“Where did you pick him up?”
“I advertised for him.”
I took on Brother Augustine or Mr. Mills. Some called him one, some the other, and rightly, for he had two aspects, very distinct.
When I engaged him he was aged, I suppose, thirty-five, but it was impossible to say what his age really was: he was one of those men who look old when twenty, and never alter. He did not tell me his age. He was as coy as an old maid about that, but he was very ready to tell me his story, and it was an odd one.
He had been given when quite a little boy by his father, in Colchester, to the Roman Catholic priest there, who brought him up, and made him serve him daily at the altar, black his boots, and help the old housekeeper to make the beds, and dust the rooms, and clean the dishes. He also brought in the meals.
This went on till, as Mr. Mills said to me, “the dear old priest got so very old that he was fit for nothing but to be chaplain to a convent, so he was moved away, and then I had to be put somewhere. So I was put with Hyams, the tailor.”
How long Mills was with Hyams I do not know, but the swirl of life in freedom after the even and quiet of a parsonage was more than he could bear, and he took it into his head to become a monk.
He entered on his novitiate, “And,” said he, “they shaved my head, and I have been a martyr to neuralgia ever since.”