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Updated: June 25, 2025
Bitter loss, the loss of disappointment which at the time the soul tells one is worse than loss by death, he had known over Blanche; pain, anger, hardness, with his family he could not have missed; horror and remorse had both assailed him over Phoebe; natural sorrow that held no sense of outrage he had felt for the loss of Killigrew and Boase.
Boase instead of for Ishmael, and when he was shown into the study he stood revolving his cap in his hands and some weighty thought in his brain till the Parson bade him sit down and say what it was had brought him. But John-James still stood and, his eyes fixed anxiously on the Parson, at last blurted out: "Mr. Boase, you'm tachen Ishmael things like gentry do belong to knaw, aren't 'ee?"
Boase waved his hat in a gesture of triumph, as though to signal that all was well, and his first shouted words told Ishmael that this was not to be the end of his career at St. Renny. With the knowledge went a queer little pang of disappointment; he had so been accustoming his mind to the glamour of expulsion in circumstances such as his.
Boase had seemed to him like someone who is almost gone already, whose frail envelope must soon be burned through, and it had come to him that no one could ever take his place.
For some appetite for more life was bound to stir and break into being one day, and Boase was passionately desirous that it should make for happiness and good. Thus Boase thought of it all, but, after the fashion of the race of which Ishmael also was one, he showed no sign of his meditations. With the approach of the boy's twenty-first birthday the Parson saw light.
"I want to be decent ..." was all he said gruffly, but with a something so youthful in manner and sentiment that Boase had a yearning over him as in the days when he had been a little boy. "Let me say one thing to you, Ishmael. I have said it before, but when you were less able to understand.
"I too have had a letter," he said, and there was something in his voice which made Ishmael aware of a portent beyond the ordinary. "From Archelaus ..." added Boase. "From Archelaus?" echoed Ishmael. The name came upon him like the name of one dead, it seemed to him that when they spoke of Killigrew they touched more upon the living than when they mentioned Archelaus.
Neither was Boase altogether happy about the path in life of his spiritual son, although that path seemed to lead, in its unobtrusive manner, upward. It was an age when materialism was to the fore, when the old faiths had not yet seen their way to harmonise with the undeniable facts of science, when morality itself was of a rather priggish and material order.
She had found something that for her had been hitherto hidden, and Boase saw it and was glad. It was noteworthy that it was to him and not to Ishmael she spoke of it. Georgie, with all her dearness, was almost too prosperous to understand. Judy radiated an inner joy that Ishmael had not attained and that Georgie had never felt the need of.
Something in Ishmael was dead, and in dying it had for the time being stunned what Boase could only hope was a more vital and permanent part. Ishmael said good-bye at the Vicarage and went home again, his mind floating through greyness even as his body was passing through the grey of the weather and surroundings.
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