CHAPTER I
THE SUMMONS
On a certain day in November, a misty day with sharpness under the mist, a gentleman was walking out of the little town of St. Ives, which stood black and bleak above the bleak, black waters of the Ouse and the mournful clusters of bare, drooping willows.
It was late in the afternoon, and there chanced to be no one abroad in the grazing lands outside the town save this one gentleman who walked eastward towards the damp, vaporous fen country.
The horizon was brought within a few yards of him by the confining mist, and, as he walked farther from St. Ives, the town began to be also rapidly lost and absorbed in the general dull greyness, so that when he turned at last (sharply and as if with some set purpose or some lively inner prompting), the dwelling-houses, the river, bounded by the barns and palings, had all disappeared, and there remained only visible the erect tall steeple of the church, pointing into the grey sky from the dark obscured willows and dark obscured town and unseen river.
And though he walked rapidly, yet this tower and steeple of the old, humble, enduring church continued long in sight, for it was uplifted into the higher, clearer air, and was in itself substantial and massive.
For the high-wrought mood of this gentleman who, as he advanced farther into utter solitude, so continually looked back, this steeple of God's mansion had a deep spiritual meaning; it rose out of darkness and vapour and obscurity as the mandate of God rose, the one clear thing, out of the confusions and strifes and clamours of the world.
The mandate of God, ay—surely the one thing that mattered, the one thing to be followed and obeyed—and when the summons and command were clear there was great joy in obedience; but what when, as now, the order was not given, when God remained mute and the soul of His creature was enclosed in darkness even as town and fields were now enclosed in the cloudy exhumations of the earth?
When the steeple was at last hidden from his keenest glance, the gentleman stopped and, leaning against a paling, gazed over the short expanse of foggy ground visible to him, alone and terribly lonely in his soul.
A deep melancholy lay upon him, a melancholy almost inseparable from his unbending, austere, and sombre creed, a melancholy of the spirit, black and awful, neither to be ignored nor reasoned with—a spiritual disease to which he had been prone since his earliest youth, and which became at times almost intolerable and scarcely to be endured by any mortal, however stout-hearted.