Thomas Wingfold, Curate
MacDonald, George, 1824-1905
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of Thomas Wingfold, Curate
Charles Franks, Charles Aldarondo, and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.
THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE.
By George MacDonald, LL.D.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL I.
THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE.
CHAPTER I.
HELEN LINGARD.
A swift, gray November wind had taken every chimney of the house for
an organ-pipe, and was roaring in them all at once, quelling the
more distant and varied noises of the woods, which moaned and surged
like a sea. Helen Lingard had not been out all day. The morning,
indeed, had been fine, but she had been writing a long letter to her
brother Leopold at Cambridge, and had put off her walk in the
neighbouring park till after luncheon, and in the meantime the wind
had risen, and brought with it a haze that threatened rain. She was
in admirable health, had never had a day's illness in her life, was
hardly more afraid of getting wet than a young farmer, and enjoyed
wind, especially when she was on horseback. Yet as she stood looking
from her window, across a balcony where shivered more than one
autumnal plant that ought to have been removed a week ago, out upon
the old-fashioned garden and meadows beyond, where each lonely tree
bowed with drifting garments--I was going to say, like a suppliant,
but it was AWAY from its storming enemy--she did not feel inclined
to go out. That she was healthy was no reason why she should be
unimpressible, any more than that good temper should be a reason for
indifference to the behaviour of one's friend. She always felt
happier in a new dress, when it was made to her mind and fitted her
body; and when the sun shone she was lighter-hearted than when it
rained: I had written MERRIER, but Helen was seldom merry, and had
she been made aware of the fact, and questioned why, would have
answered--Because she so seldom saw reason.
She was what all her friends called a sensible girl; but, as I say,
that was no reason why she should be an insensible girl as well, and
be subject to none of the influences of the weather. She did feel
those influences, and therefore it was that she turned away from the
window with the sense, rather than the conviction, that the fireside
in her own room was rendered even, more attractive by the unfriendly
aspect of things outside and the roar in the chimney, which happily
was not accompanied by a change in the current of the smoke.
The hours between luncheon and tea are confessedly dull, but dulness
is not inimical to a certain kind of comfort, and Helen liked to be
that way comfortable. Nor had she ever yet been aware of self-rebuke
because of the liking. Let us see what kind and degree of comfort
she had in the course of an hour and a half attained. And in
discovering this I shall be able to present her to my reader with a
little more circumstance.
She sat before the fire in a rather masculine posture. I would not
willingly be rude, but the fact remains--a posture in which she
would not, I think, have sat for her photograph--leaning back in a
chintz-covered easy-chair, all the lines of direction about her
parallel with the lines of the chair, her arms lying on its arms,
and the fingers of each hand folded down over the end of each
arm--square, straight, right-angled,--gazing into the fire, with
something of the look of a sage, but one who has made no discovery.
She had just finished the novel of the day, and was suffering a mild
reaction--the milder, perhaps, that she was not altogether satisfied
with the consummation. For the heroine had, after much sorrow and
patient endurance, at length married a man whom she could not help
knowing to be not worth having. For the author even knew it, only
such was his reading of life, and such his theory of artistic duty,
that what it was a disappointment to Helen to peruse, it seemed to
have been a comfort to him to write. Indeed, her dissatisfaction
went so far that, although the fire kept burning away in perfect
content before her, enhanced by the bellowing complaint of the wind
in the chimney, she yet came nearer thinking than she had ever been
in her life. Now thinking, especially to one who tries it for the
first time, is seldom, or never, a quite comfortable operation, and
hence Helen was very near becoming actually uncomfortable. She was
even on the borders of making the unpleasant discovery that the
business of life--and that not only for North Pole expeditions,
Back