Salem Chapel

clouds at the bookseller’s accost, to re-enter that place where this enchantment still hovered, by way of calming himself down ere he returned to those prose regions which were his own lawful habitation. He saw vaguely the books that were placed on the counter before him⁠—heard vaguely the polite purling of Masters’s voice, all-solicitous to make up for the momentary incivility with which he had treated a friend of Lady Western’s⁠—and was conscious of taking out his purse and paying something for the volume, which he carried away with him. But the book might have been Sanskrit for anything Mr. Vincent cared⁠—and he would have paid any fabulous price for it with the meekest resignation. His attempt to appear moderately interested, and to conduct this common transaction as if he had all his wits about him, was sufficient occupation just at this moment. His head was turned. There should have been roses blossoming all along the bare pavement of George Street to account for the sweet gleams of light which warmed the entire atmosphere as he traversed that commonplace way. Not only the interview just passed, but the meeting to come, bewildered him with an intoxicating delight. Here, then, was the society he had dreamed of, opening its perfumed doors to receive him. From Mrs. Tozer’s supper-table to the bowery gates of Grange Lane was a jump which, ten days ago, would of itself have made the young minister giddy with satisfaction and pleasure. Now these calm emotions had ceased to move him; for not society, but a sweeter syren, had thrown chains of gold round the unsuspecting Nonconformist. With Her, Back Grove Street was Paradise. Where her habitation was, or what he should see there, was indifferent to Vincent. He was again to meet Herself.

VII

The days which intervened between this meeting and Lady Western’s party were spent in a way which the managers of Salem would have been far from approving of. Mr. Vincent, indeed, was rapt out of himself, out of his work, out of all the ordinary regions of life and thought. When he sat down to his sermons, his pen hung idly in his hand, and his mind, wilfully cheating itself by that semblance of study, went off into long delicious reveries, indescribable, intangible⁠—a secret sweet intoxication which forbade labour, yet nourished thought. Though he sometimes did not write a word in an hour, so deep was the aspect of studiousness displayed by the young pastor at his writing-desk, and so entire the silence he maintained in his room, shut up in that world of dreams which nobody knew anything of, that his landlady, who was one of his hearers, communicated the fact to Tozer, and expatiated everywhere upon the extreme devotion to study displayed by the new minister. Old Mr. Tufton, who had been in the habit of putting together the disjointed palaver which he called a sermon on the Saturday morning, shook his head over the information, and doubted that his young brother was resorting more to carnal than to spiritual means of filling his chapel; but the members of Salem generally heard the rumour with pride, and felt a certain distinction accrue to themselves from the possibility that their pastor might ruin his health by over-study. It was a new sensation in Salem; and the news, as it was whispered about, certainly came to the ears of a few of those young men and thinkers, principally poor lawyers’ clerks and drapers’ assistants, whom Tozer was so anxious to reach, and drew two or three doubtful, genteel hearers to the chapel, where Mr. Vincent’s sermon, though no better than usual, and in reality dashed off at the last moment in sheer desperation, when necessity momentarily thrust the dreams away, was listened to with a certain awe and devout attention, solely due to the toil it was reported to have cost. The young minister himself came out of the pulpit remorseful and ashamed, feeling that he had neglected his duty, and thoroughly disgusted with the superficial production, just lighted up with a few fiery sentences of that eloquence which belongs to excitement and passion, which he had just delivered. But Tozer and all the deacons buzzed approbation. They were penetrated with the conviction that he had worked hard at his sermon, and given them his best, and were not to be undeceived by the quality of the work itself, which was a secondary matter. More deeply disgusted and contemptuous than ever was the young pastor at the end of that Sunday⁠—disgusted with himself to have done his work so poorly⁠—contemptuous of those who were pleased with it⁠—his heart swelling with mortified pride to think that what he thought so unworthy of him was more appreciated than his best efforts. For he did not know the report that had gone abroad; he did not know that, while brooding over his own rising passion, and absorbed in dreams with which Salem had nothing to do, the little world around him was complacently giving him credit for a purpose of wearing himself out in its behalf. The sermons so hastily written, thrust into a corner by the overpowering enchantment of those reveries, were not the only sin he had to charge against himself. He could not bring himself to bear the irksome society that surrounded him, in the state of elevation and excitement he was in. Tozer was unendurable, and Phoebe to be avoided at all costs. He did not even pay his promised visit to Mrs. Hilyard, nor go to Siloam Cottage as usual. In short, he spent the days in a kind of dream, avoiding all his duties, paying no visits, doing no pastoral work, neglecting the very sermon over which his landlady saw him hanging so many silent hours, without knowing that all the vacant atmosphere between him and that blank sheet of paper, in which she saw nothing, was peopled with fairy visitants and unreal scenes to the