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He had not much of the gift of making talk a questionable accomplishment, and he never could approach his so-called inferiors but as his equals, the fact being that in their presence he never felt any difference. Notwithstanding his ignorance of the lore of Christianity, Thomas Wingfold was, in regard to some things, gifted with what I am tempted to call a divine stupidity.
"May I ask what word it was?" interrupted Wingfold, eagerly. "I will not say," returned Polwarth. "Not having troubled you, you would probably only wonder why it should have troubled me. For my purpose in mentioning the matter, it is enough to say that I had turned with eagerness to the passage wherein it occurs, as given in two of the gospels in our version.
Wingfold, my uncle once dictated to me, and I wrote down just as he said it. He can always do better dictating than writing, but this time he was so ill with asthma that he could not talk much faster than I could write; and yet to be so ill I never saw him show so little suffering; his thinking seemed to make him forget it. Mayn't I read it, uncle? I know the gentlemen would like to hear it."
While Wingfold had been speaking in general terms, with the race in his mind's, and the congregation in his body's eye, he had yet thought more of one soul, with its one crime and its intolerable burden, than all the rest: Leopold was ever present to him, and while he strove to avoid absorption in a personal interest however justifiable, it was of necessity that the thought of the most burdened sinner he knew should colour the whole of his utterance.
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 left the room, when in came Barbara in her riding-habit, with the glow of joyous motion upon her face, for she had just ridden from Mortgrange. "How do you do, mamma?" she said, but did not come within a couple of yards of her. "I've had such a ride as straight as any crow could fly, between the two stations! I never could hit the line before.
"If he had not taken him then, would you ever have been sorry you struck him!" She burst into outcry and weeping, mingled with such imprecation, that Wingfold thought it one of those cases of possession in which nothing but prayer is of use. But the soul and the demon were so united, so entirely of one mind, that there was no room for prayer to get between them.
It was very still too so still that the silence seemed to have taken the shape of gloom. Pardon me for talking in this unbusiness-like way: a man can't be a draper always; he must be foolish sometimes. Thirty years ago I used to read Tennyson. I believe I was amongst the earliest of his admirers." "Foolish!" echoed Wingfold, thoughtfully.
"No," answered Wingfold; "I have nothing, never had anything worth giving to another; and it would seem to me very unreasonable to subject a helpless congregation to the blundering attempts of such a fellow to put into the forms of reasonable speech things he really knows nothing about."
On the stair he met the butler: Mr. Wingfold had called to see Mr. Lingard. "He can't see him to-day. He is too much exhausted," said Bascombe; and the curate left the house thoughtful and sorry, feeling as if a vulture had settled by the side of the youth a good-natured vulture, no doubt, but not the less one bent on picking out the eyes of his mind.
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