THREE:The men laughed again. "You must a-been born with all your teeth," said the private, as we quickened to a trot. "What makes you think we ain't after conscripts?"And so I began to hear the tale. I was startled by its strong reminder of Charlotte's own life; but Charlotte answered my anxious glance with a brow so unfretted that I let the reading go on, and so made a cruel mistake. At every turning-point in the story its reader would have paused to talk it over, but Charlotte, with a steadily darkling brow, murmured each time "Go on," and I was silent, hoping that farther along there would be a better place to stop for good. Not so; the story's whirling flood swept us forward to a juncture ever drawing nearer and clearer, clearer and crueler, where a certain man would have to choose between the woman he loved and that breadth and fruitfulness of life to which his splendid gifts imperiously pointed him. Oh, you story-tellers! Every next page put the question plainer, drove the iron deeper: must a man, or even may a man, wed his love, when she stands between him and his truest career, a drawback and drag upon his finest service to his race and day? And, oh, me! who let my eye quail when Charlotte searched it, as though her own case had brought that question to me before ever we had seen this book. And, oh, that impenetrable woman reading! Her husband was in Lee's army, out of which, she boasted, she would steal him in a minute if she could. She was with us, now, only because, at whatever cost to others, she was going where no advancement of the enemy's lines could shut her off from him; and so stop reading a moment she must, to declare her choice for Love as against all the careers on earth, and to put that choice fairly to shame by the unworthiness of her pleadings in its defence. I intervened; I put her grovelling arguments aside and thrust better ones in, for the same choice, and then, in the fear that they were not enough, stumbled into special pleading and protested that the book itself had put the question unfairly.
FORE:Cuthbert Silverdale was not unaware of the emotion which he had roused in so many female breasts, and it is impossible to acquit him of a sort of clerical complacency in the knowledge that so many young ladies gazed and gazed on him with a mixture of religious and personal devotion. Though a firm believer in the celibacy of the clergy, he did not feel himself debarred from sentimental relations with both married and unmarried members of his flock, indeed the very fact that nothing could conceivably come of these little mawkishnesses made them appear perfectly{108} licit. He held their hands, and took their arms, and sat at their knees, and called them dear girls two or three at a time, finding safety perhaps in numbers, and not wishing to encourage false hopes. He was an incorrigible if an innocent flirt; a licensed lap-dog practising familiarities which, if indulged in by the ordinary layman, would assuredly have led to kickings. In some curious manner he quite succeeded in deceiving himself as to the propriety of those affectionate demonstrations, and considered himself a sort of brother to all those young ladies, who worked for him with the industry (and more than the excitement) of devoted sisters. To do him justice he was just as familiar with the male members of his congregation, and patted his boys on the back, and linked his arm in theirs, but it would be idle to contend that he got as much satisfaction out of those male embraces.
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THREE:As they sang, and as we sat in our saddles behind the low fence that ran quite round the opening, Ferry turned from looking across into the lighted window on the road and handed me his field-glass. "How many candles do you see in there?"
THREE:TRADITIONAL LIKENESS OF CONFUCIUS. TRADITIONAL LIKENESS OF CONFUCIUS.Charles was no better next day, but merely obstinate, and went up to his work, as usual, with his sister. Keeling appeared shortly after, and, as usual, began the dictation. Now and then he gave sharp glances at Norah, and before long stopped in the middle of a letter.
