for getting on with so little money, but the greater number of dwellers
in the labyrinth would have considered one-half of their expenditure to
be an exceeding measure of affluence, and so doubtless any domestic
tyranny which had been experienced by Ernest was a small thing to what
the average Johnian sizar had had to put up with.

A few would at once emerge on its being found after their first ex-
amination that they were likely to be ornaments to the college; these
would win valuable scholarships that enabled them to live in some
degree of comfort, and would amalgamate with the more studious of
those who were in a better social position, but even these, with few
exceptions, were long in shaking off the uncouthness they brought
with them to the University, nor would their origin cease to be easily
recognisable till they had become dons and tutors. I have seen some of
these men attain high position in the world of politics or science, and
yet still retain a look of labyrinth and Johnian sizarship.

Unprepossessing then, in feature, gait and manners, unkempt and
ill-dressed beyond what can be easily described, these poor fellows
formed a class apart, whose thoughts and ways were not as the thoughts
and ways of Ernest and his friends, and it was among them that Sime-
onism chiefly flourished.

Destined most of them for the Church (for in those days “holy orders”
were seldom heard of), the Simeonites held themselves to have received
a very loud call to the ministry, and were ready to pinch themselves
for years so as to prepare for it by the necessary theological courses.
To most of them the fact of becoming clergymen would be the entrée
into a social position from which they were at present kept out by
barriers they well knew to be impassable; ordination, therefore, opened
fields for ambition which made it the central point in their thoughts,
rather than as with Ernest, something which he supposed would have to
be done some day, but about which, as about dying, he hoped there was
no need to trouble himself as yet.

By way of preparing themselves more completely they would have meet-
ings in one another’s rooms for tea and prayer and other spiritual
exercises. Placing themselves under the guidance of a few well-known
tutors they would teach in Sunday Schools, and be instant, in season
and out of season, in imparting spiritual instruction to all whom they
could persuade to listen to them.

But the soil of the more prosperous undergraduates was not suitable for
the seed they tried to sow. The small pieties with which they larded
their discourse, if chance threw them into the company of one whom they
considered worldly, caused nothing but aversion in the minds of those
for whom they were intended. When they distributed tracts, dropping
them by night into good men’s letter boxes while they were asleep,
their tracts got burnt, or met with even worse contumely; they were
themselves also treated with the ridicule which they reflected proudly
had been the lot of true followers of Christ in all ages. Often at
their prayer meetings was the passage of St Paul referred to in which
he bids his Corinthian converts note concerning themselves that they
were for the most part neither well-bred nor intellectual people. They
reflected with pride that they too had nothing to be proud of in these
respects, and like St Paul, gloried in the fact that in the flesh they
had not much to glory.

Ernest had several Johnian friends, and came thus to hear about the
Simeonites and to see some of them, who were pointed out to him as they
passed through the courts. They had a repellent attraction for him; he
disliked them, but he could not bring himself to leave them alone. On
one occasion he had gone so far as to parody one of the tracts they
had sent round in the night, and to get a copy dropped into each of the
leading Simeonites’ boxes. The subject he had taken was “Personal
Cleanliness.” Cleanliness, he said, was next to godliness; he wished to
know on which side it was to stand, and concluded by exhorting Sim-
eonites to a freer use of the tub. I cannot commend my hero’s humour
in this matter; his tract was not brilliant, but I mention the fact as
showing that at this time he was something of a Saul and took plea-
sure in persecuting the elect, not, as I have said, that he had any
hankering after scepticism, but because, like the farmers in his
father’s village, though he would not stand seeing the Christian
religion made light of, he was not going to see it taken seriously.
Ernest’s friends thought his dislike for Simeonites was due to his
being the son of a clergyman who, it was known, bullied him; it is more
likely, however, that it rose from an unconscious sympathy with them,
which, as in St Paul’s case, in the end drew him into the ranks of
those whom he had most despised and hated.



CHAPTER XLVIII



Once, recently, when he was down at home after taking his degree, his
mother had had a short conversation with him about his becoming a
clergyman, set on thereto by Theobald, who shrank from the subject
himself. This time it was during a turn taken in the garden, and not on
the sofa—which was reserved for supreme occasions.

“You know, my dearest boy,” she said to him, “that papa” (she always
called Theobald “papa” when talking to Ernest) “is so anxious you
should not go into the Church blindly, and without fully realising the
difficulties of a clergyman’s position. He has considered all of them
himself, and has been shown how small they are, when they are faced
boldly, but he wishes you, too, to feel them as strongly and completely
as possible before committing yourself to irrevocable vows, so that you
may never, never have to regret the step you will have taken.”

This was the first time Ernest had heard that there were any
difficulties, and he not unnaturally enquired in a vague way after
their nature.

“That, my dear boy,” rejoined Christina, “is a question which I am not
fitted to enter upon either by nature or education. I might easily
unsettle your mind without being able to settle it again. Oh, no! Such
questions are far better avoided by women, and, I should have thought,
by men, but papa wished me to speak to you upon the subject, so that
there might be no mistake hereafter, and I have done so. Now,
therefore, you know all.”

The conversation ended here, so far as this subject was concerned, and
Ernest thought he did know all. His mother would not have told him he
knew all—not about a matter of that sort—unless he actually did know
it; well, it did not come to very much; he supposed there were some
difficulties, but his father, who at any rate was an excellent scholar
and a learned man, was probably quite right here, and he need not
trouble himself more about them. So little impression did the
conversation make on him, that it was not till long afterwards that,
happening to remember it, he saw what a piece of sleight of hand had
been practised upon him. Theobald and Christina, however, were
satisfied that they had done their duty by opening their son’s eyes to
the difficulties of assenting to all a clergyman must assent to. This
was enough; it was a matter for rejoicing that, though they had been
put so fully and candidly before him, he did not find them serious. It
was not in vain that they had prayed for so many years to be made
“truly honest and conscientious.”

“And now, my dear,” resumed Christina, after having disposed of all
the difficulties that might stand in the way of Ernest’s becoming a
clergyman, “there is another matter on which I should like to have a
talk with you. It is about your sister Charlotte. You know how clever
she is, and what a dear, kind sister she has been and always will be to
yourself and Joey. I wish, my dearest Ernest, that I saw more chance of
her finding a suitable husband than I do at Battersby, and I sometimes
think you might do more than you do to help her.”

Ernest began to chafe at this, for he had heard it so often, but he
said nothing.

“You know, my dear, a brother can do so much for his sister if he lays
himself out to do it. A mother can do very little—indeed, it is hardly
a mother’s place to seek out young men; it is a brother’s place to find
a suitable partner for his sister; all that I can do is to try to make
Battersby as attractive as possible to any of your friends whom you may
invite. And in that,” she added, with a little toss of her head, “I do
not think I have been deficient hitherto.”

Ernest said he had already at different times asked several of his
friends.

“Yes, my dear, but you must admit that they were none of them exactly
the kind of young man whom Charlotte could be expected to take a fancy
to. Indeed, I must own to having been a little disappointed that you
should have yourself chosen any of these as your intimate friends.”

Ernest winced again.

“You never brought down Figgins when you were at Roughborough; now I
should have thought Figgins would have been just the kind of boy whom
you might have asked to come and see us.”

Figgins had been gone through times out of number already. Ernest had
hardly known him, and Figgins, being nearly three years older than
Ernest, had left long before he did. Besides he had not been a nice
boy, and had made himself unpleasant to Ernest in many ways.

“Now,” continued his mother, “there’s Towneley. I have heard you speak
of Towneley as having rowed with you in a boat at Cambridge. I wish, my
dear, you would cultivate your acquaintance with Towneley, and ask him
to pay us a visit. The name has an aristocratic sound, and I think I
have heard you say he is an eldest son.”

Ernest flushed at the sound of Towneley’s name.

What had really happened in respect of Ernest’s friends was briefly
this. His mother liked to get hold of the names of the boys and
especially of any who were at all intimate with her son; the more she
heard, the more she wanted to know; there was no gorging her to
satiety; she was like a ravenous young cuckoo being fed upon a grass
plot by a water wag-tail, she would swallow all that Ernest could bring
her, and yet be as hungry as before. And she always went to Ernest for
her meals rather than to Joey, for Joey was either more stupid or more
impenetrable—at any rate she could pump Ernest much the better of the
two.

From time to time an actual live boy had been thrown to her, either by
being caught and brought to Battersby, or by being asked to meet her if
at any time she came to Roughborough. She had generally made herself
agreeable, or fairly agreeable, as long as the boy was present, but as
soon as she got Ernest to herself again she changed her note. Into
whatever form she might throw her criticisms it came always in the end
to this, that his friend was no good, that Ernest was not much better,
and that he should have brought her someone else, for this one would
not do at all.

The more intimate the boy had been or was supposed to be with Ernest
the more he was declared to be naught, till in the end he had hit upon
the plan of saying, concerning any boy whom he particularly liked, that
he was not one of his especial chums, and that indeed he hardly knew
why he had asked him; but he found he only fell on Scylla in trying to
avoid Charybdis, for though the boy was declared to be more successful
it was Ernest who was naught for not thinking more highly of him.

When she had once got hold of a name she never forgot it. “And how
is So-and-so?” she would exclaim, mentioning some former friend of
Ernest’s with whom he had either now quarrelled, or who had long since
proved to be a mere comet and no fixed star at all. How Ernest wished
he had never mentioned So-and-so’s name, and vowed to himself that
he would never talk about his friends in future, but in a few hours he
would forget and would prattle away as imprudently as ever; then his
mother would pounce noiselessly on his remarks as a barn-owl pounces
upon a mouse, and would bring them up in a pellet six months afterwards
when they were no longer in harmony with their surroundings.

Then there was Theobald. If a boy or college friend had been invited to
Battersby, Theobald would lay himself out at first to be agreeable. He
could do this well enough when he liked, and as regards the outside
world he generally did like. His clerical neighbours, and indeed all
his neighbours, respected him yearly more and more, and would have
given Ernest sufficient cause to regret his imprudence if he had
dared to hint that he had anything, however little, to complain of.
Theobald’s mind worked in this way: “Now, I know Ernest has told
this boy what a disagreeable person I am, and I will just show him
that I am not disagreeable at all, but a good old fellow, a jolly old
boy, in fact a regular old brick, and that it is Ernest who is in fault
all through.”

So he would behave very nicely to the boy at first, and the boy would
be delighted with him, and side with him against Ernest. Of course if
Ernest had got the boy to come to Battersby he wanted him to enjoy his
visit, and was therefore pleased that Theobald should behave so well,
but at the same time he stood so much in need of moral support that it
was painful to him to see one of his own familiar friends go over to
the enemy’s camp. For no matter how well we may know a thing—how
clearly we may see a certain patch of colour, for example, as red, it
shakes us and knocks us about to find another see it, or be more than
half inclined to see it, as green.

Theobald had generally begun to get a little impatient before the end
of the visit, but the impression formed during the earlier part was the
one which the visitor had carried away with him. Theobald never
discussed any of the boys with Ernest. It was Christina who did this.
Theobald let them come, because Christina in a quiet, persistent way
insisted on it; when they did come he behaved, as I have said, civilly,
but he did not like it, whereas Christina did like it very much; she
would have had half Roughborough and half Cambridge to come and stay
at Battersby if she could have managed it, and if it would not have cost
so much money: she liked their coming, so that she might make a new
acquaintance, and she liked tearing them to pieces and flinging the
bits over Ernest as soon as she had had enough of them.

The worst of it was that she had so often proved to be right. Boys and
young men are violent in their affections, but they are seldom very
constant; it is not till they get older that they really know the kind
of friend they want; in their earlier essays young men are simply
learning to judge character. Ernest had been no exception to the
general rule. His swans had one after the other proved to be more or
less geese even in his own estimation, and he was beginning almost to
think that his mother was a better judge of character than he was; but
I think it may be assumed with some certainty that if Ernest had
brought her a real young swan she would have declared it to be the
ugliest and worst goose of all that she had yet seen.

At first he had not suspected that his friends were wanted with a view
to Charlotte; it was understood that Charlotte and they might perhaps
take a fancy for one another; and that would be so very nice, would it
not? But he did not see that there was any deliberate malice in the
arrangement. Now, however, that he had awoke to what it all meant, he
was less inclined to bring any friend of his to Battersby. It seemed to
his silly young mind almost dishonest to ask your friend to come and
see you when all you really meant was “Please, marry my sister.” It was
like trying to obtain money under false pretences. If he had been fond
of Charlotte it might have been another matter, but he thought her one
of the most disagreeable young women in the whole circle of his
acquaintance.

She was supposed to be very clever. All young ladies are either very
pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to
which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they
must. It was hopeless to try and pass Charlotte off as either pretty or
sweet. So she became clever as the only remaining alternative. Ernest
never knew what particular branch of study it was in which she showed
her talent, for she could neither play nor sing nor draw, but so astute
are women that his mother and Charlotte really did persuade him into
thinking that she, Charlotte, had something more akin to true genius
than any other member of the family. Not one, however, of all the
friends whom Ernest had been inveigled into trying to inveigle had
shown the least sign of being so far struck with Charlotte’s command-
ing powers, as to wish to make them his own, and this may have had
something to do with the rapidity and completeness with which Christ-
-ina had dismissed them one after another and had wanted a new one.

And now she wanted Towneley. Ernest had seen this coming and had tried
to avoid it, for he knew how impossible it was for him to ask Towneley,
even if he had wished to do so.

Towneley belonged to one of the most exclusive sets in Cambridge, and
was perhaps the most popular man among the whole number of under-
graduates. He was big and very handsome—as it seemed to Ernest the
handsomest man whom he ever had seen or ever could see, for it was
impossible to imagine a more lively and agreeable countenance. He was
good at cricket and boating, very good-natured, singularly free from
conceit, not clever but very sensible, and, lastly, his father and moth-
er had been drowned by the overturning of a boat when he was only
two years old and had left him as their only child and heir to one of
the finest estates in the South of England. Fortune every now and then
does things handsomely by a man all round; Towneley was one of those to
whom she had taken a fancy, and the universal verdict in this case was
that she had chosen wisely.

Ernest had seen Towneley as every one else in the University (except,
of course, dons) had seen him, for he was a man of mark, and being very
susceptible he had liked Towneley even more than most people did, but
at the same time it never so much as entered his head that he should
come to know him. He liked looking at him if he got a chance, and was
very much ashamed of himself for doing so, but there the matter ended.

By a strange accident, however, during Ernest’s last year, when the
names of the crews for the scratch fours were drawn he had found
himself coxswain of a crew, among whom was none other than his especial
hero Towneley; the three others were ordinary mortals, but they could
row fairly well, and the crew on the whole was rather a good one.

Ernest was frightened out of his wits. When, however, the two met, he
found Towneley no less remarkable for his entire want of anything like
“side,” and for his power of setting those whom he came across at their
ease, than he was for outward accomplishments; the only difference he
found between Towneley and other people was that he was so very much
easier to get on with. Of course Ernest worshipped him more and more.

The scratch fours being ended the connection between the two came to an
end, but Towneley never passed Ernest thenceforward without a nod and a
few good-natured words. In an evil moment he had mentioned Towneley’s
name at Battersby, and now what was the result? Here was his mother
plaguing him to ask Towneley to come down to Battersby and marry
Charlotte. Why, if he had thought there was the remotest chance of
Towneley’s marrying Charlotte he would have gone down on his knees to
him and told him what an odious young woman she was, and implored him
to save himself while there was yet time.

But Ernest had not prayed to be made “truly honest and conscientious”
for as many years as Christina had. He tried to conceal what he felt
and thought as well as he could, and led the conversation back to the
difficulties which a clergyman might feel to stand in the way of his
being ordained—not because he had any misgivings, but as a diversion.
His mother, however, thought she had settled all that, and he got no
more out of her. Soon afterwards he found the means of escaping, and
was not slow to avail himself of them.



CHAPTER XLIX



On his return to Cambridge in the May term of 1858, Ernest and a few
other friends who were also intended for orders came to the conclusion
that they must now take a more serious view of their position. They
therefore attended chapel more regularly than hitherto, and held
evening meetings of a somewhat furtive character, at which they would
study the New Testament. They even began to commit the Epistles of St
Paul to memory in the original Greek. They got up Beveridge on the
Thirty-nine Articles, and Pearson on the Creed; in their hours of
recreation they read More’s Mystery of Godliness, which Ernest
thought was charming, and Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, which also
impressed him deeply, through what he thought was the splendour of its
language. They handed themselves over to the guidance of Dean Alford’s
notes on the Greek Testament, which made Ernest better understand what
was meant by “difficulties,” but also made him feel how shallow and
impotent were the conclusions arrived at by German neologians, with
whose works, being innocent of German, he was not otherwise acquainted.
Some of the friends who joined him in these pursuits were Johnians, and
the meetings were often held within the walls of St John’s.

I do not know how tidings of these furtive gatherings had reached the
Simeonites, but they must have come round to them in some way, for they
had not been continued many weeks before a circular was sent to each of
the young men who attended them, informing them that the Rev. Gideon
Hawke, a well-known London Evangelical preacher, whose sermons were
then much talked of, was about to visit his young friend Badcock of St
John’s, and would be glad to say a few words to any who might wish to
hear them, in Badcock’s rooms on a certain evening in May.

Badcock was one of the most notorious of all the Simeonites. Not on-
ly was he ugly, dirty, ill-dressed, bumptious, and in every way object-
ionable, but he was deformed and waddled when he walked so that he
had won a nick-name which I can only reproduce by calling it “Here’s
my back, and there’s my back,” because the lower parts of his back
emphasised themselves demonstratively as though about to fly off in
different directions like the two extreme notes in the chord of the
augmented sixth, with every step he took. It may be guessed, therefore,
that the receipt of the circular had for a moment an almost paralysing
effect on those to whom it was addressed, owing to the astonishment
which it occasioned them. It certainly was a daring surprise, but like
so many deformed people, Badcock was forward and hard to check; he was
a pushing fellow to whom the present was just the opportunity he wanted
for carrying war into the enemy’s quarters.

Ernest and his friends consulted. Moved by the feeling that as they
were now preparing to be clergymen they ought not to stand so stiffly
on social dignity as heretofore, and also perhaps by the desire to have
a good private view of a preacher who was then much upon the lips of
men, they decided to accept the invitation. When the appointed time
came they went with some confusion and self-abasement to the rooms of
this man, on whom they had looked down hitherto as from an immeasurable
height, and with whom nothing would have made them believe a few weeks
earlier that they could ever come to be on speaking terms.

Mr Hawke was a very different-looking person from Badcock. He was
remarkably handsome, or rather would have been but for the thin-
ness of his lips, and a look of too great firmness and inflexibility. His
features were a good deal like those of Leonardo da Vinci; moreover he
was kempt, looked in vigorous health, and was of a ruddy countenance.
He was extremely courteous in his manner, and paid a good deal of
attention to Badcock, of whom he seemed to think highly. Altogether our
young friends were taken aback, and inclined to think smaller beer of
themselves and larger of Badcock than was agreeable to the old Adam who
was still alive within them. A few well-known “Sims” from St John’s and
other colleges were present, but not enough to swamp the Ernest set, as
for the sake of brevity, I will call them.

After a preliminary conversation in which there was nothing to offend,
the business of the evening began by Mr Hawke’s standing up at one
end of the table, and saying “Let us pray.” The Ernest set did not like
this, but they could not help themselves, so they knelt down and
repeated the Lord’s Prayer and a few others after Mr Hawke, who
delivered them remarkably well. Then, when all had sat down, Mr Hawke
addressed them, speaking without notes and taking for his text the
words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Whether owing to Mr
Hawke’s manner, which was impressive, or to his well-known reputation
for ability, or whether from the fact that each one of the Ernest set
knew that he had been more or less a persecutor of the “Sims” and yet
felt instinctively that the “Sims” were after all much more like the
early Christians than he was himself—at any rate the text, familiar
though it was, went home to the consciences of Ernest and his friends
as it had never yet done. If Mr Hawke had stopped here he would have
almost said enough; as he scanned the faces turned towards him, and saw
the impression he had made, he was perhaps minded to bring his sermon
to an end before beginning it, but if so, he reconsidered himself and
proceeded as follows. I give the sermon in full, for it is a typical
one, and will explain a state of mind which in another generation or
two will seem to stand sadly in need of explanation.

“My young friends,” said Mr Hawke, “I am persuaded there is not one of
you here who doubts the existence of a Personal God. If there were, it
is to him assuredly that I should first address myself. Should I be
mistaken in my belief that all here assembled accept the existence of a
God who is present amongst us though we see him not, and whose eye
is upon our most secret thoughts, let me implore the doubter to confer
with me in private before we part; I will then put before him consider-
ations through which God has been mercifully pleased to reveal himself
to me, so far as man can understand him, and which I have found bring
peace to the minds of others who have doubted.

“I assume also that there is none who doubts but that this God, after
whose likeness we have been made, did in the course of time have pity
upon man’s blindness, and assume our nature, taking flesh and coming
down and dwelling among us as a man indistinguishable physically from
ourselves. He who made the sun, moon and stars, the world and all that
therein is, came down from Heaven in the person of his Son, with the
express purpose of leading a scorned life, and dying the most cruel,
shameful death which fiendish ingenuity has invented.

“While on earth he worked many miracles. He gave sight to the blind,
raised the dead to life, fed thousands with a few loaves and fishes,
and was seen to walk upon the waves, but at the end of his appointed
time he died, as was foredetermined, upon the cross, and was buried by
a few faithful friends. Those, however, who had put him to death set a
jealous watch over his tomb.

“There is no one, I feel sure, in this room who doubts any part of the
foregoing, but if there is, let me again pray him to confer with me in
private, and I doubt not that by the blessing of God his doubts will
cease.

“The next day but one after our Lord was buried, the tomb being still
jealously guarded by enemies, an angel was seen descending from Heaven
with glittering raiment and a countenance that shone like fire. This
glorious being rolled away the stone from the grave, and our Lord
himself came forth, risen from the dead.

“My young friends, this is no fanciful story like those of the ancient
deities, but a matter of plain history as certain as that you and I are
now here together. If there is one fact better vouched for than another
in the whole range of certainties it is the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ; nor is it less well assured that a few weeks after he had risen
from the dead, our Lord was seen by many hundreds of men and women
to rise amid a host of angels into the air upon a heavenward journey till
the clouds covered him and concealed him from the sight of men.

“It may be said that the truth of these statements has been denied, but
what, let me ask you, has become of the questioners? Where are they
now? Do we see them or hear of them? Have they been able to hold what
little ground they made during the supineness of the last century? Is
there one of your fathers or mothers or friends who does not see
through them? Is there a single teacher or preacher in this great
University who has not examined what these men had to say, and found
it naught? Did you ever meet one of them, or do you find any of their
books securing the respectful attention of those competent to judge
concerning them? I think not; and I think also you know as well as I do
why it is that they have sunk back into the abyss from which they for
a time emerged: it is because after the most careful and patient
examination by the ablest and most judicial minds of many countries,
their arguments were found so untenable that they themselves renounced
them. They fled from the field routed, dismayed, and suing for peace;
nor have they again come to the front in any civilised country.

“You know these things. Why, then, do I insist upon them? My dear young
friends, your own consciousness will have made the answer to each one
of you already; it is because, though you know so well that these
things did verily and indeed happen, you know also that you have not
realised them to yourselves as it was your duty to do, nor heeded their
momentous, awful import.

“And now let me go further. You all know that you will one day come to
die, or if not to die—for there are not wanting signs which make me
hope that the Lord may come again, while some of us now present are
alive—yet to be changed; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead
shall be raised incorruptible, for this corruption must put on
incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality, and the saying shall
be brought to pass that is written, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’

“Do you, or do you not believe that you will one day stand before the
Judgement Seat of Christ? Do you, or do you not believe that you will
have to give an account for every idle word that you have ever spoken?
Do you, or do you not believe that you are called to live, not
according to the will of man, but according to the will of that Christ
who came down from Heaven out of love for you, who suffered and died
for you, who calls you to him, and yearns towards you that you may take
heed even in this your day—but who, if you heed not, will also one day
judge you, and with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of
turning?

“My dear young friends, strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which
leadeth to Eternal Life, and few there be that find it. Few, few, few,
for he who will not give up ALL for Christ’s sake, has given up
nothing.

“If you would live in the friendship of this world, if indeed you are
not prepared to give up everything you most fondly cherish, should
the Lord require it of you, then, I say, put the idea of Christ
deliberately on one side at once. Spit upon him, buffet him, crucify
him anew, do anything you like so long as you secure the friendship of
this world while it is still in your power to do so; the pleasures of
this brief life may not be worth paying for by the torments of
eternity, but they are something while they last. If, on the other
hand, you would live in the friendship of God, and be among the number
of those for whom Christ has not died in vain; if, in a word, you value
your eternal welfare, then give up the friendship of this world; of a
surety you must make your choice between God and Mammon, for you
cannot serve both.

“I put these considerations before you, if so homely a term may be
pardoned, as a plain matter of business. There is nothing low or
unworthy in this, as some lately have pretended, for all nature shows
us that there is nothing more acceptable to God than an enlightened
view of our own self-interest; never let anyone delude you here; it is
a simple question of fact; did certain things happen or did they not?
If they did happen, is it reasonable to suppose that you will make
yourselves and others more happy by one course of conduct or by
another?

“And now let me ask you what answer you have made to this question
hitherto? Whose friendship have you chosen? If, knowing what you know,
you have not yet begun to act according to the immensity of the
knowledge that is in you, then he who builds his house and lays up his
treasure on the edge of a crater of molten lava is a sane, sensible
person in comparison with yourselves. I say this as no figure of speech
or bugbear with which to frighten you, but as an unvarnished
unexaggerated statement which will be no more disputed by yourselves
than by me.”

And now Mr Hawke, who up to this time had spoken with singular
quietness, changed his manner to one of greater warmth and continued—

“Oh! my young friends turn, turn, turn, now while it is called
to-day—now from this hour, from this instant; stay not even to gird up
your loins; look not behind you for a second, but fly into the bosom of
that Christ who is to be found of all who seek him, and from that
fearful wrath of God which lieth in wait for those who know not the
things belonging to their peace. For the Son of Man cometh as a thief
in the night, and there is not one of us can tell but what this day his
soul may be required of him. If there is even one here who has heeded
me,”—and he let his eye fall for an instant upon almost all his
hearers, but especially on the Ernest set—“I shall know that it was not
for nothing that I felt the call of the Lord, and heard as I thought a
voice by night that bade me come hither quickly, for there was a chosen
vessel who had need of me.”

Here Mr Hawke ended rather abruptly; his earnest manner, striking
countenance and excellent delivery had produced an effect greater than
the actual words I have given can convey to the reader; the virtue lay
in the man more than in what he said; as for the last few mysterious
words about his having heard a voice by night, their effect was magic-
al; there was not one who did not look down to the ground, nor who
in his heart did not half believe that he was the chosen vessel on
whose especial behalf God had sent Mr Hawke to Cambridge. Even if this
were not so, each one of them felt that he was now for the first time
in the actual presence of one who had had a direct communication from
the Almighty, and they were thus suddenly brought a hundredfold nearer
to the New Testament miracles. They were amazed, not to say scared, and
as though by tacit consent they gathered together, thanked Mr Hawke for
his sermon, said good-night in a humble deferential manner to Badcock
and the other Simeonites, and left the room together. They had heard
nothing but what they had been hearing all their lives; how was it,
then, that they were so dumbfoundered by it? I suppose partly because
they had lately begun to think more seriously, and were in a fit state
to be impressed, partly from the greater directness with which each
felt himself addressed, through the sermon being delivered in a room,
and partly to the logical consistency, freedom from exaggeration, and
profound air of conviction with which Mr Hawke had spoken. His
simplicity and obvious earnestness had impressed them even before he
had alluded to his special mission, but this clenched everything, and
the words “Lord, is it I?” were upon the hearts of each as they walked
pensively home through moonlit courts and cloisters.

I do not know what passed among the Simeonites after the Ernest set
had left them, but they would have been more than mortal if they had not
been a good deal elated with the results of the evening. Why, one of
Ernest’s friends was in the University eleven, and he had actually been
in Badcock’s rooms and had slunk off on saying good-night as meekly as
any of them. It was no small thing to have scored a success like this.



CHAPTER L



Ernest felt now that the turning point of his life had come. He would
give up all for Christ—even his tobacco.

So he gathered together his pipes and pouches, and locked them up in
his portmanteau under his bed where they should be out of sight, and as
much out of mind as possible. He did not burn them, because someone
might come in who wanted to smoke, and though he might abridge his
own liberty, yet, as smoking was not a sin, there was no reason why he
should be hard on other people.

After breakfast he left his rooms to call on a man named Dawson, who
had been one of Mr Hawke’s hearers on the preceding evening, and who
was reading for ordination at the forthcoming Ember Weeks, now only
four months distant. This man had been always of a rather serious turn
of mind—a little too much so for Ernest’s taste; but times had changed,
and Dawson’s undoubted sincerity seemed to render him a fitting
counsellor for Ernest at the present time. As he was going through the
first court of John’s on his way to Dawson’s rooms, he met Badcock, and
greeted him with some deference. His advance was received with one of
those ecstatic gleams which shone occasionally upon the face of Bad-
cock, and which, if Ernest had known more, would have reminded him
of Robespierre. As it was, he saw it and unconsciously recognised the
unrest and self-seekingness of the man, but could not yet formulate
them; he disliked Badcock more than ever, but as he was going to profit
by the spiritual benefits which he had put in his way, he was bound to
be civil to him, and civil he therefore was.

Badcock told him that Mr Hawke had returned to town immediately
his discourse was over, but that before doing so he had enquired
particularly who Ernest and two or three others were. I believe each
one of Ernest’s friends was given to understand that he had been more
or less particularly enquired after. Ernest’s vanity—for he was his
mother’s son—was tickled at this; the idea again presented itself to
him that he might be the one for whose benefit Mr Hawke had been sent.
There was something, too, in Badcock’s manner which conveyed the idea
that he could say more if he chose, but had been enjoined to silence.

On reaching Dawson’s rooms, he found his friend in raptures over the
discourse of the preceding evening. Hardly less delighted was he with
the effect it had produced on Ernest. He had always known, he said,
that Ernest would come round; he had been sure of it, but he had hardly
expected the conversion to be so sudden. Ernest said no more had he,
but now that he saw his duty so clearly he would get ordained as soon
as possible, and take a curacy, even though the doing so would make him
have to go down from Cambridge earlier, which would be a great grief to
him. Dawson applauded this determination, and it was arranged that as
Ernest was still more or less of a weak brother, Dawson should take
him, so to speak, in spiritual tow for a while, and strengthen and
confirm his faith.

An offensive and defensive alliance therefore was struck up between
this pair (who were in reality singularly ill assorted), and Ernest set
to work to master the books on which the Bishop would examine him.
Others gradually joined them till they formed a small set or church
(for these are the same things), and the effect of Mr Hawke’s sermon
instead of wearing off in a few days, as might have been expected,
became more and more marked, so much so that it was necessary for
Ernest’s friends to hold him back rather than urge him on, for he
seemed likely to develop—as indeed he did for a time—into a religious
enthusiast.

In one matter only, did he openly backslide. He had, as I said above,
locked up his pipes and tobacco, so that he might not be tempted to use
them. All day long on the day after Mr Hawke’s sermon he let them lie
in his portmanteau bravely; but this was not very difficult, as he had
for some time given up smoking till after hall. After hall this day he
did not smoke till chapel time, and then went to chapel in self-defence.
When he returned he determined to look at the matter from a common
sense point of view. On this he saw that, provided tobacco did not
injure his health—and he really could not see that it did—it stood
much on the same footing as tea or coffee.

Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not
yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for
this reason. We can conceive of St Paul or even our Lord Himself as
drinking a cup of tea, but we cannot imagine either of them as smoking
a cigarette or a churchwarden. Ernest could not deny this, and admitted
that Paul would almost certainly have condemned tobacco in good round
terms if he had known of its existence. Was it not then taking rather a
mean advantage of the Apostle to stand on his not having actually
forbidden it? On the other hand, it was possible that God knew Paul
would have forbidden smoking, and had purposely arranged the discovery
of tobacco for a period at which Paul should be no longer living. This
might seem rather hard on Paul, considering all he had done for
Christianity, but it would be made up to him in other ways.

These reflections satisfied Ernest that on the whole he had better
smoke, so he sneaked to his portmanteau and brought out his pipes and
tobacco again. There should be moderation he felt in all things, even
in virtue; so for that night he smoked immoderately. It was a pity,
however, that he had bragged to Dawson about giving up smoking. The
pipes had better be kept in a cupboard for a week or two, till in other
and easier respects Ernest should have proved his steadfastness. Then
they might steal out again little by little—and so they did.

Ernest now wrote home a letter couched in a vein different from his
ordinary ones. His letters were usually all common form and padding,
for as I have already explained, if he wrote about anything that really
interested him, his mother always wanted to know more and more about
it—every fresh answer being as the lopping off of a hydra’s head and
giving birth to half a dozen or more new questions—but in the end it
came invariably to the same result, namely, that he ought to have done
something else, or ought not to go on doing as he proposed. Now,
however, there was a new departure, and for the thousandth time he
concluded that he was about to take a course of which his father and
mother would approve, and in which they would be interested, so that
at last he and they might get on more sympathetically than heretofore.
He therefore wrote a gushing impulsive letter, which afforded much
amusement to myself as I read it, but which is too long for repro-
duction. One passage ran: “I am now going towards Christ; the
greater number of my college friends are, I fear, going away from Him;
we must pray for them that they may find the peace that is in Christ
even as I have myself found it.” Ernest covered his face with his hands
for shame as he read this extract from the bundle of letters he had put
into my hands—they had been returned to him by his father on his
mother’s death, his mother having carefully preserved them.

“Shall I cut it out?” said I, “I will if you like.”

“Certainly not,” he answered, “and if good-natured friends have kept
more records of my follies, pick out any plums that may amuse the
reader, and let him have his laugh over them.” But fancy what effect a
letter like this—so unled up to—must have produced at Battersby! Even
Christina refrained from ecstasy over her son’s having discovered the
power of Christ’s word, while Theobald was frightened out of his wits.
It was well his son was not going to have any doubts or difficulties,
and that he would be ordained without making a fuss over it, but he
smelt mischief in this sudden conversion of one who had never yet shown
any inclination towards religion. He hated people who did not know
where to stop. Ernest was always so outré and strange; there was
never any knowing what he would do next, except that it would be
something unusual and silly. If he was to get the bit between his teeth
after he had got ordained and bought his living, he would play more
pranks than ever he, Theobald, had done. The fact, doubtless, of his
being ordained and having bought a living would go a long way to steady
him, and if he married, his wife must see to the rest; this was his
only chance and, to do justice to his sagacity, Theobald in his heart
did not think very highly of it.

When Ernest came down to Battersby in June, he imprudently tried to
open up a more unreserved communication with his father than was his
wont. The first of Ernest’s snipe-like flights on being flushed by Mr
Hawke’s sermon was in the direction of ultra-evangelicalism. Theobald
himself had been much more Low than High Church. This was the normal
development of the country clergyman during the first years of his
clerical life, between, we will say, the years 1825 to 1850; but he was
not prepared for the almost contempt with which Ernest now regarded
the doctrines of baptismal regeneration and priestly absolution (Hoity
toity, indeed, what business had he with such questions?), nor for his
desire to find some means of reconciling Methodism and the Church.
Theobald hated the Church of Rome, but he hated dissenters too, for he
found them as a general rule troublesome people to deal with; he always
found people who did not agree with him troublesome to deal with:
besides, they set up for knowing as much as he did; nevertheless if he
had been let alone he would have leaned towards them rather than
towards the High Church party. The neighbouring clergy, however, would
not let him alone. One by one they had come under the influence,
directly or indirectly, of the Oxford movement which had begun twenty
years earlier. It was surprising how many practices he now tolerated
which in his youth he would have considered Popish; he knew very well
therefore which way things were going in Church matters, and saw that
as usual Ernest was setting himself the other way. The opportunity for
telling his son that he was a fool was too favourable not to be embrac-
ed, and Theobald was not slow to embrace it. Ernest was annoyed
and surprised, for had not his father and mother been wanting him to be
more religious all his life? Now that he had become so they were still
not satisfied. He said to himself that a prophet was not without hon-
our save in his own country, but he had been lately—or rather until
lately—getting into an odious habit of turning proverbs upside down,
and it occurred to him that a country is sometimes not without honour
save for its own prophet. Then he laughed, and for the rest of the day
felt more as he used to feel before he had heard Mr Hawke’s sermon.

He returned to Cambridge for the Long Vacation of 1858—none too soon,
for he had to go in for the Voluntary Theological Examination, which
bishops were now beginning to insist upon. He imagined all the time he
was reading that he was storing himself with the knowledge that would
best fit him for the work he had taken in hand. In truth, he was
cramming for a pass. In due time he did pass—creditably, and was
ordained Deacon with half-a-dozen others of his friends in the autumn
of 1858. He was then just twenty-three years old.



CHAPTER LI



Ernest had been ordained to a curacy in one of the central parts of
London. He hardly knew anything of London yet, but his instincts drew
him thither. The day after he was ordained he entered upon his duties
—feeling much as his father had done when he found himself boxed
up in the carriage with Christina on the morning of his marriage.
Before the first three days were over, he became aware that the light
of the happiness which he had known during his four years at Cambridge
had been extinguished, and he was appalled by the irrevocable nature of
the step which he now felt that he had taken much too hurriedly.

The most charitable excuse that I can make for the vagaries which it
will now be my duty to chronicle is that the shock of change consequent
upon his becoming suddenly religious, being ordained and leaving Cam-
bridge, had been too much for my hero, and had for the time thrown
him off an equilibrium which was yet little supported by experience,
and therefore as a matter of course unstable.

Everyone has a mass of bad work in him which he will have to work off
and get rid of before he can do better—and indeed, the more lasting a
man’s ultimate good work is, the more sure he is to pass through a
time, and perhaps a very long one, in which there seems very little
hope for him at all. We must all sow our spiritual wild oats. The fault
I feel personally disposed to find with my godson is not that he had
wild oats to sow, but that they were such an exceedingly tame and
uninteresting crop. The sense of humour and tendency to think for
himself, of which till a few months previously he had been showing fair
promise, were nipped as though by a late frost, while his earlier habit
of taking on trust everything that was told him by those in authority,
and following everything out to the bitter end, no matter how pre-
posterous, returned with redoubled strength. I suppose this was what
might have been expected from anyone placed as Ernest now was,
especially when his antecedents are remembered, but it surprised and
disappointed some of his cooler-headed Cambridge friends who had be-
gun to think well of his ability. To himself it seemed that religion was
incompatible with half measures, or even with compromise. Circumstances
had led to his being ordained; for the moment he was sorry they had,
but he had done it and must go through with it. He therefore set him-
self to find out what was expected of him, and to act accordingly. His
rector was a moderate High Churchman of no very pronounced views—an
elderly man who had had too many curates not to have long since found
out that the connection between rector and curate, like that between
employer and employed in every other walk of life, was a mere matter of
business. He had now two curates, of whom Ernest was the junior; the
senior curate was named Pryer, and when this gentleman made advances,
as he presently did, Ernest in his forlorn state was delighted to meet
them.

Pryer was about twenty-eight years old. He had been at Eton and at
Oxford. He was tall, and passed generally for good-looking; I only saw
him once for about five minutes, and then thought him odious both in
manners and appearance. Perhaps it was because he caught me up in
a way I did not like. I had quoted Shakespeare for lack of something
better to fill up a sentence—and had said that one touch of nature
made the whole world kin. “Ah,” said Pryer, in a bold, brazen way which
displeased me, “but one touch of the unnatural makes it more kindred
still,” and he gave me a look as though he thought me an old bore and
did not care two straws whether I was shocked or not. Naturally enough,
after this I did not like him.

This, however, is anticipating, for it was not till Ernest had been
three or four months in London that I happened to meet his
fellow-curate, and I must deal here rather with the effect he produced
upon my godson than upon myself. Besides being what was generally
considered good-looking, he was faultless in his get-up, and altogether
the kind of man whom Ernest was sure to be afraid of and yet be tak-
en in by. The style of his dress was very High Church, and his acquaint-
ances were exclusively of the extreme High Church party, but he
kept his views a good deal in the background in his rector’s presence,
and that gentleman, though he looked askance on some of Pryer’s
friends, had no such ground of complaint against him as to make him
sever the connection. Pryer, too, was popular in the pulpit, and, take
him all round, it was probable that many worse curates would be found
for one better. When Pryer called on my hero, as soon as the two were
alone together, he eyed him all over with a quick penetrating glance
and seemed not dissatisfied with the result—for I must say here that
Ernest had improved in personal appearance under the more genial
treatment he had received at Cambridge. Pryer, in fact, approved of him
sufficiently to treat him civilly, and Ernest was immediately won by
anyone who did this. It was not long before he discovered that the High
Church party, and even Rome itself, had more to say for themselves than
he had thought. This was his first snipe-like change of flight.

Pryer introduced him to several of his friends. They were all of them
young clergymen, belonging as I have said to the highest of the High
Church school, but Ernest was surprised to find how much they resembled
other people when among themselves. This was a shock to him; it was ere
long a still greater one to find that certain thoughts which he had
warred against as fatal to his soul, and which he had imagined he
should lose once for all on ordination, were still as troublesome to
him as they had been; he also saw plainly enough that the young
gentlemen who formed the circle of Pryer’s friends were in much the
same unhappy predicament as himself.

This was deplorable. The only way out of it that Ernest could see was
that he should get married at once. But then he did not know any one
whom he wanted to marry. He did not know any woman, in fact, whom he
would not rather die than marry. It had been one of Theobald’s and
Christina’s main objects to keep him out of the way of women, and they
had so far succeeded that women had become to him mysterious,
inscrutable objects to be tolerated when it was impossible to avoid
them, but never to be sought out or encouraged. As for any man loving,
or even being at all fond of any woman, he supposed it was so, but he
believed the greater number of those who professed such sentiments were
liars. Now, however, it was clear that he had hoped against hope too
long, and that the only thing to do was to go and ask the first woman
who would listen to him to come and be married to him as soon as
possible.

He broached this to Pryer, and was surprised to find that this gentle-
man, though attentive to such members of his flock as were young
and good-looking, was strongly in favour of the celibacy of the clergy,
as indeed were the other demure young clerics to whom Pryer had
introduced Ernest.



CHAPTER LII



“You know, my dear Pontifex,” said Pryer to him, some few weeks after
Ernest had become acquainted with him, when the two were taking a
constitutional one day in Kensington Gardens, “You know, my dear
Pontifex, it is all very well to quarrel with Rome, but Rome has
reduced the treatment of the human soul to a science, while our own
Church, though so much purer in many respects, has no organised system
either of diagnosis or pathology—I mean, of course, spiritual diagnosis
and spiritual pathology. Our Church does not prescribe remedies upon
any settled system, and, what is still worse, even when her physicians
have according to their lights ascertained the disease and pointed out
the remedy, she has no discipline which will ensure its being actually
applied. If our patients do not choose to do as we tell them, we cannot
make them. Perhaps really under all the circumstances this is as well,
for we are spiritually mere horse doctors as compared with the Roman
priesthood, nor can we hope to make much headway against the sin and
misery that surround us, till we return in some respects to the
practice of our forefathers and of the greater part of Christendom.”

Ernest asked in what respects it was that his friend desired a return
to the practice of our forefathers.

“Why, my dear fellow, can you really be ignorant? It is just this,
either the priest is indeed a spiritual guide, as being able to show
people how they ought to live better than they can find out for
themselves, or he is nothing at all—he has no raison d’être. If the
priest is not as much a healer and director of men’s souls as a
physician is of their bodies, what is he? The history of all ages has
shown—and surely you must know this as well as I do—that as men
cannot cure the bodies of their patients if they have not been properly
trained in hospitals under skilled teachers, so neither can souls be
cured of their more hidden ailments without the help of men who are
skilled in soul-craft—or in other words, of priests. What do one half
of our formularies and rubrics mean if not this? How in the name of all
that is reasonable can we find out the exact nature of a spiritual
malady, unless we have had experience of other similar cases? How can
we get this without express training? At present we have to begin all
experiments for ourselves, without profiting by the organised
experience of our predecessors, inasmuch as that experience is never
organised and co-ordinated at all. At the outset, therefore, each one
of us must ruin many souls which could be saved by knowledge of a few
elementary principles.”

Ernest was very much impressed.

“As for men curing themselves,” continued Pryer, “they can no more
cure their own souls than they can cure their own bodies, or manage
their own law affairs. In these two last cases they see the folly of med-
dling with their own cases clearly enough, and go to a professional ad-
viser as a matter of course; surely a man’s soul is at once a more
difficult and intricate matter to treat, and at the same time it is more
important to him that it should be treated rightly than that either his
body or his money should be so. What are we to think of the practice of
a Church which encourages people to rely on unprofessional advice in
matters affecting their eternal welfare, when they would not think of
jeopardising their worldly affairs by such insane conduct?”

Ernest could see no weak place in this. These ideas had crossed his own
mind vaguely before now, but he had never laid hold of them or set them
in an orderly manner before himself. Nor was he quick at detecting
false analogies and the misuse of metaphors; in fact he was a mere
child in the hands of his fellow curate.

“And what,” resumed Pryer, “does all this point to? Firstly, to the
duty of confession—the outcry against which is absurd as an outcry
would be against dissection as part of the training of medical stu-
dents. Granted these young men must see and do a great deal we do
not ourselves like even to think of, but they should adopt some other
profession unless they are prepared for this; they may even get
inoculated with poison from a dead body and lose their lives, but they
must stand their chance. So if we aspire to be priests in deed as well
as name, we must familiarise ourselves with the minutest and most
repulsive details of all kinds of sin, so that we may recognise it in
all its stages. Some of us must doubtlessly perish spiritually in such
investigations. We cannot help it; all science must have its martyrs,
and none of these will deserve better of humanity than those who have
fallen in the pursuit of spiritual pathology.”

Ernest grew more and more interested, but in the meekness of his soul
said nothing.

“I do not desire this martyrdom for myself,” continued the other, “on
the contrary I will avoid it to the very utmost of my power, but if it
be God’s will that I should fall while studying what I believe most
calculated to advance his glory—then, I say, not my will, oh Lord, but
thine be done.”

This was too much even for Ernest. “I heard of an Irish-woman once,”
he said, with a smile, “who said she was a martyr to the drink.”

“And so she was,” rejoined Pryer with warmth; and he went on to show
that this good woman was an experimentalist whose experiment, though
disastrous in its effects upon herself, was pregnant with instruction
to other people. She was thus a true martyr or witness to the frightful
consequences of intemperance, to the saving, doubtless, of many who
but for her martyrdom would have taken to drinking. She was one of a
forlorn hope whose failure to take a certain position went to the
proving it to be impregnable and therefore to the abandonment of all
attempt to take it. This was almost as great a gain to mankind as the
actual taking of the position would have been.

“Besides,” he added more hurriedly, “the limits of vice and virtue are
wretchedly ill-defined. Half the vices which the world condemns most
loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than
total abstinence.”

Ernest asked timidly for an instance.

“No, no,” said Pryer, “I will give you no instance, but I will give you
a formula that shall embrace all instances. It is this, that no
practice is entirely vicious which has not been extinguished among the
comeliest, most vigorous, and most cultivated races of mankind in spite
of centuries of endeavour to extirpate it. If a vice in spite of such
efforts can still hold its own among the most polished nations, it must
be founded on some immutable truth or fact in human nature, and must
have some compensatory advantage which we cannot afford altogether to
dispense with.”

“But,” said Ernest timidly, “is not this virtually doing away with all
distinction between right and wrong, and leaving people without any
moral guide whatever?”

“Not the people,” was the answer: “it must be our care to be guides to
these, for they are and always will be incapable of guiding themselves
sufficiently. We should tell them what they must do, and in an ideal
state of things should be able to enforce their doing it: perhaps when
we are better instructed the ideal state may come about; nothing will
so advance it as greater knowledge of spiritual pathology on our own
part. For this, three things are necessary; firstly, absolute freedom
in experiment for us the clergy; secondly, absolute knowledge of what
the laity think and do, and of what thoughts and actions result in what
spiritual conditions; and thirdly, a compacter organisation among
ourselves.

“If we are to do any good we must be a closely united body, and must
be sharply divided from the laity. Also we must be free from those ties
which a wife and children involve. I can hardly express the horror with
which I am filled by seeing English priests living in what I can only
designate as ‘open matrimony.’ It is deplorable. The priest must be
absolutely sexless—if not in practice, yet at any rate in theory,　ab-
solutely—and that too, by a theory so universally accepted that none
shall venture to dispute it.”

“But,” said Ernest, “has not the Bible already told people what they
ought and ought not to do, and is it not enough for us to insist on
what can be found here, and let the rest alone?”

“If you begin with the Bible,” was the rejoinder, “you are three parts
gone on the road to infidelity, and will go the other part before you
know where you are. The Bible is not without its value to us the
clergy, but for the laity it is a stumbling-block which cannot be taken
out of their way too soon or too completely. Of course, I mean on the
supposition that they read it, which, happily, they seldom do. If people
read the Bible as the ordinary British churchman or churchwoman
reads it, it is harmless enough; but if they read it with any care—
which we should assume they will if we give it them at all—it is
fatal to them.”

“What do you mean?” said Ernest, more and more astonished, but more
and more feeling that he was at least in the hands of a man who had
definite ideas.

“Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible. A more
unreliable book was never put upon paper. Take my advice and don’t read
it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely.”

“But surely you believe the Bible when it tells you of such things as
that Christ died and rose from the dead? Surely you believe this?” said
Ernest, quite prepared to be told that Pryer believed nothing of the
kind.

“I do not believe it, I know it.”

“But how—if the testimony of the Bible fails?”

“On that of the living voice of the Church, which I know to be
infallible and to be informed of Christ himself.”



CHAPTER LIII



The foregoing conversation and others like it made a deep impression
upon my hero. If next day he had taken a walk with Mr Hawke, and heard
what he had to say on the other side, he would have been just as much
struck, and as ready to fling off what Pryer had told him, as he now
was to throw aside all he had ever heard from anyone except Pryer; but
there was no Mr Hawke at hand, so Pryer had everything his own way.

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange
metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape. It is no more to be
wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should
have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a
free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a
mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest, however, could
not be expected to know this; embryos never do. Embryos think with
each stage of their development that they have now reached the only
condition which really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be
their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing
can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto
death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our
power to recognise a past and a present as resembling one another. It
is the making us consider the points of difference between our present
and our past greater than the points of resemblance, so that we can no
longer call the former of these two in any proper sense a continuation
of the second, but find it less trouble to think of it as something
that we choose to call new.

But, to let this pass, it was clear that spiritual pathology (I confess
that I do not know myself what spiritual pathology means—but Pryer and
Ernest doubtless did) was the great desideratum of the age. It seemed
to Ernest that he had made this discovery himself and been familiar
with it all his life, that he had never known, in fact, of anything
else. He wrote long letters to his college friends expounding his views
as though he had been one of the Apostolic fathers. As for the Old
Testament writers, he had no patience with them. “Do oblige me,” I find
him writing to one friend, “by reading the prophet Zechariah, and
giving me your candid opinion upon him. He is poor stuff, full of
Yankee bounce; it is sickening to live in an age when such balderdash
can be gravely admired whether as poetry or prophecy.” This was because
Pryer had set him against Zechariah. I do not know what Zechariah had
done; I should think myself that Zechariah was a very good prophet;
perhaps it was because he was a Bible writer, and not a very prominent
one, that Pryer selected him as one through whom to disparage the Bible
in comparison with the Church.

To his friend Dawson I find him saying a little later on: “Pryer and I
continue our walks, working out each other’s thoughts. At first he
used to do all the thinking, but I think I am pretty well abreast of him
now, and rather chuckle at seeing that he is already beginning to
modify some of the views he held most strongly when I first knew him.

“Then I think he was on the high road to Rome; now, however, he seems
to be a good deal struck with a suggestion of mine in which you, too,
perhaps may be interested. You see we must infuse new life into the
Church somehow; we are not holding our own against either Rome or
infidelity.” (I may say in passing that I do not believe Ernest had as
yet ever seen an infidel—not to speak to.) “I proposed, therefore, a
few days back to Pryer—and he fell in eagerly with the proposal as soon
as he saw that I had the means of carrying it out—that we should set on
foot a spiritual movement somewhat analogous to the Young England
movement of twenty years ago, the aim of which shall be at once to
outbid Rome on the one hand, and scepticism on the other. For this
purpose I see nothing better than the foundation of an institution or
college for placing the nature and treatment of sin on a more
scientific basis than it rests at present. We want—to borrow a useful
term of Pryer’s—a College of Spiritual Pathology where young men” (I
suppose Ernest thought he was no longer young by this time) “may study
the nature and treatment of the sins of the soul as medical students
study those of the bodies of their patients. Such a college, as you
will probably admit, will approach both Rome on the one hand, and
science on the other—Rome, as giving the priesthood more skill, and
therefore as paving the way for their obtaining greater power, and
science, by recognising that even free thought has a certain kind of
value in spiritual enquiries. To this purpose Pryer and I have resolved
to devote ourselves henceforth heart and soul.

“Of course, my ideas are still unshaped, and all will depend upon the
men by whom the college is first worked. I am not yet a priest, but
Pryer is, and if I were to start the College, Pryer might take charge
of it for a time and I work under him nominally as his subordinate.
Pryer himself suggested this. Is it not generous of him?

“The worst of it is that we have not enough money; I have, it is true,
£5000, but we want at least £10,000, so Pryer says, before we can
start; when we are fairly under weigh I might live at the college and
draw a salary from the foundation, so that it is all one, or nearly so,
whether I invest my money in this way or in buying a living; besides I
want very little; it is certain that I shall never marry; no clergyman
should think of this, and an unmarried man can live on next to nothing.
Still I do not see my way to as much money as I want, and Pryer
suggests that as we can hardly earn more now we must get it by a
judicious series of investments. Pryer knows several people who make
quite a handsome income out of very little or, indeed, I may say,
nothing at all, by buying things at a place they call the Stock Ex-
change; I don’t know much about it yet, but Pryer says I should soon
learn; he thinks, indeed, that I have shown rather a talent in this
direction, and under proper auspices should make a very good man of
business. Others, of course, and not I, must decide this; but a man can
do anything if he gives his mind to it, and though I should not care
about having more money for my own sake, I care about it very much
when I think of the good I could do with it by saving souls from such
horrible torture hereafter. Why, if the thing succeeds, and I really
cannot see what is to hinder it, it is hardly possible to exaggerate
its importance, nor the proportions which it may ultimately assume,”
etc., etc.

Again I asked Ernest whether he minded my printing this. He winced, but
said “No, not if it helps you to tell your story: but don’t you think
it is too long?”

I said it would let the reader see for himself how things were going in
half the time that it would take me to explain them to him.

“Very well then, keep it by all means.”

I continue turning over my file of Ernest’s letters and find as
follows—

“Thanks for your last, in answer to which I send you a rough copy of
a letter I sent to the Times a day or two back. They did not insert
it, but it embodies pretty fully my ideas on the parochial visitation
question, and Pryer fully approves of the letter. Think it carefully
over and send it back to me when read, for it is so exactly my present
creed that I cannot afford to lose it.

“I should very much like to have a viva voce discussion on these
matters: I can only see for certain that we have suffered a dreadful
loss in being no longer able to excommunicate. We should excommunicate
rich and poor alike, and pretty freely too. If this power were restored
to us we could, I think, soon put a stop to by far the greater part of
the sin and misery with which we are surrounded.”

These letters were written only a few weeks after Ernest had been
ordained, but they are nothing to others that he wrote a little later
on.

In his eagerness to regenerate the Church of England (and through this
the universe) by the means which Pryer had suggested to him, it
occurred to him to try to familiarise himself with the habits and
thoughts of the poor by going and living among them. I think he got
this notion from Kingsley’s Alton Locke, which, High Churchman though
he for the nonce was, he had devoured as he had devoured Stanley’s Life
of Arnold, Dickens’s novels, and whatever other literary garbage of the
day was most likely to do him harm; at any rate he actually put his
scheme into practice, and took lodgings in Ashpit Place, a small street
in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, in a house of which the
landlady was the widow of a cabman.

This lady occupied the whole ground floor. In the front kitchen there
was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender. On the
first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished com-
fortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The two upper floors
were parcelled out among four different sets of lodgers: there was a
tailor named Holt, a drunken fellow who used to beat his wife at night
till her screams woke the house; above him there was another tailor
with a wife but no children; these people were Wesleyans, given to
drink but not noisy. The two back rooms were held by single ladies, who
it seemed to Ernest must be respectably connected, for well-dressed
gentlemanly-looking young men used to go up and down stairs past
Ernest’s rooms to call at any rate on Miss Snow—Ernest had heard her
door slam after they had passed. He thought, too, that some of them
went up to Miss Maitland’s. Mrs Jupp, the landlady, told Ernest that
these were brothers and cousins of Miss Snow’s, and that she was
herself looking out for a situation as a governess, but at present had
an engagement as an actress at the Drury Lane Theatre. Ernest asked
whether Miss Maitland in the top back was also looking out for a sit-
uation, and was told she was wanting an engagement as a milliner. He
believed whatever Mrs Jupp told him.



CHAPTER LIV



This move on Ernest’s part was variously commented upon by his friends,
the general opinion being that it was just like Pontifex, who was sure
to do something unusual wherever he went, but that on the whole the
idea was commendable. Christina could not restrain herself when on
sounding her clerical neighbours she found them inclined to applaud
her son for conduct which they idealised into something much more
self-denying than it really was. She did not quite like his living in
such an unaristocratic neighbourhood; but what he was doing would
probably get into the newspapers, and then great people would take
notice of him. Besides, it would be very cheap; down among these poor
people he could live for next to nothing, and might put by a great deal
of his income. As for temptations, there could be few or none in such a
place as that. This argument about cheapness was the one with which she
most successfully met Theobald, who grumbled more suo that he had no
sympathy with his son’s extravagance and conceit. When Christina
pointed out to him that it would be cheap he replied that there was
something in that.

On Ernest himself the effect was to confirm the good opinion of himself
which had been growing upon him ever since he had begun to read for
orders, and to make him flatter himself that he was among the few who
were ready to give up all for Christ. Ere long he began to conceive
of himself as a man with a mission and a great future. His lightest and
most hastily formed opinions began to be of momentous importance to
him, and he inflicted them, as I have already shown, on his old friends,
week by week becoming more and more entêté with himself and
his own crotchets. I should like well enough to draw a veil over this
part of my hero’s career, but cannot do so without marring my story.

In the spring of 1859 I find him writing—

“I cannot call the visible Church Christian till its fruits are
Christian, that is until the fruits of the members of the Church of
England are in conformity, or something like conformity, with her
teaching. I cordially agree with the teaching of the Church of England
in most respects, but she says one thing and does another, and until
excommunication—yes, and wholesale excommunication—be resorted to,
I cannot call her a Christian institution. I should begin with our Rect-
or, and if I found it necessary to follow him up by excommunicating
the Bishop, I should not flinch even from this.

“The present London Rectors are hopeless people to deal with. My own
is one of the best of them, but the moment Pryer and I show signs of
wanting to attack an evil in a way not recognised by routine, or of
remedying anything about which no outcry has been made, we are met
with, ‘I cannot think what you mean by all this disturbance; nobody
else among the clergy sees these things, and I have no wish to be the
first to begin turning everything topsy-turvy.’ And then people call
him a sensible man. I have no patience with them. However, we know what
we want, and, as I wrote to Dawson the other day, have a scheme on foot
which will, I think, fairly meet the requirements of the case. But we
want more money, and my first move towards getting this has not turned
out quite so satisfactorily as Pryer and I had hoped; we shall,
however, I doubt not, retrieve it shortly.”

When Ernest came to London he intended doing a good deal of
house-to-house visiting, but Pryer had talked him out of this even
before he settled down in his new and strangely-chosen apartments. The
line he now took was that if people wanted Christ, they must prove
their want by taking some little trouble, and the trouble required of
them was that they should come and seek him, Ernest, out; there he was
in the midst of them ready to teach; if people did not choose to come
to him it was no fault of his.

“My great business here,” he writes again to Dawson, “is to observe. I
am not doing much in parish work beyond my share of the daily services.
I have a man’s Bible Class, and a boy’s Bible Class, and a good many
young men and boys to whom I give instruction one way or another; then
there are the Sunday School children, with whom I fill my room on a
Sunday evening as full as it will hold, and let them sing hymns and
chants. They like this. I do a great deal of reading—chiefly of books
which Pryer and I think most likely to help; we find nothing comparable
to the Jesuits. Pryer is a thorough gentleman, and an admirable man of
business—no less observant of the things of this world, in fact, than
of the things above; by a brilliant coup he has retrieved, or nearly
so, a rather serious loss which threatened to delay indefinitely the
execution of our great scheme. He and I daily gather fresh principles.
I believe great things are before me, and am strong in the hope of
being able by and by to effect much.

“As for you I bid you God speed. Be bold but logical, speculative but
cautious, daringly courageous, but properly circumspect withal,” etc.,
etc.

I think this may do for the present.



CHAPTER LV



I had called on Ernest as a matter of course when he first came to
London, but had not seen him. I had been out when he returned my call,
so that he had been in town for some weeks before I actually saw him,
which I did not very long after he had taken possession of his new
rooms. I liked his face, but except for the common bond of music, in
respect of which our tastes were singularly alike, I should hardly have
known how to get on with him. To do him justice he did not air any of
his schemes to me until I had drawn him out concerning them. I, to
borrow the words of Ernest’s landlady, Mrs Jupp, “am not a very regular
church-goer”—I discovered upon cross-examination that Mrs Jupp had been
to church once when she was churched for her son Tom some five and
twenty years since, but never either before or afterwards; not even, I
fear, to be married, for though she called herself “Mrs” she wore no
wedding ring, and spoke of the person who should have been Mr Jupp as
“my poor dear boy’s father,” not as “my husband.” But to return. I was
vexed at Ernest’s having been ordained. I was not ordained myself and I
did not like my friends to be ordained, nor did I like having to be on
my best behaviour and to look as if butter would not melt in my mouth,
and all for a boy whom I remembered when he knew yesterday and
to-morrow and Tuesday, but not a day of the week more—not even Sunday
itself—and when he said he did not like the kitten because it had pins
in its toes.

I looked at him and thought of his aunt Alethea, and how fast the money
she had left him was accumulating; and it was all to go to this young
man, who would use it probably in the very last ways with which Miss
Pontifex would have sympathised. I was annoyed. “She always said,” I
thought to myself, “that she should make a mess of it, but I did not
think she would have made as great a mess of it as this.” Then I
thought that perhaps if his aunt had lived he would not have been like
this.

Ernest behaved quite nicely to me and I own that the fault was mine if
the conversation drew towards dangerous subjects. I was the aggressor,
presuming I suppose upon my age and long acquaintance with him, as
giving me a right to make myself unpleasant in a quiet way.

Then he came out, and the exasperating part of it was that up to a
certain point he was so very right. Grant him his premises and his
conclusions were sound enough, nor could I, seeing that he was already
ordained, join issue with him about his premises as I should certainly
have done if I had had a chance of doing so before he had taken orders.
The result was that I had to beat a retreat and went away not in the
best of humours. I believe the truth was that I liked Ernest, and was
vexed at his being a clergyman, and at a clergyman having so much money
coming to him.

I talked a little with Mrs Jupp on my way out. She and I had reckoned
one another up at first sight as being neither of us “very regular
church-goers,” and the strings of her tongue had been loosened. She
said Ernest would die. He was much too good for the world and he looked
so sad “just like young Watkins of the ‘Crown’ over the way who died a
month ago, and his poor dear skin was white as alablaster; least-ways
they say he shot hisself. They took him from the Mortimer, I met them
just as I was going with my Rose to get a pint o’ four ale, and she had
her arm in splints. She told her sister she wanted to go to Perry’s to
get some wool, instead o’ which it was only a stall to get me a pint o’
ale, bless her heart; there’s nobody else would do that much for poor
old Jupp, and it’s a horrid lie to say she is gay; not but what I like
a gay woman, I do: I’d rather give a gay woman half-a-crown than stand
a modest woman a pot o’ beer, but I don’t want to go associating with
bad girls for all that. So they took him from the Mortimer; they
wouldn’t let him go home no more; and he done it that artful you know.
His wife was in the country living with her mother, and she always
spoke respectful o’ my Rose. Poor dear, I hope his soul is in Heaven.
Well Sir, would you believe it, there’s that in Mr Pontifex’s face
which is just like young Watkins; he looks that worrited and scrunched
up at times, but it’s never for the same reason, for he don’t know
nothing at all, no more than a unborn babe, no he don’t; why there’s
not a monkey going about London with an Italian organ grinder but knows
more than Mr Pontifex do. He don’t know—well I suppose—”

Here a child came in on an errand from some neighbour and interrupted
her, or I can form no idea where or when she would have ended her
discourse. I seized the opportunity to run away, but not before I had
given her five shillings and made her write down my address, for I was
a little frightened by what she said. I told her if she thought her
lodger grew worse, she was to come and let me know.

Weeks went by and I did not see her again. Having done as much as I
had, I felt absolved from doing more, and let Ernest alone as thinking
that he and I should only bore one another.

He had now been ordained a little over four months, but these months
had not brought happiness or satisfaction with them. He had lived in a
clergyman’s house all his life, and might have been expected perhaps to
have known pretty much what being a clergyman was like, and so he did—a
country clergyman; he had formed an ideal, however, as regards what a
town clergyman could do, and was trying in a feeble tentative way to
realise it, but somehow or other it always managed to escape him.

He lived among the poor, but he did not find that he got to know them.
The idea that they would come to him proved to be a mistaken one. He
did indeed visit a few tame pets whom his rector desired him to look
after. There was an old man and his wife who lived next door but one to
Ernest himself; then there was a plumber of the name of Chesterfield;
an aged lady of the name of Gover, blind and bed-ridden, who munched
and munched her feeble old toothless jaws as Ernest spoke or read to
her, but who could do little more; a Mr Brookes, a rag and bottle
merchant in Birdsey’s Rents in the last stage of dropsy, and perhaps
half a dozen or so others. What did it all come to, when he did go to
see them? The plumber wanted to be flattered, and liked fooling a
gentleman into wasting his time by scratching his ears for him. Mrs
Gover, poor old woman, wanted money; she was very good and meek, and
when Ernest got her a shilling from Lady Anne Jones’s bequest, she said
it was “small but seasonable,” and munched and munched in gratitude.
Ernest sometimes gave her a little money himself, but not, as he says
now, half what he ought to have given.

What could he do else that would have been of the smallest use to her?
Nothing indeed; but giving occasional half-crowns to Mrs Gover was not
regenerating the universe, and Ernest wanted nothing short of this. The
world was all out of joint, and instead of feeling it to be a cursed
spite that he was born to set it right, he thought he was just the kind
of person that was wanted for the job, and was eager to set to work,
only he did not exactly know how to begin, for the beginning he had
made with Mr Chesterfield and Mrs Gover did not promise great
developments.

Then poor Mr Brookes—he suffered very much, terribly indeed; he was not
in want of money; he wanted to die and couldn’t, just as we sometimes
want to go to sleep and cannot. He had been a serious-minded man, and
death frightened him as it must frighten anyone who believes that all
his most secret thoughts will be shortly exposed in public. When I read
Ernest the description of how his father used to visit Mrs Thompson at
Battersby, he coloured and said—“that’s just what I used to say to Mr
Brookes.” Ernest felt that his visits, so far from comforting Mr
Brookes, made him fear death more and more, but how could he help it?

Even Pryer, who had been curate a couple of years, did not know
personally more than a couple of hundred people in the parish at the
outside, and it was only at the houses of very few of these that he
ever visited, but then Pryer had such a strong objection on principle
to house visitations. What a drop in the sea were those with whom he
and Pryer were brought into direct communication in comparison with
those whom he must reach and move if he were to produce much effect
of any kind, one way or the other. Why there were between fifteen and
twenty thousand poor in the parish, of whom but the merest fraction
ever attended a place of worship. Some few went to dissenting chapels,
a few were Roman Catholics; by far the greater number, however, were
practically infidels, if not actively hostile, at any rate indifferent
to religion, while many were avowed Atheists—admirers of Tom Paine, of
whom he now heard for the first time; but he never met and conversed
with any of these.

Was he really doing everything that could be expected of him? It was
all very well to say that he was doing as much as other young clergymen
did; that was not the kind of answer which Jesus Christ was likely to
accept; why, the Pharisees themselves in all probability did as much as
the other Pharisees did. What he should do was to go into the highways
and byways, and compel people to come in. Was he doing this? Or were
not they rather compelling him to keep out—outside their doors at any
rate? He began to have an uneasy feeling as though ere long, unless he
kept a sharp look out, he should drift into being a sham.

True, all would be changed as soon as he could endow the College for
Spiritual Pathology; matters, however, had not gone too well with “the
things that people bought in the place that was called the Stock
Exchange.” In order to get on faster, it had been arranged that Ernest
should buy more of these things than he could pay for, with the idea
that in a few weeks, or even days, they would be much higher in value,
and he could sell them at a tremendous profit; but, unfortunately,
instead of getting higher, they had fallen immediately after Ernest had
bought, and obstinately refused to get up again; so, after a few
settlements, he had got frightened, for he read an article in some
newspaper, which said they would go ever so much lower, and, contrary
to Pryer’s advice, he insisted on selling—at a loss of something like
£500. He had hardly sold when up went the shares again, and he saw how
foolish he had been, and how wise Pryer was, for if Pryer’s advice had
been followed, he would have made £500, instead of losing it. However,
he told himself he must live and learn.

Then Pryer made a mistake. They had bought some shares, and the
shares went up delightfully for about a fortnight. This was a happy
time indeed, for by the end of a fortnight, the lost £500 had been
recovered, and three or four hundred pounds had been cleared into the
bargain. All the feverish anxiety of that miserable six weeks, when the
£500 was being lost, was now being repaid with interest. Ernest wanted
to sell and make sure of the profit, but Pryer would not hear of it;
they would go ever so much higher yet, and he showed Ernest an article
in some newspaper which proved that what he said was reasonable, and
they did go up a little—but only a very little, for then they went
down, down, and Ernest saw first his clear profit of three or four
hundred pounds go, and then the £500 loss, which he thought he had
recovered, slipped away by falls of a half and one at a time, and then
he lost £200 more. Then a newspaper said that these shares were the
greatest rubbish that had ever been imposed upon the English public,
and Ernest could stand it no longer, so he sold out, again this time
against Pryer’s advice, so that when they went up, as they shortly did,
Pryer scored off Ernest a second time.

Ernest was not used to vicissitudes of this kind, and they made him so
anxious that his health was affected. It was arranged therefore that he
had better know nothing of what was being done. Pryer was a much bet-
ter man of business than he was, and would see to it all. This relieved
Ernest of a good deal of trouble, and was better after all for the
investments themselves; for, as Pryer justly said, a man must not have
a faint heart if he hopes to succeed in buying and selling upon the
Stock Exchange, and seeing Ernest nervous made Pryer nervous too—at
least, he said it did. So the money drifted more and more into Pryer’s
hands. As for Pryer himself, he had nothing but his curacy and a small
allowance from his father.

Some of Ernest’s old friends got an inkling from his letters of what
he was doing, and did their utmost to dissuade him, but he was as
infatuated as a young lover of two and twenty. Finding that these
friends disapproved, he dropped away from them, and they, being bored
with his egotism and high-flown ideas, were not sorry to let him do so.
Of course, he said nothing about his speculations—indeed, he hardly
knew that anything done in so good a cause could be called speculation.
At Battersby, when his father urged him to look out for a next
presentation, and even brought one or two promising ones under his
notice, he made objections and excuses, though always promising to do
as his father desired very shortly.



CHAPTER LVI



By and by a subtle, indefinable malaise began to take possession of
him. I once saw a very young foal trying to eat some most objectionable
refuse, and unable to make up its mind whether it was good or no.
Clearly it wanted to be told. If its mother had seen what it was doing
she would have set it right in a moment, and as soon as ever it had
been told that what it was eating was filth, the foal would have
recognised it and never have wanted to be told again; but the foal
could not settle the matter for itself, or make up its mind whether it
liked what it was trying to eat or no, without assistance from without.
I suppose it would have come to do so by and by, but it was wasting
time and trouble, which a single look from its mother would have saved,
just as wort will in time ferment of itself, but will ferment much more
quickly if a little yeast be added to it. In the matter of knowing what
gives us pleasure we are all like wort, and if unaided from without can
only ferment slowly and toilsomely.

My unhappy hero about this time was very much like the foal, or rather
he felt much what the foal would have felt if its mother and all the
other grown-up horses in the field had vowed that what it was eating
was the most excellent and nutritious food to be found anywhere. He was
so anxious to do what was right, and so ready to believe that every one
knew better than himself, that he never ventured to admit to himself
that he might be all the while on a hopelessly wrong tack. It did not
occur to him that there might be a blunder anywhere, much less did it
occur to him to try and find out where the blunder was. Nevertheless he
became daily more full of malaise, and daily, only he knew it not,
more ripe for an explosion should a spark fall upon him.

One thing, however, did begin to loom out of the general vagueness, and
to this he instinctively turned as trying to seize it—I mean, the fact
that he was saving very few souls, whereas there were thousands and
thousands being lost hourly all around him which a little energy such
as Mr Hawke’s might save. Day after day went by, and what was he doing?
Standing on professional etiquette, and praying that his shares might
go up and down as he wanted them, so that they might give him money
enough to enable him to regenerate the universe. But in the meantime
the people were dying. How many souls would not be doomed to endless
ages of the most frightful torments that the mind could think of,
before he could bring his spiritual pathology engine to bear upon them?
Why might he not stand and preach as he saw the Dissenters doing
sometimes in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and other thoroughfares? He could
say all that Mr Hawke had said. Mr Hawke was a very poor creature in
Ernest’s eyes now, for he was a Low Churchman, but we should not be
above learning from any one, and surely he could affect his hearers as
powerfully as Mr Hawke had affected him if he only had the courage to
set to work. The people whom he saw preaching in the squares sometimes
drew large audiences. He could at any rate preach better than they.

Ernest broached this to Pryer, who treated it as something too
outrageous to be even thought of. Nothing, he said, could more tend to
lower the dignity of the clergy and bring the Church into contempt. His
manner was brusque, and even rude.

Ernest ventured a little mild dissent; he admitted it was not usual,
but something at any rate must be done, and that quickly. This was how
Wesley and Whitfield had begun that great movement which had kindled
religious life in the minds of hundreds of thousands. This was no time
to be standing on dignity. It was just because Wesley and Whitfield had
done what the Church would not that they had won men to follow them
whom the Church had now lost.

Pryer eyed Ernest searchingly, and after a pause said, “I don’t know
what to make of you, Pontifex; you are at once so very right and so
very wrong. I agree with you heartily that something should be done,
but it must not be done in a way which experience has shown leads to
nothing but fanaticism and dissent. Do you approve of these Wesleyans?
Do you hold your ordination vows so cheaply as to think that it does
not matter whether the services of the Church are performed in her
churches and with all due ceremony or not? If you do—then, frankly, you
had no business to be ordained; if you do not, then remember that one
of the first duties of a young deacon is obedience to authority.
Neither the Catholic Church, nor yet the Church of England allows her
clergy to preach in the streets of cities where there is no lack of
churches.”

Ernest felt the force of this, and Pryer saw that he wavered.

“We are living,” he continued more genially, “in an age of transition,
and in a country which, though it has gained much by the Reformation,
does not perceive how much it has also lost. You cannot and must not
hawk Christ about in the streets as though you were in a heathen
country whose inhabitants had never heard of him. The people here in
London have had ample warning. Every church they pass is a protest to
them against their lives, and a call to them to repent. Every church-
bell they hear is a witness against them, everyone of those whom
they meet on Sundays going to or coming from church is a warning voice
from God. If these countless influences produce no effect upon them,
neither will the few transient words which they would hear from you.
You are like Dives, and think that if one rose from the dead they would
hear him. Perhaps they might; but then you cannot pretend that you have
risen from the dead.”

Though the last few words were spoken laughingly, there was a sub-sneer
about them which made Ernest wince; but he was quite subdued, and so
the conversation ended. It left Ernest, however, not for the first
time, consciously dissatisfied with Pryer, and inclined to set his
friend’s opinion on one side—not openly, but quietly, and without
telling Pryer anything about it.



CHAPTER LVII



He had hardly parted from Pryer before there occurred another incident
which strengthened his discontent. He had fallen, as I have shown,
among a gang of spiritual thieves or coiners, who passed the basest
metal upon him without his finding it out, so childish and inexper-
ienced was he in the ways of anything but those back eddies of
the world, schools and universities. Among the bad threepenny pieces
which had been passed off upon him, and which he kept for small hourly
disbursement, was a remark that poor people were much nicer than the
richer and better educated. Ernest now said that he always travelled
third class not because it was cheaper, but because the people whom
he met in third class carriages were so much pleasanter and better
behaved. As for the young men who attended Ernest’s evening classes,
they were pronounced to be more intelligent and better ordered
generally than the average run of Oxford and Cambridge men. Our foolish
young friend having heard Pryer talk to this effect, caught up all he
said and reproduced it more suo.

One evening, however, about this time, whom should he see coming a-
long a small street not far from his own but, of all persons in the world,
Towneley, looking as full of life and good spirits as ever, and if pos-
sible even handsomer than he had been at Cambridge. Much as Ernest
liked him he found himself shrinking from speaking to him, and was
endeavouring to pass him without doing so when Towneley saw him and
stopped him at once, being pleased to see an old Cambridge face. He
seemed for the moment a little confused at being seen in such a
neighbourhood, but recovered himself so soon that Ernest hardly noticed
it, and then plunged into a few kindly remarks about old times. Ernest
felt that he quailed as he saw Towneley’s eye wander to his white
necktie and saw that he was being reckoned up, and rather disap-
provingly reckoned up, as a parson. It was the merest passing shade
upon Towneley’s face, but Ernest had felt it.

Towneley said a few words of common form to Ernest about his profes-
sion as being what he thought would be most likely to interest him, and
Ernest, still confused and shy, gave him for lack of something better
to say his little threepenny-bit about poor people being so very nice.
Towneley took this for what it was worth and nodded assent, whereon
Ernest imprudently went further and said “Don’t you like poor people
very much yourself?”

Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw, and said
quietly, but slowly and decidedly, “No, no, no,” and escaped.

It was all over with Ernest from that moment. As usual he did not know
it, but he had entered none the less upon another reaction. Towneley
had just taken Ernest’s threepenny-bit into his hands, looked at it and
returned it to him as a bad one. Why did he see in a moment that it was
a bad one now, though he had been unable to see it when he had taken it
from Pryer? Of course some poor people were very nice, and always would
be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw
that no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and
lower classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an
impassable barrier.

That evening he reflected a good deal. If Towneley was right, and
Ernest felt that the “No” had applied not to the remark about poor
people only, but to the whole scheme and scope of his own recently
adopted ideas, he and Pryer must surely be on a wrong track. Towneley
had not argued with him; he had said one word only, and that one of the
shortest in the language, but Ernest was in a fit state for inoculation,
and the minute particle of virus set about working immediately.

Which did he now think was most likely to have taken the juster view
of life and things, and whom would it be best to imitate, Towneley or
Pryer? His heart returned answer to itself without a moment’s
hesitation. The faces of men like Towneley were open and kindly; they
looked as if at ease themselves, and as though they would set all who
had to do with them at ease as far as might be. The faces of Pryer and
his friends were not like this. Why had he felt tacitly rebuked as soon
as he had met Towneley? Was he not a Christian? Certainly; he believed
in the Church of England as a matter of course. Then how could he be
himself wrong in trying to act up to the faith that he and Towneley
held in common? He was trying to lead a quiet, unobtrusive life of
self-devotion, whereas Towneley was not, so far as he could see, trying
to do anything of the kind; he was only trying to get on comfortably in
the world, and to look and be as nice as possible. And he was nice, and
Ernest knew that such men as himself and Pryer were not nice, and his
old dejection came over him.

Then came an even worse reflection; how if he had fallen among material
thieves as well as spiritual ones? He knew very little of how his money
was going on; he had put it all now into Pryer’s hands, and though Pry-
er gave him cash to spend whenever he wanted it, he seemed impatient
of being questioned as to what was being done with the principal. It
was part of the understanding, he said, that that was to be left to
him, and Ernest had better stick to this, or he, Pryer, would throw up
the College of Spiritual Pathology altogether; and so Ernest was cowed
into acquiescence, or cajoled, according to the humour in which Pryer
saw him to be. Ernest thought that further questions would look as if
he doubted Pryer’s word, and also that he had gone too far to be able
to recede in decency or honour. This, however, he felt was riding out
to meet trouble unnecessarily. Pryer had been a little impatient, but
he was a gentleman and an admirable man of business, so his money
would doubtless come back to him all right some day.

Ernest comforted himself as regards this last source of anxiety, but as
regards the other, he began to feel as though, if he was to be saved, a
good Samaritan must hurry up from somewhere—he knew not whence.



CHAPTER LVIII



Next day he felt stronger again. He had been listening to the voice of
the evil one on the night before, and would parley no more with such
thoughts. He had chosen his profession, and his duty was to persevere
with it. If he was unhappy it was probably because he was not giving up
all for Christ. Let him see whether he could not do more than he was
doing now, and then perhaps a light would be shed upon his path.

It was all very well to have made the discovery that he didn’t very
much like poor people, but he had got to put up with them, for it was
among them that his work must lie. Such men as Towneley were very kind
and considerate, but he knew well enough it was only on condition that
he did not preach to them. He could manage the poor better, and, let
Pryer sneer as he liked, he was resolved to go more among them, and try
the effect of bringing Christ to them if they would not come and seek
Christ of themselves. He would begin with his own house.

Who then should he take first? Surely he could not do better than begin
with the tailor who lived immediately over his head. This would be
desirable, not only because he was the one who seemed to stand most in
need of conversion, but also because, if he were once converted, he
would no longer beat his wife at two o’clock in the morning, and the
house would be much pleasanter in consequence. He would therefore go
upstairs at once, and have a quiet talk with this man.

Before doing so, he thought it would be well if he were to draw up
something like a plan of a campaign; he therefore reflected over some
pretty conversations which would do very nicely if Mr Holt would be
kind enough to make the answers proposed for him in their proper
places. But the man was a great hulking fellow, of a savage temper, and
Ernest was forced to admit that unforeseen developments might arise to
disconcert him. They say it takes nine tailors to make a man, but
Ernest felt that it would take at least nine Ernests to make a Mr Holt.
How if, as soon as Ernest came in, the tailor were to become violent
and abusive? What could he do? Mr Holt was in his own lodgings, and
had a right to be undisturbed. A legal right, yes, but had he a moral
right? Ernest thought not, considering his mode of life. But put this
on one side; if the man were to be violent, what should he do? Paul had
fought with wild beasts at Ephesus—that must indeed have been awful—
but perhaps they were not very wild wild beasts; a rabbit and a canary
are wild beasts; but, formidable or not as wild beasts go, they would,
nevertheless stand no chance against St Paul, for he was inspired; the
miracle would have been if the wild beasts escaped, not that St Paul
should have done so; but, however all this might be, Ernest felt that
he dared not begin to convert Mr Holt by fighting him. Why, when he had
heard Mrs Holt screaming “murder,” he had cowered under the bed clothes
and waited, expecting to hear the blood dripping through the ceiling on
to his own floor. His imagination translated every sound into a pat,
pat, pat, and once or twice he thought he had felt it dropping on to
his counterpane, but he had never gone upstairs to try and rescue poor
Mrs Holt. Happily it had proved next morning that Mrs Holt was in her
usual health.

Ernest was in despair about hitting on any good way of opening up
spiritual communication with his neighbour, when it occurred to him
that he had better perhaps begin by going upstairs, and knocking very
gently at Mr Holt’s door. He would then resign himself to the guidance
of the Holy Spirit, and act as the occasion, which, I suppose, was
another name for the Holy Spirit, suggested. Triply armed with this
reflection, he mounted the stairs quite jauntily, and was about to
knock when he heard Holt’s voice inside swearing savagely at his wife.
This made him pause to think whether after all the moment was an
auspicious one, and while he was thus pausing, Mr Holt, who had heard
that someone was on the stairs, opened the door and put his head out.
When he saw Ernest, he made an unpleasant, not to say offensive
movement, which might or might not have been directed at Ernest and
looked altogether so ugly that my hero had an instantaneous and
unequivocal revelation from the Holy Spirit to the effect that he
should continue his journey upstairs at once, as though he had never
intended arresting it at Mr Holt’s room, and begin by converting Mr and
Mrs Baxter, the Methodists in the top floor front. So this was what he
did.

These good people received him with open arms, and were quite ready to
talk. He was beginning to convert them from Methodism to the Church of
England, when all at once he found himself embarrassed by discovering
that he did not know what he was to convert them from. He knew the
Church of England, or thought he did, but he knew nothing of Methodism
beyond its name. When he found that, according to Mr Baxter, the
Wesleyans had a vigorous system of Church discipline (which worked
admirably in practice) it appeared to him that John Wesley had
anticipated the spiritual engine which he and Pryer were preparing, and
when he left the room he was aware that he had caught more of a
spiritual Tartar than he had expected. But he must certainly explain to
Pryer that the Wesleyans had a system of Church discipline. This was
very important.

Mr Baxter advised Ernest on no account to meddle with Mr Holt, and
Ernest was much relieved at the advice. If an opportunity arose of
touching the man’s heart, he would take it; he would pat the children
on the head when he saw them on the stairs, and ingratiate himself with
them as far as he dared; they were sturdy youngsters, and Ernest was
afraid even of them, for they were ready with their tongues, and knew
much for their ages. Ernest felt that it would indeed be almost better
for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and he cast
into the sea, than that he should offend one of the little Holts. How-
ever, he would try not to offend them; perhaps an occasional penny
or two might square them. This was as much as he could do, for he saw
that the attempt to be instant out of season, as well as in season,
would, St Paul’s injunction notwithstanding, end in failure.

Mrs Baxter gave a very bad account of Miss Emily Snow, who lodged in
the second floor back next to Mr Holt. Her story was quite different
from that of Mrs Jupp the landlady. She would doubtless be only too
glad to receive Ernest’s ministrations or those of any other gentleman,
but she was no governess, she was in the ballet at Drury Lane, and
besides this, she was a very bad young woman, and if Mrs Baxter was
landlady would not be allowed to stay in the house a single hour, not
she indeed.

Miss Maitland in the next room to Mrs Baxter’s own was a quiet and
respectable young woman to all appearance; Mrs Baxter had never
known of any goings on in that quarter, but, bless you, still waters run
deep, and these girls were all alike, one as bad as the other. She was
out at all kinds of hours, and when you knew that you knew all.

Ernest did not pay much heed to these aspersions of Mrs Baxter’s. Mrs
Jupp had got round the greater number of his many blind sides, and had
warned him not to believe Mrs Baxter, whose lip she said was something
awful.

Ernest had heard that women were always jealous of one another, and
certainly these young women were more attractive than Mrs Baxter was,
so jealousy was probably at the bottom of it. If they were maligned
there could be no objection to his making their acquaintance; if not
maligned they had all the more need of his ministrations. He would
reclaim them at once.

He told Mrs Jupp of his intention. Mrs Jupp at first tried to dissuade
him, but seeing him resolute, suggested that she should herself see
Miss Snow first, so as to prepare her and prevent her from being
alarmed by his visit. She was not at home now, but in the course of the
next day, it should be arranged. In the meantime he had better try Mr
Shaw, the tinker, in the front kitchen. Mrs Baxter had told Ernest that
Mr Shaw was from the North Country, and an avowed freethinker; he
would probably, she said, rather like a visit, but she did not think Ernest
would stand much chance of making a convert of him.



CHAPTER LIX



Before going down into the kitchen to convert the tinker Ernest ran
hurriedly over his analysis of Paley’s Evidences, and put into his
pocket a copy of Archbishop Whateley’s Historic Doubts. Then he
descended the dark rotten old stairs and knocked at the tinker’s door.
Mr Shaw was very civil; he said he was rather throng just now, but if
Ernest did not mind the sound of hammering he should be very glad
of a talk with him. Our hero, assenting to this, ere long led the
conversation to Whateley’s Historic Doubts—a work which, as the
reader may know, pretends to show that there never was any such
person as Napoleon Buonaparte, and thus satirises the arguments of
those who have attacked the Christian miracles.

Mr Shaw said he knew Historic Doubts very well.

“And what you think of it?” said Ernest, who regarded the pamphlet
as a masterpiece of wit and cogency.

“If you really want to know,” said Mr Shaw, with a sly twinkle, “I
think that he who was so willing and able to prove that what was was
not, would be equally able and willing to make a case for thinking that
what was not was, if it suited his purpose.” Ernest was very much taken
aback. How was it that all the clever people of Cambridge had never put
him up to this simple rejoinder? The answer is easy: they did not
develop it for the same reason that a hen had never developed webbed
feet—that is to say, because they did not want to do so; but this was
before the days of Evolution, and Ernest could not as yet know anything
of the great principle that underlies it.

“You see,” continued Mr Shaw, “these writers all get their living by
writing in a certain way, and the more they write in that way, the more
they are likely to get on. You should not call them dishonest for this
any more than a judge should call a barrister dishonest for earning his
living by defending one in whose innocence he does not seriously
believe; but you should hear the barrister on the other side before you
decide upon the case.”

This was another facer. Ernest could only stammer that he had
endeavoured to examine these questions as carefully as he could.

“You think you have,” said Mr Shaw; “you Oxford and Cambridge gentlemen
think you have examined everything. I have examined very little myself
except the bottoms of old kettles and saucepans, but if you will answer
me a few questions, I will tell you whether or no you have examined
much more than I have.”

Ernest expressed his readiness to be questioned.

“Then,” said the tinker, “give me the story of the Resurrection of
Jesus Christ as told in St John’s gospel.”

I am sorry to say that Ernest mixed up the four accounts in a deplor-
able manner; he even made the angel come down and roll away the
stone and sit upon it. He was covered with confusion when the tinker
first told him without the book of some of his many inaccuracies, and
then verified his criticisms by referring to the New Testament itself.

“Now,” said Mr Shaw good naturedly, “I am an old man and you are a
young one, so perhaps you’ll not mind my giving you a piece of advice.
I like you, for I believe you mean well, but you’ve been real bad
brought up, and I don’t think you have ever had so much as a chance
yet. You know nothing of our side of the question, and I have just
shown you that you do not know much more of your own, but I think you
will make a kind of Carlyle sort of a man some day. Now go upstairs and
read the accounts of the Resurrection correctly without mixing them up,
and have a clear idea of what it is that each writer tells us, then if
you feel inclined to pay me another visit I shall be glad to see you,
for I shall know you have made a good beginning and mean business. Till
then, Sir, I must wish you a very good morning.”

Ernest retreated abashed. An hour sufficed him to perform the task
enjoined upon him by Mr Shaw; and at the end of that hour the “No, no,
no,” which still sounded in his ears as he heard it from Towneley, came
ringing up more loudly still from the very pages of the Bible itself,
and in respect of the most important of all the events which are
recorded in it. Surely Ernest’s first day’s attempt at more promiscuous
visiting, and at carrying out his principles more thoroughly, had not
been unfruitful. But he must go and have a talk with Pryer. He
therefore got his lunch and went to Pryer’s lodgings. Pryer not being
at home, he lounged to the British Museum Reading Room, then recently
opened, sent for the “Vestiges of Creation,” which he had never yet
seen, and spent the rest of the afternoon in reading it.

Ernest did not see Pryer on the day of his conversation with Mr Shaw,
but he did so next morning and found him in a good temper, which of
late he had rarely been. Sometimes, indeed, he had behaved to Ernest in
a way which did not bode well for the harmony with which the College of
Spiritual Pathology would work when it had once been founded. It almost
seemed as though he were trying to get a complete moral ascendency over
him, so as to make him a creature of his own.

He did not think it possible that he could go too far, and indeed, when
I reflect upon my hero’s folly and inexperience, there is much to be
said in excuse for the conclusion which Pryer came to.

As a matter of fact, however, it was not so. Ernest’s faith in Pryer
had been too great to be shaken down all in a moment, but it had been
weakened lately more than once. Ernest had fought hard against allowing
himself to see this, nevertheless any third person who knew the pair
would have been able to see that the connection between the two might
end at any moment, for when the time for one of Ernest’s snipe-like
changes of flight came, he was quick in making it; the time, however,
was not yet come, and the intimacy between the two was apparently all
that it had ever been. It was only that horrid money business (so said
Ernest to himself) that caused any unpleasantness between them, and no
doubt Pryer was right, and he, Ernest, much too nervous. However, that
might stand over for the present.

In like manner, though he had received a shock by reason of his
conversation with Mr Shaw, and by looking at the “Vestiges,” he was as
yet too much stunned to realise the change which was coming over him.
In each case the momentum of old habits carried him forward in the old
direction. He therefore called on Pryer, and spent an hour and more
with him.

He did not say that he had been visiting among his neighbours; this to
Pryer would have been like a red rag to a bull. He only talked in much
his usual vein about the proposed College, the lamentable want of
interest in spiritual things which was characteristic of modern
society, and other kindred matters; he concluded by saying that for the
present he feared Pryer was indeed right, and that nothing could be
done.

“As regards the laity,” said Pryer, “nothing; not until we have a
discipline which we can enforce with pains and penalties. How can a
sheep dog work a flock of sheep unless he can bite occasionally as well
as bark? But as regards ourselves we can do much.”

Pryer’s manner was strange throughout the conversation, as though
he were thinking all the time of something else. His eyes wandered
curiously over Ernest, as Ernest had often noticed them wander before:
the words were about Church discipline, but somehow or other the
discipline part of the story had a knack of dropping out after having
been again and again emphatically declared to apply to the laity and
not to the clergy: once indeed Pryer had pettishly exclaimed: “Oh,
bother the College of Spiritual Pathology.” As regards the clergy,
glimpses of a pretty large cloven hoof kept peeping out from under the
saintly robe of Pryer’s conversation, to the effect, that so long as
they were theoretically perfect, practical peccadilloes—or even
peccadaccios, if there is such a word, were of less importance. He was
restless, as though wanting to approach a subject which he did not
quite venture to touch upon, and kept harping (he did this about every
third day) on the wretched lack of definition concerning the limits of
vice and virtue, and the way in which half the vices wanted regulating
rather than prohibiting. He dwelt also on the advantages of complete
unreserve, and hinted that there were mysteries into which Ernest had
not yet been initiated, but which would enlighten him when he got to
know them, as he would be allowed to do when his friends saw that he
was strong enough.

Pryer had often been like this before, but never so nearly, as it
seemed to Ernest, coming to a point—though what the point was he
could not fully understand. His inquietude was communicating itself to
Ernest, who would probably ere long have come to know as much as Pryer
could tell him, but the conversation was abruptly interrupted by the
appearance of a visitor. We shall never know how it would have ended,
for this was the very last time that Ernest ever saw Pryer. Perhaps
Pryer was going to break to him some bad news about his speculations.



CHAPTER LX



Ernest now went home and occupied himself till luncheon with studying
Dean Alford’s notes upon the various Evangelistic records of the
Resurrection, doing as Mr Shaw had told him, and trying to find out not
that they were all accurate, but whether they were all accurate or no.
He did not care which result he should arrive at, but he was resolved
that he would reach one or the other. When he had finished Dean
Alford’s notes he found them come to this, namely, that no one yet had
succeeded in bringing the four accounts into tolerable harmony with
each other, and that the Dean, seeing no chance of succeeding better
than his predecessors had done, recommended that the whole story should
be taken on trust—and this Ernest was not prepared to do.

He got his luncheon, went out for a long walk, and returned to dinner
at half past six. While Mrs Jupp was getting him his dinner—a steak and
a pint of stout—she told him that Miss Snow would be very happy to see
him in about an hour’s time. This disconcerted him, for his mind was
too unsettled for him to wish to convert anyone just then. He reflected
a little, and found that, in spite of the sudden shock to his opinions,
he was being irresistibly drawn to pay the visit as though nothing had
happened. It would not look well for him not to go, for he was known to
be in the house. He ought not to be in too great a hurry to change his
opinions on such a matter as the evidence for Christ’s Resurrection all
of a sudden—besides he need not talk to Miss Snow about this subject
to-day—there were other things he might talk about. What other things?
Ernest felt his heart beat fast and fiercely, and an inward monitor
warned him that he was thinking of anything rather than of Miss Snow’s
soul.

What should he do? Fly, fly, fly—it was the only safety. But would
Christ have fled? Even though Christ had not died and risen from the
dead there could be no question that He was the model whose example we
were bound to follow. Christ would not have fled from Miss Snow; he was
sure of that, for He went about more especially with prostitutes and
disreputable people. Now, as then, it was the business of the true
Christian to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. It would
be inconvenient to him to change his lodgings, and he could not ask Mrs
Jupp to turn Miss Snow and Miss Maitland out of the house. Where was he
to draw the line? Who would be just good enough to live in the same
house with him, and who just not good enough?

Besides, where were these poor girls to go? Was he to drive them from
house to house till they had no place to lie in? It was absurd; his
duty was clear: he would go and see Miss Snow at once, and try if he
could not induce her to change her present mode of life; if he found
temptation becoming too strong for him he would fly then—so he went
upstairs with his Bible under his arm, and a consuming fire in his
heart.

He found Miss Snow looking very pretty in a neatly, not to say
demurely, furnished room. I think she had bought an illuminated text or
two, and pinned it up over her fireplace that morning. Ernest was very
much pleased with her, and mechanically placed his Bible upon the
table. He had just opened a timid conversation and was deep in blushes,
when a hurried step came bounding up the stairs as though of one over
whom the force of gravity had little power, and a man burst into the
room saying, “I’m come before my time.” It was Towneley.

His face dropped as he caught sight of Ernest. “What, you here,
Pontifex! Well, upon my word!”

I cannot describe the hurried explanations that passed quickly between
the three—enough that in less than a minute Ernest, blushing more
scarlet than ever, slunk off, Bible and all, deeply humiliated as he
contrasted himself and Towneley. Before he had reached the bottom of
the staircase leading to his own room he heard Towneley’s hearty laugh
through Miss Snow’s door, and cursed the hour that he was born.

Then it flashed upon him that if he could not see Miss Snow he could
at any rate see Miss Maitland. He knew well enough what he wanted now,
and as for the Bible, he pushed it from him to the other end of his table.
It fell over on to the floor, and he kicked it into a corner. It was
the Bible given him at his christening by his affectionate aunt,
Elizabeth Allaby. True, he knew very little of Miss Maitland, but
ignorant young fools in Ernest’s state do not reflect or reason
closely. Mrs Baxter had said that Miss Maitland and Miss Snow were
birds of a feather, and Mrs Baxter probably knew better than that old
liar, Mrs Jupp. Shakespeare says:

O Opportunity, thy guilt is great
’Tis thou that execut’st the traitor’s treason:
Thou set’st the wolf where he the lamb may get;
Whoever plots the sin, thou ’point’st the season;
’Tis thou that spurn’st at right, at law, at reason;
And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him,
Sits Sin, to seize the souls that wander by him.

If the guilt of opportunity is great, how much greater is the guilt of
that which is believed to be opportunity, but in reality is no
opportunity at all. If the better part of valour is discretion, how
much more is not discretion the better part of vice

About ten minutes after we last saw Ernest, a scared, insulted girl,
flushed and trembling, was seen hurrying from Mrs Jupp’s house as fast
as her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two
policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs Jupp’s, between whom there
shambled rather than walked our unhappy friend Ernest, with staring
eyes, ghastly pale, and with despair branded upon every line of his
face.



CHAPTER LXI



Pryer had done well to warn Ernest against promiscuous house to house
visitation. He had not gone outside Mrs Jupp’s street door, and yet
what had been the result?

Mr Holt had put him in bodily fear; Mr and Mrs Baxter had nearly made a
Methodist of him; Mr Shaw had undermined his faith in the Resurrection;
Miss Snow’s charms had ruined—or would have done so but for an
accident—his moral character. As for Miss Maitland, he had done his
best to ruin hers, and had damaged himself gravely and irretrievably in
consequence. The only lodger who had done him no harm was the bellows’
mender, whom he had not visited.

Other young clergymen, much greater fools in many respects than he,
would not have got into these scrapes. He seemed to have developed an
aptitude for mischief almost from the day of his having been ordained.
He could hardly preach without making some horrid faux pas. He preach-
ed one Sunday morning when the Bishop was at his Rector’s church,
and made his sermon turn upon the question what kind of little cake it
was that the widow of Zarephath had intended making when Elijah found
her gathering a few sticks. He demonstrated that it was a seed cake.
The sermon was really very amusing, and more than once he saw a smile
pass over the sea of faces underneath him. The Bishop was very angry,
and gave my hero a severe reprimand in the vestry after service was
over; the only excuse he could make was that he was preaching ex
tempore, had not thought of this particular point till he was actually
in the pulpit, and had then been carried away by it.

Another time he preached upon the barren fig-tree, and described the
hopes of the owner as he watched the delicate blossom unfold, and give
promise of such beautiful fruit in autumn. Next day he received a
letter from a botanical member of his congregation who explained to him
that this could hardly have been, inasmuch as the fig produces its
fruit first and blossoms inside the fruit, or so nearly so that no
flower is perceptible to an ordinary observer. This last, however, was
an accident which might have happened to any one but a scientist or an
inspired writer.

The only excuse I can make for him is that he was very young—not yet
four and twenty—and that in mind as in body, like most of those who in
the end come to think for themselves, he was a slow grower. By far the
greater part, moreover, of his education had been an attempt, not so
much to keep him in blinkers as to gouge his eyes out altogether.

But to return to my story. It transpired afterwards that Miss Maitland
had had no intention of giving Ernest in charge when she ran out of Mrs
Jupp’s house. She was running away because she was frightened, but
almost the first person whom she ran against had happened to be a
policeman of a serious turn of mind, who wished to gain a reputation
for activity. He stopped her, questioned her, frightened her still
more, and it was he rather than Miss Maitland, who insisted on giving
my hero in charge to himself and another constable.

Towneley was still in Mrs Jupp’s house when the policeman came. He
had heard a disturbance, and going down to Ernest’s room while Miss
Maitland was out of doors, had found him lying, as it were, stunned at
the foot of the moral precipice over which he had that moment fallen.
He saw the whole thing at a glance, but before he could take action,
the policemen came in and action became impossible.

He asked Ernest who were his friends in London. Ernest at first wanted
not to say, but Towneley soon gave him to understand that he must do as
he was bid, and selected myself from the few whom he had named. “Writes
for the stage, does he?” said Towneley. “Does he write comedy?” Ernest
thought Towneley meant that I ought to write tragedy, and said he was
afraid I wrote burlesque. “Oh, come, come,” said Towneley, “that will
do famously. I will go and see him at once.” But on second thoughts he
determined to stay with Ernest and go with him to the police court. So
he sent Mrs Jupp for me. Mrs Jupp hurried so fast to fetch me, that in
spite of the weather’s being still cold she was “giving out,” as she
expressed it, in streams. The poor old wretch would have taken a cab,
but she had no money and did not like to ask Towneley to give her some.
I saw that something very serious had happened, but was not prepared
for anything so deplorable as what Mrs Jupp actually told me. As for
Mrs Jupp, she said her heart had been jumping out of its socket and
back again ever since.

I got her into a cab with me, and we went off to the police station.
She talked without ceasing.

“And if the neighbours do say cruel things about me, I’m sure it ain’t
no thanks to him if they’re true. Mr Pontifex never took a bit o’
notice of me no more than if I had been his sister. Oh, it’s enough to
make anyone’s back bone curdle. Then I thought perhaps my Rose might
get on better with him, so I set her to dust him and clean him as
though I were busy, and gave her such a beautiful clean new pinny, but
he never took no notice of her no more than he did of me, and she
didn’t want no compliment neither, she wouldn’t have taken not a
shilling from him, though he had offered it, but he didn’t seem to know
anything at all. I can’t make out what the young men are a-coming to; I
wish the horn may blow for me and the worms take me this very night, if
it’s not enough to make a woman stand before God and strike the one
half on ’em silly to see the way they goes on, and many an honest girl
has to go home night after night without so much as a fourpenny bit and
paying three and sixpence a week rent, and not a shelf nor cupboard in
the place and a dead wall in front of the window.

“It’s not Mr Pontifex,” she continued, “that’s so bad, he’s good at
heart. He never says nothing unkind. And then there’s his dear eyes—but
when I speak about that to my Rose she calls me an old fool and says I
ought to be poleaxed. It’s that Pryer as I can’t abide. Oh he! He likes
to wound a woman’s feelings he do, and to chuck anything in her face,
he do—he likes to wind a woman up and to wound her down.” (Mrs Jupp
pronounced “wound” as though it rhymed to “sound.”) “It’s a gentle-
man’s place to soothe a woman, but he, he’d like to tear her hair out by
handfuls. Why, he told me to my face that I was a-getting old; old
indeed! there’s not a woman in London knows my age except Mrs Davis
down in the Old Kent Road, and beyond a haricot vein in one of my legs
I’m as young as ever I was. Old indeed! There’s many a good tune played
on an old fiddle. I hate his nasty insinuendos.”

Even if I had wanted to stop her, I could not have done so. She said a
great deal more than I have given above. I have left out much because I
could not remember it, but still more because it was really impossible
for me to print it.

When we got to the police station I found Towneley and Ernest already
there. The charge was one of assault, but not aggravated by serious
violence. Even so, however, it was lamentable enough, and we both saw
that our young friend would have to pay dearly for his inexperience. We
tried to bail him out for the night, but the Inspector would not accept
bail, so we were forced to leave him.

Towneley then went back to Mrs Jupp’s to see if he could find Miss
Maitland and arrange matters with her. She was not there, but he traced
her to the house of her father, who lived at Camberwell. The father was
furious and would not hear of any intercession on Towneley’s part. He
was a Dissenter, and glad to make the most of any scandal against a
clergyman; Towneley, therefore, was obliged to return unsuccessful.

Next morning, Towneley—who regarded Ernest as a drowning man, who
must be picked out of the water somehow or other if possible, irrespective
of the way in which he got into it—called on me, and we put the matter
into the hands of one of the best known attorneys of the day. I was
greatly pleased with Towneley, and thought it due to him to tell him
what I had told no one else. I mean that Ernest would come into his
aunt’s money in a few years’ time, and would therefore then be rich.

Towneley was doing all he could before this, but I knew that the
knowledge I had imparted to him would make him feel as though Ernest
was more one of his own class, and had therefore a greater claim upon
his good offices. As for Ernest himself, his gratitude was greater than
could be expressed in words. I have heard him say that he can call to
mind many moments, each one of which might well pass for the happiest
of his life, but that this night stands clearly out as the most painful
that he ever passed, yet so kind and considerate was Towneley that it
was quite bearable.

But with all the best wishes in the world neither Towneley nor I could
do much to help beyond giving our moral support. Our attorney told us
that the magistrate before whom Ernest would appear was very severe
on cases of this description, and that the fact of his being a clergyman
would tell against him. “Ask for no remand,” he said, “and make no
defence. We will call Mr Pontifex’s rector and you two gentlemen as
witnesses for previous good character. These will be enough. Let us
then make a profound apology and beg the magistrate to deal with the
case summarily instead of sending it for trial. If you can get this,
believe me, your young friend will be better out of it than he has any
right to expect.”



CHAPTER LXII



This advice, besides being obviously sensible, would end in saving
Ernest both time and suspense of mind, so we had no hesitation in
adopting it. The case was called on about eleven o’clock, but we got it
adjourned till three, so as to give time for Ernest to set his affairs
as straight as he could, and to execute a power of attorney enabling me
to act for him as I should think fit while he was in prison.

Then all came out about Pryer and the College of Spiritual Pathology.
Ernest had even greater difficulty in making a clean breast of this
than he had had in telling us about Miss Maitland, but he told us all,
and the upshot was that he had actually handed over to Pryer every
halfpenny that he then possessed with no other security than Pryer’s
I.O.U.’s for the amount. Ernest, though still declining to believe that
Pryer could be guilty of dishonourable conduct, was becoming alive to
the folly of what he had been doing; he still made sure, however, of
recovering, at any rate, the greater part of his property as soon as
Pryer should have had time to sell. Towneley and I were of a different
opinion, but we did not say what we thought.

It was dreary work waiting all the morning amid such unfamiliar and
depressing surroundings. I thought how the Psalmist had exclaimed with
quiet irony, “One day in thy courts is better than a thousand,” and I
thought that I could utter a very similar sentiment in respect of the
Courts in which Towneley and I were compelled to loiter. At last, about
three o’clock the case was called on, and we went round to the part of
the court which is reserved for the general public, while Ernest was
taken into the prisoner’s dock. As soon as he had collected himself
sufficiently he recognised the magistrate as the old gentleman who had
spoken to him in the train on the day he was leaving school, and saw,
or thought he saw, to his great grief, that he too was recognised.

Mr Ottery, for this was our attorney’s name, took the line he had
proposed. He called no other witnesses than the rector, Towneley and
myself, and threw himself on the mercy of the magistrate. When he had
concluded, the magistrate spoke as follows: “Ernest Pontifex, yours is
one of the most painful cases that I have ever had to deal with. You
have been singularly favoured in your parentage and education. You have
had before you the example of blameless parents, who doubtless
instilled into you from childhood the enormity of the offence which by
your own confession you have committed. You were sent to one of the
best public schools in England. It is not likely that in the healthy at-
mosphere of such a school as Roughborough you can have come across
contaminating influences; you were probably, I may say certainly,
impressed at school with the heinousness of any attempt to depart from
the strictest chastity until such time as you had entered into a state
of matrimony. At Cambridge you were shielded from impurity by every
obstacle which virtuous and vigilant authorities could devise, and even
had the obstacles been fewer, your parents probably took care that your
means should not admit of your throwing money away upon abandoned
characters. At night proctors patrolled the street and dogged your
steps if you tried to go into any haunt where the presence of vice was
suspected. By day the females who were admitted within the college
walls were selected mainly on the score of age and ugliness. It is hard
to see what more can be done for any young man than this. For the last
four or five months you have been a clergyman, and if a single impure
thought had still remained within your mind, ordination should have
removed it: nevertheless, not only does it appear that your mind is as
impure as though none of the influences to which I have referred had
been brought to bear upon it, but it seems as though their only result
had been this—that you have not even the common sense to be able to
distinguish between a respectable girl and a prostitute.

“If I were to take a strict view of my duty I should commit you for
trial, but in consideration of this being your first offence, I shall
deal leniently with you and sentence you to imprisonment with hard
labour for six calendar months.”

Towneley and I both thought there was a touch of irony in the
magistrate’s speech, and that he could have given a lighter sentence if
he would, but that was neither here nor there. We obtained leave to see
Ernest for a few minutes before he was removed to Coldbath Fields,
where he was to serve his term, and found him so thankful to have been
summarily dealt with that he hardly seemed to care about the miserable
plight in which he was to pass the next six months. When he came out,
he said, he would take what remained of his money, go off to America or
Australia and never be heard of more.

We left him full of this resolve, I, to write to Theobald, and also to
instruct my solicitor to get Ernest’s money out of Pryer’s hands, and
Towneley to see the reporters and keep the case out of the newspapers.
He was successful as regards all the higher-class papers. There was
only one journal, and that of the lowest class, which was incorruptible.



CHAPTER LXIII



I saw my solicitor at once, but when I tried to write to Theobald, I
found it better to say I would run down and see him. I therefore
proposed this, asking him to meet me at the station, and hinting that I
must bring bad news about his son. I knew he would not get my letter
more than a couple of hours before I should see him, and thought the
short interval of suspense might break the shock of what I had to say.

Never do I remember to have halted more between two opinions than on
my journey to Battersby upon this unhappy errand. When I thought of the
little sallow-faced lad whom I had remembered years before, of the long
and savage cruelty with which he had been treated in childhood—cruelty
none the less real for having been due to ignorance and stupidity
rather than to deliberate malice; of the atmosphere of lying and
self-laudatory hallucination in which he had been brought up; of the
readiness the boy had shown to love anything that would be good enough
to let him, and of how affection for his parents, unless I am much
mistaken, had only died in him because it had been killed anew, again
and again and again, each time that it had tried to spring. When I
thought of all this I felt as though, if the matter had rested with me,
I would have sentenced Theobald and Christina to mental suffering even
more severe than that which was about to fall upon them. But on the
other hand, when I thought of Theobald’s own childhood, of that
dreadful old George Pontifex his father, of John and Mrs John, and of
his two sisters, when again I thought of Christina’s long years of hope
deferred that maketh the heart sick, before she was married, of the
life she must have led at Crampsford, and of the surroundings in the
midst of which she and her husband both lived at Battersby, I felt as
though the wonder was that misfortunes so persistent had not been
followed by even graver retribution.

Poor people! They had tried to keep their ignorance of the world from
themselves by calling it the pursuit of heavenly things, and then
shutting their eyes to anything that might give them trouble. A son
having been born to them they had shut his eyes also as far as was
practicable. Who could blame them? They had chapter and verse for
everything they had either done or left undone; there is no better
thumbed precedent than that for being a clergyman and a clergyman’s
wife. In what respect had they differed from their neighbours? How did
their household differ from that of any other clergyman of the better
sort from one end of England to the other? Why then should it have been
upon them, of all people in the world, that this tower of Siloam had
fallen?

Surely it was the tower of Siloam that was naught rather than those who
stood under it; it was the system rather than the people that was at
fault. If Theobald and his wife had but known more of the world and of
the things that are therein, they would have done little harm to
anyone. Selfish they would have always been, but not more so than may
very well be pardoned, and not more than other people would be. As it
was, the case was hopeless; it would be no use their even entering into
their mothers’ wombs and being born again. They must not only be born
again but they must be born again each one of them of a new father and
of a new mother and of a different line of ancestry for many
generations before their minds could become supple enough to learn
anew. The only thing to do with them was to humour them and make the
best of them till they died—and be thankful when they did so.

Theobald got my letter as I had expected, and met me at the station
nearest to Battersby. As I walked back with him towards his own house I
broke the news to him as gently as I could. I pretended that the whole
thing was in great measure a mistake, and that though Ernest no doubt
had had intentions which he ought to have resisted, he had not meant
going anything like the length which Miss Maitland supposed. I said we
had felt how much appearances were against him, and had not dared to
set up this defence before the magistrate, though we had no doubt about
its being the true one.

Theobald acted with a readier and acuter moral sense than I had given
him credit for.

“I will have nothing more to do with him,” he exclaimed promptly, “I
will never see his face again; do not let him write either to me or to
his mother; we know of no such person. Tell him you have seen me, and
that from this day forward I shall put him out of my mind as though he
had never been born. I have been a good father to him, and his mother
idolised him; selfishness and ingratitude have been the only return we
have ever had from him; my hope henceforth must be in my remaining
children.”

I told him how Ernest’s fellow curate had got hold of his money, and
hinted that he might very likely be penniless, or nearly so, on leaving
prison. Theobald did not seem displeased at this, but added soon
afterwards: “If this proves to be the case, tell him from me that I
will give him a hundred pounds if he will tell me through you when he
will have it paid, but tell him not to write and thank me, and say that
if he attempts to open up direct communication either with his mother
or myself, he shall not have a penny of the money.”

Knowing what I knew, and having determined on violating Miss Pontifex’s
instructions should the occasion arise, I did not think Ernest would be
any the worse for a complete estrangement from his family, so I
acquiesced more readily in what Theobald had proposed than that
gentleman may have expected.

Thinking it better that I should not see Christina, I left Theobald
near Battersby and walked back to the station. On my way I was pleased
to reflect that Ernest’s father was less of a fool than I had taken him
to be, and had the greater hopes, therefore, that his son’s blunders
might be due to postnatal, rather than congenital misfortunes.
Accidents which happen to a man before he is born, in the persons of
his ancestors, will, if he remembers them at all, leave an indelible
impression on him; they will have moulded his character so that, do
what he will, it is hardly possible for him to escape their conse-
quences. If a man is to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, he must
do so, not only as a little child, but as a little embryo, or rather as
a little zoosperm—and not only this, but as one that has come of
zoosperms which have entered into the Kingdom of Heaven before him for
many generations. Accidents which occur for the first time, and belong
to the period since a man’s last birth, are not, as a general rule, so
permanent in their effects, though of course they may sometimes be so.
At any rate, I was not displeased at the view which Ernest’s father
took of the situation.



CHAPTER LXIV



After Ernest had been sentenced, he was taken back to the cells to wait
for the van which should take him to Coldbath Fields, where he was to
serve his term.

He was still too stunned and dazed by the suddenness with which events
had happened during the last twenty-four hours to be able to realise
his position. A great chasm had opened between his past and future;
nevertheless he breathed, his pulse beat, he could think and speak. It
seemed to him that he ought to be prostrated by the blow that had
fallen on him, but he was not prostrated; he had suffered from many
smaller laches far more acutely. It was not until he thought of the
pain his disgrace would inflict on his father and mother that he felt
how readily he would have given up all he had, rather than have fallen
into his present plight. It would break his mother’s heart. It must, he
knew it would—and it was he who had done this.

He had had a headache coming on all the forenoon, but as he thought of
his father and mother, his pulse quickened, and the pain in his head
suddenly became intense. He could hardly walk to the van, and he found
its motion insupportable. On reaching the prison he was too ill to walk
without assistance across the hall to the corridor or gallery where
prisoners are marshalled on their arrival. The prison warder, seeing at
once that he was a clergyman, did not suppose he was shamming, as he
might have done in the case of an old gaol-bird; he therefore sent for
the doctor. When this gentleman arrived, Ernest was declared to be
suffering from an incipient attack of brain fever, and was taken away
to the infirmary. Here he hovered for the next two months between life
and death, never in full possession of his reason and often delirious,
but at last, contrary to the expectation of both doctor and nurse, he
began slowly to recover.

It is said that those who have been nearly drowned, find the return to
consciousness much more painful than the loss of it had been, and so it
was with my hero. As he lay helpless and feeble, it seemed to him a
refinement of cruelty that he had not died once for all during his
delirium. He thought he should still most likely recover only to sink a
little later on from shame and sorrow; nevertheless from day to day he
mended, though so slowly that he could hardly realise it to himself.
One afternoon, however, about three weeks after he had regained
consciousness, the nurse who tended him, and who had been very kind to
him, made some little rallying sally which amused him; he laughed, and
as he did so, she clapped her hands and told him he would be a man
again. The spark of hope was kindled, and again he wished to live.
Almost from that moment his thoughts began to turn less to the horrors
of the past, and more to the best way of meeting the future.

His worst pain was on behalf of his father and mother, and how he
should again face them. It still seemed to him that the best thing both
for him and them would be that he should sever himself from them
completely, take whatever money he could recover from Pryer, and go to
some place in the uttermost parts of the earth, where he should never
meet anyone who had known him at school or college, and start afresh.
Or perhaps he might go to the gold fields in California or Australia,
of which such wonderful accounts were then heard; there he might even
make his fortune, and return as an old man many years hence, unknown to
everyone, and if so, he would live at Cambridge. As he built these
castles in the air, the spark of life became a flame, and he longed for
health, and for the freedom which, now that so much of his sentence had
expired, was not after all very far distant.

Then things began to shape themselves more definitely. Whatever
happened he would be a clergyman no longer. It would have been
practically impossible for him to have found another curacy, even if he
had been so minded, but he was not so minded. He hated the life he had
been leading ever since he had begun to read for orders; he could not
argue about it, but simply he loathed it and would have no more of it.
As he dwelt on the prospect of becoming a layman again, however
disgraced, he rejoiced at what had befallen him, and found a blessing
in this very imprisonment which had at first seemed such an unspeakable
misfortune.

Perhaps the shock of so great a change in his surroundings had
accelerated changes in his opinions, just as the cocoons of silkworms,
when sent in baskets by rail, hatch before their time through the
novelty of heat and jolting. But however this may be, his belief in the
stories concerning the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus
Christ, and hence his faith in all the other Christian miracles, had
dropped off him once and for ever. The investigation he had made in
consequence of Mr Shaw’s rebuke, hurried though it was, had left a deep
impression upon him, and now he was well enough to read he made the New
Testament his chief study, going through it in the spirit which Mr Shaw
had desired of him, that is to say as one who wished neither to believe
nor disbelieve, but cared only about finding out whether he ought to
believe or no. The more he read in this spirit the more the balance
seemed to lie in favour of unbelief, till, in the end, all further
doubt became impossible, and he saw plainly enough that, whatever else
might be true, the story that Christ had died, come to life again, and
been carried from earth through clouds into the heavens could not now
be accepted by unbiassed people. It was well he had found it out so
soon. In one way or another it was sure to meet him sooner or later. He
would probably have seen it years ago if he had not been hoodwinked by
people who were paid for hoodwinking him. What should he have done, he
asked himself, if he had not made his present discovery till years
later when he was more deeply committed to the life of a clergyman?
Should he have had the courage to face it, or would he not more
probably have evolved some excellent reason for continuing to think as
he had thought hitherto? Should he have had the courage to break away
even from his present curacy?

He thought not, and knew not whether to be more thankful for having
been shown his error or for having been caught up and twisted round
so that he could hardly err farther, almost at the very moment of his
having discovered it. The price he had had to pay for this boon was
light as compared with the boon itself. What is too heavy a price to
pay for having duty made at once clear and easy of fulfilment instead
of very difficult? He was sorry for his father and mother, and he was
sorry for Miss Maitland, but he was no longer sorry for himself.

It puzzled him, however, that he should not have known how much he
had hated being a clergyman till now. He knew that he did not particularly
like it, but if anyone had asked him whether he actually hated it, he
would have answered no. I suppose people almost always want something
external to themselves, to reveal to them their own likes and dislikes.
Our most assured likings have for the most part been arrived at neither
by introspection nor by any process of conscious reasoning, but by the
bounding forth of the heart to welcome the gospel proclaimed to it by
another. We hear some say that such and such a thing is thus or thus,
and in a moment the train that has been laid within us, but whose
presence we knew not, flashes into consciousness and perception.

Only a year ago he had bounded forth to welcome Mr Hawke’s sermon;
since then he had bounded after a College of Spiritual Pathology; now
he was in full cry after rationalism pure and simple; how could he be
sure that his present state of mind would be more lasting than his
previous ones? He could not be certain, but he felt as though he were
now on firmer ground than he had ever been before, and no matter how
fleeting his present opinions might prove to be, he could not but act
according to them till he saw reason to change them. How impossible,
he reflected, it would have been for him to do this, if he had remained
surrounded by people like his father and mother, or Pryer and Pryer’s
friends, and his rector. He had been observing, reflecting, and assim-
ilating all these months with no more consciousness of mental growth
than a school-boy has of growth of body, but should he have been
able to admit his growth to himself, and to act up to his increased
strength if he had remained in constant close connection with people
who assured him solemnly that he was under a hallucination? The
combination against him was greater than his unaided strength could
have broken through, and he felt doubtful how far any shock less severe
than the one from which he was suffering would have sufficed to free
him.



CHAPTER LXV



As he lay on his bed day after day slowly recovering he woke up to the
fact which most men arrive at sooner or later, I mean that very few
care two straws about truth, or have any confidence that it is righter
and better to believe what is true than what is untrue, even though
belief in the untruth may seem at first sight most expedient. Yet it is
only these few who can be said to believe anything at all; the rest are
simply unbelievers in disguise. Perhaps, after all, these last are
right. They have numbers and prosperity on their side. They have all
which the rationalist appeals to as his tests of right and wrong.
Right, according to him, is what seems right to the majority of
sensible, well-to-do people; we know of no safer criterion than this,
but what does the decision thus arrived at involve? Simply this, that a
conspiracy of silence about things whose truth would be immediately
apparent to disinterested enquirers is not only tolerable but righteous
on the part of those who profess to be and take money for being par
excellence guardians and teachers of truth.

Ernest saw no logical escape from this conclusion. He saw that belief
on the part of the early Christians in the miraculous nature of Christ’s
Resurrection was explicable, without any supposition of miracle. The
explanation lay under the eyes of anyone who chose to take
a moderate degree of trouble; it had been put before the world again
and again, and there had been no serious attempt to refute it. How was
it that Dean Alford for example who had made the New Testament his
speciality, could not or would not see what was so obvious to Ernest
himself? Could it be for any other reason than that he did not want to
see it, and if so was he not a traitor to the cause of truth? Yes, but
was he not also a respectable and successful man, and were not the
vast majority of respectable and successful men, such for example,
as all the bishops and archbishops, doing exactly as Dean Alford did,
and did not this make their action right, no matter though it had been
cannibalism or infanticide, or even habitual untruthfulness of mind?

Monstrous, odious falsehood! Ernest’s feeble pulse quickened and his
pale face flushed as this hateful view of life presented itself to him
in all its logical consistency. It was not the fact of most men being
liars that shocked him—that was all right enough; but even the mom-
entary doubt whether the few who were not liars ought not to become
liars too. There was no hope left if this were so; if this were so, let
him die, the sooner the better. “Lord,” he exclaimed inwardly, “I don’t
believe one word of it. Strengthen Thou and confirm my disbelief.” It
seemed to him that he could never henceforth see a bishop going to
consecration without saying to himself: “There, but for the grace of
God, went Ernest Pontifex.” It was no doing of his. He could not boast;
if he had lived in the time of Christ he might himself have been an
early Christian, or even an Apostle for aught he knew. On the whole he
felt that he had much to be thankful for.

The conclusion, then, that it might be better to believe error than
truth should be ordered out of court at once, no matter by how clear
a logic it had been arrived at; but what was the alternative? It was
this, that our criterion of truth—i.e. that truth is what commends
itself to the great majority of sensible and successful people—is not
infallible. The rule is sound, and covers by far the greater number of
cases, but it has its exceptions.

He asked himself, what were they? Ah! that was a difficult matter;
there were so many, and the rules which governed them were sometimes
so subtle, that mistakes always had and always would be made; it was just
this that made it impossible to reduce life to an exact science. There
was a rough and ready rule-of-thumb test of truth, and a number of
rules as regards exceptions which could be mastered without much
trouble, yet there was a residue of cases in which decision was
difficult—so difficult that a man had better follow his instinct than
attempt to decide them by any process of reasoning.

Instinct then is the ultimate court of appeal. And what is instinct? It
is a mode of faith in the evidence of things not actually seen. And so
my hero returned almost to the point from which he had started
originally, namely that the just shall live by faith.

And this is what the just—that is to say reasonable people—do as
regards those daily affairs of life which most concern them. They
settle smaller matters by the exercise of their own deliberation. More
important ones, such as the cure of their own bodies and the bodies of
those whom they love, the investment of their money, the extrication of
their affairs from any serious mess—these things they generally entrust
to others of whose capacity they know little save from general report;
they act therefore on the strength of faith, not of knowledge. So the
English nation entrusts the welfare of its fleet and naval defences to
a First Lord of the Admiralty, who, not being a sailor can know nothing
about these matters except by acts of faith. There can be no doubt
about faith and not reason being the ultima ratio.

Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of
credulity as any writer who ever lived, cannot get beyond this. He has
no demonstrable first premise. He requires postulates and axioms which
transcend demonstration, and without which he can do nothing. His
superstructure indeed is demonstration, but his ground is faith. Nor
again can he get further than telling a man he is a fool if he persists
in differing from him. He says “which is absurd,” and declines to
discuss the matter further. Faith and authority, therefore, prove to be
as necessary for him as for anyone else. “By faith in what, then,”
asked Ernest of himself, “shall a just man endeavour to live at this
present time?” He answered to himself, “At any rate not by faith in the
supernatural element of the Christian religion.”

And how should he best persuade his fellow-countrymen to leave off
believing in this supernatural element? Looking at the matter from a
practical point of view he thought the Archbishop of Canterbury
afforded the most promising key to the situation. It lay between him
and the Pope. The Pope was perhaps best in theory, but in practice the
Archbishop of Canterbury would do sufficiently well. If he could only
manage to sprinkle a pinch of salt, as it were, on the Archbishop’s
tail, he might convert the whole Church of England to free thought by a
coup de main. There must be an amount of cogency which even an
Archbishop—an Archbishop whose perceptions had never been quick-
ened by imprisonment for assault—would not be able to withstand. When
brought face to face with the facts, as he, Ernest, could arrange them; his
Grace would have no resource but to admit them; being an honourable
man he would at once resign his Archbishopric, and Christianity would
become extinct in England within a few months’ time. This, at any rate,
was how things ought to be. But all the time Ernest had no confidence
in the Archbishop’s not hopping off just as the pinch was about to fall
on him, and this seemed so unfair that his blood boiled at the thought
of it. If this was to be so, he must try if he could not fix him by the
judicious use of bird-lime or a snare, or throw the salt on his tail
from an ambuscade.

To do him justice it was not himself that he greatly cared about. He
knew he had been humbugged, and he knew also that the greater part
of the ills which had afflicted him were due, indirectly, in chief mea-
sure to the influence of Christian teaching; still, if the mischief had
ended with himself, he should have thought little about it, but there
was his sister, and his brother Joey, and the hundreds and thousands of
young people throughout England whose lives were being blighted through
the lies told them by people whose business it was to know better, but
who scamped their work and shirked difficulties instead of facing them.
It was this which made him think it worth while to be angry, and to
consider whether he could not at least do something towards saving
others from such years of waste and misery as he had had to pass
himself. If there was no truth in the miraculous accounts of Christ’s
Death and Resurrection, the whole of the religion founded upon the
historic truth of those events tumbled to the ground. “My,” he
exclaimed, with all the arrogance of youth, “they put a gipsy or
fortune-teller into prison for getting money out of silly people who
think they have supernatural power; why should they not put a clergyman
in prison for pretending that he can absolve sins, or turn bread and
wine into the flesh and blood of One who died two thousand years ago?
What,” he asked himself, “could be more pure ‘hanky-panky’ than that a
bishop should lay his hands upon a young man and pretend to convey to
him the spiritual power to work this miracle? It was all very well to
talk about toleration; toleration, like everything else, had its
limits; besides, if it was to include the bishop let it include the
fortune-teller too.” He would explain all this to the Archbishop of
Canterbury by and by, but as he could not get hold of him just now, it
occurred to him that he might experimentalise advantageously upon the
viler soul of the prison chaplain. It was only those who took the first
and most obvious step in their power who ever did great things in the
end, so one day, when Mr Hughes—for this was the chaplain’s name—
was talking with him, Ernest introduced the question of Christian
evidences, and tried to raise a discussion upon them. Mr Hughes had
been very kind to him, but he was more than twice my hero’s age, and
had long taken the measure of such objections as Ernest tried to put
before him. I do not suppose he believed in the actual objective truth
of the stories about Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension any more than
Ernest did, but he knew that this was a small matter, and that the real
issue lay much deeper than this.

Mr Hughes was a man who had been in authority for many years, and he
brushed Ernest on one side as if he had been a fly. He did it so well
that my hero never ventured to tackle him again, and confined his
conversation with him for the future to such matters as what he had
better do when he got out of prison; and here Mr Hughes was ever ready
to listen to him with sympathy and kindness.



CHAPTER LXVI



Ernest was now so far convalescent as to be able to sit up for the
greater part of the day. He had been three months in prison, and,
though not strong enough to leave the infirmary, was beyond all fear of
a relapse. He was talking one day with Mr Hughes about his future, and
again expressed his intention of emigrating to Australia or New Zealand
with the money he should recover from Pryer. Whenever he spoke of this
he noticed that Mr Hughes looked grave and was silent: he had thought
that perhaps the chaplain wanted him to return to his profession, and
disapproved of his evident anxiety to turn to something else; now, how-
ever, he asked Mr Hughes point blank why it was that he disapproved
of his idea of emigrating.

Mr Hughes endeavoured to evade him, but Ernest was not to be put off.
There was something in the chaplain’s manner which suggested that he
knew more than Ernest did, but did not like to say it. This alarmed him
so much that he begged him not to keep him in suspense; after a little
hesitation Mr Hughes, thinking him now strong enough to stand it, broke
the news as gently as he could that the whole of Ernest’s money had
disappeared.

The day after my return from Battersby I called on my solicitor, and
was told that he had written to Pryer, requiring him to refund the
monies for which he had given his I.O.U.’s. Pryer replied that he had
given orders to his broker to close his operations, which unfortunately
had resulted so far in heavy loss, and that the balance should be paid
to my solicitor on the following settling day, then about a week
distant. When the time came, we heard nothing from Pryer, and going to
his lodgings found that he had left with his few effects on the very
day after he had heard from us, and had not been seen since.

I had heard from Ernest the name of the broker who had been employed,
and went at once to see him. He told me Pryer had closed all his
accounts for cash on the day that Ernest had been sentenced, and had
received £2315, which was all that remained of Ernest’s original £5000.
With this he had decamped, nor had we enough clue as to his whereabouts
to be able to take any steps to recover the money. There was in fact
nothing to be done but to consider the whole as lost. I may say here
that neither I nor Ernest ever heard of Pryer again, nor have any idea
what became of him.

This placed me in a difficult position. I knew, of course, that in a
few years Ernest would have many times over as much money as he had
lost, but I knew also that he did not know this, and feared that the
supposed loss of all he had in the world might be more than he could
stand when coupled with his other misfortunes.

The prison authorities had found Theobald’s address from a letter in
Ernest’s pocket, and had communicated with him more than once
concerning his son’s illness, but Theobald had not written to me, and I
supposed my godson to be in good health. He would be just twenty-
four years old when he left prison, and if I followed out his aunt’s
instructions, would have to battle with fortune for another four years
as well as he could. The question before me was whether it was right to
let him run so much risk, or whether I should not to some extent
transgress my instructions—which there was nothing to prevent my doing
if I thought Miss Pontifex would have wished it—and let him have the
same sum that he would have recovered from Pryer.

If my godson had been an older man, and more fixed in any definite
groove, this is what I should have done, but he was still very young,
and more than commonly unformed for his age. If, again, I had known of
his illness I should not have dared to lay any heavier burden on his
back than he had to bear already; but not being uneasy about his
health, I thought a few years of roughing it and of experience con-
cerning the importance of not playing tricks with money would do him
no harm. So I decided to keep a sharp eye upon him as soon as he came
out of prison, and to let him splash about in deep water as best he
could till I saw whether he was able to swim, or was about to sink. In
the first case I would let him go on swimming till he was nearly
eight-and-twenty, when I would prepare him gradually for the good
fortune that awaited him; in the second I would hurry up to the rescue.
So I wrote to say that Pryer had absconded, and that he could have £100
from his father when he came out of prison. I then waited to see what
effect these tidings would have, not expecting to receive an answer for
three months, for I had been told on enquiry that no letter could be
received by a prisoner till after he had been three months in gaol. I
also wrote to Theobald and told him of Pryer’s disappearance.

As a matter of fact, when my letter arrived the governor of the gaol
read it, and in a case of such importance would have relaxed the rules
if Ernest’s state had allowed it; his illness prevented this, and the
governor left it to the chaplain and the doctor to break the news to
him when they thought him strong enough to bear it, which was now the
case. In the meantime I received a formal official document saying that
my letter had been received and would be communicated to the prisoner
in due course; I believe it was simply through a mistake on the part of
a clerk that I was not informed of Ernest’s illness, but I heard
nothing of it till I saw him by his own desire a few days after the
chaplin had broken to him the substance of what I had written.

Ernest was terribly shocked when he heard of the loss of his money, but
his ignorance of the world prevented him from seeing the full extent of
the mischief. He had never been in serious want of money yet, and did
not know what it meant. In reality, money losses are the hardest to
bear of any by those who are old enough to comprehend them.

A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical
operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or
that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful
as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greater
number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be
hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better
men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their
prostration. Suicide is a common consequence of money losses; it is
rarely sought as a means of escape from bodily suffering. If we feel
that we have a competence at our backs, so that we can die warm and
quietly in our beds, with no need to worry about expense, we live our
lives out to the dregs, no matter how excruciating our torments. Job
probably felt the loss of his flocks and herds more than that of his
wife and family, for he could enjoy his flocks and herds without his
family, but not his family—not for long—if he had lost all his money.
Loss of money indeed is not only the worst pain in itself, but it is
the parent of all others. Let a man have been brought up to a moderate
competence, and have no specially; then let his money be suddenly taken
from him, and how long is his health likely to survive the change in
all his little ways which loss of money will entail? How long again is
the esteem and sympathy of friends likely to survive ruin? People may
be very sorry for us, but their attitude towards us hitherto has been
based upon the supposition that we were situated thus or thus in money
matters; when this breaks down there must be a restatement of the
social problem so far as we are concerned; we have been obtaining
esteem under false pretences. Granted, then, that the three most
serious losses which a man can suffer are those affecting money, health
and reputation. Loss of money is far the worst, then comes ill-health,
and then loss of reputation; loss of reputation is a bad third, for, if
a man keeps health and money unimpaired, it will be generally found
that his loss of reputation is due to breaches of parvenu conventions
only, and not to violations of those older, better established canons
whose authority is unquestionable. In this case a man may grow a new
reputation as easily as a lobster grows a new claw, or, if he have
health and money, may thrive in great peace of mind without any
reputation at all. The only chance for a man who has lost his money
is that he shall still be young enough to stand uprooting and
transplanting without more than temporary derangement, and this I
believed my godson still to be.

By the prison rules he might receive and send a letter after he had
been in gaol three months, and might also receive one visit from a
friend. When he received my letter, he at once asked me to come and see
him, which of course I did. I found him very much changed, and still so
feeble, that the exertion of coming from the infirmary to the cell in
which I was allowed to see him, and the agitation of seeing me were too
much for him. At first he quite broke down, and I was so pained at the
state in which I found him, that I was on the point of breaking my
instructions then and there. I contented myself, however, for the time,
with assuring him that I would help him as soon as he came out of
prison, and that, when he had made up his mind what he would do, he was
to come to me for what money might be necessary, if he could not get it
from his father. To make it easier for him I told him that his aunt, on
her death-bed, had desired me to do something of this sort should an
emergency arise, so that he would only be taking what his aunt had left
him.

“Then,” said he, “I will not take the £100 from my father, and I will
never see him or my mother again.”

I said: “Take the £100, Ernest, and as much more as you can get, and
then do not see them again if you do not like.”

This Ernest would not do. If he took money from them, he could not cut
them, and he wanted to cut them. I thought my godson would get on a
great deal better if he would only have the firmness to do as he
proposed, as regards breaking completely with his father and mother,
and said so. “Then don’t you like them?” said he, with a look of
surprise.

“Like them!” said I, “I think they’re horrid.”

“Oh, that’s the kindest thing of all you have done for me,” he
exclaimed, “I thought all—all middle-aged people liked my father and
mother.”

He had been about to call me old, but I was only fifty-seven, and was
not going to have this, so I made a face when I saw him hesitating,
which drove him into “middle-aged.”

“If you like it,” said I, “I will say all your family are horrid except
yourself and your aunt Alethea. The greater part of every family is
always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large
family, it is as much as can be expected.”

“Thank you,” he replied, gratefully, “I think I can now stand almost
anything. I will come and see you as soon as I come out of gaol.
Good-bye.” For the warder had told us that the time allowed for our
interview was at an end.



CHAPTER LXVII



As soon as Ernest found that he had no money to look to upon leaving
prison he saw that his dreams about emigrating and farming must come to
an end, for he knew that he was incapable of working at the plough or
with the axe for long together himself. And now it seemed he should
have no money to pay any one else for doing so. It was this that
resolved him to part once and for all with his parents. If he had been
going abroad he could have kept up relations with them, for they would
have been too far off to interfere with him.

He knew his father and mother would object to being cut; they would
wish to appear kind and forgiving; they would also dislike having no
further power to plague him; but he knew also very well that so long as
he and they ran in harness together they would be always pulling one
way and he another. He wanted to drop the gentleman and go down into
the ranks, beginning on the lowest rung of the ladder, where no one
would know of his disgrace or mind it if he did know; his father and
mother on the other hand would wish him to clutch on to the fag-end of
gentility at a starvation salary and with no prospect of advancement.
Ernest had seen enough in Ashpit Place to know that a tailor, if he did
not drink and attended to his business, could earn more money than a
clerk or a curate, while much less expense by way of show was required
of him. The tailor also had more liberty, and a better chance of
rising. Ernest resolved at once, as he had fallen so far, to fall still
lower—promptly, gracefully and with the idea of rising again, rather
than cling to the skirts of a respectability which would permit him to
exist on sufferance only, and make him pay an utterly extortionate
price for an article which he could do better without.

He arrived at this result more quickly than he might otherwise have
done through remembering something he had once heard his aunt say
about “kissing the soil.” This had impressed him and stuck by him per-
haps by reason of its brevity; when later on he came to know the story
of Hercules and Antæus, he found it one of the very few ancient fables
which had a hold over him—his chiefest debt to classical literature.
His aunt had wanted him to learn carpentering, as a means of kissing
the soil should his Hercules ever throw him. It was too late for this
now—or he thought it was—but the mode of carrying out his aunt’s idea
was a detail; there were a hundred ways of kissing the soil besides
becoming a carpenter.

He had told me this during our interview, and I had encouraged him to
the utmost of my power. He showed so much more good sense than I had
given him credit for that I became comparatively easy about him, and
determined to let him play his own game, being always, however, ready
to hand in case things went too far wrong. It was not simply because he
disliked his father and mother that he wanted to have no more to do
with them; if it had been only this he would have put up with them; but
a warning voice within told him distinctly enough that if he was clean
cut away from them he might still have a chance of success, whereas if
they had anything whatever to do with him, or even knew where he was,
they would hamper him and in the end ruin him. Absolute independence he
believed to be his only chance of very life itself.

Over and above this—if this were not enough—Ernest had a faith in his
own destiny such as most young men, I suppose, feel, but the grounds of
which were not apparent to any one but himself. Rightly or wrongly, in
a quiet way he believed he possessed a strength which, if he were only
free to use it in his own way, might do great things some day. He did
not know when, nor where, nor how his opportunity was to come, but he
never doubted that it would come in spite of all that had happened, and
above all else he cherished the hope that he might know how to seize it
if it came, for whatever it was it would be something that no one else
could do so well as he could. People said there were no dragons and
giants for adventurous men to fight with nowadays; it was beginning to
dawn upon him that there were just as many now as at any past time.

Monstrous as such a faith may seem in one who was qualifying himself
for a high mission by a term of imprisonment, he could no more help it
than he could help breathing; it was innate in him, and it was even
more with a view to this than for other reasons that he wished to sever
the connection between himself and his parents; for he knew that if
ever the day came in which it should appear that before him too there
was a race set in which it might be an honour to have run among the
foremost, his father and mother would be the first to let him and
hinder him in running it. They had been the first to say that he ought
to run such a race; they would also be the first to trip him up if he
took them at their word, and then afterwards upbraid him for not having
won. Achievement of any kind would be impossible for him unless he was
free from those who would be for ever dragging him back into the
conventional. The conventional had been tried already and had been
found wanting.

He had an opportunity now, if he chose to take it, of escaping once for
all from those who at once tormented him and would hold him earthward
should a chance of soaring open before him. He should never have had
it but for his imprisonment; but for this the force of habit and routine
would have been too strong for him; he should hardly have had it if he
had not lost all his money; the gap would not have been so wide but
that he might have been inclined to throw a plank across it. He
rejoiced now, therefore, over his loss of money as well as over his
imprisonment, which had made it more easy for him to follow his truest
and most lasting interests.

At times he wavered, when he thought of how his mother, who in her way,
as he thought, had loved him, would weep and think sadly over him, or
how perhaps she might even fall ill and die, and how the blame would
rest with him. At these times his resolution was near breaking, but
when he found I applauded his design, the voice within, which bade him
see his father’s and mother’s faces no more, grew louder and more
persistent. If he could not cut himself adrift from those who he knew
would hamper him, when so small an effort was wanted, his dream of a
destiny was idle; what was the prospect of a hundred pounds from his
father in comparison with jeopardy to this? He still felt deeply the
pain his disgrace had inflicted upon his father and mother, but he was
getting stronger, and reflected that as he had run his chance with them
for parents, so they must run theirs with him for a son.

He had nearly settled down to this conclusion when he received a letter
from his father which made his decision final. If the prison rules had
been interpreted strictly, he would not have been allowed to have this
letter for another three months, as he had already heard from me, but
the governor took a lenient view, and considered the letter from me to
be a business communication hardly coming under the category of a
letter from friends. Theobald’s letter therefore was given to his son.
It ran as follows:—

“My dear Ernest, My object in writing is not to upbraid you with the
disgrace and shame you have inflicted upon your mother and myself, to
say nothing of your brother Joey, and your sister. Suffer of course we
must, but we know to whom to look in our affliction, and are filled
with anxiety rather on your behalf than our own. Your mother is won-
derful. She is pretty well in health, and desires me to send you her
love.

“Have you considered your prospects on leaving prison? I understand
from Mr Overton that you have lost the legacy which your grandfather
left you, together with all the interest that accrued during your
minority, in the course of speculation upon the Stock Exchange! If you
have indeed been guilty of such appalling folly it is difficult to see
what you can turn your hand to, and I suppose you will try to find a
clerkship in an office. Your salary will doubtless be low at first, but
you have made your bed and must not complain if you have to lie upon
it. If you take pains to please your employers they will not be
backward in promoting you.

“When I first heard from Mr Overton of the unspeakable calamity which
had befallen your mother and myself, I had resolved not to see you
again. I am unwilling, however, to have recourse to a measure which
would deprive you of your last connecting link with respectable people.
Your mother and I will see you as soon as you come out of prison; not
at Battersby—we do not wish you to come down here at present—but
somewhere else, probably in London. You need not shrink from seeing us;
we shall not reproach you. We will then decide about your future.

“At present our impression is that you will find a fairer start
probably in Australia or New Zealand than here, and I am prepared to
find you £75 or even if necessary so far as £100 to pay your passage
money. Once in the colony you must be dependent upon your own
exertions.

“May Heaven prosper them and you, and restore you to us years hence a
respected member of society.—Your affectionate father,


T. PONTIFEX.”

Then there was a postscript in Christina’s writing.

“My darling, darling boy, pray with me daily and hourly that we may yet
again become a happy, united, God-fearing family as we were before this
horrible pain fell upon us.—Your sorrowing but ever loving mother,


C. P.”

This letter did not produce the effect on Ernest that it would have
done before his imprisonment began. His father and mother thought they
could take him up as they had left him off. They forgot the rapidity
with which development follows misfortune, if the sufferer is young and
of a sound temperament. Ernest made no reply to his father’s letter,
but his desire for a total break developed into something like a
passion. “There are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children
who have lost their parents—oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of
refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?” And he brooded over
the bliss of Melchisedek who had been born an orphan, without father,
without mother, and without descent.



CHAPTER LXVIII



When I think over all that Ernest told me about his prison meditations,
and the conclusions he was drawn to, it occurs to me that in reality he
was wanting to do the very last thing which it would have entered into
his head to think of wanting. I mean that he was trying to give up
father and mother for Christ’s sake. He would have said he was giving
them up because he thought they hindered him in the pursuit of his
truest and most lasting happiness. Granted, but what is this if it is
not Christ? What is Christ if He is not this? He who takes the highest
and most self-respecting view of his own welfare which it is in his
power to conceive, and adheres to it in spite of conventionality, is a
Christian whether he knows it and calls himself one, or whether he does
not. A rose is not the less a rose because it does not know its own
name.

What if circumstances had made his duty more easy for him than it would
be to most men? That was his luck, as much as it is other people’s luck
to have other duties made easy for them by accident of birth. Surely if
people are born rich or handsome they have a right to their good
fortune. Some I know, will say that one man has no right to be born
with a better constitution than another; others again will say that
luck is the only righteous object of human veneration. Both, I daresay,
can make out a very good case, but whichever may be right surely Ernest
had as much right to the good luck of finding a duty made easier as he
had had to the bad fortune of falling into the scrape which had got him
into prison. A man is not to be sneered at for having a trump card in
his hand; he is only to be sneered at if he plays his trump card badly.

Indeed, I question whether it is ever much harder for anyone to give
up father and mother for Christ’s sake than it was for Ernest. The
relations between the parties will have almost always been severely
strained before it comes to this. I doubt whether anyone was ever yet
required to give up those to whom he was tenderly attached for a mere
matter of conscience: he will have ceased to be tenderly attached to
them long before he is called upon to break with them; for differences
of opinion concerning any matter of vital importance spring from
differences of constitution, and these will already have led to so much
other disagreement that the “giving up” when it comes, is like giving
up an aching but very loose and hollow tooth. It is the loss of those
whom we are not required to give up for Christ’s sake which is really
painful to us. Then there is a wrench in earnest. Happily, no matter
how light the task that is demanded from us, it is enough if we do it;
we reap our reward, much as though it were a Herculean labour.

But to return, the conclusion Ernest came to was that he would be a
tailor. He talked the matter over with the chaplain, who told him there
was no reason why he should not be able to earn his six or seven
shillings a day by the time he came out of prison, if he chose to learn
the trade during the remainder of his term—not quite three months; the
doctor said he was strong enough for this, and that it was about the
only thing he was as yet fit for; so he left the infirmary sooner than
he would otherwise have done and entered the tailor’s shop, overjoyed
at the thoughts of seeing his way again, and confident of rising some
day if he could only get a firm foothold to start from.

Everyone whom he had to do with saw that he did not belong to what are
called the criminal classes, and finding him eager to learn and to save
trouble always treated him kindly and almost respectfully. He did not
find the work irksome: it was far more pleasant than making Latin and
Greek verses at Roughborough; he felt that he would rather be here in
prison than at Roughborough again—yes, or even at Cambridge itself. The
only trouble he was ever in danger of getting into was through
exchanging words or looks with the more decent-looking of his
fellow-prisoners. This was forbidden, but he never missed a chance of
breaking the rules in this respect.

Any man of his ability who was at the same time anxious to learn would
of course make rapid progress, and before he left prison the warder
said he was as good a tailor with his three months’ apprenticeship as
many a man was with twelve. Ernest had never before been so much
praised by any of his teachers. Each day as he grew stronger in health
and more accustomed to his surroundings he saw some fresh advantage in
his position, an advantage which he had not aimed at, but which had
come almost in spite of himself, and he marvelled at his own good
fortune, which had ordered things so greatly better for him than he
could have ordered them for himself.

His having lived six months in Ashpit Place was a case in point. Things
were possible to him which to others like him would be impossible. If
such a man as Towneley were told he must live henceforth in a house
like those in Ashpit Place it would be more than he could stand. Ernest
could not have stood it himself if he had gone to live there of
compulsion through want of money. It was only because he had felt
himself able to run away at any minute that he had not wanted to do so;
now, however, that he had become familiar with life in Ashpit Place he
no longer minded it, and could live gladly in lower parts of London
than that so long as he could pay his way. It was from no prudence or
forethought that he had served this apprenticeship to life among the
poor. He had been trying in a feeble way to be thorough in his work: he
had not been thorough, the whole thing had been a _fiasco_; but he had
made a little puny effort in the direction of being genuine, and
behold, in his hour of need it had been returned to him with a reward
far richer than he had deserved. He could not have faced becoming one
of the very poor unless he had had such a bridge to conduct him over to
them as he had found unwittingly in Ashpit Place. True, there had been
drawbacks in the particular house he had chosen, but he need not live
in a house where there was a Mr Holt and he should no longer be tied to
the profession which he so much hated; if there were neither screams
nor scripture readings he could be happy in a garret at three shillings
a week, such as Miss Maitland lived in.

As he thought further he remembered that all things work together for
good to them that love God; was it possible, he asked himself, that he
too, however imperfectly, had been trying to love him? He dared not
answer Yes, but he would try hard that it should be so. Then there came
into his mind that noble air of Handel’s: “Great God, who yet but
darkly known,” and he felt it as he had never felt it before. He had
lost his faith in Christianity, but his faith in something—he knew not
what, but that there was a something as yet but darkly known which made
right right and wrong wrong—his faith in this grew stronger and
stronger daily.

Again there crossed his mind thoughts of the power which he felt to be
in him, and of how and where it was to find its vent. The same instinct
which had led him to live among the poor because it was the nearest
thing to him which he could lay hold of with any clearness came to his
assistance here too. He thought of the Australian gold and how those
who lived among it had never seen it though it abounded all around
them: “There is gold everywhere,” he exclaimed inwardly, “to those who
look for it.” Might not his opportunity be close upon him if he looked
carefully enough at his immediate surroundings? What was his position?
He had lost all. Could he not turn his having lost all into an
opportunity? Might he not, if he too sought the strength of the Lord,
find, like St Paul, that it was perfected in weakness?

He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were gone
for a very long time if not for ever; but there was something else also
that had taken its flight along with these. I mean the fear of that
which man could do unto him. _Cantabil vacuus_. Who could hurt him more
than he had been hurt already? Let him but be able to earn his bread,
and he knew of nothing which he dared not venture if it would make the
world a happier place for those who were young and loveable. Herein he
found so much comfort that he almost wished he had lost his reputation
even more completely—for he saw that it was like a man’s life which may
be found of them that lose it and lost of them that would find it. He
should not have had the courage to give up all for Christ’s sake, but
now Christ had mercifully taken all, and lo! it seemed as though all
were found.

As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the
denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do;
it was a fight about names—not about things; practically the Church of
Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal
standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint
who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters
little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may
make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency,
and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the
uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or
want of dogma that the danger lies. This was the crowning point of the
edifice; when he had got here he no longer wished to molest even the
Pope. The Archbishop of Canterbury might have hopped about all round
him and even picked crumbs out of his hand without running risk of
getting a sly sprinkle of salt. That wary prelate himself might perhaps
have been of a different opinion, but the robins and thrushes that hop
about our lawns are not more needlessly distrustful of the hand that
throws them out crumbs of bread in winter, than the Archbishop would
have been of my hero.

Perhaps he was helped to arrive at the foregoing conclusion by an event
which almost thrust inconsistency upon him. A few days after he had
left the infirmary the chaplain came to his cell and told him that the
prisoner who played the organ in chapel had just finished his sentence
and was leaving the prison; he therefore offered the post to Ernest,
who he already knew played the organ. Ernest was at first in doubt
whether it would be right for him to assist at religious services more
than he was actually compelled to do, but the pleasure of playing the
organ, and the privileges which the post involved, made him see
excellent reasons for not riding consistency to death. Having, then,
once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far
too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere
long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance
differed but little from the indifferentism from which Mr Hawke had
aroused him.

By becoming organist he was saved from the treadmill, for which the
doctor had said he was unfit as yet, but which he would probably have
been put to in due course as soon as he was stronger. He might have
escaped the tailor’s shop altogether and done only the comparatively
light work of attending to the chaplain’s rooms if he had liked, but he
wanted to learn as much tailoring as he could, and did not therefore
take advantage of this offer; he was allowed, however, two hours a day
in the afternoon for practice. From that moment his prison life ceased
to be monotonous, and the remaining two months of his sentence slipped
by almost as rapidly as they would have done if he had been free. What
with music, books, learning his trade, and conversation with the
chaplain, who was just the kindly, sensible person that Ernest wanted
in order to steady him a little, the days went by so pleasantly that
when the time came for him to leave prison, he did so, or thought he
did so, not without regret.




CHAPTER LXIX


In coming to the conclusion that he would sever the connection between
himself and his family once for all Ernest had reckoned without his
family. Theobald wanted to be rid of his son, it is true, in so far as
he wished him to be no nearer at any rate than the Antipodes; but he
had no idea of entirely breaking with him. He knew his son well enough
to have a pretty shrewd idea that this was what Ernest would wish
himself, and perhaps as much for this reason as for any other he was
determined to keep up the connection, provided it did not involve
Ernest’s coming to Battersby nor any recurring outlay.

When the time approached for him to leave prison, his father and mother
consulted as to what course they should adopt.

“We must never leave him to himself,” said Theobald impressively; “we
can neither of us wish that.”

“Oh, no! no! dearest Theobald,” exclaimed Christina. “Whoever else
deserts him, and however distant he may be from us, he must still feel
that he has parents whose hearts beat with affection for him no matter
how cruelly he has pained them.”

“He has been his own worst enemy,” said Theobald. “He has never loved
us as we deserved, and now he will be withheld by false shame from
wishing to see us. He will avoid us if he can.”

“Then we must go to him ourselves,” said Christina, “whether he likes
it or not we must be at his side to support him as he enters again upon
the world.”

“If we do not want him to give us the slip we must catch him as he
leaves prison.”

“We will, we will; our faces shall be the first to gladden his eyes as
he comes out, and our voices the first to exhort him to return to the
paths of virtue.”

“I think,” said Theobald, “if he sees us in the street he will turn
round and run away from us. He is intensely selfish.”

“Then we must get leave to go inside the prison, and see him before he
gets outside.”

After a good deal of discussion this was the plan they decided on
adopting, and having so decided, Theobald wrote to the governor of the
gaol asking whether he could be admitted inside the gaol to receive
Ernest when his sentence had expired. He received answer in the
affirmative, and the pair left Battersby the day before Ernest was to
come out of prison.

Ernest had not reckoned on this, and was rather surprised on being told
a few minutes before nine that he was to go into the receiving room
before he left the prison as there were visitors waiting to see him.
His heart fell, for he guessed who they were, but he screwed up his
courage and hastened to the receiving room. There, sure enough,
standing at the end of the table nearest the door were the two people
whom he regarded as the most dangerous enemies he had in all the
world—his father and mother.

He could not fly, but he knew that if he wavered he was lost.

His mother was crying, but she sprang forward to meet him and clasped
him in her arms. “Oh, my boy, my boy,” she sobbed, and she could say no
more.

Ernest was as white as a sheet. His heart beat so that he could hardly
breathe. He let his mother embrace him, and then withdrawing himself
stood silently before her with the tears falling from his eyes.

At first he could not speak. For a minute or so the silence on all
sides was complete. Then, gathering strength, he said in a low voice:

“Mother,” (it was the first time he had called her anything but
“mamma”?) “we must part.” On this, turning to the warder, he said: “I
believe I am free to leave the prison if I wish to do so. You cannot
compel me to remain here longer. Please take me to the gates.”

Theobald stepped forward. “Ernest, you must not, shall not, leave us in
this way.”

“Do not speak to me,” said Ernest, his eyes flashing with a fire that
was unwonted in them. Another warder then came up and took Theobald
aside, while the first conducted Ernest to the gates.

“Tell them,” said Ernest, “from me that they must think of me as one
dead, for I am dead to them. Say that my greatest pain is the thought
of the disgrace I have inflicted upon them, and that above all things
else I will study to avoid paining them hereafter; but say also that if
they write to me I will return their letters unopened, and that if they
come and see me I will protect myself in whatever way I can.”

By this time he was at the prison gate, and in another moment was at
liberty. After he had got a few steps out he turned his face to the
prison wall, leant against it for support, and wept as though his heart
would break.

Giving up father and mother for Christ’s sake was not such an easy
matter after all. If a man has been possessed by devils for long enough
they will rend him as they leave him, however imperatively they may
have been cast out. Ernest did not stay long where he was, for he
feared each moment that his father and mother would come out. He pulled
himself together and turned into the labyrinth of small streets which
opened out in front of him.

He had crossed his Rubicon—not perhaps very heroically or dramatically,
but then it is only in dramas that people act dramatically. At any
rate, by hook or by crook, he had scrambled over, and was out upon the
other side. Already he thought of much which he would gladly have said,
and blamed his want of presence of mind; but, after all, it mattered
very little. Inclined though he was to make very great allowances for
his father and mother, he was indignant at their having thrust
themselves upon him without warning at a moment when the excitement of
leaving prison was already as much as he was fit for. It was a mean
advantage to have taken over him, but he was glad they had taken it,
for it made him realise more fully than ever that his one chance lay in
separating himself completely from them.

The morning was grey, and the first signs of winter fog were beginning
to show themselves, for it was now the 30th of September. Ernest wore
the clothes in which he had entered prison, and was therefore dressed
as a clergyman. No one who looked at him would have seen any difference
between his present appearance and his appearance six months
previously; indeed, as he walked slowly through the dingy crowded lane
called Eyre Street Hill (which he well knew, for he had clerical
friends in that neighbourhood), the months he had passed in prison
seemed to drop out of his life, and so powerfully did association carry
him away that, finding himself in his old dress and in his old
surroundings, he felt dragged back into his old self—as though his six
months of prison life had been a dream from which he was now waking to
take things up as he had left them. This was the effect of unchanged
surroundings upon the unchanged part of him. But there was a changed
part, and the effect of unchanged surroundings upon this was to make
everything seem almost as strange as though he had never had any life
but his prison one, and was now born into a new world.

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the
process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed
and unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, in nothing else than this
process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid,
when we fail flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it temporarily we
sleep, when we give up the attempt altogether we die. In quiet,
uneventful lives the changes internal and external are so small that
there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and
accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also
great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with
little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not according
as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of
fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.

The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of
the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is
either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as
external and internal at one and the same time, subject and
object—external and internal—being unified as much as everything else.
This will knock our whole system over, but then every system has got to
be knocked over by something.

Much the best way out of this difficulty is to go in for separation
between internal and external—subject and object—when we find this
convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity convenient.
This is illogical, but extremes are alone logical, and they are always
absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it is always illogical. It is
faith and not logic which is the supreme arbiter. They say all roads
lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead
ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion
already more than once insisted on in these pages, that the just shall
live by faith, that is to say that sensible people will get through
life by rule of thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently
without asking too many questions for conscience sake. Take any fact,
and reason upon it to the bitter end, and it will ere long lead to this
as the only refuge from some palpable folly.

But to return to my story. When Ernest got to the top of the street and
looked back, he saw the grimy, sullen walls of his prison filling up
the end of it. He paused for a minute or two. “There,” he said to
himself, “I was hemmed in by bolts which I could see and touch; here I
am barred by others which are none the less real—poverty and ignorance
of the world. It was no part of my business to try to break the
material bolts of iron and escape from prison, but now that I am free I
must surely seek to break these others.”

He had read somewhere of a prisoner who had made his escape by cutting
up his bedstead with an iron spoon. He admired and marvelled at the
man’s mind, but could not even try to imitate him; in the presence of
immaterial barriers, however, he was not so easily daunted, and felt as
though, even if the bed were iron and the spoon a wooden one, he could
find some means of making the wood cut the iron sooner or later.

He turned his back upon Eyre Street Hill and walked down Leather Lane
into Holborn. Each step he took, each face or object that he knew,
helped at once to link him on to the life he had led before his
imprisonment, and at the same time to make him feel how completely that
imprisonment had cut his life into two parts, the one of which could
bear no resemblance to the other.

He passed down Fetter Lane into Fleet Street and so to the Temple, to
which I had just returned from my summer holiday. It was about half
past nine, and I was having my breakfast, when I heard a timid knock at
the door and opened it to find Ernest.




CHAPTER LXX


I had begun to like him on the night Towneley had sent for me, and on
the following day I thought he had shaped well. I had liked him also
during our interview in prison, and wanted to see more of him, so that
I might make up my mind about him. I had lived long enough to know that
some men who do great things in the end are not very wise when they are
young; knowing that he would leave prison on the 30th, I had expected
him, and, as I had a spare bedroom, pressed him to stay with me, till
he could make up his mind what he would do.

Being so much older than he was, I anticipated no trouble in getting my
own way, but he would not hear of it. The utmost he would assent to was
that he should be my guest till he could find a room for himself, which
he would set about doing at once.

He was still much agitated, but grew better as he ate a breakfast, not
of prison fare and in a comfortable room. It pleased me to see the
delight he took in all about him; the fireplace with a fire in it; the
easy chairs, the _Times_, my cat, the red geraniums in the window, to
say nothing of coffee, bread and butter, sausages, marmalade, etc.
Everything was pregnant with the most exquisite pleasure to him. The
plane trees were full of leaf still; he kept rising from the breakfast
table to admire them; never till now, he said, had he known what the
enjoyment of these things really was. He ate, looked, laughed and cried
by turns, with an emotion which I can neither forget nor describe.

He told me how his father and mother had lain in wait for him, as he
was about to leave prison. I was furious, and applauded him heartily
for what he had done. He was very grateful to me for this. Other
people, he said, would tell him he ought to think of his father and
mother rather than of himself, and it was such a comfort to find
someone who saw things as he saw them himself. Even if I had differed
from him I should not have said so, but I was of his opinion, and was
almost as much obliged to him for seeing things as I saw them, as he to
me for doing the same kind office by himself. Cordially as I disliked
Theobald and Christina, I was in such a hopeless minority in the
opinion I had formed concerning them that it was pleasant to find
someone who agreed with me.

Then there came an awful moment for both of us.

A knock, as of a visitor and not a postman, was heard at my door.

“Goodness gracious,” I exclaimed, “why didn’t we sport the oak? Perhaps
it is your father. But surely he would hardly come at this time of day!
Go at once into my bedroom.”

I went to the door, and, sure enough, there were both Theobald and
Christina. I could not refuse to let them in and was obliged to listen
to their version of the story, which agreed substantially with
Ernest’s. Christina cried bitterly—Theobald stormed. After about ten
minutes, during which I assured them that I had not the faintest
conception where their son was, I dismissed them both. I saw they
looked suspiciously upon the manifest signs that someone was
breakfasting with me, and parted from me more or less defiantly, but I
got rid of them, and poor Ernest came out again, looking white,
frightened and upset. He had heard voices, but no more, and did not
feel sure that the enemy might not be gaining over me. We sported the
oak now, and before long he began to recover.

After breakfast, we discussed the situation. I had taken away his
wardrobe and books from Mrs Jupp’s, but had left his furniture,
pictures and piano, giving Mrs Jupp the use of these, so that she might
let her room furnished, in lieu of charge for taking care of the
furniture. As soon as Ernest heard that his wardrobe was at hand, he
got out a suit of clothes he had had before he had been ordained, and
put it on at once, much, as I thought, to the improvement of his
personal appearance.

Then we went into the subject of his finances. He had had ten pounds
from Pryer only a day or two before he was apprehended, of which
between seven and eight were in his purse when he entered the prison.
This money was restored to him on leaving. He had always paid cash for
whatever he bought, so that there was nothing to be deducted for debts.
Besides this, he had his clothes, books and furniture. He could, as I
have said, have had £100 from his father if he had chosen to emigrate,
but this both Ernest and I (for he brought me round to his opinion)
agreed it would be better to decline. This was all he knew of as
belonging to him.

He said he proposed at once taking an unfurnished top back attic in as
quiet a house as he could find, say at three or four shillings a week,
and looking out for work as a tailor. I did not think it much mattered
what he began with, for I felt pretty sure he would ere long find his
way to something that suited him, if he could get a start with anything
at all. The difficulty was how to get him started. It was not enough
that he should be able to cut out and make clothes—that he should have
the organs, so to speak, of a tailor; he must be put into a tailor’s
shop and guided for a little while by someone who knew how and where to
help him.

The rest of the day he spent in looking for a room, which he soon
found, and in familiarising himself with liberty. In the evening I took
him to the Olympic, where Robson was then acting in a burlesque on
Macbeth, Mrs Keeley, if I remember rightly, taking the part of Lady
Macbeth. In the scene before the murder, Macbeth had said he could not
kill Duncan when he saw his boots upon the landing. Lady Macbeth put a
stop to her husband’s hesitation by whipping him up under her arm, and
carrying him off the stage, kicking and screaming. Ernest laughed till
he cried. “What rot Shakespeare is after this,” he exclaimed,
involuntarily. I remembered his essay on the Greek tragedians, and was
more I _épris_ with him than ever.

Next day he set about looking for employment, and I did not see him
till about five o’clock, when he came and said that he had had no
success. The same thing happened the next day and the day after that.
Wherever he went he was invariably refused and often ordered point
blank out of the shop; I could see by the expression of his face,
though he said nothing, that he was getting frightened, and began to
think I should have to come to the rescue. He said he had made a great
many enquiries and had always been told the same story. He found that
it was easy to keep on in an old line, but very hard to strike out into
a new one.

He talked to the fishmonger in Leather Lane, where he went to buy a
bloater for his tea, casually as though from curiosity and without any
interested motive. “Sell,” said the master of the shop, “Why nobody
wouldn’t believe what can be sold by penn’orths and twopenn’orths if
you go the right way to work. Look at whelks, for instance. Last
Saturday night me and my little Emma here, we sold £7 worth of whelks
between eight and half past eleven o’clock—and almost all in penn’orths
and twopenn’orths—a few, hap’orths, but not many. It was the steam that
did it. We kept a-boiling of ’em hot and hot, and whenever the steam
came strong up from the cellar on to the pavement, the people bought,
but whenever the steam went down they left off buying; so we boiled
them over and over again till they was all sold. That’s just where it
is; if you know your business you can sell, if you don’t you’ll soon
make a mess of it. Why, but for the steam, I should not have sold 10s.
worth of whelks all the night through.”

This, and many another yarn of kindred substance which he heard from
other people determined Ernest more than ever to stake on tailoring as
the one trade about which he knew anything at all, nevertheless, here
were three or four days gone by and employment seemed as far off as
ever.

I now did what I ought to have done before, that is to say, I called on
my own tailor whom I had dealt with for over a quarter of a century and
asked his advice. He declared Ernest’s plan to be hopeless. “If,” said
Mr Larkins, for this was my tailor’s name, “he had begun at fourteen,
it might have done, but no man of twenty-four could stand being turned
to work into a workshop full of tailors; he would not get on with the
men, nor the men with him; you could not expect him to be ‘hail fellow,
well met’ with them, and you could not expect his fellow-workmen to
like him if he was not. A man must have sunk low through drink or
natural taste for low company, before he could get on with those who
have had such a different training from his own.”

Mr Larkins said a great deal more and wound up by taking me to see the
place where his own men worked. “This is a paradise,” he said,
“compared to most workshops. What gentleman could stand this air, think
you, for a fortnight?”

I was glad enough to get out of the hot, fetid atmosphere in five
minutes, and saw that there was no brick of Ernest’s prison to be
loosened by going and working among tailors in a workshop.

Mr Larkins wound up by saying that even if my _protégé_ were a much
better workman than he probably was, no master would give him
employment, for fear of creating a bother among the men.

I left, feeling that I ought to have thought of all this myself, and
was more than ever perplexed as to whether I had not better let my
young friend have a few thousand pounds and send him out to the
colonies, when, on my return home at about five o’clock, I found him
waiting for me, radiant, and declaring that he had found all he wanted.




CHAPTER LXXI


It seems he had been patrolling the streets for the last three or four
nights—I suppose in search of something to do—at any rate knowing
better what he wanted to get than how to get it. Nevertheless, what he
wanted was in reality so easily to be found that it took a highly
educated scholar like himself to be unable to find it. But, however
this may be, he had been scared, and now saw lions where there were
none, and was shocked and frightened, and night after night his courage
had failed him and he had returned to his lodgings in Laystall Street
without accomplishing his errand. He had not taken me into his
confidence upon this matter, and I had not enquired what he did with
himself in the evenings. At last he had concluded that, however painful
it might be to him, he would call on Mrs Jupp, who he thought would be
able to help him if anyone could. He had been walking moodily from
seven till about nine, and now resolved to go straight to Ashpit Place
and make a mother confessor of Mrs Jupp without more delay.

Of all tasks that could be performed by mortal woman there was none
which Mrs Jupp would have liked better than the one Ernest was thinking
of imposing upon her; nor do I know that in his scared and broken-down
state he could have done much better than he now proposed. Miss Jupp
would have made it very easy for him to open his grief to her; indeed,
she would have coaxed it all out of him before he knew where he was;
but the fates were against Mrs Jupp, and the meeting between my hero
and his former landlady was postponed _sine die_, for his determination
had hardly been formed and he had not gone more than a hundred yards in
the direction of Mrs Jupp’s house, when a woman accosted him.

He was turning from her, as he had turned from so many others, when she
started back with a movement that aroused his curiosity. He had hardly
seen her face, but being determined to catch sight of it, followed her
as she hurried away, and passed her; then turning round he saw that she
was none other than Ellen, the housemaid who had been dismissed by his
mother eight years previously.

He ought to have assigned Ellen’s unwillingness to see him to its true
cause, but a guilty conscience made him think she had heard of his
disgrace and was turning away from him in contempt. Brave as had been
his resolutions about facing the world, this was more than he was
prepared for; “What! you too shun me, Ellen?” he exclaimed.

The girl was crying bitterly and did not understand him. “Oh, Master
Ernest,” she sobbed, “let me go; you are too good for the likes of me
to speak to now.”

“Why, Ellen,” said he, “what nonsense you talk; you haven’t been in
prison, have you?”

“Oh, no, no, no, not so bad as that,” she exclaimed passionately.

“Well, I have,” said Ernest, with a forced laugh, “I came out three or
four days ago after six months with hard labour.”

Ellen did not believe him, but she looked at him with a “Lor’! Master
Ernest,” and dried her eyes at once. The ice was broken between them,
for as a matter of fact Ellen had been in prison several times, and
though she did not believe Ernest, his merely saying he had been in
prison made her feel more at ease with him. For her there were two
classes of people, those who had been in prison and those who had not.
The first she looked upon as fellow-creatures and more or less
Christians, the second, with few exceptions, she regarded with
suspicion, not wholly unmingled with contempt.

Then Ernest told her what had happened to him during the last six
months, and by-and-by she believed him.

“Master Ernest,” said she, after they had talked for a quarter of an
hour or so, “There’s a place over the way where they sell tripe and
onions. I know you was always very fond of tripe and onions, let’s go
over and have some, and we can talk better there.”

So the pair crossed the street and entered the tripe shop; Ernest
ordered supper.

“And how is your pore dear mamma, and your dear papa, Master Ernest,”
said Ellen, who had now recovered herself and was quite at home with my
hero. “Oh, dear, dear me,” she said, “I did love your pa; he was a good
gentleman, he was, and your ma too; it would do anyone good to live
with her, I’m sure.”

Ernest was surprised and hardly knew what to say. He had expected to
find Ellen indignant at the way she had been treated, and inclined to
lay the blame of her having fallen to her present state at his father’s
and mother’s door. It was not so. Her only recollection of Battersby
was as of a place where she had had plenty to eat and drink, not too
much hard work, and where she had not been scolded. When she heard that
Ernest had quarrelled with his father and mother she assumed as a
matter of course that the fault must lie entirely with Ernest.

“Oh, your pore, pore ma!” said Ellen. “She was always so very fond of
you, Master Ernest: you was always her favourite; I can’t abear to
think of anything between you and her. To think now of the way she used
to have me into the dining-room and teach me my catechism, that she
did! Oh, Master Ernest, you really must go and make it all up with her;
indeed you must.”

Ernest felt rueful, but he had resisted so valiantly already that the
devil might have saved himself the trouble of trying to get at him
through Ellen in the matter of his father and mother. He changed the
subject, and the pair warmed to one another as they had their tripe and
pots of beer. Of all people in the world Ellen was perhaps the one to
whom Ernest could have spoken most freely at this juncture. He told her
what he thought he could have told to no one else.

“You know, Ellen,” he concluded, “I had learnt as a boy things that I
ought not to have learnt, and had never had a chance of that which
would have set me straight.”

“Gentlefolks is always like that,” said Ellen musingly.

“I believe you are right, but I am no longer a gentleman, Ellen, and I
don’t see why I should be ‘like that’ any longer, my dear. I want you
to help me to be like something else as soon as possible.”

“Lor’! Master Ernest, whatever can you be meaning?”

The pair soon afterwards left the eating-house and walked up Fetter
Lane together.

Ellen had had hard times since she had left Battersby, but they had
left little trace upon her.

Ernest saw only the fresh-looking smiling face, the dimpled cheek, the
clear blue eyes and lovely sphinx-like lips which he had remembered as
a boy. At nineteen she had looked older than she was, now she looked
much younger; indeed she looked hardly older than when Ernest had last
seen her, and it would have taken a man of much greater experience than
he possessed to suspect how completely she had fallen from her first
estate. It never occurred to him that the poor condition of her
wardrobe was due to her passion for ardent spirits, and that first and
last she had served five or six times as much time in gaol as he had.
He ascribed the poverty of her attire to the attempts to keep herself
respectable, which Ellen during supper had more than once alluded to.
He had been charmed with the way in which she had declared that a pint
of beer would make her tipsy, and had only allowed herself to be forced
into drinking the whole after a good deal of remonstrance. To him she
appeared a very angel dropped from the sky, and all the more easy to
get on with for being a fallen one.

As he walked up Fetter Lane with her towards Laystall Street, he
thought of the wonderful goodness of God towards him in throwing in his
way the very person of all others whom he was most glad to see, and
whom, of all others, in spite of her living so near him, he might have
never fallen in with but for a happy accident.

When people get it into their heads that they are being specially
favoured by the Almighty, they had better as a general rule mind their
p’s and q’s, and when they think they see the devil’s drift with more
special clearness, let them remember that he has had much more
experience than they have, and is probably meditating mischief.

Already during supper the thought that in Ellen at last he had found a
woman whom he could love well enough to wish to live with and marry had
flitted across his mind, and the more they had chatted the more reasons
kept suggesting themselves for thinking that what might be folly in
ordinary cases would not be folly in his.

He must marry someone; that was already settled. He could not marry a
lady; that was absurd. He must marry a poor woman. Yes, but a fallen
one? Was he not fallen himself? Ellen would fall no more. He had only
to look at her to be sure of this. He could not live with her in sin,
not for more than the shortest time that could elapse before their
marriage; he no longer believed in the supernatural element of
Christianity, but the Christian morality at any rate was indisputable.
Besides, they might have children, and a stigma would rest upon them.
Whom had he to consult but himself now? His father and mother never
need know, and even if they did, they should be thankful to see him
married to any woman who would make him happy as Ellen would. As for
not being able to afford marriage, how did poor people do? Did not a
good wife rather help matters than not? Where one could live two could
do so, and if Ellen was three or four years older than he was—well,
what was that?

Have you, gentle reader, ever loved at first sight? When you fell in
love at first sight, how long, let me ask, did it take you to become
ready to fling every other consideration to the winds except that of
obtaining possession of the loved one? Or rather, how long would it
have taken you if you had had no father or mother, nothing to lose in
the way of money, position, friends, professional advancement, or what
not, and if the object of your affections was as free from all these
_impedimenta_ as you were yourself?

If you were a young John Stuart Mill, perhaps it would have taken you
some time, but suppose your nature was Quixotic, impulsive, altruistic,
guileless; suppose you were a hungry man starving for something to love
and lean upon, for one whose burdens you might bear, and who might help
you to bear yours. Suppose you were down on your luck, still stunned by
a horrible shock, and this bright vista of a happy future floated
suddenly before you, how long under these circumstances do you think
you would reflect before you would decide on embracing what chance had
thrown in your way?

It did not take my hero long, for before he got past the ham and beef
shop near the top of Fetter Lane, he had told Ellen that she must come
home with him and live with him till they could get married, which they
would do upon the first day that the law allowed.

I think the devil must have chuckled and made tolerably sure of his
game this time.




CHAPTER LXXII


Ernest told Ellen of his difficulty about finding employment.

“But what do you think of going into a shop for, my dear,” said Ellen.
“Why not take a little shop yourself?”

Ernest asked how much this would cost. Ellen told him that he might
take a house in some small street, say near the “Elephant and Castle,”
for 17s. or 18s. a week, and let off the two top floors for 10s.,
keeping the back parlour and shop for themselves. If he could raise
five or six pounds to buy some second-hand clothes to stock the shop
with, they could mend them and clean them, and she could look after the
women’s clothes while he did the men’s. Then he could mend and make, if
he could get the orders.

They could soon make a business of £2 a week in this way; she had a
friend who began like that and had now moved to a better shop, where
she made £5 or £6 a week at least—and she, Ellen, had done the greater
part of the buying and selling herself.

Here was a new light indeed. It was as though he had got his £5000 back
again all of a sudden, and perhaps ever so much more later on into the
bargain. Ellen seemed more than ever to be his good genius.

She went out and got a few rashers of bacon for his and her breakfast.
She cooked them much more nicely than he had been able to do, and laid
breakfast for him and made coffee, and some nice brown toast. Ernest
had been his own cook and housemaid for the last few days and had not
given himself satisfaction. Here he suddenly found himself with someone
to wait on him again. Not only had Ellen pointed out to him how he
could earn a living when no one except himself had known how to advise
him, but here she was so pretty and smiling, looking after even his
comforts, and restoring him practically in all respects that he much
cared about to the position which he had lost—or rather putting him in
one that he already liked much better. No wonder he was radiant when he
came to explain his plans to me.

He had some difficulty in telling all that had happened. He hesitated,
blushed, hummed and hawed. Misgivings began to cross his mind when he
found himself obliged to tell his story to someone else. He felt
inclined to slur things over, but I wanted to get at the facts, so I
helped him over the bad places, and questioned him till I had got out
pretty nearly the whole story as I have given it above.

I hope I did not show it, but I was very angry. I had begun to like
Ernest. I don’t know why, but I never have heard that any young man to
whom I had become attached was going to get married without hating his
intended instinctively, though I had never seen her; I have observed
that most bachelors feel the same thing, though we are generally at
some pains to hide the fact. Perhaps it is because we know we ought to
have got married ourselves. Ordinarily we say we are delighted—in the
present case I did not feel obliged to do this, though I made an effort
to conceal my vexation. That a young man of much promise who was heir
also to what was now a handsome fortune, should fling himself away upon
such a person as Ellen was quite too provoking, and the more so because
of the unexpectedness of the whole affair.

I begged him not to marry Ellen yet—not at least until he had known her
for a longer time. He would not hear of it; he had given his word, and
if he had not given it he should go and give it at once. I had hitherto
found him upon most matters singularly docile and easy to manage, but
on this point I could do nothing with him. His recent victory over his
father and mother had increased his strength, and I was nowhere. I
would have told him of his true position, but I knew very well that
this would only make him more bent on having his own way—for with so
much money why should he not please himself? I said nothing, therefore,
on this head, and yet all that I could urge went for very little with
one who believed himself to be an artisan or nothing.

Really from his own standpoint there was nothing very outrageous in
what he was doing. He had known and been very fond of Ellen years
before. He knew her to come of respectable people, and to have borne a
good character, and to have been universally liked at Battersby. She
was then a quick, smart, hard-working girl—and a very pretty one. When
at last they met again she was on her best behaviour, in fact, she was
modesty and demureness itself. What wonder, then, that his imagination
should fail to realise the changes that eight years must have worked?
He knew too much against himself, and was too bankrupt in love to be
squeamish; if Ellen had been only what he thought her, and if his
prospects had been in reality no better than he believed they were, I
do not know that there is anything much more imprudent in what Ernest
proposed than there is in half the marriages that take place every day.

There was nothing for it, however, but to make the best of the
inevitable, so I wished my young friend good fortune, and told him he
could have whatever money he wanted to start his shop with, if what he
had in hand was not sufficient. He thanked me, asked me to be kind
enough to let him do all my mending and repairing, and to get him any
other like orders that I could, and left me to my own reflections.

I was even more angry when he was gone than I had been while he was
with me. His frank, boyish face had beamed with a happiness that had
rarely visited it. Except at Cambridge he had hardly known what
happiness meant, and even there his life had been clouded as of a man
for whom wisdom at the greatest of its entrances was quite shut out. I
had seen enough of the world and of him to have observed this, but it
was impossible, or I thought it had been impossible, for me to have
helped him.

Whether I ought to have tried to help him or not I do not know, but I
am sure that the young of all animals often do want help upon matters
about which anyone would say _a priori_ that there should be no
difficulty. One would think that a young seal would want no teaching
how to swim, nor yet a bird to fly, but in practice a young seal drowns
if put out of its depth before its parents have taught it to swim; and
so again, even the young hawk must be taught to fly before it can do
so.

I grant that the tendency of the times is to exaggerate the good which
teaching can do, but in trying to teach too much, in most matters, we
have neglected others in respect of which a little sensible teaching
would do no harm.

I know it is the fashion to say that young people must find out things
for themselves, and so they probably would if they had fair play to the
extent of not having obstacles put in their way. But they seldom have
fair play; as a general rule they meet with foul play, and foul play
from those who live by selling them stones made into a great variety of
shapes and sizes so as to form a tolerable imitation of bread.

Some are lucky enough to meet with few obstacles, some are plucky
enough to over-ride them, but in the greater number of cases, if people
are saved at all they are saved so as by fire.

While Ernest was with me Ellen was looking out for a shop on the south
side of the Thames near the “Elephant and Castle,” which was then
almost a new and a very rising neighbourhood. By one o’clock she had
found several from which a selection was to be made, and before night
the pair had made their choice.

Ernest brought Ellen to me. I did not want to see her, but could not
well refuse. He had laid out a few of his shillings upon her wardrobe,
so that she was neatly dressed, and, indeed, she looked very pretty and
so good that I could hardly be surprised at Ernest’s infatuation when
the other circumstances of the case were taken into consideration. Of
course we hated one another instinctively from the first moment we set
eyes on one another, but we each told Ernest that we had been most
favourably impressed.

Then I was taken to see the shop. An empty house is like a stray dog or
a body from which life has departed. Decay sets in at once in every
part of it, and what mould and wind and weather would spare, street
boys commonly destroy. Ernest’s shop in its untenanted state was a
dirty unsavoury place enough. The house was not old, but it had been
run up by a jerry-builder and its constitution had no stamina whatever.
It was only by being kept warm and quiet that it would remain in health
for many months together. Now it had been empty for some weeks and the
cats had got in by night, while the boys had broken the windows by day.
The parlour floor was covered with stones and dirt, and in the area was
a dead dog which had been killed in the street and been thrown down
into the first unprotected place that could be found. There was a
strong smell throughout the house, but whether it was bugs, or rats, or
cats, or drains, or a compound of all four, I could not determine. The
sashes did not fit, the flimsy doors hung badly; the skirting was gone
in several places, and there were not a few holes in the floor; the
locks were loose, and paper was torn and dirty; the stairs were weak
and one felt the treads give as one went up them.

Over and above these drawbacks the house had an ill name, by reason of
the fact that the wife of the last occupant had hanged herself in it
not very many weeks previously. She had set down a bloater before the
fire for her husband’s tea, and had made him a round of toast. She then
left the room as though about to return to it shortly, but instead of
doing so she went into the back kitchen and hanged herself without a
word. It was this which had kept the house empty so long in spite of
its excellent position as a corner shop. The last tenant had left
immediately after the inquest, and if the owner had had it done up then
people would have got over the tragedy that had been enacted in it, but
the combination of bad condition and bad fame had hindered many from
taking it, who like Ellen, could see that it had great business
capabilities. Almost anything would have sold there, but it happened
also that there was no second-hand clothes shop in close proximity so
that everything combined in its favour, except its filthy state and its
reputation.

When I saw it, I thought I would rather die than live in such an awful
place—but then I had been living in the Temple for the last five and
twenty years. Ernest was lodging in Laystall Street and had just come
out of prison; before this he had lived in Ashpit Place so that this
house had no terrors for him provided he could get it done up. The
difficulty was that the landlord was hard to move in this respect. It
ended in my finding the money to do everything that was wanted, and
taking a lease of the house for five years at the same rental as that
paid by the last occupant. I then sublet it to Ernest, of course taking
care that it was put more efficiently into repair than his landlord was
at all likely to have put it.

A week later I called and found everything so completely transformed
that I should hardly have recognised the house. All the ceilings had
been whitewashed, all the rooms papered, the broken glass hacked out
and reinstated, the defective wood-work renewed, all the sashes,
cupboards and doors had been painted. The drains had been thoroughly
overhauled, everything in fact, that could be done had been done, and
the rooms now looked as cheerful as they had been forbidding when I had
last seen them. The people who had done the repairs were supposed to
have cleaned the house down before leaving, but Ellen had given it
another scrub from top to bottom herself after they were gone, and it
was as clean as a new pin. I almost felt as though I could have lived
in it myself, and as for Ernest, he was in the seventh heaven. He said
it was all my doing and Ellen’s.

There was already a counter in the shop and a few fittings, so that
nothing now remained but to get some stock and set them out for sale.
Ernest said he could not begin better than by selling his clerical
wardrobe and his books, for though the shop was intended especially for
the sale of second-hand clothes, yet Ellen said there was no reason why
they should not sell a few books too; so a beginning was to be made by
selling the books he had had at school and college at about one
shilling a volume, taking them all round, and I have heard him say that
he learned more that proved of practical use to him through stocking
his books on a bench in front of his shop and selling them, than he had
done from all the years of study which he had bestowed upon their
contents.

For the enquiries that were made of him whether he had such and such a
book taught him what he could sell and what he could not; how much he
could get for this, and how much for that. Having made ever such a
little beginning with books, he took to attending book sales as well as
clothes sales, and ere long this branch of his business became no less
important than the tailoring, and would, I have no doubt, have been the
one which he would have settled down to exclusively, if he had been
called upon to remain a tradesman; but this is anticipating.

I made a contribution and a stipulation. Ernest wanted to sink the
gentleman completely, until such time as he could work his way up
again. If he had been left to himself he would have lived with Ellen in
the shop back parlour and kitchen, and have let out both the upper
floors according to his original programme. I did not want him,
however, to cut himself adrift from music, letters and polite life, and
feared that unless he had some kind of den into which he could retire
he would ere long become the tradesman and nothing else. I therefore
insisted on taking the first floor front and back myself, and
furnishing them with the things which had been left at Mrs Jupp’s. I
bought these things of him for a small sum and had them moved into his
present abode.

I went to Mrs Jupp’s to arrange all this, as Ernest did not like going
to Ashpit Place. I had half expected to find the furniture sold and Mrs
Jupp gone, but it was not so; with all her faults the poor old woman
was perfectly honest.

I told her that Pryer had taken all Ernest’s money and run away with
it. She hated Pryer. “I never knew anyone,” she exclaimed, “as
white-livered in the face as that Pryer; he hasn’t got an upright vein
in his whole body. Why, all that time when he used to come breakfasting
with Mr Pontifex morning after morning, it took me to a perfect shadow
the way he carried on. There was no doing anything to please him right.
First I used to get them eggs and bacon, and he didn’t like that; and
then I got him a bit of fish, and he didn’t like that, or else it was
too dear, and you know fish is dearer than ever; and then I got him a
bit of German, and he said it rose on him; then I tried sausages, and
he said they hit him in the eye worse even than German; oh! how I used
to wander my room and fret about it inwardly and cry for hours, and all
about them paltry breakfasts—and it wasn’t Mr Pontifex; he’d like
anything that anyone chose to give him.

“And so the piano’s to go,” she continued. “What beautiful tunes Mr
Pontifex did play upon it, to be sure; and there was one I liked better
than any I ever heard. I was in the room when he played it once and
when I said, ‘Oh, Mr Pontifex, that’s the kind of woman I am,’ he said,
‘No, Mrs Jupp, it isn’t, for this tune is old, but no one can say you
are old.’ But, bless you, he meant nothing by it, it was only his mucky
flattery.”

Like myself, she was vexed at his getting married. She didn’t like his
being married, and she didn’t like his not being married—but, anyhow,
it was Ellen’s fault, not his, and she hoped he would be happy. “But
after all,” she concluded, “it ain’t you and it ain’t me, and it ain’t
him and it ain’t her. It’s what you must call the fortunes of
matterimony, for there ain’t no other word for it.”

In the course of the afternoon the furniture arrived at Ernest’s new
abode. In the first floor we placed the piano, table, pictures,
bookshelves, a couple of arm-chairs, and all the little household gods
which he had brought from Cambridge. The back room was furnished
exactly as his bedroom at Ashpit Place had been—new things being got
for the bridal apartment downstairs. These two first-floor rooms I
insisted on retaining as my own, but Ernest was to use them whenever he
pleased; he was never to sublet even the bedroom, but was to keep it
for himself in case his wife should be ill at any time, or in case he
might be ill himself.

In less than a fortnight from the time of his leaving prison all these
arrangements had been completed, and Ernest felt that he had again
linked himself on to the life which he had led before his
imprisonment—with a few important differences, however, which were
greatly to his advantage. He was no longer a clergyman; he was about to
marry a woman to whom he was much attached, and he had parted company
for ever with his father and mother.

True, he had lost all his money, his reputation, and his position as a
gentleman; he had, in fact, had to burn his house down in order to get
his roast sucking pig; but if asked whether he would rather be as he
was now or as he was on the day before his arrest, he would not have
had a moment’s hesitation in preferring his present to his past. If his
present could only have been purchased at the expense of all that he
had gone through, it was still worth purchasing at the price, and he
would go through it all again if necessary. The loss of the money was
the worst, but Ellen said she was sure they would get on, and she knew
all about it. As for the loss of reputation—considering that he had
Ellen and me left, it did not come to much.

I saw the house on the afternoon of the day on which all was finished,
and there remained nothing but to buy some stock and begin selling.
When I was gone, after he had had his tea, he stole up to his
castle—the first floor front. He lit his pipe and sat down to the
piano. He played Handel for an hour or so, and then set himself to the
table to read and write. He took all his sermons and all the
theological works he had begun to compose during the time he had been a
clergyman and put them in the fire; as he saw them consume he felt as
though he had got rid of another incubus. Then he took up some of the
little pieces he had begun to write during the latter part of his
undergraduate life at Cambridge, and began to cut them about and
re-write them. As he worked quietly at these till he heard the clock
strike ten and it was time to go to bed, he felt that he was now not
only happy but supremely happy.

Next day Ellen took him to Debenham’s auction rooms, and they surveyed
the lots of clothes which were hung up all round the auction room to be
viewed. Ellen had had sufficient experience to know about how much each
lot ought to fetch; she overhauled lot after lot, and valued it; in a
very short time Ernest himself began to have a pretty fair idea what
each lot should go for, and before the morning was over valued a dozen
lots running at prices about which Ellen said he would not hurt if he
could get them for that.

So far from disliking this work or finding it tedious, he liked it very
much, indeed he would have liked anything which did not overtax his
physical strength, and which held out a prospect of bringing him in
money. Ellen would not let him buy anything on the occasion of this
sale; she said he had better see one sale first and watch how prices
actually went. So at twelve o’clock when the sale began, he saw the
lots sold which he and Ellen had marked, and by the time the sale was
over he knew enough to be able to bid with safety whenever he should
actually want to buy. Knowledge of this sort is very easily acquired by
anyone who is in _bona fide_ want of it.

But Ellen did not want him to buy at auctions—not much at least at
present. Private dealing, she said, was best. If I, for example, had
any cast-off clothes, he was to buy them from my laundress, and get a
connection with other laundresses, to whom he might give a trifle more
than they got at present for whatever clothes their masters might give
them, and yet make a good profit. If gentlemen sold their things, he
was to try and get them to sell to him. He flinched at nothing; perhaps
he would have flinched if he had had any idea how _outré_ his
proceedings were, but the very ignorance of the world which had ruined
him up till now, by a happy irony began to work its own cure. If some
malignant fairy had meant to curse him in this respect, she had
overdone her malice. He did not know he was doing anything strange. He
only knew that he had no money, and must provide for himself, a wife,
and a possible family. More than this, he wanted to have some leisure
in an evening, so that he might read and write and keep up his music.
If anyone would show him how he could do better than he was doing, he
should be much obliged to them, but to himself it seemed that he was
doing sufficiently well; for at the end of the first week the pair
found they had made a clear profit of £3. In a few weeks this had
increased to £4, and by the New Year they had made a profit of £5 in
one week.

Ernest had by this time been married some two months, for he had stuck
to his original plan of marrying Ellen on the first day he could
legally do so. This date was a little delayed by the change of abode
from Laystall Street to Blackfriars, but on the first day that it could
be done it was done. He had never had more than £250 a year, even in
the times of his affluence, so that a profit of £5 a week, if it could
be maintained steadily, would place him where he had been as far as
income went, and, though he should have to feed two mouths instead of
one, yet his expenses in other ways were so much curtailed by his
changed social position, that, take it all round, his income was
practically what it had been a twelvemonth before. The next thing to do
was to increase it, and put by money.

Prosperity depends, as we all know, in great measure upon energy and
good sense, but it also depends not a little upon pure luck—that is to
say, upon connections which are in such a tangle that it is more easy
to say that they do not exist, than to try to trace them. A
neighbourhood may have an excellent reputation as being likely to be a
rising one, and yet may become suddenly eclipsed by another, which no
one would have thought so promising. A fever hospital may divert the
stream of business, or a new station attract it; so little, indeed, can
be certainly known, that it is better not to try to know more than is
in everybody’s mouth, and to leave the rest to chance.

Luck, which certainly had not been too kind to my hero hitherto, now
seemed to have taken him under her protection. The neighbourhood
prospered, and he with it. It seemed as though he no sooner bought a
thing and put it into his shop, than it sold with a profit of from
thirty to fifty per cent. He learned book-keeping, and watched his
accounts carefully, following up any success immediately; he began to
buy other things besides clothes—such as books, music, odds and ends of
furniture, etc. Whether it was luck or business aptitude, or energy, or
the politeness with which he treated all his customers, I cannot
say—but to the surprise of no one more than himself, he went ahead
faster than he had anticipated, even in his wildest dreams, and by
Easter was established in a strong position as the owner of a business
which was bringing him in between four and five hundred a year, and
which he understood how to extend.




CHAPTER LXXIII


Ellen and he got on capitally, all the better, perhaps, because the
disparity between them was so great, that neither did Ellen want to be
elevated, nor did Ernest want to elevate her. He was very fond of her,
and very kind to her; they had interests which they could serve in
common; they had antecedents with a good part of which each was
familiar; they had each of them excellent tempers, and this was enough.
Ellen did not seem jealous at Ernest’s preferring to sit the greater
part of his time after the day’s work was done in the first floor front
where I occasionally visited him. She might have come and sat with him
if she had liked, but, somehow or other, she generally found enough to
occupy her down below. She had the tact also to encourage him to go out
of an evening whenever he had a mind, without in the least caring that
he should take her too—and this suited Ernest very well. He was, I
should say, much happier in his married life than people generally are.

At first it had been very painful to him to meet any of his old
friends, as he sometimes accidentally did, but this soon passed; either
they cut him, or he cut them; it was not nice being cut for the first
time or two, but after that, it became rather pleasant than not, and
when he began to see that he was going ahead, he cared very little what
people might say about his antecedents. The ordeal is a painful one,
but if a man’s moral and intellectual constitution are naturally sound,
there is nothing which will give him so much strength of character as
having been well cut.

It was easy for him to keep his expenditure down, for his tastes were
not luxurious. He liked theatres, outings into the country on a Sunday,
and tobacco, but he did not care for much else, except writing and
music. As for the usual run of concerts, he hated them. He worshipped
Handel; he liked Offenbach, and the airs that went about the streets,
but he cared for nothing between these two extremes. Music, therefore,
cost him little. As for theatres, I got him and Ellen as many orders as
they liked, so these cost them nothing. The Sunday outings were a small
item; for a shilling or two he could get a return ticket to some place
far enough out of town to give him a good walk and a thorough change
for the day. Ellen went with him the first few times, but she said she
found it too much for her, there were a few of her old friends whom she
should sometimes like to see, and they and he, she said, would not hit
it off perhaps too well, so it would be better for him to go alone.
This seemed so sensible, and suited Ernest so exactly that he readily
fell into it, nor did he suspect dangers which were apparent enough to
me when I heard how she had treated the matter. I kept silence,
however, and for a time all continued to go well. As I have said, one
of his chief pleasures was in writing. If a man carries with him a
little sketch book and is continually jotting down sketches, he has the
artistic instinct; a hundred things may hinder his due development, but
the instinct is there. The literary instinct may be known by a man’s
keeping a small note-book in his waistcoat pocket, into which he jots
down anything that strikes him, or any good thing that he hears said,
or a reference to any passage which he thinks will come in useful to
him. Ernest had such a note-book always with him. Even when he was at
Cambridge he had begun the practice without anyone’s having suggested
it to him. These notes he copied out from time to time into a book,
which as they accumulated, he was driven into indexing approximately,
as he went along. When I found out this, I knew that he had the
literary instinct, and when I saw his notes I began to hope great
things of him.

For a long time I was disappointed. He was kept back by the nature of
the subjects he chose—which were generally metaphysical. In vain I
tried to get him away from these to matters which had a greater
interest for the general public. When I begged him to try his hand at
some pretty, graceful, little story which should be full of whatever
people knew and liked best, he would immediately set to work upon a
treatise to show the grounds on which all belief rested.

“You are stirring mud,” said I, “or poking at a sleeping dog. You are
trying to make people resume consciousness about things, which, with
sensible men, have already passed into the unconscious stage. The men
whom you would disturb are in front of you, and not, as you fancy,
behind you; it is you who are the lagger, not they.”

He could not see it. He said he was engaged on an essay upon the famous
_quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_ of St Vincent de Lerins.
This was the more provoking because he showed himself able to do better
things if he had liked.

I was then at work upon my burlesque “The Impatient Griselda,” and was
sometimes at my wits’ end for a piece of business or a situation; he
gave me many suggestions, all of which were marked by excellent good
sense. Nevertheless I could not prevail with him to put philosophy on
one side, and was obliged to leave him to himself.

For a long time, as I have said, his choice of subjects continued to be
such as I could not approve. He was continually studying scientific and
metaphysical writers, in the hope of either finding or making for
himself a philosopher’s stone in the shape of a system which should go
on all fours under all circumstances, instead of being liable to be
upset at every touch and turn, as every system yet promulgated has
turned out to be.

He kept to the pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp so long that I gave up
hope, and set him down as another fly that had been caught, as it were,
by a piece of paper daubed over with some sticky stuff that had not
even the merit of being sweet, but to my surprise he at last declared
that he was satisfied, and had found what he wanted.

I supposed that he had only hit upon some new “Lo, here!” when to my
relief, he told me that he had concluded that no system which should go
perfectly upon all fours was possible, inasmuch as no one could get
behind Bishop Berkeley, and therefore no absolutely incontrovertible
first premise could ever be laid. Having found this he was just as well
pleased as if he had found the most perfect system imaginable. All he
wanted he said, was to know which way it was to be—that is to say
whether a system was possible or not, and if possible then what the
system was to be. Having found out that no system based on absolute
certainty was possible he was contented.

I had only a very vague idea who Bishop Berkeley was, but was thankful
to him for having defended us from an incontrovertible first premise. I
am afraid I said a few words implying that after a great deal of
trouble he had arrived at the conclusion which sensible people reach
without bothering their brains so much.

He said: “Yes, but I was not born sensible. A child of ordinary powers
learns to walk at a year or two old without knowing much about it;
failing ordinary powers he had better learn laboriously than never
learn at all. I am sorry I was not stronger, but to do as I did was my
only chance.”

He looked so meek that I was vexed with myself for having said what I
had, more especially when I remembered his bringing-up, which had
doubtless done much to impair his power of taking a common-sense view
of things. He continued—

“I see it all now. The people like Towneley are the only ones who know
anything that is worth knowing, and like that of course I can never be.
But to make Towneleys possible there must be hewers of wood and drawers
of water—men in fact through whom conscious knowledge must pass before
it can reach those who can apply it gracefully and instinctively as the
Towneleys can. I am a hewer of wood, but if I accept the position
frankly and do not set up to be a Towneley, it does not matter.”

He still, therefore, stuck to science instead of turning to literature
proper as I hoped he would have done, but he confined himself
henceforth to enquiries on specific subjects concerning which an
increase of our knowledge—as he said—was possible. Having in fact,
after infinite vexation of spirit, arrived at a conclusion which cut at
the roots of all knowledge, he settled contentedly down to the pursuit
of knowledge, and has pursued it ever since in spite of occasional
excursions into the regions of literature proper.

But this is anticipating, and may perhaps also convey a wrong
impression, for from the outset he did occasionally turn his attention
to work which must be more properly called literary than either
scientific or metaphysical.




CHAPTER LXXIV


About six months after he had set up his shop his prosperity had
reached its climax. It seemed even then as though he were likely to go
ahead no less fast than heretofore, and I doubt not that he would have
done so, if success or non-success had depended upon himself alone.
Unfortunately he was not the only person to be reckoned with.

One morning he had gone out to attend some sales, leaving his wife
perfectly well, as usual in good spirits, and looking very pretty. When
he came back he found her sitting on a chair in the back parlour, with
her hair over her face, sobbing and crying as though her heart would
break. She said she had been frightened in the morning by a man who had
pretended to be a customer, and had threatened her unless she gave him
some things, and she had had to give them to him in order to save
herself from violence; she had been in hysterics ever since the man had
gone. This was her story, but her speech was so incoherent that it was
not easy to make out what she said. Ernest knew she was with child, and
thinking this might have something to do with the matter, would have
sent for a doctor if Ellen had not begged him not to do so.

Anyone who had had experience of drunken people would have seen at a
glance what the matter was, but my hero knew nothing about
them—nothing, that is to say, about the drunkenness of the habitual
drunkard, which shows itself very differently from that of one who gets
drunk only once in a way. The idea that his wife could drink had never
even crossed his mind, indeed she always made a fuss about taking more
than a very little beer, and never touched spirits. He did not know
much more about hysterics than he did about drunkenness, but he had
always heard that women who were about to become mothers were liable to
be easily upset and were often rather flighty, so he was not greatly
surprised, and thought he had settled the matter by registering the
discovery that being about to become a father has its troublesome as
well as its pleasant side.

The great change in Ellen’s life consequent upon her meeting Ernest and
getting married had for a time actually sobered her by shaking her out
of her old ways. Drunkenness is so much a matter of habit, and habit so
much a matter of surroundings, that if you completely change the
surroundings you will sometimes get rid of the drunkenness altogether.
Ellen had intended remaining always sober henceforward, and never
having had so long a steady fit before, believed she was now cured. So
she perhaps would have been if she had seen none of her old
acquaintances. When, however, her new life was beginning to lose its
newness, and when her old acquaintances came to see her, her present
surroundings became more like her past, and on this she herself began
to get like her past too. At first she only got a little tipsy and
struggled against a relapse; but it was no use, she soon lost the heart
to fight, and now her object was not to try and keep sober, but to get
gin without her husband’s finding it out.

So the hysterics continued, and she managed to make her husband still
think that they were due to her being about to become a mother. The
worse her attacks were, the more devoted he became in his attention to
her. At last he insisted that a doctor should see her. The doctor of
course took in the situation at a glance, but said nothing to Ernest
except in such a guarded way that he did not understand the hints that
were thrown out to him. He was much too downright and matter of fact to
be quick at taking hints of this sort. He hoped that as soon as his
wife’s confinement was over she would regain her health and had no
thought save how to spare her as far as possible till that happy time
should come.

In the mornings she was generally better, as long that is to say as
Ernest remained at home; but he had to go out buying, and on his return
would generally find that she had had another attack as soon as he had
left the house. At times she would laugh and cry for half an hour
together, at others she would lie in a semi-comatose state upon the
bed, and when he came back he would find that the shop had been
neglected and all the work of the household left undone. Still he took
it for granted that this was all part of the usual course when women
were going to become mothers, and when Ellen’s share of the work
settled down more and more upon his own shoulders he did it all and
drudged away without a murmur. Nevertheless, he began to feel in a
vague way more as he had felt in Ashpit Place, at Roughborough, or at
Battersby, and to lose the buoyancy of spirits which had made another
man of him during the first six months of his married life.

It was not only that he had to do so much household work, for even the
cooking, cleaning up slops, bed-making and fire-lighting ere long
devolved upon him, but his business no longer prospered. He could buy
as hitherto, but Ellen seemed unable to sell as she had sold at first.
The fact was that she sold as well as ever, but kept back part of the
proceeds in order to buy gin, and she did this more and more till even
the unsuspecting Ernest ought to have seen that she was not telling the
truth. When she sold better—that is to say when she did not think it
safe to keep back more than a certain amount, she got money out of him
on the plea that she had a longing for this or that, and that it would
perhaps irreparably damage the baby if her longing was denied her. All
seemed right, reasonable, and unavoidable, nevertheless Ernest saw that
until the confinement was over he was likely to have a hard time of it.
All however would then come right again.




CHAPTER LXXV


In the month of September 1860 a girl was born, and Ernest was proud
and happy. The birth of the child, and a rather alarming talk which the
doctor had given to Ellen sobered her for a few weeks, and it really
seemed as though his hopes were about to be fulfilled. The expenses of
his wife’s confinement were heavy, and he was obliged to trench upon
his savings, but he had no doubt about soon recouping this now that
Ellen was herself again; for a time indeed his business did revive a
little, nevertheless it seemed as though the interruption to his
prosperity had in some way broken the spell of good luck which had
attended him in the outset; he was still sanguine, however, and worked
night and day with a will, but there was no more music, or reading, or
writing now. His Sunday outings were put a stop to, and but for the
first floor being let to myself, he would have lost his citadel there
too, but he seldom used it, for Ellen had to wait more and more upon
the baby, and, as a consequence, Ernest had to wait more and more upon
Ellen.

One afternoon, about a couple of months after the baby had been born,
and just as my unhappy hero was beginning to feel more hopeful and
therefore better able to bear his burdens, he returned from a sale, and
found Ellen in the same hysterical condition that he had found her in
in the spring. She said she was again with child, and Ernest still
believed her.

All the troubles of the preceding six months began again then and
there, and grew worse and worse continually. Money did not come in
quickly, for Ellen cheated him by keeping it back, and dealing
improperly with the goods he bought. When it did come in she got it out
of him as before on pretexts which it seemed inhuman to inquire into.
It was always the same story. By and by a new feature began to show
itself. Ernest had inherited his father’s punctuality and exactness as
regards money; he liked to know the worst of what he had to pay at
once; he hated having expenses sprung upon him which if not foreseen
might and ought to have been so, but now bills began to be brought to
him for things ordered by Ellen without his knowledge, or for which he
had already given her the money. This was awful, and even Ernest
turned. When he remonstrated with her—not for having bought the things,
but for having said nothing to him about the moneys being owing—Ellen
met him with hysteria and there was a scene. She had now pretty well
forgotten the hard times she had known when she had been on her own
resources and reproached him downright with having married her—on that
moment the scales fell from Ernest’s eyes as they had fallen when
Towneley had said, “No, no, no.” He said nothing, but he woke up once
for all to the fact that he had made a mistake in marrying. A touch had
again come which had revealed him to himself.

He went upstairs to the disused citadel, flung himself into the
arm-chair, and covered his face with his hands.

He still did not know that his wife drank, but he could no longer trust
her, and his dream of happiness was over. He had been saved from the
Church—so as by fire, but still saved—but what could now save him from
his marriage? He had made the same mistake that he had made in wedding
himself to the Church, but with a hundred times worse results. He had
learnt nothing by experience: he was an Esau—one of those wretches
whose hearts the Lord had hardened, who, having ears, heard not, having
eyes saw not, and who should find no place for repentance though they
sought it even with tears.

Yet had he not on the whole tried to find out what the ways of God
were, and to follow them in singleness of heart? To a certain extent,
yes; but he had not been thorough; he had not given up all for God. He
knew that very well he had done little as compared with what he might
and ought to have done, but still if he was being punished for this,
God was a hard taskmaster, and one, too, who was continually pouncing
out upon his unhappy creatures from ambuscades. In marrying Ellen he
had meant to avoid a life of sin, and to take the course he believed to
be moral and right. With his antecedents and surroundings it was the
most natural thing in the world for him to have done, yet in what a
frightful position had not his morality landed him. Could any amount of
immorality have placed him in a much worse one? What was morality worth
if it was not that which on the whole brought a man peace at the last,
and could anyone have reasonable certainty that marriage would do this?
It seemed to him that in his attempt to be moral he had been following
a devil which had disguised itself as an angel of light. But if so,
what ground was there on which a man might rest the sole of his foot
and tread in reasonable safety?

He was still too young to reach the answer, “On common sense”—an answer
which he would have felt to be unworthy of anyone who had an ideal
standard.

However this might be, it was plain that he had now done for himself.
It had been thus with him all his life. If there had come at any time a
gleam of sunshine and hope, it was to be obscured immediately—why,
prison was happier than this! There, at any rate, he had had no money
anxieties, and these were beginning to weigh upon him now with all
their horrors. He was happier even now than he had been at Battersby or
at Roughborough, and he would not now go back, even if he could, to his
Cambridge life, but for all that the outlook was so gloomy, in fact so
hopeless, that he felt as if he could have only too gladly gone to
sleep and died in his arm-chair once for all.

As he was musing thus and looking upon the wreck of his hopes—for he
saw well enough that as long as he was linked to Ellen he should never
rise as he had dreamed of doing—he heard a noise below, and presently a
neighbour ran upstairs and entered his room hurriedly—

“Good gracious, Mr Pontifex,” she exclaimed, “for goodness’ sake come
down quickly and help. O Mrs Pontifex is took with the horrors—and
she’s orkard.”

The unhappy man came down as he was bid and found his wife mad with
_delirium tremens_.

He knew all now. The neighbours thought he must have known that his
wife drank all along, but Ellen had been so artful, and he so simple,
that, as I have said, he had had no suspicion. “Why,” said the woman
who had summoned him, “she’ll drink anything she can stand up and pay
her money for.” Ernest could hardly believe his ears, but when the
doctor had seen his wife and she had become more quiet, he went over to
the public house hard by and made enquiries, the result of which
rendered further doubt impossible. The publican took the opportunity to
present my hero with a bill of several pounds for bottles of spirits
supplied to his wife, and what with his wife’s confinement and the way
business had fallen off, he had not the money to pay with, for the sum
exceeded the remnant of his savings.

He came to me—not for money, but to tell me his miserable story. I had
seen for some time that there was something wrong, and had suspected
pretty shrewdly what the matter was, but of course I said nothing.
Ernest and I had been growing apart for some time. I was vexed at his
having married, and he knew I was vexed, though I did my best to hide
it.

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but
they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The
rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the
marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no
less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the
married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my _protégé_ to
a fate with which I had neither right nor power to meddle. In fact I
had begun to feel him rather a burden; I did not so much mind this when
I could be of use, but I grudged it when I could be of none. He had
made his bed and he must lie upon it. Ernest had felt all this and had
seldom come near me till now, one evening late in 1860, he called on
me, and with a very woebegone face told me his troubles.

As soon as I found that he no longer liked his wife I forgave him at
once, and was as much interested in him as ever. There is nothing an
old bachelor likes better than to find a young married man who wishes
he had not got married—especially when the case is such an extreme one
that he need not pretend to hope that matters will come all right
again, or encourage his young friend to make the best of it.

I was myself in favour of a separation, and said I would make Ellen an
allowance myself—of course intending that it should come out of
Ernest’s money; but he would not hear of this. He had married Ellen, he
said, and he must try to reform her. He hated it, but he must try; and
finding him as usual very obstinate I was obliged to acquiesce, though
with little confidence as to the result. I was vexed at seeing him
waste himself upon such a barren task, and again began to feel him
burdensome. I am afraid I showed this, for he again avoided me for some
time, and, indeed, for many months I hardly saw him at all.

Ellen remained very ill for some days, and then gradually recovered.
Ernest hardly left her till she was out of danger. When she had
recovered he got the doctor to tell her that if she had such another
attack she would certainly die; this so frightened her that she took
the pledge.

Then he became more hopeful again. When she was sober she was just what
she was during the first days of her married life, and so quick was he
to forget pain, that after a few days he was as fond of her as ever.
But Ellen could not forgive him for knowing what he did. She knew that
he was on the watch to shield her from temptation, and though he did
his best to make her think that he had no further uneasiness about her,
she found the burden of her union with respectability grow more and
more heavy upon her, and looked back more and more longingly upon the
lawless freedom of the life she had led before she met her husband.

I will dwell no longer on this part of my story. During the spring
months of 1861 she kept straight—she had had her fling of dissipation,
and this, together with the impression made upon her by her having
taken the pledge, tamed her for a while. The shop went fairly well, and
enabled Ernest to make the two ends meet. In the spring and summer of
1861 he even put by a little money again. In the autumn his wife was
confined of a boy—a very fine one, so everyone said. She soon
recovered, and Ernest was beginning to breathe freely and be almost
sanguine when, without a word of warning, the storm broke again. He
returned one afternoon about two years after his marriage, and found
his wife lying upon the floor insensible.

From this time he became hopeless, and began to go visibly down hill.
He had been knocked about too much, and the luck had gone too long
against him. The wear and tear of the last three years had told on him,
and though not actually ill he was overworked, below par, and unfit for
any further burden.

He struggled for a while to prevent himself from finding this out, but
facts were too strong for him. Again he called on me and told me what
had happened. I was glad the crisis had come; I was sorry for Ellen,
but a complete separation from her was the only chance for her husband.
Even after this last outbreak he was unwilling to consent to this, and
talked nonsense about dying at his post, till I got tired of him. Each
time I saw him the old gloom had settled more and more deeply upon his
face, and I had about made up my mind to put an end to the situation by
a _coup de main_, such as bribing Ellen to run away with somebody else,
or something of that kind, when matters settled themselves as usual in
a way which I had not anticipated.




CHAPTER LXXVI


The winter had been a trying one. Ernest had only paid his way by
selling his piano. With this he seemed to cut away the last link that
connected him with his earlier life, and to sink once for all into the
small shop-keeper. It seemed to him that however low he might sink his
pain could not last much longer, for he should simply die if it did.

He hated Ellen now, and the pair lived in open want of harmony with
each other. If it had not been for his children, he would have left her
and gone to America, but he could not leave the children with Ellen,
and as for taking them with him he did not know how to do it, nor what
to do with them when he had got them to America. If he had not lost
energy he would probably in the end have taken the children and gone
off, but his nerve was shaken, so day after day went by and nothing was
done.

He had only got a few shillings in the world now, except the value of
his stock, which was very little; he could get perhaps £3 or £4 by
selling his music and what few pictures and pieces of furniture still
belonged to him. He thought of trying to live by his pen, but his
writing had dropped off long ago; he no longer had an idea in his head.
Look which way he would he saw no hope; the end, if it had not actually
come, was within easy distance and he was almost face to face with
actual want. When he saw people going about poorly clad, or even
without shoes and stockings, he wondered whether within a few months’
time he too should not have to go about in this way. The remorseless,
resistless hand of fate had caught him in its grip and was dragging him
down, down, down. Still he staggered on, going his daily rounds, buying
second-hand clothes, and spending his evenings in cleaning and mending
them.

One morning, as he was returning from a house at the West End where he
had bought some clothes from one of the servants, he was struck by a
small crowd which had gathered round a space that had been railed off
on the grass near one of the paths in the Green Park.

It was a lovely soft spring morning at the end of March, and unusually
balmy for the time of year; even Ernest’s melancholy was relieved for a
while by the look of spring that pervaded earth and sky; but it soon
returned, and smiling sadly he said to himself: “It may bring hope to
others, but for me there can be no hope henceforth.”

As these words were in his mind he joined the small crowd who were
gathered round the railings, and saw that they were looking at three
sheep with very small lambs only a day or two old, which had been
penned off for shelter and protection from the others that ranged the
park.

They were very pretty, and Londoners so seldom get a chance of seeing
lambs that it was no wonder every one stopped to look at them. Ernest
observed that no one seemed fonder of them than a great lubberly
butcher boy, who leaned up against the railings with a tray of meat
upon his shoulder. He was looking at this boy and smiling at the
grotesqueness of his admiration, when he became aware that he was being
watched intently by a man in coachman’s livery, who had also stopped to
admire the lambs, and was leaning against the opposite side of the
enclosure. Ernest knew him in a moment as John, his father’s old
coachman at Battersby, and went up to him at once.

“Why, Master Ernest,” said he, with his strong northern accent, “I was
thinking of you only this very morning,” and the pair shook hands
heartily. John was in an excellent place at the West End. He had done
very well, he said, ever since he had left Battersby, except for the
first year or two, and that, he said, with a screw of the face, had
well nigh broke him.

Ernest asked how this was.

“Why, you see,” said John, “I was always main fond of that lass Ellen,
whom you remember running after, Master Ernest, and giving your watch
to. I expect you haven’t forgotten that day, have you?” And here he
laughed. “I don’t know as I be the father of the child she carried away
with her from Battersby, but I very easily may have been. Anyhow, after
I had left your papa’s place a few days I wrote to Ellen to an address
we had agreed upon, and told her I would do what I ought to do, and so
I did, for I married her within a month afterwards. Why, Lord love the
man, whatever is the matter with him?”—for as he had spoken the last
few words of his story Ernest had turned white as a sheet, and was
leaning against the railings.

“John,” said my hero, gasping for breath, “are you sure of what you
say—are you quite sure you really married her?”

“Of course I am,” said John, “I married her before the registrar at
Letchbury on the 15th of August 1851.

“Give me your arm,” said Ernest, “and take me into Piccadilly, and put
me into a cab, and come with me at once, if you can spare time, to Mr
Overton’s at the Temple.”