Alas, poor Yorick! He had been so enjoying his company—company that had neither respect for his cloth, nor contempt for his cloth, nor indifference to his cloth; that, in fact, knew nothing about his cloth—and rejoicing in Jim's free speech, that would have been cramped here and crimped there had the speaker known he was addressing a parson-gentleman. It was like stepping back into the old days before he took clerk's orders; days when he was still uninsulated, still one with his kind. And yet there was never a man with a more earnest belief in his inherited mission to fight the Devil in any of the half-score of Churches that look askant at one another, and waste good powder and shot over the creeds their congregations shout in unison, knowing all the while that one or more of the chorus may be—must be—uttering a lie. Athelstan Taylor had donned the cloth he wore simply because it was the uniform of his territorial regiment in the army that, as he conceived, was being for ever enrolled in the service of Ormuzd against Ahrimanes. In his enthusiasm to fight beneath the banner of his division of the army, the Cross, he had ridden roughshod over a hundred scruples on petty details; and the consequence was that his most earnest admirers were often fain to shake their heads over his lawless expressions of opinion on sacred subjects, and to lament that Taylor, with so many fine points in his character, should be on vital points of Doctrine so painfully unsound. It was an open secret on the part of both Augustus Fossett and his sister that they prayed for Athelstan; the former with a belief as real as he was capable of that the wanderer would be guided; the latter with a practical misgiving that a very large number of thoughtful persons had not been guided, or so many samples would not be to be found outside the Communions of the English—and Roman—Churches. For too many of her brother's idols had "gone over" for it to be possible to pool the latter in the sum total of orthodox, heterodox, and cacodox dissidents. Of which last, in connection with this brother's and sister's petitions to the Almighty to guide Athelstan into their way of thinking, the one they preferred to call Socinianism was the most poisonous and insidious. A creed baited with mere veracities, to get a bite from the unwary!
As for Athelstan, every time he came to take his friend's burden off his shoulders in London he felt more clearly than before how apt he was to lose sight of even Ormuzd and Ahriman in a blind struggle against the brutalism and debauchery, and filth and disease, of a London outskirt well up to its date. Encouraged at first by the tidiness of the last-built bee-lines of bricks and mortar, he had half hoped a compromise was being found between purchasing a sense of Christianity for the rich at the cost of indefinite multiplication of the poor, and passing sentence of death on those unable to enjoy living on nothing, or to give anything in exchange for something. But as soon as he began to get behind the scenes his poorer parishioners were enacting, he saw and heard every day things that had dashed his hope; and by the time of the story had quite come to the conclusion that the small population whose souls he was supposed to be looking after were as vicious as the Court of Charles the Second, and so idle as to affirm the right of male mankind to sixteen hours out of twenty-four to eat, drink, sleep, and do nothing in—slight exceptions to the last, to nobody's credit, being allowed for. Of course it was an exaggerated feeling on Athelstan's part; one thing was that he could not reconcile himself to the ubiquitous fœtor of the beer in which, speaking broadly, his flock—who didn't acknowledge him as their shepherd at all—lived and moved and had their being. Under exasperation, he thought of them in that way ... and forgave them!
Miss Fossett interrupted a reverie to this effect, by saying to him, as he arrived, after striding five miles in an hour through the slush and drizzle: "I've had to put that child to bed."
"Hullo!—nothing bad, I hope?" What a damper! And he had looked forward so to the small anxious face, and the consolation he was going to give it. All his clients were not so nice as Lizarann.
"Dr. Ferris said he wasn't sure if it was pleurisy. It might be pneumonia."
"Doctor's been, then?"
"Oh yes!—I sent for him. She's been poulticed ever since."
"Hope it's all a fuss about nothing."
"I hope so. Here's a visitor, Lizarann. Now don't you jump up!"