She put out both hands to him, her eyes welling. But he had turned sharply away from her cry, and strode across the room in his irritation. Her hands fell, and one caught at the edge of the table for support while she leaned, bowing her head.
He came abruptly back. "Are you aware, Mehetabel, that you have proposed a bargain to me? I do not bargain with my children: I expect obedience. Nor as a father am I obliged to give my reasons. But since you are leaving us, and I would not dismiss you harshly, let me say that I have studied this man for whom you avow a fondness; and apart from his calling—which I detest—I find him vain, foppish, insincere. He has levitas with levitas: I believe his heart to be as shallow as his head. I know him to be no fit mate for one of my daughters; least of all for you who have gifts above your sisters—gifts which I have recognised and tried to improve. Child, summon your pride to you, and let it help your obedience." He broke off and gazed out of the window. "If," said he more softly, "our fate be not offered to us, we must make it. If, while our true fate delays, there come to us unworthy phantoms simulating it, we should test them; lest impatient we run to embrace vanity, and betray, not our hopes alone, but the purpose God had in mind for us from the beginning."
Hetty looked up. She might have thought that she was twenty-seven, and asked herself how long was it likely to be before a prince came across those dreary fields to the thatched parsonage, seeking her. But her heart was full of the man she loved, and she thought only that her father did him bitter injustice.
She shivered and lifted her face. "Good-bye, papa," she said coldly.
He kissed her on the cheek, and took a step to follow her to the door; but thought better of it and returned to the window. He heard the door close upon her, and five minutes later saw her whisked away in the gig by Dick Ellison's side.
CHAPTER VIII.
He continued to stare out of the window long after the gig had disappeared over the low horizon: a small, nervous, indomitable figure of a man close upon his sixty-second birthday, standing for a while with his back turned upon his unwieldy manuscripts and his jaw thrust forward obstinately as he surveyed the blank landscape. He had the scholar's stoop, but this thrust of the jaw was habitual and lifted his face at an angle which gave an "up-sighted" expression to his small eyes, set somewhat closely together above a long straight nose. Nose, eyes, jaw announced obstinacy, and the eyes, quick and fiery, warned you that it was of the aggressive kind which not only holds to its purpose, but never ceases nagging until it be attained. In build he was lean and wiry: in carriage amazingly dignified for one who (to be precise) stood but 5 feet 5 and a half inches high.
His father had been a non-juring clergyman, one of the many ejected from their livings on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662; and he himself had been educated as a Nonconformist at Mr. Morton's famous academy on Newington Green, where Daniel Defoe had preceded him as a pupil, and where he had heard John Bunyan preach. At the conclusion of his training there he was pitched upon to answer some pamphlets levelled against the Dissenters, and this set him on a course of reading which produced an effect he was far from intending: for instead of writing the answer he determined to renounce Dissent and attach himself to the Established Church. He dwelt at that time with his mother and an old aunt, themselves ardent Dissenters, to whom he could not tell his design. So he arose before daybreak one morning, tramped sixty miles to Oxford, and entered himself at Exeter College as a poor scholar. This was in August, 1683.
He took up his residence in Oxford with forty-five shillings in his pocket. He studied there five years, and during that time received from his family and friends just five shillings; obtained his Bachelor's degree, and departed seven pounds and fifteen shillings richer than when he entered the University. The winter of 1683 was a hard beginning for a scholar too poor to buy fuel, the cold being so severe in the Thames valley that coaches plied as freely on the river from the Temple to Westminster as if they had gone upon the land. Yet "I tarried," he afterwards wrote, "in Exeter College, though I met with some hardships I had before been unacquainted with, till I was of standing sufficient to take my Bachelor's degree; and not being able to subsist there afterwards, I came to London during the time of my Lord Bishop of London's suspension by the High Commission, and was instituted into deacon's orders by my Lord Bishop of Rochester, at his palace at Bromley, August 7th, 1688."
He had maintained himself by instructing wealthier undergraduates and writing their exercises for them (as a servitor he had to black their boots and run their errands); also by scribbling for John Dunton, the famous London bookseller, whose acquaintance he had made during his last year at Mr. Morton's. With all this he found time and the will to be charitable, and had visited the poor creatures imprisoned in the Castle at Oxford—many for debt. He lived to take the measure of this kindness, and to see it repeated by his sons.