‘You see the whole question turns on your Protestant deification of the intellect. . . . If you really believed, as you all say you do, that the nature of man, and therefore his intellect among the rest, was utterly corrupt, you would not be so superstitiously careful to tell the truth . . . as you call it; because you would know that man’s heart, if not his head, would needs turn the truth into a lie by its own corruption. . . . The proper use of reasoning is to produce opinion,—and if the subject in which you wish to produce the opinion is diseased, you must adapt the medicine accordingly.’
To all which Lancelot, with several strong curses, scrawled the following answer:—
‘And this is my Cousin Luke!—Well, I shall believe henceforward that there is, after all, a thousand times greater moral gulf fixed between Popery and Tractarianism, than between Tractarianism and the extremest Protestantism. My dear fellow,—I won’t bother you, by cutting up your charming ambiguous middle terms, which make reason and reasoning identical, or your theory that the office of reasoning is to induce opinions—(the devil take opinions, right or wrong—I want facts, faith in real facts!)—or about deifying the intellect—as if all sound intellect was not in itself divine light—a revelation to man of absolute laws independent of him, as the very heathens hold. But this I will do—thank you most sincerely for the compliment you pay us Cismontane heretics. We do retain some dim belief in a God—even I am beginning to believe in believing in Him. And therefore, as I begin to suppose, it is, that we reverence facts, as the work of God, His acted words and will, which we dare not falsify; which we believe will tell their own story better than we can tell it for them. If our eyes are dimmed, we think it safer to clear them, which do belong to us, than to bedevil, by the light of those very already dimmed eyes, the objects round, which do not belong to us. Whether we are consistent or not about the corruptness of man, we are about the incorruptness of God; and therefore about that of the facts by which God teaches men: and believe, and will continue to believe, that the blackest of all sins, the deepest of all Atheisms, that which, above all things, proves no faith in God’s government of the universe, no sense of His presence, no understanding of His character, is—a lie.
‘One word more—Unless you tell your father within twenty-four hours after receiving this letter, I will. And I, being a Protestant (if cursing Popery means Protestantism), mean what I say.’
As Lancelot walked up to the Priory that morning, the Reverend Panurgus O’Blareaway dashed out of a cottage by the roadside, and seized him unceremoniously by the shoulders. He was a specimen of humanity which Lancelot could not help at once liking and despising; a quaint mixture of conceit and earnestness, uniting the shrewdness of a stockjobber with the frolic of a schoolboy broke loose. He was rector of a place in the west of Ireland, containing some ten Protestants and some thousand Papists. Being, unfortunately for himself, a red-hot Orangeman, he had thought fit to quarrel with the priest, in consequence of which he found himself deprived both of tithes and congregation; and after receiving three or four Rockite letters, and a charge of slugs through his hat (of which he always talked as if being shot at was the most pleasant and amusing feature of Irish life), he repaired to England, and there, after trying to set up as popular preacher in London, declaiming at Exeter Hall, and writing for all the third-rate magazines, found himself incumbent of Lower Whitford. He worked there, as he said himself, ‘like a horse;’ spent his mornings in the schools, his afternoons in the cottages; preached four or five extempore sermons every week to overflowing congregations; took the lead, by virtue of the ‘gift of the gab,’ at all ‘religious’ meetings for ten miles round; and really did a great deal of good in his way. He had an unblushing candour about his own worldly ambition, with a tremendous brogue; and prided himself on exaggerating deliberately both of these excellences.
‘The top of the morning to ye, Mr. Smith. Ye haven’t such a thing as a cegar about ye? I’ve been preaching to school-children till me throat’s as dry as the slave of a lime-burner’s coat.’
‘I am very sorry; but, really, I have left my case at home.’
‘Oh! ah! faix and I forgot. Ye mustn’t be smokin’ the nasty things going up to the castle. Och, Mr. Smith, but you’re the lucky man!’
‘I am much obliged to you for the compliment,’ said Lancelot, gruffly; ‘but really I don’t see how I deserve it.’
‘Desarve it! Sure luck’s all, and that’s your luck, and not your deserts at all. To have the handsomest girl in the county dying for love of ye’—(Panurgus had a happy knack of blurting out truths—when they were pleasant ones). ‘And she just the beautifulest creature that ever spilte shoe-leather, barring Lady Philandria Mountflunkey, of Castle Mountflunkey, Quane’s County, that shall be nameless.’
‘Upon my word, O’Blareaway, you seem to be better acquainted with my matters than I am. Don’t you think, on the whole, it might be better to mind your own business?’
‘Me own business! Poker o’ Moses! and ain’t it me own business? Haven’t ye spilte my tenderest hopes? And good luck to ye in that same, for ye’re as pretty a rider as ever kicked coping-stones out of a wall; and poor Paddy loves a sportsman by nature. Och! but ye’ve got a hand of trumps this time. Didn’t I mate the vicar the other day, and spake my mind to him?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Lancelot, with a strong expletive.
‘Faix, I told him he might as well Faugh a ballagh—make a rid road, and get out of that, with his bowings and his crossings, and his Popery made asy for small minds, for there was a gun a-field that would wipe his eye,—maning yourself, ye Prathestant.’
‘All I can say is, that you had really better mind your own business, and I’ll mind my own.’
‘Och,’ said the good-natured Irishman, ‘and it’s you must mind my business, and I’ll mind yours; and that’s all fair and aqual. Ye’ve cut me out intirely at the Priory, ye Tory, and so ye’re bound to give me a lift somehow. Couldn’t ye look me out a fine fat widow, with an illigant little fortune? For what’s England made for except to find poor Paddy a wife and money? Ah, ye may laugh, but I’d buy me a chapel at the West-end: me talents are thrown away here intirely, wasting me swateness on the desert air, as Tom Moore says’ (Panurgus used to attribute all quotations whatsoever to Irish geniuses); ‘and I flatter meself I’m the boy to shute the Gospel to the aristocracy.’
Lancelot burst into a roar of laughter, and escaped over the next gate: but the Irishman’s coarse hints stuck by him as they were intended to do. ‘Dying for the love of me!’ He knew it was an impudent exaggeration, but, somehow, it gave him confidence; ‘there is no smoke,’ he thought, ‘without fire.’ And his heart beat high with new hopes, for which he laughed at himself all the while. It was just the cordial which he needed. That conversation determined the history of his life.
He met Argemone that morning in the library, as usual; but he soon found that she was not thinking of Homer. She was moody and abstracted; and he could not help at last saying,—
‘I am afraid I and my classics are de trop this morning, Miss Lavington.’
‘Oh, no, no. Never that.’ She turned away her head. He fancied that it was to hide a tear.
Suddenly she rose, and turned to him with a clear, calm, gentle gaze.
‘Listen to me, Mr. Smith. We must part to-day, and for ever. This intimacy has gone on—too long, I am afraid, for your happiness. And now, like all pleasant things in this miserable world, it must cease. I cannot tell you why; but you will trust me. I thank you for it—I thank God for it. I have learnt things from it which I shall never forget. I have learnt, at least from it, to esteem and honour you. You have vast powers. Nothing, nothing, I believe, is too high for you to attempt and succeed. But we must part; and now, God be with you. Oh, that you would but believe that these glorious talents are His loan! That you would but be a true and loyal knight to him who said—“Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls!”—Ay,’ she went on, more and more passionately, for she felt that not she, but One mightier than herself was speaking through her, ‘then you might be great indeed. Then I might watch your name from afar, rising higher and higher daily in the ranks of God’s own heroes. I see it—and you have taught me to see it—that you are meant for a faith nobler and deeper than all doctrines and systems can give. You must become the philosopher, who can discover new truths—the artist who can embody them in new forms, while poor I—And that is another reason why we should part.—Hush! hear me out. I must not be a clog, to drag you down in your course. Take this, and farewell; and remember that you once had a friend called Argemone.’
She put into his hands a little Bible. He took it, and laid it down on the table.
For a minute he stood silent and rooted to the spot. Disappointment, shame, rage, hatred, all boiled up madly within him. The bitterest insults rose to his lips—‘Flirt, cold-hearted pedant, fanatic!’ but they sank again unspoken, as he looked into the celestial azure of those eyes, calm and pure as a soft evening sky. A mighty struggle between good and evil shook his heart to the roots; and, for the first time in his life, his soul breathed out one real prayer, that God would help him now or never to play the man. And in a moment the darkness passed; a new spirit called out all the latent strength within him; and gently and proudly he answered her,—
‘Yes, I will go. I have had mad dreams, conceited and insolent, and have met with my deserts. Brute and fool as I am, I have aspired even to you! And I have gained, in the sunshine of your condescension, strength and purity.—Is not that enough for me? And now I will show you that I love you—by obeying you. You tell me to depart—I go for ever.’
He turned away. Why did she almost spring after him?
‘Lancelot! one word! Do not misunderstand me, as I know you will. You will think me so cold, heartless, fickle.—Oh, you do not know—you never can know—how much I, too, have felt!’
He stopped, spell-bound. In an instant his conversation with the Irishman flashed up before him with new force and meaning. A thousand petty incidents, which he had driven contemptuously from his mind, returned as triumphant evidences; and, with an impetuous determination, he cried out,—
‘I see—I see it all, Argemone! We love each other! You are mine, never to be parted!’
What was her womanhood, that it could stand against the energy of his manly will! The almost coarse simplicity of his words silenced her with a delicious violence. She could only bury her face in her hands and sob out,—
‘Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot, whither are you forcing me?’
‘I am forcing you no whither. God, the Father of spirits, is leading you! You, who believe in Him, how dare you fight against Him?’
‘Lancelot, I cannot—I cannot listen to you—read that!’ And she handed him the vicar’s letter. He read it, tossed it on the carpet, and crushed it with his heel.
‘Wretched pedant! Can your intellect be deluded by such barefaced sophistries? “God’s will,” forsooth! And if your mother’s opposition is not a sign that God’s will—if it mean anything except your own will, or that—that man’s—is against this mad project, and not for it, what sign would you have? So “celibacy is the highest state!” And why? Because “it is the safest and the easiest road to heaven?” A pretty reason, vicar! I should have thought that that was a sign of a lower state and not a higher. Noble spirits show their nobleness by daring the most difficult paths. And even if marriage was but one weed-field of temptations, as these miserable pedants say, who have either never tried it, or misused it to their own shame, it would be a greater deed to conquer its temptations than to flee from them in cowardly longings after ease and safety!’
She did not answer him, but kept her face buried in her hands.
‘Again, I say, Argemone, will you fight against Fate—Providence—God—call it what you will? Who made us meet at the chapel? Who made me, by my accident, a guest in your father’s house! Who put it into your heart to care for my poor soul? Who gave us this strange attraction towards each other, in spite of our unlikeness? Wonderful that the very chain of circumstances which you seem to fancy the offspring of chance or the devil, should have first taught me to believe that there is a God who guides us! Argemone! speak, tell me, if you will, to go for ever; but tell me first the truth—You love me!’
A strong shudder ran through her frame—the ice of artificial years cracked, and the clear stream of her woman’s nature welled up to the light, as pure as when she first lay on her mother’s bosom: she lifted up her eyes, and with one long look of passionate tenderness she faltered out,—
‘I love you!’
He did not stir, but watched her with clasped hands, like one who in dreams finds himself in some fairy palace, and fears that a movement may break the spell.
‘Now, go,’ she said; ‘go, and let me collect my thoughts. All this has been too much for me. Do not look sad—you may come again to-morrow.’
She smiled and held out her hand. He caught it, covered it with kisses, and pressed it to his heart. She half drew it back, frightened. The sensation was new to her. Again the delicious feeling of being utterly in his power came over her, and she left her hand upon his heart, and blushed as she felt its passionate throbbings.
He turned to go—not as before. She followed with greedy eyes her new-found treasure; and as the door closed behind him, she felt as if Lancelot was the whole world, and there was nothing beside him, and wondered how a moment had made him all in all to her; and then she sank upon her knees, and folded her hands upon her bosom, and her prayers for him were like the prayers of a little child.
CHAPTER XI: THUNDERSTORM THE FIRST
But what had become of the ‘bit of writing’ which Harry Verney, by the instigation of his evil genius, had put into the squire’s fly-book? Tregarva had waited in terrible suspense for many weeks, expecting the explosion which he knew must follow its discovery. He had confided to Lancelot the contents of the paper, and Lancelot had tried many stratagems to get possession of it, but all in vain. Tregarva took this as calmly as he did everything else. Only once, on the morning of the éclaircissement between Lancelot and Argemone, he talked to Lancelot of leaving his place, and going out to seek his fortune; but some spell, which he did not explain, seemed to chain him to the Priory. Lancelot thought it was the want of money, and offered to lend him ten pounds whenever he liked; but Tregarva shook his head.
‘You have treated me, sir, as no one else has done—like a man and a friend; but I am not going to make a market of your generosity. I will owe no man anything, save to love one another.’
‘But how do you intend to live?’ asked Lancelot, as they stood together in the cloisters.
‘There’s enough of me, sir, to make a good navigator if all trades fail.’
‘Nonsense! you must not throw yourself away so.’
‘Oh, sir, there’s good to be done, believe me, among those poor fellows. They wander up and down the land like hogs and heathens, and no one tells them that they have a soul to be saved. Not one parson in a thousand gives a thought to them. They can manage old folks and little children, sir, but, somehow, they never can get hold of the young men—just those who want them most. There’s a talk about ragged schools, now. Why don’t they try ragged churches, sir, and a ragged service?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why, sir, the parsons are ready enough to save souls, but it must be only according to rule and regulation. Before the Gospel can be preached there must be three thousand pounds got together for a church, and a thousand for an endowment, not to mention the thousand pounds that the clergyman’s education costs: I don’t think of his own keep, sir; that’s little enough, often; and those that work hardest get least pay, it seems to me. But after all that expense, when they’ve built the church, it’s the tradesmen, and the gentry, and the old folk that fill it, and the working men never come near it from one year’s end to another.’
‘What’s the cause, do you think?’ asked Lancelot, who had himself remarked the same thing more than once.
‘Half of the reason, sir, I do believe, is that same Prayer-book. Not that the Prayer-book ain’t a fine book enough, and a true one; but, don’t you see, sir, to understand the virtue of it, the poor fellows ought to be already just what you want to make them.’
‘You mean that they ought to be thorough Christians already, to appreciate the spirituality of the liturgy.’
‘You’ve hit it, sir. And see what comes of the present plan; how a navvy drops into a church by accident, and there he has to sit like a fish out of water, through that hour’s service, staring or sleeping, before he can hear a word that he understands; and, sir, when the sermon does come at last, it’s not many of them can make much out of those fine book-words and long sentences. Why don’t they have a short simple service, now and then, that might catch the ears of the roughs and the blowens, without tiring out the poor thoughtless creatures’ patience, as they do now?’
‘Because,’ said Lancelot,—‘because—I really don’t know why.—But I think there is a simpler plan than even a ragged service.’
‘What, then, sir?’
‘Field-preaching. If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, let Mahomet go to the mountain.’
‘Right, sir; right you are. “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in.” And why are they to speak to them only one by one? Why not by the dozen and the hundred? We Wesleyans know, sir,—for the matter of that, every soldier knows,—what virtue there is in getting a lot of men together; how good and evil spread like wildfire through a crowd; and one man, if you can stir him up, will become leaven to leaven the whole lump. Oh why, sir, are they so afraid of field-preaching? Was not their Master and mine the prince of all field-preachers? Think, if the Apostles had waited to collect subscriptions for a church before they spoke to the poor heathens, where should we have been now?’
Lancelot could not but agree. But at that moment a footman came up, and, with a face half laughing, half terrified, said,—
‘Tregarva, master wants you in the study. And please, sir, I think you had better go in too; master knows you’re here, and you might speak a word for good, for he’s raging like a mad bull.’
‘I knew it would come at last,’ said Tregarva, quietly, as he followed Lancelot into the house.
It had come at last. The squire was sitting in his study, purple with rage, while his daughters were trying vainly to pacify him. All the men-servants, grooms, and helpers, were drawn up in line along the wall, and greeted Tregarva, whom they all heartily liked, with sly and sorrowful looks of warning,
‘Here, you sir; you—, look at this! Is this the way you repay me? I, who have kept you out of the workhouse, treated you like my own child? And then to go and write filthy, rascally, Radical ballads on me and mine! This comes of your Methodism, you canting, sneaking hypocrite!—you viper—you adder—you snake—you—!’ And the squire, whose vocabulary was not large, at a loss for another synonym, rounded off his oration by a torrent of oaths; at which Argemone, taking Honoria’s hand, walked proudly out of the room, with one glance at Lancelot of mingled shame and love. ‘This is your handwriting, you villain! you know it’ (and the squire tossed the fatal paper across the table); ‘though I suppose you’ll lie about it. How can you depend on fellows who speak evil of their betters? But all the servants are ready to swear it’s your handwriting.’
‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ interposed the old butler, ‘we didn’t quite say that; but we’ll all swear it isn’t ours.’
‘The paper is mine,’ said Tregarva.
‘Confound your coolness! He’s no more ashamed of it than—Read it out, Smith, read it out every word; and let them all hear how this pauper, this ballad-singing vagabond, whom I have bred up to insult me, dares to abuse his own master.’
‘I have not abused you, sir,’ answered Tregarva. ‘I will be heard, sir!’ he went on in a voice which made the old man start from his seat and clench his fist but he sat down again. ‘Not a word in it is meant for you. You have been a kind and a good master to me. Ask where you will if I was ever heard to say a word against you. I would have cut off my right hand sooner than write about you or yours. But what I had to say about others lies there, and I am not ashamed of it.’
‘Not against me? Read it out, Smith, and see if every word of it don’t hit at me, and at my daughters, too, by—, worst of all! Read it out, I say!’
Lancelot hesitated; but the squire, who was utterly beside himself, began to swear at him also, as masters of hounds are privileged to do; and Lancelot, to whom the whole scene was becoming every moment more and more intensely ludicrous, thought it best to take up the paper and begin:—
‘A ROUGH RHYME ON A ROUGH MATTER
‘The merry brown hares came leaping
Over the crest of the hill,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
Under the moonlight still.
‘Leaping late and early,
Till under their bite and their tread
The swedes, and the wheat, and the barley,
Lay cankered, and trampled, and dead.
‘A poacher’s widow sat sighing
On the side of the white chalk bank,
Where under the gloomy fir-woods
One spot in the ley throve rank.
‘She watched a long tuft of clover,
Where rabbit or hare never ran;
For its black sour haulm covered over
The blood of a murdered man.
‘She thought of the dark plantation,
And the hares and her husband’s blood,
And the voice of her indignation
Rose up to the throne of God.
‘“I am long past wailing and whining—
I have wept too much in my life:
I’ve had twenty years of pining
As an English labourer’s wife.
‘“A labourer in Christian England,
Where they cant of a Saviour’s name,
And yet waste men’s lives like the vermin’s
For a few more brace of game.
‘“There’s blood on your new foreign shrubs, squire;
There’s blood on your pointer’s feet;
There’s blood on the game you sell, squire,
And there’s blood on the game you eat!”’
‘You villain!’ interposed the squire, ‘when did I ever sell a head of game?’
‘“You have sold the labouring man, squire,
Body and soul to shame,
To pay for your seat in the House, squire,
And to pay for the feed of your game.
“‘You made him a poacher yourself, squire,
When you’d give neither work nor meat;
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving children’s feet;
‘“When packed in one reeking chamber,
Man, maid, mother, and little ones lay;
While the rain pattered in on the rotting bride-bed,
And the walls let in the day;
‘“When we lay in the burning fever
On the mud of the cold clay floor,
Till you parted us all for three months, squire,
At the cursed workhouse door.
“‘We quarrelled like brutes, and who wonders?
What self-respect could we keep,
Worse housed than your hacks and your pointers,
Worse fed than your hogs and your sheep?”’
‘And yet he has the impudence to say he don’t mean me!’ grumbled the old man. Tregarva winced a good deal—as if he knew what was coming next; and then looked up relieved when he found Lancelot had omitted a stanza—which I shall not omit.
‘“Our daughters with base-born babies
Have wandered away in their shame;
If your misses had slept, squire, where they did,
Your misses might do the same.
“‘Can your lady patch hearts that are breaking
With handfuls of coals and rice,
Or by dealing out flannel and sheeting
A little below cost price?
“‘You may tire of the gaol and the workhouse,
And take to allotments and schools,
But you’ve run up a debt that will never
Be repaid us by penny-club rules.
‘“In the season of shame and sadness,
In the dark and dreary day
When scrofula, gout, and madness,
Are eating your race away;
“‘When to kennels and liveried varlets
You have cast your daughters’ bread;
And worn out with liquor and harlots,
Your heir at your feet lies dead;
“‘When your youngest, the mealy-mouthed rector,
Lets your soul rot asleep to the grave,
You will find in your God the protector
Of the freeman you fancied your slave.”
‘She looked at the tuft of clover,
And wept till her heart grew light;
And at last, when her passion was over,
Went wandering into the night.
‘But the merry brown hares came leaping
Over the uplands still,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
On the side of the white chalk hill.’
‘Surely, sir,’ said Lancelot, ‘you cannot suppose that this latter part applies to you. or your family?’
‘If it don’t, it applies to half the gentlemen in the vale, and that’s just as bad. What right has the fellow to speak evil of dignities?’ continued he, quoting the only text in the Bible which he was inclined to make a ‘rule absolute.’ ‘What does such an insolent dog deserve? What don’t he deserve, I say?’
‘I think,’ quoth Lancelot, ambiguously, ‘that a man who can write such ballads is not fit to be your gamekeeper, and I think he feels so himself;’ and Lancelot stole an encouraging look at Tregarva.
‘And I say, sir,’ the keeper answered, with an effort, ‘that I leave Mr. Lavington’s service here on the spot, once and for all.’
‘And that you may do, my fine fellow!’ roared the squire. ‘Pay the rascal his wages, steward, and then duck him soundly in the weir-pool. He had better have stayed there when he fell in last.’
‘So I had, indeed, I think. But I’ll take none of your money. The day Harry Verney was buried I vowed that I’d touch no more of the wages of blood. I’m going, sir; I never harmed you, or meant a hard word of all this for you, or dreamt that you or any living soul would ever see it. But what I’ve seen myself, in spite of myself, I’ve set down here, and am not ashamed of it. And woe,’ he went on with an almost prophetic solemnity in his tone and gesture—‘woe to those who do these things! and woe to those also who, though they dare not do them themselves, yet excuse and defend them who dare, just because the world calls them gentlemen, and not tyrants and oppressors.’
He turned to go. The squire, bursting with passion, sprang up with a terrible oath, turned deadly pale, staggered, and dropped senseless on the floor.
They all rushed to lift him up. Tregarva was the first to take him in his arms and place him tenderly in his chair, where he lay back with glassy eyes, snoring heavily in a fit of apoplexy.
‘Go; for God’s sake, go,’ whispered Lancelot to the keeper, ‘and wait for me at Lower Whitford. I must see you before you stir.’
The keeper slipped away sadly. The ladies rushed in—a groom galloped off for the doctor—met him luckily in the village, and, in a few minutes, the squire was bled and put to bed, and showed hopeful signs of returning consciousness. And as Argemone and Lancelot leant together over his pillow, her hair touched her lover’s, and her fragrant breath was warm upon his cheek; and her bright eyes met his and drank light from them, like glittering planets gazing at their sun.
The obnoxious ballad produced the most opposite effects on Argemone and on Honoria. Argemone, whose reverence for the formalities and the respectabilities of society, never very great, had, of late, utterly vanished before Lancelot’s bad counsel, could think of it only as a work of art, and conceived the most romantic longing to raise Tregarva into some station where his talents might have free play. To Honoria, on the other hand, it appeared only as a very fierce, coarse, and impertinent satire, which had nearly killed her father. True, there was not a thought in it which had not at some time or other crossed her own mind; but that made her dislike all the more to see those thoughts put into plain English. That very intense tenderness and excitability which made her toil herself among the poor, and had called out both her admiration of Tregarva and her extravagant passion at his danger, made her also shrink with disgust from anything which thrust on her a painful reality, which she could not remedy. She was a staunch believer, too, in that peculiar creed which allows every one to feel for the poor, except themselves, and considers that to plead the cause of working-men is, in a gentleman, the perfection of virtue, but in a working-man himself, sheer high treason. And so beside her father’s sick-bed she thought of the keeper only as a scorpion whom she had helped to warm into life; and sighing assent to her mother, when she said, ‘That wretch, and he seemed so pious and so obliging! who would have dreamt that he was such a horrid Radical?’ she let him vanish from her mind and out of Whitford Priors, little knowing the sore weight of manly love he bore with him.
As soon as Lancelot could leave the Priory, he hastened home to find Tregarva. The keeper had packed up all his small possessions and brought them down to Lower Whitford, through which the London coach passed. He was determined to go to London and seek his fortune. He talked of turning coal-heaver, Methodist preacher, anything that came to hand, provided that he could but keep independence and a clear conscience. And all the while the man seemed to be struggling with some great purpose,—to feel that he had a work to do, though what it was, and how it was to be done, he did not see.
‘I am a tall man,’ he said, ‘like Saul the son of Kish; and I am going forth, like him, sir, to find my father’s asses. I doubt I shan’t have to look far for some of them.’
‘And perhaps,’ said Lancelot, laughing, ‘to find a kingdom.’