CHAPTER XXIV.

An angel unawares.

Feeling rather more than the usual reaction so well-known to clergymen after the concentrated duties of the Sunday, I resolved on Monday to have the long country walk I had been disappointed of on the Saturday previous.  It was such a day as it seems impossible to describe except in negatives.  It was not stormy, it was not rainy, it was not sunshiny, it was not snowy, it was not frosty, it was not foggy, it was not clear, it was nothing but cloudy and quiet and cold and generally ungenial, with just a puff of wind now and then to give an assertion to its ungeniality.  I should not in the least have cared to tell what sort the day was, had it not been an exact representation of my own mind.  It was not the day that made me such as itself.  The weather could always easily influence the surface of my mind, my external mood, but it could never go much further.  The smallest pleasure would break through the conditions that merely came of such a day.  But this morning my whole mind and heart seemed like the day.  The summer was thousands of miles off on the other side of the globe.  Ethelwyn, up at the old house there across the river, seemed millions of miles away.  The summer might come back; she never would come nearer:  it was absurd to expect it.  For in such moods stupidity constantly arrogates to itself the qualities and claims of insight.  In fact, it passes itself off for common sense, making the most dreary ever appear the most reasonable.  In such moods a man might almost be persuaded that it was ridiculous to expect any such poetic absurdity as the summer, with its diamond mornings and its opal evenings, ever to come again; nay, to think that it ever had had any existence except in the fancies of the human heart—­one of its castles in the air.  The whole of life seemed faint and foggy, with no red in it anywhere; and when I glanced at my present relations in Marshmallows, I could not help finding several circumstances to give some appearance of justice to this appearance of things.  I seemed to myself to have done no good.  I had driven Catherine Weir to the verge of suicide, while at the same time I could not restrain her from the contemplation of some dire revenge.  I had lost the man upon whom I had most reckoned as a seal of my ministry, namely, Thomas Weir.  True there was Old Rogers; but Old Rogers was just as good before I found him.  I could not dream of having made him any better.  And so I went on brooding over all the disappointing portions of my labour, all the time thinking about myself, instead of God and the work that lay for me to do in the days to come.

“Nobody,” I said, “but Old Rogers understands me.  Nobody would care, as far as my teaching goes, if another man took my place from next Sunday forward.  And for Miss Oldcastle, her playing the Agnus Dei on Saturday afternoon, even if she intended that I should hear it, could only indicate at most that she knew how she had behaved to me in the morning, and thought she had gone too far and been unkind, or perhaps was afraid lest she should be accountable for any failure I might make in my Sunday duties, and therefore felt bound to do something to restore my equanimity.”