THE CHORISTER
The Rev. John Fithian lived alone with a man-servant in a wide-windowed, sombre, red old house, elbowed by tenements, near the Church of the Lifted Cross—once a fashionable quarter: now mean, dejected, incongruously thronged, and fast losing the last appearances of respectability. Sombre without—half-lit, silent, vast within: the whole intolerant of frivolity, inharmony, garishness, ugliness, but yet quite free of gloom and ghostly suggestion. The boy tiptoed over the thick carpets, spoke in whispers, eyed the shadowy corners—sensitive to impressions, forever alert: nevertheless possessing a fine feeling of security and hopefulness; still wistful, often weeping in the night, but not melancholy. Responsive to environment, by nature harmonious with his new surroundings, he presently moved through the lofty old rooms with a manner reflecting their own—the same gravity, serenity, old-fashioned grace: expressing even their stateliness in a quaint and childish way. Thus was the soil of his heart prepared for the seed of a great change.
By and by the curate enlightened the child concerning sin and the Vicarious Sacrifice. This was when the leaves were falling from the trees in the park—a drear, dark night: the wind sweeping the streets in violent gusts, the rain lashing the windowpanes. Night had come unnoticed—swiftly, intensely: in the curate's study a change from gray twilight to firelit shadows. The boy was squatted on the hearth-rug, disquieted by the malicious beating at the window, glad to be in the glow of the fire: his visions all of ragged men and women cowering from the weather.
"It is time, now," the curate sighed, "that I told you the story."