"No, no, no," said Mr. Wace, who saw a limit to his powers of endurance. "Mr. Sherlock is sure to be here in a minute or two."
"Christian," said Philip Debarry, who felt a slight misgiving, "just be so good—but stay, I'll go myself. Excuse me, gentlemen: I'll drive round to Mr. Sherlock's lodgings. He may be under a little mistake as to the time. Studious men are sometimes rather absent-minded. You needn't come with me, Christian."
As Mr. Debarry went out, Rufus Lyon stepped on to the tribune again in rather an uneasy state of mind. A few ideas had occurred to him, eminently fitted to engage the audience profitably, and so to wrest some edification out of an unforeseen delay. But his native delicacy made him feel that in this assembly the Church people might fairly decline any "deliverance" on his part which exceeded the programme, and Mr. Wace's negative had been energetic. But the little man suffered from imprisoned ideas, and was as restless as a racer held in. He could not sit down again, but walked backward and forward, stroking his chin, emitting his low guttural interjections under the pressure of clauses and sentences which he longed to utter aloud, as he would have done in his own study. There was a low buzz in the room which helped to deepen the minister's sense that the thoughts within him were as divine messengers unheeded or rejected by a trivial generation. Many of the audience were standing; all, except the old Churchwomen on the back seats, and a few devout Dissenters who kept their eyes shut and gave their bodies a gentle oscillating motion, were interested in chat.
"Your father is uneasy," said Felix to Esther.
"Yes; and now, I think, he is feeling for his spectacles. I hope he has not left them at home: he will not be able to see anything two yards before him without them;—and it makes him so unconscious of what people expect or want."
"I'll go and ask him whether he has them," said Felix, striding over the form in front of him, and approaching Mr. Lyon, whose face showed a gleam of pleasure at this relief from his abstracted isolation.
"Miss Lyon is afraid that you are at a loss for your spectacles, sir," said Felix.
"My dear young friend," said Mr. Lyon, laying his hand on Felix Holt's fore-arm, which was about on a level with the minister's shoulder, "it is a very glorious truth, albeit made somewhat painful to me by the circumstances of the present moment, that as a counterpoise to the brevity of our mortal life (wherein, as I apprehend, our powers are being trained not only for the transmission of an improved heritage, as I have heard you insist, but also for our own entrance into a higher initiation in the Divine scheme)—it is, I say, a very glorious truth, that even in what are called the waste minutes of our time, like those of expectation, the soul may soar and range, as in some of our dreams which are brief as a broken rainbow in duration, yet seem to comprise a long history of terror or joy. And again, each moment may be a beginning of a new spiritual energy; and our pulse would doubtless be a coarse and clumsy notation of the passage from that which was not to that which is, even in the finer processes of the material world—and how much more——"
Esther was watching her father and Felix, and though she was not within hearing of what was being said, she guessed the actual state of the case—that the enquiry about the spectacles had been unheeded, and that her father was losing himself and embarrassing Felix in the intricacies of a dissertation. There was not the stillness around her that would have made a movement on her part seem conspicuous, and she was impelled by her anxiety to step on the tribune and walk up to her father, who paused a little startled.
"Pray see whether you have forgotten your spectacles, father. If so, I will go home at once and look for them."