Thomas Wingfold, Curate | Page 3

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