CHAPTER II.
THOMAS WINGFOLD.
The morning, whose afternoon was thus stormy, had been fine, and the
curate went out for a walk. Had it been just as stormy, however, he
would have gone all the same. Not that he was a great walker, or,
indeed, fond of exercise of any sort, and his walking, as an
Irishman might say, was half sitting--on stiles and stones and
fallen trees. He was not in bad health, he was not lazy, or given to
self-preservation, but he had little impulse to activity of any
sort. The springs in his well of life did not seem to flow quite
fast enough.
He strolled through Osterfield park, and down the deep descent to
the river, where, chilly as it was, he seated himself upon a large
stone on the bank, and knew that he was there, and that he had to
answer to Thomas Wingfold; but why he was there, and why he was not
called something else, he did not know. On each side of the stream
rose a steeply-sloping bank, on which grew many fern-bushes, now
half withered, and the sunlight upon them, this November morning,
seemed as cold as the wind that blew about their golden and green
fronds. Over a rocky bottom the stream went--talking rather than
singing--down the valley towards the town, where it seemed to linger
a moment to embrace the old abbey church, before it set out on its
leisurely slide through the low level to the sea. Its talk was
chilly, and its ripples, which came half from the obstructions in
its channel below, and half from the wind that ruffled it above,
were not smiles, but wrinkles rather--even in the sunshine. Thomas
felt cold himself, but the cold was of the sort that comes from the
look rather than the feel of things. He did not, however, much care
how he felt--not enough, certainly, to have made him put on a
great-coat: he was not deeply interested in himself. With his stick,
a very ordinary bit of oak, he kept knocking pebbles into the water,
and listlessly watching them splash. The wind blew, the sun shone,
the water ran, the ferns waved, the clouds went drifting over his
head, but he never looked up, or took any notice of the doings of
Mother Nature at her house-work: everything seemed to him to be
doing only what it had got to do, because it had got it to do, and
not because it cared about it, or had any end in doing it. For he,
like every other man, could read nature only by his own lamp, and
this was very much how he had hitherto responded to the demands made
upon him.
His life had not been a very interesting one, although early
passages in it had been painful. He had done fairly well at Oxford:
it had been expected of him, and he had answered expectation; he had
not distinguished himself, nor cared to do so. He had known from the
first that he was intended for the church, and had not objected, but
received it as his destiny--had even, in dim obedience, kept before
his mental vision the necessity of yielding to the heights and
hollows of the mould into which he was being thrust. But he had
taken no great interest in the matter.
The church was to him an ancient institution of such approved
respectability that it was able to communicate it, possessing
emoluments, and requiring observances. He had entered her service;
she was his mistress, and in return for the narrow shelter, humble
fare, and not quite too shabby garments she allotted him, he would
perform her hests--in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the
house for ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had
never dreamed of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of
its unattainable remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life
or his position in it, taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind
of acceptance, and laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even
bare suffering. He had a certain dull prejudice in favour of
honesty, would not have told the shadow of a lie to be made
Archbishop of Canterbury, and yet was so uninstructed in the things
that constitute practical honesty that some of his opinions would
have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked reading the prayers,
for the making of them vocal in the church was pleasant to him, and
he had a not unmusical voice. He visited the sick--with some
repugnance, it is true, but without delay, and spoke to them such
religious commonplaces as occurred to him, depending mainly on the
prayers belonging to their condition for the right performance of
his office. He never thought about being a gentleman, but always
behaved like one.
I suspect that at this time there lay somewhere in his mind, keeping
generally well out of sight however, that is, below the skin of his
consciousness, the unacknowledged feeling that he had been hardly
dealt with. But at no time, even when it rose plainest, would he
have dared to add--by Providence. Had the temptation come, he would
have banished it and the feeling together.
He did not read much, browsed over his newspaper at breakfast with a
polite curiosity, sufficient to season the loneliness of his slice
of fried bacon, and took more interest in some of the naval
intelligence than in anything else. Indeed it would have been
difficult for himself even to say in what he did take a large
interest. When leisure awoke a question as to how he should employ
it, he would generally take up his Horace and read aloud one of his
more mournful odes--with such attention to the rhythm, I must add,
as, although plentiful enough among scholars in respect of the dead
letter, is rarely found with them in respect of the living vocal
utterance.
Nor had he now sat long upon his stone, heedless of the world's
preparations for winter, before he began repeating to himself the
poet's Æquam memento rebus in arduis, which he had been trying much,
but with small success, to reproduce in similar English cadences,
moved thereto in part by the success of Tennyson in his O
mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies--a thing as yet alone in the
language, so far as I know. It was perhaps a little strange that the
curate should draw the strength of which he was most conscious from
the pages of a poet whose hereafter was chiefly servicable to him--
in virtue of its unsubstantiality and poverty, the dreamlike
thinness of its reality--in enhancing the pleasures of the world of
sun and air, cooling shade and songful streams, the world of wine
and jest, of forms that melted more slowly from encircling arms, and
eyes that did not so swiftly fade and vanish in the distance. Yet
when one reflects but for a moment on the poverty-stricken
expectations of Christians from their hereafter, I cease to wonder
at Wingfold; for human sympathy is lovely and pleasant, and if a
Christian priest and a pagan poet feel much in the same tone
concerning the affairs of a universe, why should they not comfort
each other by sitting down together in the dust?
"No hair it boots thee whether from Inachus
Ancient descended, or, of the poorest born,
Thy being drags, all bare and roofless--
Victim the same to the heartless Orcus.
All are on one road driven; for each of us
The urn is tossed, and, later or earlier,
The lot will drop and all be sentenced
Into the boat of eternal exile."
Having thus far succeeded with these two stanzas, Wingfold rose, a
little pleased with himself, and climbed the bank above him, wading
through mingled sun and wind and ferns--so careless of their
shivering beauty and their coming exile, that a watcher might have
said the prospect of one day leaving behind him the shows of this
upper world could have no part in the curate's sympathy with Horace.
