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                          CHAPTER XL


When Ernest got home and sneaked in through the back door, he
heard his father's voice in its angriest tones, enquiring whether
Master Ernest had already returned. He felt as Jack must have felt
in the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk, when from the oven in which
he was hidden he heard the ogre ask his wife what young children she
had got for his supper. With much courage, and, as the event proved,
with not less courage than discretion, he took the bull by the
horns, and announced himself at once as having just come in after
having met with a terrible misfortune. Little by little he told his
story, and though Theobald stormed somewhat at his "incredible folly
and carelessness he got off better than he expected. Theobald and
Christina had indeed at first been inclined to connect his absence
from dinner with Ellen's dismissal, but on finding it clear, as
Theobald said- everything was always clear with Theobald- that
Ernest had not been in the house all the morning, and could
therefore have known nothing of what had happened, he was acquitted on
this account for once in a way, without a stain upon his character.
Perhaps Theobald was in a good temper; he may have seen from the paper
that morning that his stocks had been rising; it may have been this or
twenty other things, but whatever it was, he did not scold so much
as Ernest had expected, and, seeing the boy look exhausted and
believing him to be much grieved at the loss of his watch, Theobald
actually prescribed a glass of wine after his dinner, which, strange
to say, did not choke him, but made him see things more cheerfully
than was usual with him.

That night when he said his prayers, he inserted a few paragraphs to
the effect that he might not be discovered, and that things might go
well with Ellen, but he was anxious and ill at ease. His guilty
conscience pointed out to him a score of weak places in his story,
through any one of which detection might even yet easily enter. Next
day and for many days afterwards he fled when no man was pursuing, and
trembled each time he heard his father's voice calling for him. He had
already so many causes of anxiety that he could stand little more, and
in spite of all his endeavours to look cheerful, even his mother could
see that something was preying upon his mind. Then the idea returned
to her that, after all, her son might not be innocent in the Ellen
matter- and this was so interesting that she felt bound to get as near
the truth as she could.

"Come here, my poor, pale-faced, heavy-eyed boy," she said to him
one day in her kindest manner; "come and sit down by me, and we will
have a little quiet confidential talk together, will we not?"

The boy went mechanically to the sofa. Whenever his mother wanted
what she called a confidential talk with him she always selected the
sofa as the most suitable ground on which to open her campaign. All
mothers do this; the sofa is to them what the dining-room is to
fathers. In the present case the sofa was particularly well adapted
for a strategic purpose, being an old-fashioned one with a high
back, mattress, bolsters and cushions. Once safely penned into one
of its deep corners, it was like a dentist's chair, not too easy to
get out of again. Here she could get at him better to pull him
about, if this should seem desirable, or if she thought fit to cry she
could bury her head in the sofa cushion and abandon herself to an
agony of grief which seldom failed of its effect. None of her
favourite manoeuvres were so easily adopted in her usual seat, the
armchair on the right hand side of the fireplace, and so well did
her son know from his mother's tone that this was going to be a sofa
conversation that he took his place like a lamb as soon as she began
to speak and before she could reach the sofa herself.

"My dearest boy," began his mother, taking hold of his hand and
placing it within her own, "promise me never to be afraid either of
your dear papa or of me; promise me this, my dear, as you love me,
promise it to me," and she kissed him again and again and stroked
his hair. But with her other hand she still kept hold of his; she
had got him and she meant to keep him.

The lad hung down his head and promised. What else could he do?

"You know there is no one, dear, dear Ernest, who loves you so
much as your papa and I do; no one who watches so carefully over
your interests or who is so anxious to enter into all your little joys
and troubles as we are; but, my dearest boy, it grieves me to think
sometimes that you have not that perfect love for and confidence in us
which you ought to have. You know, my darling, that it would be as
much our pleasure as our duty to watch over the development of your
moral and spiritual nature, but alas! you will not let us see your
moral and spiritual nature. At times we are almost inclined to doubt
whether you have a moral and spiritual nature at all. Of your inner
life, my dear, we know nothing beyond such scraps as we can glean in
spite of you, from little things which escape you almost before you
know that you have said them."

The boy winced at this. It made him feel hot and uncomfortable all
over. He knew well how careful he ought to be, and yet, do what he
could, from time to time his forgetfulness of the part betrayed him
into unreserve. His mother saw that he winced, and enjoyed the scratch
she had given him. Had she felt less confident of victory she had
better have foregone the pleasure of touching as it were the eyes at
the end of the snail's horns in order to enjoy seeing the snail draw
them in again- but she knew that when she had got him well down into
the sofa, and held his hand, she had the enemy almost absolutely at
her mercy, and could do pretty much what she liked.

"Papa does not feel," she continued, "that you love him with that
fulness and unreserve which would prompt you to have no concealment
from him, and to tell him everything freely and fearlessly as your
most loving earthly friend next only to your Heavenly Father.
Perfect love, as we know, casteth out fear: your father loves you
perfectly, my darling, but he does not feel as though you loved him
perfectly in return. If you fear him it is because you do not love him
as he deserves, and I know it sometimes cuts him to the very heart
to think that he has earned from you a deeper and more willing
sympathy than you display towards him. Oh, Ernest, Ernest, do not
grieve one who is so good and noble-hearted by conduct which I can
call by no other name than ingratitude."

Ernest could never stand being spoken to in this way by his
mother: for he still believed that she loved him, and that he was fond
of her and had a friend in her- up to a certain point. But his
mother was beginning to come to the end of her tether; she had
played the domestic confidence trick upon him times without number
already. Over and over again had she wheedled from him all she
wanted to know, and afterwards got him into the most horrible scrape
by telling the whole to Theobald. Ernest had remonstrated more than
once upon these occasions, and had pointed out to his mother how
disastrous to him his confidences had been, but Christina had always
joined issue with him and showed him in the clearest possible manner
that in each case she had been right, and that he could not reasonably
complain. Generally it was her conscience that forbade her to be
silent, and against this there was no appeal, for we are all bound
to follow the dictates of our conscience. Ernest used to have to
recite a hymn about conscience. It was to the effect that if you did
not pay attention to its voice it would soon leave off speaking. "My
mamma's conscience has not left off speaking," said Ernest to one of
his chums at Roughborough; "it's always jabbering."

When a boy has once spoken so disrespectfully as this about his
mother's conscience it is practically all over between him and her.
Ernest through sheer force of habit, of the sofa, and of the return of
the associated ideas, was still so moved by the siren's voice as to
yearn to sail towards her, and fling himself into her arms, but it
would not do; there were other associated ideas that returned also,
and the mangled bones of too many murdered confessions were lying
whitening round the skirts of his mother's dress, to allow him by
any possibility to trust her further. So he hung his head and looked
sheepish, but kept his own counsel.

"I see, my dearest," continued his mother, "either that I am
mistaken, and that there is nothing on your mind, or that you will not
unburden yourself to me: but oh, Ernest, tell me at least this much;
is there nothing that you repent of, nothing which makes you unhappy
in connection with that miserable girl Ellen?"

Ernest's heart failed him. "I am a dead boy now," he said to
himself. He had not the faintest conception what his mother was
driving at, and thought she suspected about the watch; but he held his
ground.

I do not believe he was much more of a coward than his neighbours,
only he did not know that all sensible people are cowards when they
are off their beat, or when they think they are going to be roughly
handled. I believe that if the truth were known, it would be found
that even the valiant St. Michael himself tried hard to shirk his
famous combat with the dragon; he pretended not to see all sorts of
misconduct on the dragon's part; shut his eyes to the eating up of I
do not know how many hundreds of men, women, and children whom he
had promised to protect; allowed himself to be publicly insulted a
dozen times over without resenting it; and in the end, when even an
angel could stand it no longer, he shillyshallied and temporised an
unconscionable time before he would fix the day and hour for the
encounter. As for the actual combat it was much such another
wurra-wurra as Mrs. Allaby had had with the young man who had in the
end married her eldest daughter, till after a time, behold, there
was the dragon lying dead, while he was himself alive and not very
seriously hurt after all.

"I do not know what you mean, mamma," exclaimed Ernest anxiously and
more or less hurriedly. His mother construed his manner into
indignation at being suspected, and being rather frightened herself
she turned tail and scuttled off as fast as her tongue could carry
her.

"Oh!" she said, "I see by your tone that you are innocent! Oh! oh!
how I thank my Heavenly Father for this; may He for His dear Son's
sake keep you always pure. Your father, my dear"- (here she spoke
hurriedly but gave him a searching look) "was as pure as a spotless
angel when he came to me. Like him, always be self-denying, truly
truthful both in word and deed, never forgetful whose son and grandson
you are, nor of the name we gave you, of the sacred stream in whose
waters your sins were washed out of you through the blood and blessing
of Christ," etc.

But Ernest cut this- I will not say short- but a great deal
shorter than it would have been if Christina had had her say out, by
extricating himself from his mamma's embrace and showing a clean
pair of heels. As he got near the purlieus of the kitchen (where he
was more at ease) he heard his father calling for his mother, and
again his guilty conscience rose against him. "He has found all out
now," it cried, "and he is going to tell mamma- this time I am done
for." But there was nothing in it; his father only wanted the key of
the cellaret. Then Ernest slunk off into a coppice or spinney behind
the Rectory paddock, and consoled himself with a pipe of tobacco. Here
in the wood with the summer sun streaming through the trees and a book
and his pipe the boy forgot his cares and had an interval of that rest
without which I verily believe his life would have been insupportable.

Of course, Ernest was made to look for his lost property, and a
reward was offered for it, but it seemed he had wandered a good deal
off the path, thinking to find a lark's nest, more than once, and
looking for a watch and purse on Battersby piewipes was very like
looking for a needle in a bundle of hay: besides it might have been
found and taken by some tramp, or by a magpie of which there were many
in the neighbourhood, so that after a week or ten days the search
was discontinued, and the unpleasant fact had to be faced that
Ernest must have another watch, another knife, and a small sum of
pocket-money.

It was only right, however, that Ernest should pay half the cost
of the watch; this should be made easy for him, for it should be
deducted from his pocket-money in half-yearly installments extending
over two, or even it might be three years. In Ernest's own
interests, then, as well as those of as well as those of his father
and mother, it would be well that the watch should cost as little as
possible, so it was resolved to buy a second-hand one. Nothing was
to be said to Ernest, but it was to be bought, and laid upon his plate
as a surprise just before the holidays were over. Theobald would
have to go to the county town in a few days, and could then find
some second-hand watch which would answer sufficiently well. In the
course of time, therefore, Theobald went, furnished with a long list
of household commissions, among which was the purchase of a watch
for Ernest.

Those, as I have said, were always happy times, when Theobald was
away for a whole day certain; the boy was beginning feel easy in his
mind as though God had heard his prayers, and he was not going to be
found out. Altogether the day had proved an unusually tranquil one,
but, alas! it was not to close as it had begun; the fickle
atmosphere in which he lived was never more likely to breed a storm
than after such an interval of brilliant calm, and when Theobald
returned Ernest had only to look in his face to see that a hurricane
was approaching.

Christina saw that something had gone very wrong, and was quite
frightened lest Theobald should have heard of some serious money loss;
he did not, however, at once unbosom himself, but rang the bell and
said to the servant, "Tell Master Ernest I wish to speak to him in the
dining-room."

                          CHAPTER XLI


LONG before Ernest reached the dining-room his ill-divining soul had
told him that his sin had found him out. What head of a family ever
sends for any of its members into the dining-room if his intentions
are honourable?

When he reached it he found it empty- his father having been
called away for a few minutes unexpectedly upon some parish
business- and he was left in the same kind of suspense as people are
in after they have been ushered into their dentist's ante-room.

Of all the rooms in the house he hated the dining-room worst. It was
here that he had had to do his Latin and Greek lessons with his
father. It had a smell of some particular kind of polish or varnish
which was used in polishing the furniture, and neither I nor Ernest
can even now come within range of the smell of this kind of varnish
without our hearts failing us.

Over the chimney-piece there was a veritable old master, one of
the few original pictures which Mr. George Pontifex had brought from
Italy. It was supposed to be a Salvator Rosa, and had been bought as a
great bargain. The subject was Elijah or Elisha (whichever it was)
being fed by the ravens in the desert. There were the ravens in the
upper right-hand corner with bread and meat in their beaks and
claws, and there was the prophet in question in the lower left-hand
corner looking longingly up towards them. When Ernest was a very small
boy it had been a constant matter of regret to him that the food which
the ravens carried never actually reached the prophet; he did not
understand the limitation of the painter's art, and wanted the meat
and the prophet to be brought into direct contact. One day, with the
help of some steps which had been left in the room, he had clambered
up to the picture and with a piece of bread and butter traced a greasy
line right across it from the ravens to Elisha's mouth, after which he
had felt more comfortable.

Ernest's mind was drifting back to this youthful escapade when he
heard his father's hand on the door, and in another second Theobald
entered.

"Oh, Ernest," said he, in an off-hand, rather cheery manner,
"there's a little matter which I should like you to explain to me,
as I have no doubt you very easily can." Thump, thump, thump, went
Ernest's heart against his ribs; but his father's manner was so much
nicer than usual that he began to think it might be after all only
another false alarm.

"It had occurred to your mother and myself that we should like to
set you up with a watch again before you went back to school" ("Oh,
that's all," said Ernest to himself, quite relieved), "and I have been
to-day to look out for a second-hand one which should answer every
purpose so long as you are at school."

Theobald spoke as if watches had half-a-dozen purposes besides
time-keeping, but he could hardly open his mouth without using one
or other of his tags, and "answering every purpose" was one of them.

Ernest was breaking out into the usual expressions of gratitude,
when Theobald continued, "You are interrupting me," and Ernest's heart
thumped again.

"You are interrupting me, Ernest. I have not yet done." Ernest was
instantly dumb.

"I passed several shops with second-hand watches for sale, but I saw
none of a description and price which pleased me, till at last I was
shown one which had, so the shopman said, been left with him
recently for sale, and which I at once recognised as the one which had
been given you by your Aunt Alethea. Even if I had failed to recognise
it, as perhaps I might have done, I should have identified it directly
it reached my hands, inasmuch as it had 'E.P., a present from A.P.'
engraved upon the inside. I need say no more to show that this was the
very watch which you told your mother and me that you had dropped
out of your pocket."

Up to this time Theobald's manner had been studiously calm, and
his words had been uttered slowly, but here he suddenly quickened
and flung off the mask as he added the words, "or some such cock and
bull story, which your mother and I were too truthful to disbelieve.
You can guess what must be our feelings now."

Ernest felt that this last home-thrust was just. In his less anxious
moments he had thought his papa and mamma "green" for the readiness
with which they believed him, but he could not deny that their
credulity was a proof of their habitual truthfulness of mind. In
common justice he must own that it was very dreadful for two such
truthful people to have a son as untruthful as he knew himself to be.

"Believing that a son of your mother and myself would be incapable
of falsehood I at once assumed that some tramp had picked the watch up
and was now trying to dispose of it."

This, to the best of my belief, was not accurate. Theobald's first
assumption had been that it was Ernest who was trying to sell the
watch, and it was an inspiration of the moment to say that his
magnanimous mind had at once conceived the idea of a tramp.

"You may imagine how shocked I was when I discovered that the
watch had been brought for sale by that miserable woman Ellen"- here
Ernest's heart hardened a little, and he felt as near an approach to
an instinct to turn as one so defenceless could be expected to feel;
his father quickly perceived this and continued, "who was turned out
of this house in circumstances which I will not pollute your ears by
more particularly describing.

"I put aside the horrid conviction which was beginning to dawn
upon me, and assumed that in the interval between her dismissal and
her leaving this house, she had added theft to her other sin, and
having found your watch in your bedroom had purloined it. It even
occurred to me that you might have missed your watch after the woman
was gone, and, suspecting who had taken it, had run after the carriage
in order to recover it; but when I told the shopman of my suspicions
he assured me that the person who left it with him had declared most
solemnly that it had been given her by her master's son, whose
property it was, and who had a perfect right to dispose of it.

"He told me further that, thinking the circumstances in which the
watch was offered for sale somewhat suspicious, he had insisted upon
the woman's telling him the whole story of how she came by it,
before he would consent to buy it of her.

"'He said that at first- as women of that stamp invariably do- she
tried prevarication, but on being threatened that she should at once
be given into custody if she did not tell the whole truth, she
described the way in which you had run after the carriage, till as she
said you were black in the face, and insisted on giving her all your
pocket-money, your knife, and your watch. She added that my coachman
John- whom I shall instantly discharge- was witness to the whole
transaction. Now, Ernest, be pleased to tell me whether this appalling
story is true or false?"

It never occurred to Ernest to ask his father why he did not hit a
man his own size, or to stop him midway in the story with a
remonstrance against being kicked when he was down. The boy was too
much shocked and shaken to be inventive; he could only drift and
stammer out that the tale was true.

"So I feared," said Theobald, "and now, Ernest, be good enough to
ring the bell."

When the bell had been answered, Theobald desired that John should
be sent for, and when John came Theobald calculated the wages due to
him and desired him at once to leave the house.

John's manner was quiet and respectful. He took his dismissal as a
matter of course, for Theobald had hinted enough to make him
understand why he was being discharged, but when he saw Ernest sitting
pale and awe-struck on the edge of his chair against the dining-room
wall, a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and turning to Theobald
he said in a broad northern accent which I will not attempt to
reproduce:

"Look here, master, I can guess what all this is about- now before I
goes I want to have a word with you."

"Ernest," said Theobald, "leave the room."

"No, Master Ernest, you shan't," said John, planting himself against
the door. "Now, master," he continued, "you may do as you please about
me. I've been a good servant to you, and I don't mean to say as you've
been a bad master to me, but I do say that if you bear hardly on
Master Ernest here I have those in the village as'll hear on't and let
me know; and if I do hear on't I'll come back and break every bone
in your skin, so there!"

John's breath came and went quickly, as though he would have been
well enough pleased to begin the bone-breaking business at once.
Theobald turned of an ashen colour- not, as he explained afterwards,
at the idle threats of a detected and angry ruffian, but at such
atrocious insolence from one of his own servants.

"I shall leave Master Ernest, John," he rejoined proudly, "to the
reproaches of his own conscience." ("Thank God and thank John,"
thought Ernest.) "As for yourself, I admit that you have been an
excellent servant until this unfortunate business came on, and I shall
have much pleasure in giving you a character if you want one. Have you
anything more to say?"

"No more nor what I have said," said John sullenly, "but what I've
said I means and I'll stick to- character or no character."

"Oh, you need not be afraid about your character, John," said
Theobald kindly, "and as it is getting late, there can be no
occasion for you to leave the house before to-morrow morning."

To this there was no reply from John, who retired, packed up his
things, and left the house at once.

When Christina heard what had happened she said she could condone
all except that Theobald should have been subjected to such
insolence from one of his own servants through the misconduct of his
son. Theobald was the bravest man in the whole world, and could easily
have collared the wretch and turned him out of the room, but how far
more dignified, how far nobler had been his reply! How it would tell
in a novel or upon the stage, for though the stage as a whole was
immoral, yet there were doubtless some plays which were improving
spectacles. She could fancy the whole house hushed with excitement
at hearing John's menace, and hardly breathing by reason of their
interest and expectation of the coming answer. Then the actor-
probably the great and good Mr. Macready- would say, "I shall leave
Master Ernest, John, to the reproaches of his own conscience." Oh,
it was sublime! What a roar of applause must follow! Then she should
enter herself, and fling her arms about her husband's neck, and call
him her lion-hearted husband. When the curtain dropped, it would be
buzzed about the house that the scene just witnessed had been drawn
from real life, and had actually occurred in the household of the Rev.
Theobald Pontifex, who had married a Miss Allaby, etc., etc.

As regards Ernest the suspicions which had already crossed her
mind were deepened, but she thought it better to leave the matter
where it was. At present she was in a very strong position. Ernest's
official purity was firmly established, but at the same time he had
shown himself so susceptible that she was able to fuse two
contradictory impressions concerning him into a single idea, and
consider him as a kind of Joseph and Don Juan in one. This was what
she had wanted all along, but her vanity being gratified by the
possession of such a son, there was an end of it; the son himself
was naught.

No doubt if John had not interfered, Ernest would have had to
expiate his offence with ache, penury, and imprisonment. As it was the
boy was "to consider himself" as undergoing these punishments, and
as suffering pangs of unavailing remorse inflicted on him by his
conscience into the bargain; but beyond the fact that Theobald kept
him more closely to his holiday task, and the continued coldness of
his parents, no ostensible punishment was meted out to him. Ernest,
however, tells me that he looks back upon this as the time when he
began to know that he had a cordial and active dislike for both his
parents, which I suppose means that he was now beginning to be aware
that he was reaching man's estate.

                          CHAPTER XLII


ABOUT a week before he went back to school his father again sent for
him into the dining-room, and told him that he should restore him
his watch, but that he should deduct the sum he had paid for it- for
he had thought it better to pay a few shillings rather than dispute
the ownership of the watch, seeing that Ernest had undoubtedly given
it to Ellen- from his pocket-money, in payments which should extend
over two half years. He would therefore have to go back to
Roughborough this half year with only five shillings' pocket-money. If
he wanted more he must earn more merit money.

Ernest was not so careful about money as a pattern boy should be. He
did not say to himself, "Now I have got a sovereign which must last me
fifteen weeks, therefore I may spend exactly one shilling and
fourpence in each week"- and spend exactly one and fourpence in each
week accordingly. He ran through his money at about the same rate as
other boys did, being pretty well cleaned out a few days after he
had got back to school. When he had no more money, he got a little
into debt, and when as far in debt as he could see his way to
repaying, he went without luxuries. Immediately he got any money he
would pay his debts; if there was any over he would spend it; if there
was not- and there seldom was- he would begin to go on tick again.

His finance was always based upon the supposition that he should
go back to school with L1 in his pocket- of which he owed say a matter
of fifteen shillings. There would be five shillings for sundry
school subscriptions- but when these cooks bills were paid the
weekly allowance of sixpence given to each boy in hall, his merit
money (which this half he was resolved should come to a good sum)
and renewed credit, would carry him through the half.

The sudden failure of 15/- was disastrous to my hero's scheme of
finance. His face betrayed his emotions so clearly that Theobald
said he was determined "to learn the truth at once, and this time
without days and days of falsehood" before he reached it. The
melancholy fact was not long in coming out, namely, that the
wretched Ernest added debt to the vices of idleness, falsehood, and
possibly -for it was not impossible -immorality.

How had he come to get into debt? Did the other boys do so? Ernest
reluctantly admitted that they did.

With what shops did they get into debt?

This was asking too much. Ernest said he didn't know!

"Oh, Ernest, Ernest," exclaimed his mother, who was in the room, "do
not so soon a second time presume upon the forbearance of the
tenderest-hearted father in the world. Give time for one stab to
heal before you wound him with another."

This was all very fine, but what was Ernest to do? How could he
get the school shopkeepers into trouble by owning that they let some
of the boys go on tick with them? There was Mrs. Cross, a good old
soul, who used to sell hot rolls and butter for breakfast, or eggs and
toast, or it might be the quarter of a fowl with bread sauce and
mashed potatoes for which she would charge 6d. If she made a
farthing out of the sixpence it was as much as she did. When the
boys would come trooping into her shop after "the hounds" how often
had not Ernest heard her say to her servant girls, "Now then, you
wanches, git some cheers." All the boys were fond of her, and was
he, Ernest, to tell tales about her? It was horrible.

"Now look here, Ernest," said his father with his blackest scowl, "I
am going to put a stop to this nonsense once for all. Either take me
fully into your confidence, as a son should take a father, and trust
me to deal with this matter as a clergyman and a man of the world-
or understand distinctly that I shall take the whole story to Dr.
Skinner, who, I imagine, will take much sterner measures than I
should."

"Oh, Ernest, Ernest," sobbed Christina, "be wise in time, and
trust those who have already shown you that they know but too well how
to be forbearing."

No genuine hero of romance should have hesitated for a moment.
Nothing should have cajoled or frightened him into telling tales out
of school. Ernest thought of his ideal boys: they, he well knew, would
have let their tongues be cut out of them before information could
have been wrung from any word of theirs. But Ernest was not an ideal
boy, and he was not strong enough for his surroundings; I doubt how
far any boy could withstand the moral pressure which was brought to
bear upon him; at any rate he could not do so, and after a little more
writhing he yielded himself a passive prey to the enemy. He consoled
himself with the reflection that his papa had not played the
confidence trick on him quite as often as his mamma had, and that
probably it was better he should tell his father, than that his father
should insist on Dr. Skinner's making an enquiry. His papa's
conscience "jabbered" a good deal, but not as much as his mamma's. The
little fool forgot that he had not given his father as many chances of
betraying him as he had to Christina.

Then it all came out. He owed this at Mrs. Cross's, and this to Mrs.
Jones, and this at the "Swan and Bottle" public house, to say
nothing of another shilling or sixpence or two in other quarters.
Nevertheless, Theobald and Christina were not satiated, but rather the
more they discovered the greater grew their appetite for discovery; it
was their obvious duty to find out everything, for though they might
rescue their own darling from this hotbed of iniquity without
getting to know more than they knew at present, were there not other
papas and mammas with darlings whom also they were bound to rescue
if it were yet possible? What boys, then, owed money to these
harpies as well as Ernest?

Here, again, there was a feeble show of resistance, but the
thumbscrews were instantly applied, and Ernest, demoralised as he
already was, recanted and submitted himself to the powers that were.
He told only a little less than he knew or thought he knew. He was
examined, re-examined, cross-examined, sent to the retirement of his
own bedroom and cross-examined again; the smoking in Mrs. Jones's
kitchen all came out; which boys smoked and which did not; which
boys owed money and, roughly, how much and where; which boys swore and
used bad language. Theobald was resolved that this time Ernest should,
as he called it, take him into his confidence without reserve, so
the school list which went with Dr. Skinner's half-yearly bills was
brought out, and the most secret character of each boy was gone
through seriatim by Mr. and Mrs. Pontifex, so far as it was in
Ernest's power to give information concerning it, and yet Theobald had
on the preceding Sunday preached a less feeble sermon than he commonly
preached, upon the horrors of the Inquisition. No matter how awful was
the depravity revealed to them, the pair never flinched, but probed
and probed, till they were on the point of reaching subjects more
delicate than they had yet touched upon. Here Ernest's unconscious
self took the matter up and made a resistance to which his conscious
self was unequal, by tumbling him off his chair in a fit of fainting.

Dr. Martin was sent for and pronounced the boy to be seriously
unwell; at the same time he prescribed absolute rest and absence
from nervous excitement. So the anxious parents were unwillingly
compelled to be content with what they had got already- being
frightened into leading him a quiet life for the short remainder of
the holidays. They were not idle, but Satan can find as much
mischief for busy hands as for idle ones, so he sent a little job in
the direction of Battersby which Theobald and Christina undertook
immediately. It would be a pity, they reasoned, that Ernest should
leave Roughborough, now that he had been there three years; it would
be difficult to find another school for him, and to explain why he had
left Roughborough. Besides, Dr. Skinner and Theobald were supposed
to be old friends, and it would be unpleasant to offend him; these
were all valid reasons for not removing the boy. The proper thing to
do then, would be to warn Dr. Skinner confidentially of the state of
his school, and to furnish him with a school list annotated with the
remarks extracted from Ernest, which should be appended to the name of
each boy.

Theobald was the perfection of neatness; while his son was ill
upstairs, he copied out the school list so that he could throw his
comments into a tabular form, which assumed the following shape
-only that of course I have changed the names. One cross in each
square was to indicate occasional offence; two stood for frequent, and
three for habitual delinquency.

                        Drinking      Swearing        Notes
                       Beer at the       and
           Smoking      "Swan and      Obsene
                         Bottle"      Language

 Smith.        O            O            XX          Will smoke
                                                     next half.
 Brown.       XXX           O             X
 Jones.        X           XX            XXX
 Robinson.    XX           XX             X

 And thus through the whole school.

Of course, in justice to Ernest, Dr. Skinner would be bound over
to secrecy before a word was said to him, but, Ernest being thus
protected, he could not be furnished with the facts too completely.

                          CHAPTER XLIII


SO important did Theobald consider this matter that he made a
special journey to Roughborough before the half year began. It was a
relief to have him out of the house, but though his destination was
not mentioned, Ernest guessed where he had gone.

To this day he considers his conduct at this crisis to have been one
of the most serious laches of his life- one which he can never think
of without shame and indignation. He says he ought to have run away
from home. But what good could he have done if he had? He would have
been caught, brought back and examined two days later instead of two
days earlier. A boy of barely sixteen cannot stand against the moral
pressure of a father and mother who have always oppressed him any more
than he can cope physically with a powerful full-grown man. True, he
may allow himself to be killed rather than yield, but this is being so
morbidly heroic as to come close round again to cowardice; for it is
little else than suicide, which is universally condemned as cowardly.

On the re-assembling of the school it became apparent that something
had gone wrong. Dr. Skinner called the boys together, and with much
pomp excommunicated Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Jones, by declaring their
shops to be out of bounds. The street in which the "Swan and Bottle"
stood was also forbidden. The vices of drinking and smoking,
therefore, were clearly aimed at, and before prayers Dr. Skinner spoke
a few impressive words about the abominable sin of using bad language.
Ernest's feelings can be imagined.

Next day at the hour when the daily punishments were read out,
though there had not yet been time for him to have offended, Ernest
Pontifex was declared to have incurred every punishment which the
school provided for evil-doers. He was placed on the idle list for the
whole half year, and on perpetual detentions; his bounds were
curtailed; he was to attend Junior callings-over; in fact he was so
hemmed in with punishments upon every side that it was hardly possible
for him to go outside the school gates. This unparalleled list of
punishments inflicted on the first day of the half year, and
intended to last till the ensuing Christmas holidays, was not
connected with any specified offence. It required no great
penetration, therefore, on the part of the boys to connect Ernest with
the putting Mrs. Cross's and Mrs. Jones's shops out of bounds.

Great indeed was the indignation about Mrs. Cross, who, it was
known, remembered Dr. Skinner himself as a small boy only just got
into jackets, and had doubtless let him have many a sausage and mashed
potatoes upon deferred payment. The head boys assembled in conclave to
consider what steps should be taken, but hardly had they done so
before Ernest knocked timidly at the headroom door and took the bull
by the horns by explaining the facts as far as he could bring
himself to do so. He made a clean breast of everything except about
the school list and the remarks he had made about each boy's
character. This infamy was more than he could own to, and he kept
his counsel concerning it. Fortunately he was safe in doing so, for
Dr. Skinner, pedant and more than pedant though he was, had just sense
enough to turn on Theobald in the matter of the school list. Whether
he resented being told that he did not know the characters of his
own boys, or whether he dreaded a scandal about the school I know not,
but when Theobald had handed him the list, over which he had
expended so much pains, Dr. Skinner had cut him uncommonly short,
and had then and there, with more suavity than was usual with him,
committed it to the flames before Theobald's own eyes.

Ernest got off with the head boys easier than he expected. It was
admitted that the offence, heinous though it was, had been committed
under extenuating circumstances; the frankness with which the
culprit had confessed all, his evidently unfeigned remorse, and the
fury with which Dr. Skinner was pursuing him tended to bring about a
reaction in his favour, as though he had been more sinned against than
 sinning.

As the half year wore on his spirits gradually revived, and when
attacked by one of his fits of self-abasement he was in some degree
consoled by having found out that even his father and mother, whom
he had supposed so immaculate, were no better than they should be.
About the fifth of November it was a school custom to meet on a
certain common not far from Roughborough and burn somebody in
effigy, this being the compromise arrived at in the matter of
fireworks and Guy Fawkes festivities. This year it was decided that
Pontifex's governor should be the victim, and Ernest, though a good
deal exercised in mind as to what he ought to do, in the end saw no
sufficient reason for holding aloof from proceedings which, as he
justly remarked, could not do his father any harm.

It so happened that the Bishop had held a confirmation at the school
on the fifth of November. Dr. Skinner had not quite liked the
selection of this day, but the Bishop was pressed by many engagements,
and had been compelled to make the arrangement as it then stood.
Ernest was among those who had to be confirmed, and was deeply
impressed with the solemn importance of the ceremony. When he felt the
huge old Bishop drawing down upon him as he knelt in chapel he could
hardly breathe, and when the apparition paused before him and laid its
hands upon his head he was frightened almost out of his wits. He
felt that he had arrived at one of the great turning points of his
life, and that the Ernest of the future could resemble only very
faintly the Ernest of the past.

This happened at about noon, but by the one o'clock dinner-hour
the effect of the confirmation had worn off, and he saw no reason
why he should forego his annual amusement with the bonfire; so he went
with the others and was very valiant till the image was actually
produced and was about to be burnt; then he felt a little
frightened. It was a poor thing enough, made of paper, calico and
straw, but they had christened it The Rev. Theobald Pontifex, and he
had a revulsion of feeling as he saw it being carried towards the
bonfire. Still he held his ground, and in a few minutes when all was
over felt none the worse for having assisted at a ceremony which,
after all, was prompted by a boyish love of mischief rather than by
rancour.

I should say that Ernest had written to his father, and told him
of the unprecedented way in which he was being treated; he even
ventured to suggest that Theobald should interfere for his
protection and reminded him how the story had been got out of him, but
Theobald had had enough of Dr. Skinner for the present; the burning of
the school list had been a rebuff which did not encourage which did
not encourage him to meddle a second time in the internal economics of
Roughborough. He therefore replied that he must either remove Ernest
from Roughborough altogether, which would for many reasons be
undesirable, or trust to the discretion of the head-master as
regards the treatment he might think best for any of his pupils.
Ernest said no more; he still felt that it was so discreditable to him
to have allowed any confession to be wrung from him, that he could not
press the promised amnesty for himself.

It was during the "Mother Cross row," as it was long styled among
the boys, that a remarkable phenomenon was witnessed at
Roughborough: I mean that of the head boys under certain conditions
doing errands for their juniors. The head boys had no bounds and could
go to Mrs. Cross's whenever they liked; they actually, therefore, made
themselves go-betweens, and would get anything from either Mrs.
Cross's or Mrs. Jones's for any boy, no matter how low in the
school, between the hours of a quarter to nine and nine in the
morning, and a quarter to six and six in the afternoon. By degrees,
however, the boys grew bolder, and the shops, though not openly
declared in bounds again, were tacitly allowed to be so.

                          CHAPTER XLIV


I MAY spare the reader more details about my hero's school days.
He rose, always in spite of himself, into the Doctor's form, and for
the last two years or so of his time was among the praepostors, though
he never rose into the upper half of them. He did little, and I
think the Doctor rather gave him up as a boy whom he had better
leave to himself, for he rarely made him construe, and he used to send
in his exercises or not, pretty much as he liked. His tacit,
unconscious obstinacy had in time effected more even than a few bold
sallies in the first instance would have done. To the end of his
career his position inter pares was what it had been at the beginning,
namely, among the upper part of the less reputable class- whether of
seniors or juniors-rather than among the lower part of the more
respectable.

Only once in the whole course of his school life did he get praise
from Dr. Skinner for any exercise, and this he has treasured as the
best example of guarded approval which he has ever seen. He had had to
write a copy of Alcaics on "The dogs of the monks of St. Bernard," and
when the exercise was returned to him he found the Doctor had
written on it: "In this copy of Alcaics- which is still excessively
bad- I fancy that I can discern some faint symptoms of improvement."
Ernest says that if the exercise was any better than usual it must
have been by a fluke, for he is sure that he always liked dogs,
especially St. Bernard dogs, far too much to take any pleasure in
writing Alcaics about them.

"As I look back upon it," he said to me but the other day, with a
hearty laugh, "I respect myself more for having never once got the
best mark for an exercise than I should do if I had got it every
time it could be got. I am glad nothing could make me do Latin and
Greek verses; I am glad Skinner could never get any moral influence
over me; I am glad I was idle at school, and I am glad my father
overtasked me as a boy- otherwise, likely enough I should have
acquiesced in the swindle, and might have written as good a copy of
Alcaics about the dogs of the monks of St. Bernard as my neighbours,
and yet I don't know, for I remember there was another boy, who sent
in a Latin copy of some sort, but for his own pleasure he wrote the
following--

     The dogs of the monks of St. Bernard go
     To pick little children out of the snow,
     And around their necks is the cordial gin
     Tied with a little bit of bob-bin.

I should like to have written that, and I did try, but I couldn't. I
didn't quite like the last line, and tried to mend it, but I
couldn't."

I fancied I could see traces of bitterness against the instructors
of his youth in Ernest's manner, and said something to this effect.

"Oh, no," he replied, still laughing, "no more than St. Anthony felt
towards the devils who had tempted him, when he met some of them
casually a hundred or a couple of hundred years afterwards. Of
course he knew they were devils, but that was all right enough;
there must be devils. St. Anthony probably liked these devils better
than most others, and for old acquaintance sake showed them as much
indulgence as was compatible with decorum.

"Besides, you know," he added, "St. Anthony tempted the devils quite
as much as they tempted him; for his peculiar sanctity was a greater
temptation to tempt him than they could stand. Strictly speaking, it
was the devils who were the more to be pitied, for they were led up by
St. Anthony to be tempted and fell, whereas St. Anthony did not
fall. I believe I was a disagreeable and unintelligible boy, and if
ever I meet Skinner there is no one whom I would shake hands with,
or do a good turn to more readily."

At home things went on rather better; the Ellen and Mother Cross
rows sank slowly down upon the horizon, and even at home he had
quieter times now that he had become a praepostor. Nevertheless the
watchful eye and protecting hand were still ever over him to guard his
comings in and his goings out, and to spy out all his ways. Is it
wonderful that the boy, though always trying to keep up appearances as
though he were cheerful and contented-and at times actually being
so- wore often an anxious, jaded look when he thought none were
looking, which told of an almost incessant conflict within?

Doubtless Theobald saw these looks and knew how to interpret them,
but it was his profession to know how to shut his eyes to things
that were inconvenient- no clergyman could keep his benefice for a
month if he could not do this; besides he had allowed himself for so
many years to say things he ought not to have said, and not to say the
things he ought to have said, that he was little likely to see
anything that he thought it more convenient not to see unless he was
made to do so.

It was not much that was wanted. To make no mysteries where Nature
has made none, to bring his conscience under some% like reasonable
control, to give Ernest his head a little more, to ask fewer
questions, and to give him pocket-money with a desire it should be
spent upon menus plaisirs....

"Call that not much indeed," laughed Ernest, as I read him what I
have just written. "Why, it is the whole duty of a father, but it is
the mystery-making which is the worst evil. If people, would dare to
speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less
sorrow in the world a hundred years hence."

To return, however, to Roughborough. On the day of his leaving, when
he was sent for into the library to be shaken hands with, he was
surprised to feel that, though assuredly glad to leave, he did not
do so with any especial grudge against the Doctor rankling in his
breast. He had come to the end of it all, and was still alive, nor,
take it all round, more seriously amiss than other people. Dr. Skinner
received him graciously, and was even frolicsome after his own heavy
fashion. Young people are almost always placable, and Ernest felt as
he went away that another such interview would not only have wiped off
all old scores, but have brought him round into the ranks of the
Doctor's admirers and supporters- among whom it is only fair to say
that the greater number of the more promising boys were found.

Just before saying good-bye the Doctor actually took down a volume
from those shelves which had seemed so awful six years previously, and
gave it to him after having written his name in it, and the words
Philias Kai Eunoias Charhin, which I believe means "with all kind
wishes from donor." The book was one written in Latin by a German
-Schomann: "De comitiis Atheniensibus"- not exactly light and cheerful
reading, but Ernest felt it was high time he got to understand the
Athenian constitution and manner of voting; he had got them up a great
many times already, but had forgotten them as fast as he had learned
them; now, however, that the Doctor had given him this book, he
would master the subject once for all. How strange it How strange it
was! I He wanted to remember these things very badly; he knew he
did, but he could never retain them; in spite of himself they no
sooner fell upon his mind than they fell off it again, he had such a
dreadful memory; whereas, if anyone played him a piece of music and
told him where it came from, he never forgot that, though he made no
effort to retain it, and was not even conscious of trying to
remember it at all. His mind must be badly formed and he was no good.

Having still a short time to spare, he got the keys of St. Michael's
church and went to have a farewell practice upon the organ, which he
could now play fairly well. He walked up and down the aisle for a
while in a meditative mood, and then, settling down to the organ,
played "They loathed to drink of the river" about six times over,
after which he felt more composed and happier; then, tearing himself
away from the instrument he loved so well, he hurried to the station.

As the train drew out he looked down from a high embankment onto the
little house his aunt had taken, and where it might be said she had
died through her desire to do him a kindness. There were the two
well-known bow windows, out of which he had often stepped to run
across the lawn into the workshop. He reproached himself with the
little gratitude he had shown towards this kind lady -the only one
of his relations whom he had ever felt as though he could have taken
into his confidence. Dearly as he loved her memory, he was glad she
had not known the scrapes he had got into since she died; perhaps
she might not have forgiven them- and how awful that would have
been! But then, if she had lived, perhaps many of his ills would
have been spared him. As he mused thus he grew sad again. Where,
where, he asked himself, was it all to end? Was it to be always sin,
shame, and sorrow in the future, as it had been in the past, and the
ever-watchful eye and protecting hand of his father laying burdens
on him greater than he could bear- or was he, too, some day or another
to come to feel that he was fairly well and happy?

There was a grey mist across the sun, so that the eye could bear its
light, and Ernest, while musing as above, was looking right into the
middle of the sun himself, as into the face of one whom he knew and
was fond of. At first his face was grave, but kindly, as of a tired
man who feels that a long task is over; but in a few seconds the
more humorous side of his misfortunes presented itself to him, and
he smiled half reproachfully, half merrily, as thinking how little all
that had happened to him really mattered, and how small were his
hardships as compared with those of most people. Still looking into
the eye of the sun and smiling dreamily, he thought how he had
helped to burn his father in effigy, and his look grew merrier, till
at last he broke out into a laugh. Exactly at this moment the light
veil of cloud parted from the sun, and he was brought to terra firma
by the breaking forth of the sunshine. On this he became aware that he
was being watched attentively by a fellow-traveller opposite to him,
an elderly gentleman with a large head and iron-grey hair.

"My young friend," said he, good-naturedly, "you really must not
carry on conversations with people in the sun, while you are in a
public railway carriage."

The old gentleman said not another word, but unfolded his Times
and began to read it. As for Ernest, he blushed crimson. The pair
did not speak during the rest of the time they were in the carriage,
but they eyed each other from time to time, so that the face of each
was impressed on the recollection of the other.

                          CHAPTER XLV


SOME people say that their school days were the happiest of their
lives. They may be right, but I always look with suspicion upon
those whom I hear saying this. It is hard enough to know whether one
is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative
happiness or unhappiness of different times of one's life; the
utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we
are not distinctly aware of being miserable. As I was talking with
Ernest one day not so long since about this, he said he was so happy
now that he was sure he had never been happier, and did not wish to be
so, but that Cambridge was the first place where he had ever been
consciously and continuously happy.

How can any boy fail to feel an ecstasy of pleasure on first finding
himself in rooms which he knows for the next few years are to be his
castle? Here he will not be compelled to turn out of the most
comfortable place as soon as he has ensconced himself in it because
papa or mamma happens to come into the room, and he should give it
up to them. The most cosy chair here is for himself, there is no one
even to share the room with him, or to interfere with his doing as
he likes in it- smoking included. Why, if such a room looked out
both back and front on to a blank dead wall it would still be a
paradise; how much more then when the view is of some quiet grassy
court or cloister or garden, as from the windows of the greater number
of rooms at Oxford and Cambridge.

Theobald, as an old fellow and tutor of Emmanuel- at which college
he had entered Ernest- was able to obtain from the present tutor a
certain preference in the choice of rooms; Ernest's, therefore, were
very pleasant ones, looking out upon the grassy court that is
bounded by the Fellows' gardens.

Theobald accompanied him to Cambridge, and was at his best while
doing so. He liked the jaunt, and even he was not without a certain
feeling of pride in having a full-blown son at the University. Some of
the reflected rays of this splendour were allowed to fall upon
Ernest himself. Theobald said he was "willing to hope"- this was one
of his tags- that his son would turn over a new leaf now that he had
left school, and for his own part he was "only too ready"- this was
another tag- to let bygones be bygones.

Ernest, not yet having his name on the books, was able to dine
with his father at the Fellows' table of one of the other colleges
on the invitation of an old friend of Theobald's; he there made
acquaintance with sundry of the good things of this life, the very
names of which were new to him, and felt as he ate them that he was
now indeed receiving a liberal education. When at length the time came
for him to go to Emmanuel, where he was to sleep in his new rooms, his
father came with him to the gates and saw him safe into college; a few
minutes more and he found himself alone in a room for which he had a
latchkey.

From this time he dated many days which, if not quite unclouded,
were upon the whole very happy ones. I need not, however, describe
them, as the life of a quiet, steady-going undergraduate has been told
in a score of novels better than I can tell it. Some of Ernest's
schoolfellows came up to Cambridge at the same time a. himself, and
with these he continued on friendly terms during the whole of his
college career. Other schoolfellows were only a year or two his
seniors; these called on him, and he thus made a sufficiently
favourable entree into college life. A straightforwardness of
character that was stamped upon his face, a love of humour, and a
temper which was more easily appeased than ruffled made up for some
awkwardness and want of savoir faire. He soon became a not unpopular
member of the best set of his year, and though neither capable of
becoming, nor aspiring to become, a leader, was admitted by the
leaders as among their nearer hangers-on.

Of ambition he had at that time not one particle; greatness, or
indeed superiority of any kind, seemed so far off and incomprehensible
to him that the idea of connecting it with himself never crossed his
mind. If he could escape the notice of all those with whom he did
not feel himself en rapport, he conceived that he had triumphed
sufficiently. He did not care about taking a good degree, except
that it must be good enough to keep his father and mother quiet. He
did not dream of being able to get a fellowship; if he had, he would
have tried hard to do so, for he became so fond of Cambridge that he
could not bear the thought of having to leave it; the briefness indeed
of the season during which his present happiness was to last was
almost the only thing that now seriously troubled him.

Having less to attend to in the matter of growing, and having got
his head more free, he took to reading fairly well- not because he
liked it, but because he was told he ought to do so, and his natural
instinct, like that of all very young men who are good for anything,
was to do as those in authority told him. The intention at Battersby
was (for Dr. Skinner had said that Ernest could never get a
fellowship) that he should take a sufficiently good degree to be
able to get a tutorship or mastership in some school preparatory to
taking orders. When he was twenty-one years old his money was to
come into his own hands, and the best thing he could do with it
would be to buy the next presentation to a living, the rector of which
was now old, and live on his mastership or tutorship till the living
fell in. He could buy a very good living for the sum which his
grandfather's legacy now amounted to, for Theobald had never had any
serious intention of making deductions for his son's maintenance and
education, and the money had accumulated till it was now about five
thousand pounds; he had only talked about making deductions in order
to stimulate the boy to exertion as far as possible, by making him
think that this was his only chance of escaping starvation- or perhaps
from pure love of teasing.

When Ernest had a living of L600 or L700 a year with a house, and
not too many parishioners- why, he might add to his income by taking
pupils, or even keeping a school, and then, say at thirty, he might
marry. It was not easy for Theobald to hit on any much more sensible
plan. He could not get Ernest into business, for he had no business
connections- besides he did not know what business meant; he had no
interest, again, at the Bar; medicine was a profession which subjected
its students to ordeals and temptations which these fond parents
shrank from on behalf of their boy; he would be thrown among
companions and familiarised with details which might sully him, and
though he might stand, it was "only too possible" that he would
fall. Besides, ordination was the road which Theobald knew and
understood, and indeed the only road about which he knew anything at
all, so not unnaturally it was the one he chose for Ernest.

The foregoing had been instilled into my hero from carliest boyhood,
much as it had been instilled into Theobald himself, and with the same
result- the conviction, namely, that he was certainly to be a
clergyman, but that it was a long way off yet, and he supposed it
was all right. As for the duty of reading hard, and taking as good a
degree as he could, this was plain enough, so he set himself to
work, as I have said, steadily, and to the surprise of everyone as
well as himself got a college scholarship, of no great value, but
still a scholarship, in his freshman's term. It is hardly necessary to
say that Theobald stuck to the whole of this money, believing the
pocket-money he allowed Ernest to be sufficient for him, and knowing
how dangerous it was for young men to have money at command. I do
not suppose it even occurred to him to try to remember what he had
felt when his father took a like course in regard to  himself.

Ernest's position in this respect was much what it had been at
school except that things were on a larger scale. His tutor's and
cook's bills were paid for him; his father sent him his wine; over and
above this he had L50 a year with which to keep himself in clothes and
all other expenses; this was about the usual thing at Emmanuel in
Ernest's day, though many had much less than this. Ernest did as he
had done at school- he spent what he could, soon after he received his
money; he then incurred a few modest liabilities, and then lived
penuriously till next term, when he would immediately pay his debts,
and start new ones to much the same extent as those which he had
just got rid of. When he came into his L5000 and became independent of
his father, L15 or L20 served to cover the whole of his unauthorised
expenditure.

He joined the boat club, and was constant in his attendance at the
boats. He still smoked, but never took more wine or beer than was good
for him, except perhaps on the occasion of a boating supper, but
even then he found the consequences unpleasant, and soon learned how
to keep within safe limits. He attended chapel as often as he was
compelled to do so; he communicated two or three times a year, because
his tutor told him he ought to; in fact he set himself to live soberly
and cleanly, as I imagine all his instincts prompted him to do, and
when he fell -as who that is born of woman can help sometimes doing?
-it was not till after a sharp tussle with a temptation that was
more than his flesh and blood could stand; then he was very penitent
and would go a fairly long while without sinning again; and this was
how it had always been with him since he had arrived at years of
indiscretion.

Even to the end of his career at Cambridge he was not aware that
he had it in him to do anything, but others had begun to see that he
was not wanting in ability and sometimes told him so. He did not
believe it; indeed he knew very well that if they thought him clever
they were being taken in, but it pleased him to have been able to take
them in, and he tried to do so still further; he was therefore a
good deal on the lookout for cants that he could catch and apply in
season, and might have done himself some mischief thus if he had not
been ready to throw over any cant as soon as he had come across
another more nearly to his fancy; his friends used to say that when he
rose he flew like a snipe, darting several times in various directions
before he settled down to a steady, straight flight, but when he had
once got into this he would keep to it.

                          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
resume 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, AEschylus, 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 AEschylus, 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
interested 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
Aristphanes 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
AEschylus that he may run down the other two with greater impunity.
For after all there is no such difference between AEschylus and his
successors as will render the former very good and the latter very
bad; and the thrusts at AEschylus 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 AEschylus of
being 'pomp-bundle-worded,' which I suppose means bombastic and
given to rodomontade, AEschylus 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 AEschylus 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 AEschylus, 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 AEschylus or only pretended to do so. It
must be remembered that the claims of AEschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides, to the foremost place amongst tragedians were held to be as
incontrovertible 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 the editor as to whether or not 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 notebook 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 L5000; it was
invested to bring in 5 per cent and gave him therefore an income of
L250 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 lie 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 commence. ment 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
awakening 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 confrerie, who had as little to glory in 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
examination 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 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
Simeonism 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 entree 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
meetings 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 Simeonites 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 pleasure 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 be 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 mather, "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
corning, 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 commanding powers, as to wish to make them
his own, and this may have had something to do with the rapidity and
completeness with which Christina 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
undergraduates. 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 mother 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 everyone 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
only was he ugly, dirty, ill-dressed, bumptious, and in every way
objectionable, but he was deformed and waddled when he walked so
that he had won a nickname 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 thinness 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
considerations 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
magical; 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
dumbfounded by it? I suppose partly because they had lately begun to
think more seriously, and were in a fit state to be impressed,
partly by the greater directness with which each felt himself
addressed, through the sermon being delivered in a room, and partly by
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 Badcock, 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 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 reproduction. 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 outre 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 and 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 embraced, 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 honour 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 Cambridge, 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 preposterous, 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 begun
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 himself 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 taken in by. The style of his dress was very High Church, and
his acquaintances 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
anyone 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
gentleman, 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'etre. 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
meddling with their own cases clearly enough, and go to a professional
adviser 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 students. 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 doubtless 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 while what I
believe most calculated to advance his glory- then, I say, not my
will, O Lord, but thine be done."

This was too much even for Ernest. "I heard of an Irishwoman
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, absolutely- 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 freethinker, 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, L5000, but we want at least L10,000, 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 Exchange; 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
comfortably, 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 situation, 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 entete 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
Rector, 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, 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 Godspeed. 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, 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 lookout, 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 L500. 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 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 L500 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 L500 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 his first his clear profit
of three or four hundred pounds go, and then the L500 loss, which he
thought he had recovered, slipped away by falls of a half and one at a
time, and then he lost L200 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 better 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 everyone knew better than himself, that he never ventured
to admit to himself that he might be all the while on a hopelessly
wrong track. 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
anyone, 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 Whitefield 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
Whitefield 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, every one 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
inexperienced 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
along 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 possible 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
disapprovingly 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
profession 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 Pryer 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 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.

Whom 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 onto his
own floor. His imagination translated every sound into a pat, pat,
pat, and once or twice he thought he had felt it dropping onto 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 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. However, 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 do 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
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
deplorable 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 cars 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 ft
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 him some bad news about his
speculations.