“So you have nothing to do with it?” he said, with a smile. “Wodehouse! but then the fellow hasn’t a penny. I see someone skulking along under the walls that looks like him. Hist! Smith—Tom—what do they call you? We want you here,” said Jack, upon whom the moon was shining full. When he stood in his evening coat and spotless breadth of linen, the heir of the Wentworths was ready to meet the eye of all the world. His shabby subordinate stopped short, with a kind of sullen admiration, to look at him. Wodehouse knew the nature of Jack Wentworth’s pursuits a great deal better than his brother did, and that some of them would not bear much investigation; but when he saw him stand triumphant in gorgeous apparel, fearing no man, the poor rascal, whom everybody kicked at, rose superior to his own misfortunes. He had not made much of it in his own person, but that life was not altogether a failure which had produced Jack Wentworth. He obeyed his superior’s call with instinctive fidelity, proud, in spite of himself, to be living the same life and sharing the same perils. When he emerged into the moonlight, his shaggy countenance looked excited and haggard. Notwithstanding all his experiences, he was not of a constitution which could deny nature. He had inflicted every kind of torture upon his father while living; but, notwithstanding, the fact of the death affected him. His eyes looked wilder than usual, and his face older and more worn, and he looked round him with a kind of clandestine skulking instinct as he came out of the shadow into the light.
This was the terrible conjunction which Miss Dora saw from her window. The anxious woman did not wait long enough to be aware that the Curate left the other two to such consultations as were inevitable between them, and went away very hastily to his own house, and to the work which still awaited him—“When the wicked man turneth away from the evil of his ways, and doeth that which is lawful and right.” Mr. Wentworth, when he came back to it, sat for about an hour over his text before he wrote a single syllable. His heart had been wrung that day by the sharpest pangs which can be inflicted upon a proud and generous spirit. He was disposed to be bitter against all the world—against the dull eyes that would not see, the dull ears that could shut themselves against all suggestions either of gratitude or justice. It appeared to him, on the whole, that the wicked man was every way the best off in this world, besides being wooed and besought to accept the blessings of the other. And the Curate was conscious of an irrepressible inclination to exterminate the human vermin who made the earth such an imbroglio of distress and misery; and was sore and wounded in his heart to feel how his own toils and honest purposes availed him nothing, and how all the interest and sympathy of bystanders went to the pretender. These sentiments naturally complicated his thoughts, and made composition difficult; not to say that they added a thrill of human feeling warmer than usual to the short and succinct sermon. It was not an emotional sermon, in the ordinary sense of the word; but it was so for Mr. Wentworth, who carried to an extreme point the Anglican dislike for pulpit exaggeration in all forms. The Perpetual Curate was not a natural orator. He had very little of the eloquence which gave Mr. Vincent so much success in the Dissenting connection during his short stay in Carlingford, which was a kind of popularity not much to the taste of the Churchman. But Mr. Wentworth had a certain faculty of concentrating his thoughts into the tersest expression, and of uttering in a very few words, as if they did not mean anything particular, ideas which were always individual, and often of distinct originality—a kind of utterance which is very dear to the English mind. As was natural, there were but a limited amount of people able to find him out; but those who did so were rather fond of talking about the “restrained power” of the Curate of St. Roque’s.
Next morning was a glorious summer Sunday—one of those days of peace on which this tired old earth takes back her look of innocence, and deludes herself with thoughts of Eden. To be sure, there were tumults enough going on over her surface—vulgar merry-makings and noises, French drums beating, all kinds of discordant sounds going on here and there, by land and sea, under that tranquil impartial sun. But the air was very still in Carlingford, where you could hear the bees in the lime-blossoms as you went to church in the sunshine. All that world of soft air in which the embowered houses of Grange Lane lay beatified, was breathing sweet of the limes; but notwithstanding the radiance of the day, people were talking of other subjects as they came down under the shadow of the
