“I consider you have insulted me, Mr. Carrington; it is most unkind—unworthy of you!”
What Ernest might have replied to this especially unpleasant address, can never be known; for at that moment, Mr. Slowkopf, in an agony of digital combustion, overturned the bowl of snapdragon, and, during the confusion which ensued, Emily contrived to leave the drawing-room unobserved.
For some reason or other, Ernest did not sleep very well that night; and the first thing next morning he wrote a note explanatory and apologetic, to the Rosebud, and having despatched it, sat down to finish his sermon, but got no farther than “Dearly beloved,” till the messenger returned. The answer contained his epistle unopened, and the following note:—
“Miss Colville presents her compliments to Mr. Carrington, and begs to say, that as any discussion of the occurrence of yesterday evening must be equally useless and painful, she has thought it most advisable to return his note unread. Miss Colville trusts Mr. Carrington will not allow this silly affair to influence his manner towards Miss Colville or the boys, as such an interruption to an intimacy which is so agreeable and beneficial to them, would prove a source of deep and additional annoyance to her.”
Ernest was very sorry for what he had done, but he saw this was not the fitting time to endeavour to repair the breach; so being a sensible young man, he let the Rosebud have her own wilful way; and when the boys returned to school, informed Mrs. Colville he was about to prepare a volume of sermons for publication, which would occupy all his leisure hours; and that she must not think he meant to cut her, if his visits assumed the angelic property of being “few and far between;”—as he said this, he observed the Rosebud’s eyes fixed upon him with a peculiar expression in them—could it be regret?
CHAPTER XIV.—CONTAINS MUCH DOCTOR’S STUFF, AND OTHER RUBBISH.
Ernest was true to his word—all that spring and summer he worked at his sermons and his parish, like an ecclesiastical galley-slave, till the volume was finished, and all the people had become so good, that if it had not been for christenings, weddings, and funerals, they would scarcely have required the services of a clergyman at all. Indeed, carrying out the doctrine of self-denial logically, and to its fullest extent, we doubt whether a rectory might not be regarded as a superfluous luxury, a kind of canonical pomp and vanity, and therefore a stumbling-block to be removed from the spiritual highway of that super-excellent community.
But writing sermons, and instilling pure and heavenly principles into the decidedly earthly minds of small shopkeepers and needy agricultural labourers, albeit a high and sacred calling, considered abstractedly and as a whole, is yet, taken in detail, a very trying vocation to a man possessing, in no common degree, a taste for intellectual pursuits, and a strong appreciation of refined society. Thus it came to pass that one fine morning (it was the 12th of August) Ernest, having written a report of a district meeting for the propagation of the Gospel in parts so very foreign that the propagators themselves would have been puzzled to find them on the map, leaned back in his chair and wondered how sundry college friends of his were getting on among the grouse, when a note in the Rosebud’s handwriting was brought to him. With sparkling eyes and a slight accession of colour to his pale cheeks, he read as follows:—