“Half a league, half a league out of the city,
All to the boarding-school rode the committee:”
and could see how the enemies of the church were covering themselves with ridicule and disgrace, and securing their own ultimate defeat.
“They’re hanging themselves! They’re hanging themselves!” Mr. Yorke would say with glee, at each new extravagance.
When the Yorkes first returned to the city, Melicent’s affairs chiefly occupied their minds. There was no engagement, and there had been no private intercourse between her and Mr. Griffeth; but she had not broken with him entirely, and had requested permission to receive friendly letters from him. After Mr. Griffeth had been bound over to commit no act and write no word aggressively sentimental, this permission was unwillingly given. One of these friendly missives had come the week after her arrival; and, though the writer had kept the letter of his promise, he had so broken the spirit of it that Mrs. Yorke, to whom the letter was dutifully shown, frowned on reading it, and had a mind to answer it herself. Melicent, indeed, seemed desirous to alarm her family as much as possible regarding this affair, and carried herself with such a conscious, heroine-of-a-novel air as both amused and annoyed her family.
Among their earliest visitors was the Rev. Doctor Stewart, Mrs. Yorke’s former pastor and good friend. The mother confided to him her distress, and besought him to speak to Melicent on the subject.
“She always had a high respect for you and Mrs. Stewart, and would be influenced by what you say,” she concluded.
The minister made inquiries concerning this suitor’s orthodoxy as a Universalist.
“He is orthodox in nothing, doctor!” Mrs. Yorke exclaimed. “He wears his creed as he wears his clothes, changing, when convenient, the one with as little scruple as the other. He is a moral Sybarite, who adjusts his conscience comfortably to his wishes, and looks about with an air of calm rectitude, and an assumption of pitying superiority over people who are so bigoted as to believe the same yesterday and to-day.”
“I know the kind of man,” the minister said, with an expression of severity and mortification. “They are one of the pests of the time, and a disgrace to the ministry. I will do all I can to separate Melicent from him.”
Doctor Stewart was a stately gentleman, something over fifty years of age, gray-haired, rather heavy, and slightly old-fashioned. He was amiable in disposition, believed that great respect should be paid to the clergy, wore a white neck-cloth, and was fairly educated in everything but theology. Since the Yorkes left Boston, he had lost his wife, an excellent lady several years older than himself. He was left with three children, a son of nineteen, who was a student in Harvard College; another son, ten years older, who was making his fortune in the West; and a daughter, the eldest of the family, married to a foreign missionary, and industriously distributing Bibles to the Chinese. Once a month, in the missionary-meeting, the reverend doctor read a letter from this daughter, in which she described the great work she was doing, and asked for more Bibles and money.