CHAPTER CXIV.
THE PRISON CHAPLAIN.
The gentleman who had so suddenly and unexpectedly entered the cell in which Laura Stanbridge was confined was the ordinary. He was an enthusiast, and during his brief term of office had striven hard to bring the persons he visited to a sense of their miserable position, and the evil effects of criminal careers. In some cases—in very few it is to be feared—he had succeeded in bringing the culprits to a right way of thinking.
His father, William Leverall, returned to England at the age of sixty-five. He had spent his youth and strength in the East Indies, where he had shed so much of his blood. Covered with honourable, but fatal, wounds, he came home to breathe the fresh air of his native land and to die.
He had not succeeded in amassing a fortune, which many less worthy persons than himself had done, for he had never at any time of his life been a devotee at the shrine of mammon. He, however, bequeathed the sum of two hundred pounds a year to his wife and two children. It was all he had to leave them. His will directed that he was to be buried with his hands crossed on his breast, and that his sabre should be by his side.
To pay for her children’s education, which in England costs so much, Mrs. Leverall went to service as companion to a rich relative.
Thus, she seldom saw her children; but they were always with her in her thoughts and dreams, and the letters which she received from them gave her the brightest hopes, for they were both affectionate and obedient to a fault.
It was her wish that her son might take honours at the university and enter holy orders. His father had always been religiously disposed, and therefore the pulpit seemed to his widow to be the pinnacle of human greatness. It was far better, she thought, than following the calling of a soldier.
When her son William (he was named after his father) was twenty years of age, it was time he entered for matriculation; but her daughter Bertha was only seventeen, and though accomplished, was too young to commence life as a governess or teacher of music.
So they had recourse to speculation. Mrs. Leverall gave her son sufficient out of her ten years’ hard savings to pay his expenses to Cambridge, where he intended to compete for that truest of all lotteries—an open scholarship.