That he was a sincere believer no one, however, who caught him apart from the presiding influence of his wife believed for a moment. He swore too much for that, and occasionally he had been heard, when sentimental and under the influence of wine, to refer to Cremorne, to Evans’s and the Cider Cellars, to the Closerie du Lilas, to the Mabille, and other places in London and Paris where wicked people, in old times, were wont to enjoy themselves after their kind. Beneath his frosted exterior there was a good deal of the old Adam yet.
Once upon a time, according to William of Malmesbury, a merchant named Swelf had been in the habit of calling on the holy St. Wolstan once a year, to receive his advice in the healing of his spiritual ailments. After giving the needed absolution, the prelate observed:
‘You often repeat the sins which you have confessed, because, as the proverb goes, opportunity makes the thief. Wherefore, I advise you to become a monk, which if you do, you will not long have the opportunity for these sins.’
Upon this, the other rejoined that he could not possibly become a monk, because he found it so difficult to bring his mind to it.
‘Go your ways,’ said the bishop, in somewhat of a passion: ‘a monk you will become, whether you choose it or not, but only when the appliances and means of vice have waxen old in you;’ which fact, adds the historian, ‘we afterwards witnessed, because when now broken down by old age, he betook himself to our monastery.’
It was the decay of nature rather than the growth of grace which made that man a monk. What we lack in old age is the power to sin. The body ceases to be the servant of the senses. We lead a better life possibly, from a conventional point of view, but is it not often terribly against the grain? A man gives up a dissipated career because his strength is not equal to its demands. His vitality has been prematurely exhausted.
The conversation referred to took place in the breakfast-room of one of the attractive residences lining the route to the Bois du Cambre, which all my readers know is one of the fairest suburbs of Brussels, and of which, as most of them have gone there, I doubt not, to spend a happy day, I need say no more. The family did not reside there, but far away in the suburb, where rents and wages and provisions were alike cheap. The Colonel had gone abroad to educate his daughters more cheaply than he could in London, and the plan had so far succeeded that the young ladies had managed to read a good many French novels, the perusal of which not a little interfered with the enjoyment of family prayers, Bible-reading, and religious conferences, to which they were invariably taken by their mamma, and other means of grace. The family funds had been rather restricted, and at Brussels the mamma had assured herself that there was an exceptionally attractive Evangelical ministry in the Church of England, under the special license of the Bishop of London, and that was enough for her, the Colonel merely considering he could vegetate more cheaply in Belgium than in London. But they were all quite ready to leave for England; the Colonel to strut as a baronet and landed proprietor, the young ladies with a view to the matrimonial market—for, alas! they had met with few eligibles in Brussels—and the mamma that she might carry on on a larger scale and with increased success the missionary operations of which she had been the centre in Brussels. If she had not done much good among the people, she had—and that was her one great reward—managed considerably to annoy the priests, who glared at her with evil eyes as they watched her sallying forth daily with her bag of tracts. Money it was hard to get out of the Colonel’s lady, even in the most urgent cases; but no one was more ready with her tracts.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A COUNTRYMAN IN TOWN.
‘What has brought you to town?’ asked Wentworth one morning, as they were sitting in Clifford’s Inn, to a visitor who had just put in an appearance. His garb denoted his profession. He was the Presbyterian minister who had acted as Wentworth’s friend at the time of the election.
‘Well, I’ve come on rather important business. There is an old woman in the workhouse who maintains that the deceased Baronet has left a son who is heir to the title and estate. And thus I came up to London; but I have been run off my legs. I give you my word of honour, you won’t catch me in a hurry in London again.’