Taking that great wage out of the place year after year, said Tomlinson, one of the townspeople, and leaving that curate to do all the work on eighty pounds a year; I havent patience with him.
Several other fellow-townsmen expressed their opinions that it was a shame, and declared that they had not patience with the parson, and the consequence was that he was so talked over, that when he came back and set about his work of reformation he was met at his very first movement by a hedge of thorns that regularly surrounded the church. Every one of these thorns was a prejudice which he had to fight.
Church did very well for t owd rector, and always has done, was the cry; why wont it do for he?
Festina lente , said the Reverend Eli to himself; and he set to work slowly, cautiously, and well, making such advance in his undertaking that plenty of money was promised, and he saw in the future a handsome, well-warmed church, with all the surroundings for reverent worship.
Poor old fellow! he had said to himself as he listened to the clerk, for the old man would utter the three first words of a response in a shrill tenor, and then drop his voice, nothing, else being heard until it came to the end, when to a new-comer his peculiar Hup-men was almost startling in its strangeness.
Week, week, week; wubble, wubble, wubble , the school-children always declared he said, no matter what was the response; and then, after giving out the psalm or hymn so that no one could hear, the poor old fellow would sing
sentence, but tore open the door of the clerks desk, the Rector coming forward to where the old man knelt in his accustomed narrow place, his hands upon his book, his head upon his breast, as he had knelt down after the sermon.
Hes like ice, whispered the Churchwarden, putting forth his great strength, and lifting the old man bodily out, to lay him by the stove, the Rector placing a cushion beneath his head.
The motion seemed to revive the old man for a moment, and he opened his eyes, staring strangely at the Rector, who held one hand.
Then his lips moved, and in a voice hardly above a whisper they heard him say
Bless thou! Bless thou! those words would have killed me.
There was a pause, and the Churchwarden was hastening forth to fetch help, when there arose in the now empty church a shrill Amen .
It was the old clerks last.
Part 1, Chapter IV. At Lawford School
Silence! who was that?
Please, Miss, Cissy Hudson, Miss. Please, Miss, its Mr Bone.
This last delivered in a chorus of shrill voices; and Sage Portlock turned sharply from the semi-circle of children, one and all standing with their toes accurately touching a thickly-chalked line, to see a head thrust into the schoolroom, but with the edge of the door held closely against the neck, pressing it upon the jamb, so that the entire body to which the head belonged was invisible.
The head which had been thus suddenly thrust into the schoolroom was not attractive, the face being red and deeply lined with marks not made by age. The eyes were dull and watery, there was a greyish stubble of a couple of days growth upon the chin, and the hair that appeared above the low brow was rough, unkempt, and, if clean, did no justice to the cleansing hand.
How tiresome! muttered Sage Portlock, moving towards the door, which then opened, and a tall man, in a very shabby thin greatcoat which reached almost to his heels, stumped into the room.
Stumped or thumped either word will do to express the heavy way in which Humphrey Bone, thirty years master of Lawford boys school, drew attention to the fact that he had one leg much shorter than the other, the difference in length being made up by a sole of some five inches thickness, which sole came down upon the red-brick floor like the modified blows of a paviors rammer.
Such a clever man! Such a good teacher! the Lawford people said. There was nothing against him but a drop of drink, and this drop of drink had kept Humphrey Bone a poor man, dislocated his hip in a fall upon a dark night, when the former doctor of the place had not discovered the exact nature of the injury till it was too late, and the drop of drink in this instance had resulted in the partaker becoming a permanent cripple.
Lawford was such a slow-moving place in those days, that it took its principal inhabitants close upon twenty years to decide that a master who very often went home helplessly intoxicated, and who had become a hopeless moral wreck, living in a state of squalor and debt, could not be a fitting person to train and set an example to the boys left in his charge. And at last, but in the face of great opposition from the old-fashioned party arrayed against the Rev. Eli Mallow and his friends the party who reiterated the cry that Humphrey Bone was such a clever man, wrote such a copperplate-like hand, when his fingers were not palsied, and measured land so well it was decided that Humphrey Bone should be called upon to resign at Christmas, and Luke Ross, the son of the Lawford tanner, then training at Saint Chrysostoms College, London, should take his place.