‘Uncle Phineas left a letter for you, didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said Davidina, and was for saying no more. But Mr. Trimblerigg could not quite let it stop at that.
‘Anything that concerns others besides yourself?’
‘Yes,’ said Davidina again. ‘He told me that you were going to marry Caroline, and sent you his love.’
So apparently Davidina meant that he was not to know. For once he had beaten her; and even if it were to bring him nothing in the end there was satisfaction in that thought.
CHAPTER NINE
Some Women and a Moral
MR. TRIMBLERIGG’S call to be minister to the true Believers of Horeb was independent of the theological test of his College which qualified him for election to a pastorate among the Free Evangelicals. But practically it gave him a two-years’ start; the Free Evangelicals did not as a rule adopt pastors unless they were either twenty-three, or married. Mr. Trimblerigg was only twenty-one, but there among the True Believers the vacancy was waiting for him, and he reckoned that two preliminary years devoted to establishing his fame as a preacher and emancipating himself from the narrower doctrines of True Belief would not be spent amiss.
In the short while which must elapse before his marriage with Caroline, she and Davidina changed places domestically; and brother and sister lived queerly together at the house adjoining the chapel; an arrangement which, more than anything else could have done, decided Mr. Trimblerigg that his engagement should be short.
Of course it was impossible from the first that Horeb should absorb all his energies. He started at once as a mid-week missioner, first among the neighbouring chapels of the connection, then going further afield; and so as to avoid for the present the problem of an exchange of pulpits with easier denominations contrary to the traditions of True Belief, speaking in hired halls where connection did not count; thus, without taking up the revolutionary standpoint, he began to sit loose to the exclusiveness into which the True Believers had reduced themselves, and to make himself known among the Free Churches.
He had passed his theological degree brilliantly; a brilliancy slightly reduced in his own estimation by the fact that Miss Isabel Sparling had tied with him for first place. Thus, except for the sex-barrier, her qualification for the ministry was mathematically the same as his own.