Could he follow her?—search this wide world for her? How small a penance would it be to wander over all the earth for her sake! But he felt he had no right to pursue her. He had wronged her too deeply to persecute her by a pursuit which no sign from her invited. It was for her to make that sign—it was for her to pity and pardon him.
‘Let me go on doing my duty,’ he said to himself, ‘and if it is God’s will that I am to be happy in that way, happiness will come to me. Yes, it will come some day, when I least look for it, as the angels came to Abraham.’
So he went on with his simple unpretending life, working with a quiet earnestness which achieved wonders. It was one of his chief gifts to do all things quietly. He worked almost as silently as the bounteous fertilizing sun.
The school was thriving under Emmanuel Joyce’s care. The widow’s heart did verily sing for joy, so sweet was her new life amidst rural sights and sounds, after the squalid misery of the Bridford courts and alleys.
The Vicar was delighted to have his old pupil back again. All the cares of the parish were lifted off his shoulders when he had Cyril for his curate. He knew that, if he was luxuriating in scholarly idleness, there was nothing being neglected. When he was wanted Cyril called upon him, and he obeyed the call. He gave of his substance freely at Cyril’s bidding. There could not have been a better alliance. Clement Dulcimer, all sweetness and light, shedding smiles and kindliness upon his parishioners, Cyril Culverhouse, the earnest worker, not withholding reproof when it was needful. Between them they made Little Yafford a model parish, an ideal republic, in a small way.
The Vicar had taken a great fancy to the new schoolmaster. Joyce’s love of books was in itself a passport to Mr. Dulcimer’s favour. He invited the young man to spend an evening with him occasionally, and Emmanuel revelled in long hours of talk upon far-reaching questions—conversations from which Mr. Dulcimer let himself slip insensibly into a monologue, and poured forth his stores of curious uncatalogued knowledge. In one thing only he was rather hard upon the aspiring student. He set his face strongly against Emmanuel’s poetic efforts.
‘They are as good as most of the prize poems it has been my lot to read,’ he said, after he had conscientiously gone through Emmanuel’s little collection of manuscript verses, ‘but then you see a prize poem is generally the flattest thing in life. As intellectual efforts they do you credit, and as mental training I’ve no doubt the composition of them has been serviceable to you. But I will not be so weak as to say go on writing verses. There are about twenty poets born in a century, and about twenty thousand rhymesters. Shall a wise man waste his life—his brief precious sum of days and hours—in labouring to develop the rhymester into the poet? Why, the poet knows himself for a poet before he is twenty. The man upon whom that mantle has fallen, the man who is born to wear that crown, cannot be mistaken about himself. Look at Pope, Chatterton, Shelley, Byron, Keats—boy poets all. And is a man who has not put forth that supreme flower of genius in his youth to go on cudgelling his brain for rhymes, in the hope that labour will make him a poet? It is the stuff behind the rhymes that is wanting in him. He has nothing to say. But he thinks if he can say nothing melodiously—to somebody else’s tune—that he may make himself a poet. Wasted labour, idle delusion. Go into philosophy, natural science, criticism, history—anything you like, my dear young friend—the field is wide, and in these studies a man can make himself. God makes poets.’
Emmanuel took the lesson to heart, humiliating as it was. For a long time he had hugged the idea that he was a poet. That electro-plated verse of his, modelled upon the verse of other singers, had for his deluded ear the ring of genuine silver. Granted that there were only twenty poets born in a century. It seemed to him no less hard that he could not be one of the twenty. He had no pity for the nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine versifiers, self-deluded like himself, and doomed to disappointment as bitter.
It took him some time to recover from the shock which his self-esteem had received from Mr. Dulcimer’s candour. At first it seemed to him that if he could not be a poet he could be nothing else. Those other fields of intellectual labour in which the Vicar invited him to work, offered no attraction. They were all dry and barren; he saw no flowers to be gathered there. Ambition seemed dead within him, now that a judge in whom he believed had told him that he was not an incipient Byron.
‘You never write of an evening now, Emmanuel,’ his mother said to him, when the shortening days of September brought them together by their cheerful fireside. ‘I hope you haven’t grown tired of your pen?’