“He was near twenty-one,” said Miss Christmas—“I know: and Lord Skene wanted him to marry my mother. And where would you have been then, you little low boy?”
“Where would you have been?” I retorted.
“Here, of course,” she said, “and the daughter of a lord. And my lord wouldn’t have wanted to marry again then; and I’m sure I shouldn’t have wanted you.”
“You wouldn’t have got me if you had,” I said. “I hate you?”
“O!” she cried, affectedly aghast, and ran off to Lady Skene to complain of the dreadful language I had used.
She wore her hair in a bag-net, and I have always detested the fashion. She might have been called pretty, I suppose, by those who find a charm in pertness franked by large eyes, and a wicked dimple in a smooth cheek. But childhood can see no beauty in what it dislikes. Instinctive sympathy with itself, with its moods and difficulties, is its criterion of loveliness.
This girl, and a certain Pugsley, were my morbid aversions of those days. The reverend Mr Pugsley had been translated—through the instrumentality of Lord Skene and the influence of his lady—from a suburban cure to the living of St Luke’s, Market Grazing. He had belonged, I believe, to the “Clapham Sect,” or what, in his time, constituted the remnants of that dour and depressing body. Its spirit, indeed, still so dwelt in him, morally and physically—in his narrow convictions, as in his dismal dyspeptic face, sloping shoulders, and general joyless aspect—that a question as to his well-being might at any time have been answered by him in the words of the notorious Dr Jekyll, “I am very low, Utterson; very low.” Very low a churchman he was, in fact; so low that he crawled, symbolically, in the dust, and called himself a worm. I never disputed that half so much as his calling me one. But his professional terminology gathered no inspiration with the years, and its eternal limitations were, it seemed, satisfying to Lady Skene, who was his main prop and patroness. It began with wrath and the blood of lambs, and foundered in mud among worms and serpents. The principle of pre-election is very comforting to one’s sense of moral responsibility. It narrows it to the consideration of that small body, which, after all, it need not consider, since it is booked for Paradise. It seems a cruelty of supererogation to taunt the unelect with their doom. But Mr Pugsley gave me little hope. I was a worm, a brand; “baptised in fire that I might inherit ever-lasting fire.” I suppose that very early I showed a scorn of his nonsense; and that put his spiritual back up. Moreover I parodied him; and no man, though a priest, likes to be laughed at for his convictions. Sir Maurice Carnac, before mentioned, happened to alight on the stuff without my knowledge; and he made a huge spluttering joke of it. Here it is, founded on a Pugsleyite hymn:
“When with the heavenly hosts I sit down
Sure of my dinner and decked with my crown,
O what a blessing and O what a grace