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Thomas Wingfold, Curate

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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,
African explorers, pyramid-inspectors, and such like, but for every
man and woman born into the blindness of the planet--is to discover;
after which discovery there is little more comfort to be had of the
sort with which Helen was chiefly conversant. But she escaped for
the time after a very simple and primitive fashion, although it was
indeed a narrow escape.

Let me not be misunderstood, however, and supposed to imply that
Helen was dull in faculty, or that she contributed nothing to the
bubbling of the intellectual pool in the social gatherings at
Glaston. Far from it. When I say that she came near thinking, I say
more for her than any but the few who know what thinking is will
understand, for that which chiefly distinguishes man from those he
calls the lower animals is the faculty he most rarely exercises.
True, Helen supposed she could think--like other people, because the
thoughts of other people had passed through her in tolerable plenty,
leaving many a phantom conclusion behind; but this was THEIR
thinking, not hers. She had thought no more than was necessary now
and then to the persuasion that she saw what a sentence meant, after
which, her acceptance or rejection of what was contained in it,
never more than lukewarm, depended solely upon its relation to what
she had somehow or other, she could seldom have told how, come to
regard as the proper style of opinion to hold upon things in
general.

The social matrix which up to this time had ministered to her
development, had some relations with Mayfair, it is true, but scanty
ones indeed with the universe; so that her present condition was
like that of the common bees, every one of which Nature fits for a
queen, but its nurses, prevent from growing one by providing for it
a cell too narrow for the unrolling of royalty, and supplying it
with food not potent enough for the nurture of the ideal--with this
difference, however, that the cramped and stinted thing comes out,
if no queen, then a working bee, and Helen, who might be both, was
neither yet. If I were at liberty to mention the books on her table,
it would give a few of my readers no small help towards the settling
of her position in the "valued file" of the young women of her
generation; but there are reasons against it.

She was the daughter of an officer, who, her mother dying when she
was born, committed her to the care of a widowed aunt, and almost
immediately left for India, where he rose to high rank, and somehow
or other amassed a considerable fortune, partly through his marriage
with a Hindoo lady, by whom he had one child, a boy some three years
younger than Helen. When he died, he left his fortune equally
divided between the two children.

Helen was now three-and-twenty, and her own mistress. Her appearance
suggested Norwegian blood, for she was tall, blue-eyed, and
dark-haired--but fair-skinned, with regular features, and an over
still-some who did not like her said hard--expression of
countenance. No one had ever called her NELLY; yet she had long
remained a girl, lingering on the broken borderland after several of
her school companions had become young matrons. Her drawing-master,
a man of some observation and insight, used to say Miss Lingard
would wake up somewhere about forty.

The cause of her so nearly touching the borders of thought this
afternoon, was, that she became suddenly aware of feeling bored. Now
Helen was even seldomer bored than merry, and this time she saw no
reason for it, neither had any person to lay the blame upon. She
might have said it was the weather, but the weather had never done
it before. Nor could it be want of society, for George Bascombe was
to dine with them. So was the curate, but he did not count for much.
Neither was she weary of herself. That, indeed, might be only a
question of time, for the most complete egotist, Julius Caesar, or
Napoleon Bonaparte, must at length get weary of his paltry self; but
Helen, from the slow rate of her expansion, was not old enough yet.
Nor was she in any special sense wrapt up in herself: it was only
that she had never yet broken the shell which continues to shut in
so many human chickens, long after they imagine themselves citizens
of the real world.

Being somewhat bored then, and dimly aware that to be bored was out
of harmony with something or other, Helen was on the verge of
thinking, but, as I have said, escaped the snare in a very direct
and simple fashion: she went fast asleep, and never woke till her
maid brought her the cup of kitchen-tea from which the inmates of
some houses derive the strength to prepare for dinner.






CHAPTER II.

THOMAS WINGFOLD.





The morning, whose afternoon was thus stormy, had been fine, and the
curate went out for a walk. Had it been just as stormy, however, he
would have gone all the same. Not that he was a great walker, or,
indeed, fond of exercise of any sort, and his walking, as an
Irishman might say, was half sitting--on stiles and stones and
fallen trees. He was not in bad health, he was not lazy, or given to
self-preservation, but he had little impulse to activity of any
sort. The springs in his well of life did not seem to flow quite
fast enough.

He strolled through Osterfield park, and down the deep descent to
the river, where, chilly as it was, he seated himself upon a large
stone on the bank, and knew that he was there, and that he had to
answer to Thomas Wingfold; but why he was there, and why he was not
called something else, he did not know. On each side of the stream
rose a steeply-sloping bank, on which grew many fern-bushes, now
half withered, and the sunlight upon them, this November morning,
seemed as cold as the wind that blew about their golden and green
fronds. Over a rocky bottom the stream went--talking rather than
singing--down the valley towards the town, where it seemed to linger
a moment to embrace the old abbey church, before it set out on its
leisurely slide through the low level to the sea. Its talk was
chilly, and its ripples, which came half from the obstructions in
its channel below, and half from the wind that ruffled it above,
were not smiles, but wrinkles rather--even in the sunshine. Thomas
felt cold himself, but the cold was of the sort that comes from the
look rather than the feel of things. He did not, however, much care
how he felt--not enough, certainly, to have made him put on a
great-coat: he was not deeply interested in himself. With his stick,
a very ordinary bit of oak, he kept knocking pebbles into the water,
and listlessly watching them splash. The wind blew, the sun shone,
the water ran, the ferns waved, the clouds went drifting over his
head, but he never looked up, or took any notice of the doings of
Mother Nature at her house-work: everything seemed to him to be
doing only what it had got to do, because it had got it to do, and
not because it cared about it, or had any end in doing it. For he,
like every other man, could read nature only by his own lamp, and
this was very much how he had hitherto responded to the demands made
upon him.

His life had not been a very interesting one, although early
passages in it had been painful. He had done fairly well at Oxford:
it had been expected of him, and he had answered expectation; he had
not distinguished himself, nor cared to do so. He had known from the
first that he was intended for the church, and had not objected, but
received it as his destiny--had even, in dim obedience, kept before
his mental vision the necessity of yielding to the heights and
hollows of the mould into which he was being thrust. But he had
taken no great interest in the matter.

The church was to him an ancient institution of such approved
respectability that it was able to communicate it, possessing
emoluments, and requiring observances. He had entered her service;
she was his mistress, and in return for the narrow shelter, humble
fare, and not quite too shabby garments she allotted him, he would
perform her hests--in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the
house for ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had
never dreamed of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of
its unattainable remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life
or his position in it, taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind
of acceptance, and laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even
bare suffering. He had a certain dull prejudice in favour of
honesty, would not have told the shadow of a lie to be made
Archbishop of Canterbury, and yet was so uninstructed in the things
that constitute practical honesty that some of his opinions would
have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked reading the prayers,
for the making of them vocal in the church was pleasant to him, and
he had a not unmusical voice. He visited the sick--with some
repugnance, it is true, but without delay, and spoke to them such
religious commonplaces as occurred to him, depending mainly on the
prayers belonging to their condition for the right performance of
his office. He never thought about being a gentleman, but always
behaved like one.

I suspect that at this time there lay somewhere in his mind, keeping
generally well out of sight however, that is, below the skin of his
consciousness, the unacknowledged feeling that he had been hardly
dealt with. But at no time, even when it rose plainest, would he
have dared to add--by Providence. Had the temptation come, he would
have banished it and the feeling together.

He did not read much, browsed over his newspaper at breakfast with a
polite curiosity, sufficient to season the loneliness of his slice
of fried bacon, and took more interest in some of the naval
intelligence than in anything else. Indeed it would have been
difficult for himself even to say in what he did take a large
interest. When leisure awoke a question as to how he should employ
it, he would generally take up his Horace and read aloud one of his
more mournful odes--with such attention to the rhythm, I must add,
as, although plentiful enough among scholars in respect of the dead
letter, is rarely found with them in respect of the living vocal
utterance.

Nor had he now sat long upon his stone, heedless of the world's
preparations for winter, before he began repeating to himself the
poet's Æquam memento rebus in arduis, which he had been trying much,
but with small success, to reproduce in similar English cadences,
moved thereto in part by the success of Tennyson in his O
mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies--a thing as yet alone in the
language, so far as I know. It was perhaps a little strange that the
curate should draw the strength of which he was most conscious from
the pages of a poet whose hereafter was chiefly servicable to him--
in virtue of its unsubstantiality and poverty, the dreamlike
thinness of its reality--in enhancing the pleasures of the world of
sun and air, cooling shade and songful streams, the world of wine
and jest, of forms that melted more slowly from encircling arms, and
eyes that did not so swiftly fade and vanish in the distance. Yet
when one reflects but for a moment on the poverty-stricken
expectations of Christians from their hereafter, I cease to wonder
at Wingfold; for human sympathy is lovely and pleasant, and if a
Christian priest and a pagan poet feel much in the same tone
concerning the affairs of a universe, why should they not comfort
each other by sitting down together in the dust?

"No hair it boots thee whether from Inachus
Ancient descended, or, of the poorest born,
Thy being drags, all bare and roofless--
Victim the same to the heartless Orcus.

All are on one road driven; for each of us
The urn is tossed, and, later or earlier,
The lot will drop and all be sentenced
Into the boat of eternal exile."

Having thus far succeeded with these two stanzas, Wingfold rose, a
little pleased with himself, and climbed the bank above him, wading
through mingled sun and wind and ferns--so careless of their
shivering beauty and their coming exile, that a watcher might have
said the prospect of one day leaving behind him the shows of this
upper world could have no part in the curate's sympathy with Horace.






CHAPTER III.

THE DINERS.





Mrs. Ramshorn, Helen's aunt, was past the middle age of woman; had
been handsome and pleasing, had long ceased to be either; had but
sparingly recognised the fact, yet had recognised it, and felt
aggrieved. Hence in part it was that her mouth had gathered that
peevish and wronged expression which tends to produce a moral nausea
in the beholder. If she had but known how much uglier in the eyes of
her fellow-mortals her own discontent made her, than the severest
operation of the laws of mortal decay could have done, she might
have tried to think less of her wrongs and more of her privileges.
As it was, her own face wronged her own heart, which was still
womanly, and capable of much pity--seldom exercised. Her husband
had been dean of Halystone, a man of insufficient weight of
character to have the right influence in the formation of his
wife's. He had left her tolerably comfortable as to circumstances,
but childless. She loved Helen, whose even imperturbability had by
mere weight, as it might seem, gained such a power over her that she
was really mistress in the house without either of them knowing it.

Naturally desirous of keeping Helen's fortune in the family, and
having, as I say, no son of her own, she had yet not far to look to
find a cousin capable, as she might well imagine, of rendering
himself acceptable to the heiress. He was the son of her younger
sister, married, like herself, to a dignitary of the Church, a canon
of a northern cathedral. This youth, therefore, Greorge Bascombe by
name, whose visible calling at present was to eat his way to the
bar, she often invited to Glaston; and on this Friday afternoon he
was on his way from London to spend the Saturday and Sunday with the
two ladies. The cousins liked each other, had not had more of each
other's society than was favourable to their aunt's designs, who was
far too prudent to have made as yet any reference to them, and stood
altogether in as suitable a relative position for falling in love
with each other as Mrs. Ramshorn could well have desired. Her chief,
almost her only uneasiness, arose from the important and but too
evident fact, that Helen Lingard was not a girl of the sort to fall
readily in love. That, however, was of no consequence, provided it
did not come in the way of marrying her cousin, who, her aunt felt
confident, was better fitted to rouse her dormant affections than
any other youth she had ever seen, or was ever likely to see. Upon
this occasion she had asked Thomas Wingfold to meet him, partly with
the design that he should act as a foil to her nephew, partly in
order to do her duty by the church, to which she felt herself belong
not as a lay member, but in some undefined professional capacity, in
virtue of her departed dean. Wingfold had but lately come to the
parish, and, as he was merely curate, she had not been in haste to
invite him. On the other hand, he was the only clergyman officiating
in the abbey church, which was grand and old, with a miserable
living and a non-resident rector. He, to do him justice, paid nearly
the amount of the tithes in salary to his curate, and spent the rest
on the church material, of which, for certain reasons, he retained
the incumbency, the presentation to which belonged to his own
family.

The curate presented himself at the dinner-hour in Mrs. Ramshorn's
drawing-room, looking like any other gentleman, satisfied with his
share in the administration of things, and affecting nothing of the
professional either in dress, manner, or tone. Helen saw him for the
first time in private life, and, as she had expected, saw nothing
remarkable--a man who looked about thirty, was a little over the
middle height, and well enough constructed as men go, had a good
forehead, a questionable nose, clear grey eyes, long, mobile,
sensitive mouth, large chin, pale complexion, and straight black
hair, and might have been a lawyer just as well as a clergyman. A
keener, that is, a more interested eye than hers, might have
discovered traces of suffering in the forms of the wrinkles which,
as he talked, would now and then flit like ripples over his
forehead; but Helen's eyes seldom did more than slip over the faces
presented to her; and had it been otherwise, who could be expected
to pay much regard to Thomas Wingfold when George Bascombe was
present? There, indeed, stood a man by the corner of the
mantelpiece!--tall and handsome as an Apollo, and strong as the
young Hercules, dressed in the top of the plainest fashion,
self-satisfied, but not offensively so, good-natured, ready to
smile, as clean in conscience, apparently, and as large in sympathy,
as his shirt-front. Everybody who knew him, counted George Bascombe
a genuine good fellow, and George himself knew little to the
contrary, while Helen knew nothing.

One who had only chanced to get a glimpse of her in her own room, as
in imagination my reader has done, would hardly have recognised her
again in the drawing-room. For in her own room she was but as she
appeared to herself in her mirror--dull, inanimate; but in the
drawing-room her reflection from living eyes and presences served to
stir up what waking life was in her. When she spoke, her face dawned
with a clear, although not warm light; and although it must be owned
that when it was at rest, the same over-stillness, amounting almost
to dulness, the same seeming immobility, ruled as before, yet, even
when she was not speaking, the rest was often broken by a smile--a
genuine one, for although there was much that was stiff, there was
nothing artificial about Helen. Neither was there much of the
artificial about her cousin; for his good-nature, and his smile, and
whatever else appeared upon him, were all genuine enough--the only
thing in this respect not quite satisfactory to the morally
fastidious man being his tone in speaking. Whether he had caught it
at the university, or amongst his father's clerical friends, or in
the professional society he now frequented, I cannot tell, but it
had been manufactured somewhere--after a large, scrolly kind of
pattern, sounding well-bred and dignified. I wonder how many speak
with the voices that really belong to them.

Plainly, to judge from the one Bascombe used, he was accustomed to
lay down the law, but in gentlemanly fashion, and not as if he cared
a bit about the thing in question himself. By the side of his easy
carriage, his broad chest, and towering Greek-shaped head, Thomas
Wingfold dwindled almost to vanishing--in a word, looked nobody. And
besides his inferiority in size and self-presentment, he had a
slight hesitation of manner, which seemed to anticipate, if not to
court, the subordinate position which most men, and most women too,
were ready to assign him. He said, "Don't you think?" far oftener
than "I think" and was always more ready to fix his attention upon
the strong points of an opponent's argument than to re-assert his
own in slightly altered phrase like most men, or even in fresh forms
like a few; hence--self-assertion, either modestly worn like a shirt
of fine chain-armour, or gaunt and obtrusive like plates of steel,
being the strength of the ordinary man--what could the curate appear
but defenceless, therefore weak, and therefore contemptible? The
truth is, he had less self-conceit than a mortal's usual share, and
was not yet possessed of any opinions interesting enough to himself
to seem worth defending with any approach to vivacity.

Bascombe and he bowed in response to their introduction with proper
indifference, after a moment's solemn pause exchanged a sentence or
two which resembled an exercise in the proper use of a foreign
language, and then gave what attention Englishmen are capable of
before dinner to the two ladies--the elder of whom, I may just
mention, was dressed in black velvet with heavy Venetian lace, and
the younger in black silk, with old Honiton. Neither of them did
much towards enlivening the conversation. Mrs. Ramshorn, whose
dinner had as yet gained in interest with her years, sat peevishly
longing for its arrival, but cast every now and then a look of mild
satisfaction upon her nephew, which, however, while it made her eyes
sweeter, did not much alter the expression of her mouth. Helen
improved, as she fancied, the arrangement of a few green-house
flowers in an ugly vase on the table.

At length the butler appeared, the curate took Mrs. Ramshorn, and
the cousins followed--making, in the judgment of the butler as he
stood in the hall, and the housekeeper as she peeped from the
baise-covered door that led to the still-room, as handsome a couple
as mortal eyes need wish to see. They looked nearly of an age, the
lady the more stately, the gentleman the more graceful, or, perhaps
rather, ELEGANT, of the two.

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