But he had thought that his reformatory effort was over for the day. The invitation he had given Jim for the evening had been a sudden and passing impulse, and he had never suspected that it would be accepted. Even when it was accepted in word, he still thought nothing more would come of it. The young fellow would not be able to pass the ‘Blue Boar,’ or he would be caught at the schoolhouse by Mrs. Brown. Having done his duty amply, as he felt he had done, it was almost with relief that the curate concluded that Jim would never manage to pass the ‘Blue Boar.’ When he heard, on the contrary, a footstep ring upon the little line of pavement which divided in two the cottage garden where his lodgings were, Mr. Osborne was much startled, and it cannot be said that his start was one of pleasure. ‘Oh! here’s this confounded fellow again.’ I am afraid that was the thought that passed through his mind: and he pushed away his work with impatience, clearing away several books which he had been consulting. He wanted to make a conquest, a convert of Jim. He had a hundred reasons for wishing it. First, the conviction that on the whole it was a far more difficult task than administering the pledge to Mrs. Lloyd: second, that Jim Plowden, after all, would be a more considerable prize than the old woman, that lie was at least worth as much trouble as a young waterman on Riverside; third, that perhaps it might be allowed that an Oxford man and a gentleman has a peculiar duty towards another Oxford man and gentleman who is going astray, even though that duty is very little acknowledged. Fourthly—— No! there was nothing at all about Florence Plowden in the matter, nothing but an undying resentment against the girl who had presumed to teach him his duty! She might be right. I presume he felt in his heart that she was right, or he would not have taken the measures he had done. But he also felt in his heart that he could never forgive her for her temerity, for departing from the woman’s part so much as to venture to suggest to one of the priests of her parish what he should do. No, Florence Plowden told for nothing in the effort he was making. When her name floated up it awakened nothing but feelings of anger in his breast.
Poor Florry! She sat half in the dark with her knitting, pretending she felt her eyes weak, in order that she might not betray the melting mist of happiness that was in her face, the soft dew that kept coming into her eyes. If anybody had seen how near she was to crying, they would have thought her unhappy: whereas she was almost too happy to think, certainly too glad—except in a momentary impulse like that which had called upon her the reproof of both parents—to speak.
Jim put his books before Osborne, who grinned at the sight. It was intended for a smile, but it was a poor version of a smile. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘Browning, the “Ride to Aix.” Isn’t it just a little hackneyed? Oh, no, not the poem itself. I don’t mean that: but everybody does it. What’s the other? Ingoldsby. O—oh. I don’t know, if you ask me my opinion, that I care so very much for Ingoldsby, myself.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Jim, who for this once was wiser than his leader, ‘but they do, you know. He’s always the most popular of all.’
‘Eh—oh—ah,’ said Mr. Osborne, putting his head on one side as though to see in that way the virtues which were visible to the people in general. ‘Now, I should have thought,’ he said, ‘that this sort of stuff was too—too conventional, too fictitious, in the wrong sense of the word, to please these sort of rough intelligences; that they would like something more—more straightforward, don’t you know.’
‘Like the “Ride to Aix”? But then they’re awfully anxious to know,’ said Jim, ‘what it was for, what the news was, and when it was, and all that; and I’ve never found yet any one that knew.’
Mr. Osborne discreetly turned that question aside, for on this point he had no more information than other people. ‘Suppose you read it and let me hear,’ he said. It was very good-humoured and kind of him. He expected nothing, if truth must be told, and he was really very full of occupation and had a great many things to do. But Jim, as it turned out, did not read badly at all. And there came a note of emotion in his voice as the gallop rang on; that sort of sympathy with the excitement of the strain, and climbing passion in the throat, which only a few readers are moved by. The curate listened in amaze while this high note of poetic sympathy thrilled through the lines, which Jim read with a pause or two and strain of breath to overcome himself. He could not understand what it meant to feel thus, and yet to drift into the parlour of the ‘Blue Boar’; to tremble and flush with the poetry, and then listen to Slaughter and White maundering about politics, or sit with the schoolmistress. There came over the curate for the first time in a great many years a sense of humility, a sudden conviction that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy.
‘By Jove,’ said Jim, ‘I got through it pretty well this time. The worst is my voice always breaks at that line: “And into the square Roland staggered and stood.” One gets wound up so, don’t you know. After that I can always manage the rest.’
‘Give me the book,’ said Osborne; and he, too, read the last verses, but his voice did not break at all, the water did not come into his eyes. He read it all as if it were one of his own sermons. Decidedly there were things in heaven and earth—perhaps he acknowledged it a little grudgingly: ‘Evidently, Plowden, you have the knack of it much better than I.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Jim, with a good-humoured laugh. ‘You read so well. I’ve got no knack. It is only that a few of these things get over me somehow. Because—because they are mere stories and of no consequence.’