Here the door opened, and Mr. Lyon paused to look around, but seeing only Lyddy with the tea-tray, he went on—
"Is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding aught that is precious—though it were heaven-sent manna."
"I understand you, sir," said Felix, good-humoredly, putting out his hand to the little man, who had come close to him as he delivered the last sentence with sudden emphasis and slowness. "But I'm not inclined to clench my fist at you."
"Well, well," said Mr. Lyon, shaking the proffered hand, "we shall see more of each other, and I trust shall have much profitable communing. You will stay and have a dish of tea with us: we take the meal late on Thursdays, because my daughter is detained by giving a lesson in the French tongue. But she is doubtless returned now, and will presently come and pour out tea for us."
"Thank you, I'll stay," said Felix, not from any curiosity to see the minister's daughter, but from a liking for the society of the minister himself—for his quaint looks and ways, and the transparency of his talk, which gave a charm even to his weakness. The daughter was probably some prim Miss, neat, sensible, pious, but all in a small feminine way, in which Felix was no more interested than in Dorcas meetings, biographies of devout women, and that amount of ornamental knitting which was not inconsistent with Non-conforming seriousness.
"I'm perhaps a little too fond of banging and smashing," he went on: "a phrenologist at Glasgow told me I had large veneration; another man there, who knew me, laughed out and said I was the most blasphemous iconoclast living. 'That,' says my phrenologist, 'is because of his large ideality, which prevents him from finding anything perfect enough to be venerated.' Of course I put my ears down and wagged my tail at that stroking."
"Yes, yes; I have had my own head explored with somewhat similar results. It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, 'Know thyself,' and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident. Nevertheless——Esther, my dear, this is Mr. Holt, whose acquaintance I have now been making with more than ordinary interest. He will take tea with us."
Esther bowed slightly as she walked across the room to fetch the candle and place it near her tray. Felix rose and bowed, also with an air of indifference, which was perhaps exaggerated by the fact that he was inwardly surprised. The minister's daughter was not the sort of person he expected. She was quite incongruous with his notion of ministers' daughters in general; and though he had expected something nowise delightful, the incongruity repelled him. A very delicate scent, the faint suggestion of a garden, was wafted as she went. He would not observe her, but he had a sense of an elastic walk, the tread of small feet, a long neck and a high crown of shining brown plaits and curls that floated backward—things, in short, that suggested a fine lady to him, and determined him to notice her as little as possible. A fine lady was always a sort of spun-glass affair—not natural, and with no beauty for him as art; but a fine lady as the daughter of this rusty old Puritan was especially offensive.
"Nevertheless," continued Mr. Lyon, who rarely let drop any thread of discourse, "that phrenological science is not irreconcilable with the revealed dispensations. And it is undeniable that we have our varying native dispositions which even grace will not obliterate. I myself, from my youth up, have been given to question too curiously concerning the truth—to examine and sift the medicine of the soul rather than to apply it."
"If your truth happens to be such medicine as Holt's Pills and Elixir, the less you swallow of it the better," said Felix. "But truth-vendors and medicine-vendors usually recommend swallowing. When a man sees his livelihood in a pill or a proposition, he likes to have orders for the dose, and not curious enquiries."