"Aired!" returned her husband: "you had better say watered. In five minutes neither of us will have a dry stitch on. I'll take it off again, and be content with my blue jersey."
He hurried out into the rain. Happily there was no wind.
Helen waked the servants. Before they appeared she had the fire lighted, and as many utensils as it would accommodate set upon it with water. When Wingfold returned, he found her in the midst of her household, busily preparing every kind of eatable and drinkable they could lay hands upon.
He had brought his boat to the church yard and moored it between two headstones: they would have their breakfast first, for there was no saying when they might get any lunch, and food is work. Besides, there was little to be gained by rousing people out of their good sleep: there was no danger yet.
"It is a great comfort," said the curate, as he drank his coffee, "to see how Drake goes in heart and soul for his tenants. He is pompous—a little, and something of a fine gentleman, but what is that beside his great truth! That work of his is the simplest act of Christianity of a public kind I have ever seen!"
"But is there not a great change on him since he had his money?" said Helen. "He seems to me so much humbler in his carriage and simpler in his manners than before."
"It is quite true," replied her husband. "It is mortifying to think," he went on after a little pause, "how many of our clergy, from mere beggarly pride, holding their rank superior—as better accredited servants of the Carpenter of Nazareth, I suppose—would look down on that man as a hedge-parson. The world they court looked down upon themselves from a yet greater height once, and may come to do so again. Perhaps the sooner the better, for then they will know which to choose. Now they serve Mammon and think they serve God."
"It is not quite so bad as that, surely!" said Helen.
"If it is not worldly pride, what is it? I do not think it is spiritual pride. Few get on far enough to be much in danger of that worst of all vices. It must then be church-pride, and that is the worst form of worldly pride, for it is a carrying into the kingdom of Heaven of the habits and judgments of the kingdom of Satan. I am wrong! such things can not be imported into the kingdom of Heaven: they can only be imported into the Church, which is bad enough. Helen, the churchman's pride is a thing to turn a saint sick with disgust, so utterly is it at discord with the lovely human harmony he imagines himself the minister of. He is the Pharisee, it may be the good Pharisee, of the kingdom of Heaven; but if the proud churchman be in the kingdom at all, it must be as one of the least in it. I don't believe one in ten who is guilty of this pride is aware of the sin of it. Only the other evening I heard a worthy canon say, it may have been more in joke than appeared, that he would have all dissenters burned. Now the canon would not hang one of them—but he does look down on them all with contempt. Such miserable paltry weaknesses and wickednesses, for in a servant of the Kingdom the feeling which suggests such a speech is wicked, are the moth holes in the garments of the Church, the teredo in its piles, the dry rot in its floors, the scaling and crumbling of its buttresses. They do more to ruin what such men call the Church, even in outward respects, than any of the rude attacks of those whom they thus despise. He who, in the name of Christ, pushes his neighbor from him, is a schismatic, and that of the worst and only dangerous type! But we had better be going. It's of no use telling you to take your waterproof; you'd only be giving it to the first poor woman we picked up."
"I may as well have the good of it till then," said Helen, and ran to fetch it, while the curate went to bring his boat to the house.