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DIVINE SERVICE.
The next day the curate called again on Leopold. But Helen happened
to be otherwise engaged for a few minutes, and Mrs. Ramshorn to be
in the sick-room when the servant brought his name. With her
jealousy of Wingfold's teaching, she would not have admitted him,
but Lingard made such loud protest when he heard her say "Not at
home," insisting on seeing him, that she had to give way, and tell
the maid to show him up. She HAD NO NOTION however of leaving him
alone in the room with the invalid: who could tell what absurd and
extravagant ideas he might not put into the boy's head! He might
make him turn monk, or Socinian, or latter-day-saint, for what she
knew! So she sat, blocking up the sole small window in the youth's
dark dwelling that looked eastward, and damming back the tide of the
dawn from his diseased and tormented soul. Little conversation was
therefore possible. Still the face of his new friend was a comfort
to Leopold, and ere he left him they had managed to fix an hour for
next day, when they would not be thus foiled of their talk.
That same afternoon, Wingfold took the draper to see Polwarth.
Rachel was lying on the sofa in the parlour--a poor little heap,
looking more like a grave disturbed by efforts at a resurrection,
than a form informed with humanity. But she was cheerful and
cordial, receiving Mr. Drew and accepted his sympathy most kindly.
"We'll see what God will do for me," she said in answer to a word
from the curate. Her whole bearing, now as always, was that of one
who perfectly trusted a supreme spirit under whose influences lay
even the rugged material of her deformed dwelling.
Polwarth allowed Wingfold to help him in getting tea, and the
conversation, as will be the case where all are in earnest, quickly
found the right channel.
It is not often in real life that such conversations occur.
Generally, in any talk worth calling conversation, every man has
some point to maintain, and his object is to justify his own thesis
and disprove his neighbour's. I will allow that he may primarily
have adopted his thesis because of some sign of truth in it, but his
mode of supporting it is generally such as to block up every cranny
in his soul at which more truth might enter. In the present case,
unusual as it is for so many as three truth-loving men to come thus
together on the face of this planet, here were three simply set on
uttering truth they had seen, and gaining sight of truth as yet
veiled from them.
I shall attempt only a general impression of the result of their
evening's intercourse, partly recording the utterances of Polwarth.
"I have been trying hard to follow you, Mr. Polwarth," said the
draper, after his host had for a while had the talk to himself, "but
I cannot get a hold of your remarks. One moment I think I have got
the end of the clew, and the next find myself all abroad again.
Would you tell me what you mean by divine service, for I think you
must use the phrase in some different sense from what I have been
accustomed to?"
"Ah! I ought to remember," said Polwarth, "that what has grown
familiar to my mind from much solitary thinking, may not at once
show itself to another, when presented in the forms of a foreign
individuality. I ought to have premised that, when I use the phrase,
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