Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
MacDonald, George, 1824-1905
English
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THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE.
By George MacDonald, LL.D.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL III.
CHAPTER I.
AFTER THE SERMON.
As the sermon drew to a close, and the mist of his emotion began to
disperse, individual faces of his audience again dawned out on the
preacher's ken. Mr. Drew's head was down. As I have always said,
certain things he had been taught in his youth, and had practised in
his manhood, certain mean ways counted honest enough in the trade,
had become to him, regarded from the ideal point of the divine in
merchandize--such a merchandize, namely, as the share the son of man
might have taken in buying and selling, had his reputed father been
a shop-keeper instead of a carpenter--absolutely hateful, and the
memory of them intolerable. Nor did it relieve him much to remind
himself of the fact, that he knew not to the full the nature of the
advantages he took, for he knew that he had known them such as
shrunk from the light, not coming thereto to be made manifest. He
was now doing his best to banish them from his business, and yet
they were a painful presence to his spirit--so grievous to be borne,
that the prospect held out by the preacher of an absolute and final
deliverance from them by the indwelling presence of the God of all
living men and true merchants, was a blessedness unspeakable. Small
was the suspicion in the Abbey Church of Olaston that morning, that
the well-known successful man of business was weeping. Who could
once have imagined another reason for the laying of that round,
good-humoured, contented face down on the book-board, than pure
drowsiness from lack of work-day interest! Yet there was a human
soul crying out after its birthright. Oh, to be clean as a
mountain-river! clean as the air above the clouds, or on the middle
seas! as the throbbing aether that fills the gulf betwixt star and
star!--nay, as the thought of the Son of Man himself, who, to make
all things new and clean, stood up against the old battery of
sin-sprung suffering, withstanding and enduring and stilling the
recoil of the awful force wherewith his Father had launched the
worlds, and given birth to human souls with wills that might become
free as his own!
While Wingfold had been speaking in general terms, with the race in
his mind's, and the congregation in his body's eye, he had yet
thought more of one soul, with its one crime and its intolerable
burden, than all the rest: Leopold was ever present to him, and
while he strove to avoid absorption in a personal interest however
justifiable, it was of necessity that the thought of the most
burdened sinner he knew should colour the whole of his utterance. At
times indeed he felt as if he were speaking to him immediately--and
to him only; at others, although then he saw her no more than him,
that he was comforting the sister individually, in holding out to
her brother the mighty hope of a restored purity. And when once more
his mind could receive the messages brought home by his eyes, he saw
upon Helen's face the red sunset of a rapt listening. True it was
already fading away, but the eyes had wept, the glow yet hung about
cheek and forehead, and the firm mouth had forgotten itself into a
tremulous form, which the stillness of absorption had there for the
moment fixed.
But even already, although he could not yet read it upon her
countenance, a snake had begun to lift its head from the chaotic
swamp which runs a creek at least into every soul, the rudimentary
desolation, a remnant of the time when the world was without form
and void. And the snake said: "Why, then, did he not speak like that
to my Leopold? Why did he not comfort him with such a good hope,
well-becoming a priest of the gentle Jesus? Or, if he fancied he
must speak of confession, why did he not speak of it in plain honest
terms, instead of suggesting the idea of it so that the poor boy
imagined it came from his own spirit, and must therefore be obeyed
as the will of God?"
So said the snake, and by the time Helen had walked home with her
aunt, the glow had sunk from her soul, and a gray wintry mist had
settled down upon her spirit. And she said to herself that if this
last hope in George should fail her, she would not allow the matter
to trouble her any farther; she was a free woman, and as Leopold had
chosen other counsellors, had thus declared her unworthy of
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