I SLEPT in a little bed in a corner of the room, and my Father in
the ancestral four-poster nearer to the door. Very early one
bright September morning at the close of my eleventh year, my
Father called me over to him. I climbed up, and was snugly
wrapped in the coverlid; and then we held a momentous
conversation. It began abruptly by his asking me whether I should
like to have a new mamma. I was never a sentimentalist, and I
therefore answered, cannily, that that would depend on who she
was. He parried this, and announced that, anyway, a new mamma was
coming; I was sure to like her. Still in a noncommittal mood, I
asked: 'Will she go with me to the back of the lime-kiln?' This
question caused my Father a great bewilderment. I had to explain
that the ambition of my life was to go up behind the lime-kiln on
the top of the hill that hung over Barton, a spot which was
forbidden ground, being locally held one of extreme danger. 'Oh!
I daresay she will,' my Father then said, 'but you must guess who
she is.' I guessed one or two of the less comely of the female
'saints', and, this embarrassing my Father,--since the second I
mentioned was a married woman who kept a sweet-shop in the
village,--he cut my inquiries short by saying, 'It is Miss
Brightwen.'
So far so good, and I was well pleased. But unfortunately I
remembered that it was my duty to testify 'in season and out of
season'. I therefore asked, with much earnestness, 'But, Papa, is
she one of the Lord's children?' He replied, with gravity, that
she was. 'Has she taken up her cross in baptism?' I went on, for
this was my own strong point as a believer. My Father looked a
little shame-faced, and replied: 'Well, she has not as yet seen
the necessity of that, but we must pray that the Lord may make
her way clear before her. You see, she has been brought up,
hitherto, in the so-called Church of England.' Our positions were
now curiously changed. It seemed as if it were I who was the
jealous monitor, and my Father the deprecating penitent. I sat up
in the coverlid, and I shook a finger at him. 'Papa,' I said,
'don't tell me that she's a pedobaptist?' I had lately acquired
that valuable word, and I seized this remarkable opportunity of
using it. It affected my Father painfully, but he repeated his
assurance that if we united our prayers, and set the Scripture
plan plainly before Miss Brightwen, there could be no doubt that
she would see her way to accepting the doctrine of adult baptism.
And he said we must judge not, lest we ourselves bejudged. I had
just enough tact to let that pass, but I was quite aware that our
whole system was one of judging, and that we had no intention
whatever of being judged ourselves. Yet even at the age of eleven
one sees that on certain occasions to press home the truth is not
convenient.
Just before Christmas, on a piercing night of frost, my Father
brought to us his bride. The smartening up of the house, the new
furniture, the removal of my own possessions to a private
bedroom, the wedding-gifts of the 'saints', all these things
paled in interest before the fact that Miss Marks had 'made a
scene', in the course of the afternoon. I was dancing about the
drawing-room, and was saying: 'Oh! I am so glad my new Mamma is
coming,' when Miss Marks called out, in an unnatural voice, 'Oh!
you cruel child.' I stopped in amazement and stared at her,
whereupon she threw prudence to the winds, and moaned: 'I once
thought I should be your dear mamma.' I was simply stupefied, and
I expressed my horror in terms that were clear and strong.
Thereupon Miss Marks had a wild fit of hysterics, while I looked
on, wholly unsympathetic and still deeply affronted. She was
right; I was cruel, alas! but then, what a silly woman she had
been! The consequence was that she withdrew in a moist and
quivering condition to her boudoir, where she had locked herself
in when I, all smiles and caresses, was welcoming the bride and
bridegroom on the doorstep as politely as if I had been a valued
old family retainer.
My stepmother immediately became a great ally of mine. She was
never a tower of strength to me, but at least she was always a
lodge in my garden of cucumbers. She was a very well-meaning
pious lady, but she was not a fanatic, and her mind did not
naturally revel in spiritual aspirations. Almost her only social
fault was that she was sometimes a little fretful; this was the
way in which her bruised individuality asserted itself. But she
was affectionate, serene, and above all refined. Her refinement
was extraordinarily pleasant to my nerves, on which much else in
our surroundings jarred.
How life may have jarred, poor insulated lady, on her during her
first experience of our life at the Room, I know not, but I think
she was a philosopher. She had, with surprising rashness, and in
opposition to the wishes of every member of her own family, taken
her cake, and now she recognized that she must eat it, to the
last crumb. Over her wishes and prejudices my Father exercised a
constant, cheerful and quiet pressure. He was never unkind or
abrupt, but he went on adding avoirdupois until her will gave way
under the sheer weight. Even to public immersion, which, as was
natural in a shy and sensitive lady of advancing years, she
regarded with a horror which was long insurmountable,--even to
baptism she yielded, and my Father had the joy to announce to the
Saints one Sunday morning at the breaking of bread that 'my
beloved wife has been able at length to see the Lord's Will in
the matter of baptism, and will testify to the faith which is in
her on Thursday evening next.' No wonder my stepmother was
sometimes fretful.
On the physical side, I owe her an endless debt of gratitude. Her
relations, who objected strongly to her marriage, had told her,
among other pleasant prophecies, that 'the first thing you will
have to do will be to bury that poor child'. Under the old-world
sway of Miss Marks, I had slept beneath a load of blankets, had
never gone out save weighted with great coat and comforter, and
had been protected from fresh air as if from a pestilence. With
real courage my stepmother reversed all this. My bedroom window
stood wide open all night long, wraps were done away with, or
exchanged for flannel garments next the skin, and I was urged to
be out and about as much as possible.
All the quidnuncs among the 'saints' shook their heads; Mary
Grace Burmington, a little embittered by the downfall of her
Marks, made a solemn remonstrance to my Father, who, however,
allowed my stepmother to carry out her excellent plan. My health
responded rapidly to this change of regime, but increase of
health did not bring increase of spirituality. My Father, fully
occupied with moulding the will and inflaming the piety of my
stepmother, left me now, to a degree not precedented,
in undisturbed possession of my own devices. I did not lose my
faith, but many other things took a prominent place in my mind.
It will, I suppose, be admitted that there is no greater proof of
complete religious sincerity than fervour in private prayer. If
an individual, alone by the side of his bed, prolongs his
intercessions, lingers wrestling with his divine Companion, and
will not leave off until he has what he believes to be evidence
of a reply to his entreaties--then, no matter what the character
of his public protestations, or what the frailty of his actions,
it is absolutely certain that he believes in what he professes.
My Father prayed in private in what I may almost call a spirit of
violence. He entreated for spiritual guidance with nothing less
than importunity. It might be said that he stormed the citadels
of God's grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions
without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive
to his prayers or wearied by them. My Father's acts of
supplication, as I used to witness them at night, when I was
supposed to be asleep, were accompanied by stretchings out of the
hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, by deep
breathings, by murmurous sounds which seemed just breaking out of
silence, like Virgil's bees out of the hive, 'magnis clamoribus'.
My Father fortified his religious life by prayer as an athlete
does his physical life by lung-gymnastics and vigorous rubbings.
It was a trouble to my conscience that I could not emulate this
fervour. The poverty of my prayers had now long been a source of
distress to me, but I could not discover how to enrich them. My
Father used to warn us very solemnly against 'lip-service', by
which he meant singing hymns of experience and joining in
ministrations in which our hearts took no vital or personal part.
This was an outward act, the tendency of which I could well
appreciate, but there was a 'lip-service' even more deadly than
that, against which it never occurred to him to warn me. It
assailed me when I had come alone by my bedside, and had blown
out the candle, and had sunken on my knees in my night-gown. Then
it was that my deadness made itself felt, in the mechanical
address I put up, the emptiness of my language, the absence of
all real unction.
I never could contrive to ask God for spiritual gifts in the same
voice and spirit in which I could ask a human being for objects
which I knew he could give me and which I earnestly desired to
possess. That sense of the reality of intercession was for ever
denied me, and it was, I now see, the stigma of my want of faith.
But at the time, of course, I suspected nothing of the kind, and
I tried to keep up my zeal by a desperate mental flogging, as if
my soul had been a peg-top.
In nothing did I gain from the advent of my stepmother more than
in the encouragement she gave to my friendships with a group of
boys of my own age, of whom I had now lately formed the
acquaintance. These friendships she not merely tolerated, but
fostered; it was even due to her kind arrangements that they took
a certain set form, that our excursions started from this house
or from that on regular days. I hardly know by what stages I
ceased to be a lonely little creature of mock-monographs and mud-
pies, and became a member of a sort of club of eight or ten
active boys. The long summer holidays of 1861 were set in an
enchanting brightness.
Looking back, I cannot see a cloud on the terrestrial horizon--I
see nothing but a blaze of sunshine; descents of slippery grass
to moons of snow-white shingle, cold to the bare flesh; red
promontories running out into a sea that was like sapphire; and
our happy clan climbing, bathing, boating, lounging, chattering,
all the hot day through. Once more I have to record the fact,
which I think is not without interest, that precisely as my life
ceases to be solitary, it ceases to be distinct. I have no
difficulty in recalling, with the minuteness of a photograph,
scenes in which my Father and I were the sole actors within the
four walls of a room, but of the glorious life among wild boys on
the margin of the sea I have nothing but vague and broken
impressions, delicious and illusive.
It was a remarkable proof of my Father's temporary lapse into
indulgence that he made no effort to thwart my intimacy with
these my new companions. He was in an unusually humane mood
himself. His marriage was one proof of it; another was the
composition at this time of the most picturesque, easy and
graceful of all his writings, _The Romance of Natural History_,
even now a sort of classic. Everything combined to make him
believe that the blessing of the Lord was upon him, and to clothe
the darkness of the world with at least a mist of rose-colour. I
do not recollect that ever at this time he bethought him, when I
started in the morning for a long day with my friends on the edge
of the sea, to remind me that I must speak to them, in season and
out of season, of the Blood of Jesus. And I, young coward that I
was, let sleeping dogmas lie.
My companions were not all of them the sons of saints in our
communion; their parents belonged to that professional class
which we were only now beginning to attract to our services. They
were brought up in religious, but not in fanatical, families, and
I was the only 'converted' one among them. Mrs. Paget, of whom I
shall have presently to speak, characteristically said that it
grieved her to see 'one lamb among so many kids'. But 'kid' is a
word of varied significance and the symbol did not seem to us
effectively applied. As a matter of fact, we made what I still
feel was an excellent tacit compromise. My young companions never
jeered at me for being 'in communion with the saints', and I, on
my part, never urged the Atonement upon them. I began, in fact,
more and more to keep my own religion for use on Sundays.
It will, I hope, have been observed that among the very curious
grown-up people into whose company I was thrown, although many
were frail and some were foolish, none, so far as I can discern,
were hypocritical. I am not one of those who believe that
hypocrisy is a vice that grows on every bush. Of course, in
religious more than in any other matters, there is a perpetual
contradiction between our thoughts and our deeds which is
inevitable to our social order, and is bound to lead to _cette
tromperie mutuelle_ of which Pascal speaks. But I have often
wondered, while admiring the splendid portrait of Tartuffe,
whether such a monster ever, or at least often, has walked the
stage of life; whether Moliere observed, or only invented him.
To adopt a scheme of religious pretension, with no belief
whatever in its being true, merely for sensuous advantage, openly
acknowledging to one's inner self the brazen system of deceit,--
such a course may, and doubtless has been, trodden, yet surely
much less frequently than cynics love to suggest. But at the
juncture which I have now reached in my narrative, I had the
advantage of knowing a person who was branded before the whole
world, and punished by the law of his country, as a felonious
hypocrite. My Father himself could only sigh and admit the
charge. And yet--I doubt.
About half-way between our village and the town there lay a
comfortable villa inhabited by a retired solicitor, or perhaps
attorney, whom I shall name Mr. Dormant. We often called at his
half-way house, and, although he was a member of the town-
meeting, he not unfrequently came up to us for 'the breaking of
bread'. Mr. Dormant was a solid, pink man, of a cosy habit. He
had beautiful white hair, a very soft voice, and a welcoming,
wheedling manner; he was extremely fluent and zealous in using
the pious phraseology of the sect. My Father had never been very
much attracted to him, but the man professed, and I think felt,
an overwhelming admiration for my Father. Mr. Dormant was not
very well off, and in the previous year he had persuaded an aged
gentleman of wealth to come and board with him. When, in the
course of the winter, this gentleman died, much surprise was felt
at the report that he had left almost his entire fortune, which
was not inconsiderable, to Mr. Dormant.
Much surprise--for the old gentleman had a son to whom he had
always been warmly attached, who was far away, I think in South
America, practising a perfectly respectable profession of which
his father entirely approved. My own Father always preserved a
delicacy and a sense of honour about money which could not have
been more sensitive if he had been an ungodly man, and I am very
much pleased to remember that when the legacy was first spoken
of, he regretted that Mr. Dormant should have allowed the old
gentleman to make this will. If he knew the intention, my Father
said, it would have shown a more proper sense of his
responsibility if he had dissuaded the testator from so
unbecoming a disposition. That was long before any legal question
arose; and now Mr. Dormant came into his fortune, and began to
make handsome gifts to missionary societies, and to his own
meeting in the town. If I do not mistake, he gave, unsolicited, a
sum to our building fund, which my Father afterwards returned.
But in process of time we heard that the son had come back from
the Antipodes, and was making investigations. Before we knew
where we were, the news burst upon us, like a bomb-shell, that
Mr. Dormant had been arrested on a criminal charge and was now in
jail at Exeter.
Sympathy was at first much extended amongst us to the prisoner.
But it was lessened when we understood that the old gentleman had
been 'converted' while under Dormant's roof, and had given the
fact that his son was 'an unbeliever' as a reason for
disinheriting him. All doubt was set aside when it was divulged,
under pressure, by the nurse who attended on the old gentleman,
herself one of the 'saints', that Dormant had traced the
signature to the will by drawing the fingers of the testator over
the document when he was already and finally comatose.
My Father, setting aside by a strong effort of will the
repugnance which he felt, visited the prisoner in gaol before
this final evidence had been extracted. When he returned he said
that Dormant appeared to be enjoying a perfect confidence of
heart, and had expressed a sense of his joy and peace in the
Lord; my Father regretted that he had not been able to persuade
him to admit any error, even of judgement. But the prisoner's
attitude in the dock, when the facts were proved, and not by him
denied, was still more extraordinary. He could be induced to
exhibit no species of remorse, and, to the obvious anger of the
judge himself, stated that he had only done his duty as a
Christian, in preventing this wealth from coming into the hands
of an ungodly man, who would have spent it in the service of the
flesh and of the devil. Sternly reprimanded by the judge, he made
the final statement that at that very moment he was conscious of
his Lord's presence, in the dock at his side, whispering to him
'Well done, thou good and faithful servant!' In this frame of
conscience, and with a glowing countenance, he was hurried away
to penal servitude.
This was a very painful incident, and it is easy to see how
compromising, how cruel, it was in its effect upon our communion;
what occasion it gave to our enemies to blaspheme. No one, in
either meeting, could or would raise a voice to defend Mr.
Dormant. We had to bow our heads when we met our enemies in the
gate. The blow fell more heavily on the meeting of which he had
been a prominent and communicating member, but it fell on us too,
and my Father felt it severely. For many years he would never
mention the man's name, and he refused all discussion of the
incident.
Yet I was never sure, and I am not sure now, that the wretched
being was a hypocrite. There are as many vulgar fanatics as there
are distinguished ones, and I am not convinced that Dormant,
coarse and narrow as he was, may not have sincerely believed that
it was better for the money to be used in religious propaganda
than in the pleasures of the world, of which he doubtless formed
a very vague idea. On this affair I meditated much, and it
awakened in my mind, for the first time, a doubt whether our
exclusive system of ethics was an entirely salutary one, if it
could lead the conscience of a believer to tolerate such acts as
these, acts which my Father himself had denounced as
dishonourable and disgraceful.
My stepmother brought with her a little library of such books as
we had not previously seen, but which yet were known to all the
world except us. Prominent among these was a set of the poems of
Walter Scott, and in his unwonted geniality and provisional
spirit of compromise, my Father must do no less than read these
works aloud to my stepmother in the quiet spring evenings. This
was a sort of aftermath of courtship, a tribute of song to his
bride, very sentimental and pretty. She would sit, sedately, at
her workbox, while he, facing her, poured forth the verses at her
like a blackbird. I was not considered in this arrangement, which
was wholly matrimonial, but I was present, and the exercise made
more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal
agents. My Father read the verse admirably, with a full,--some
people (but not I) might say with a too full--perception of the
metre as well as of the rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and
glorying in the proper names. He began, and it was a happy
choice, with 'The Lady of the Lake'. It gave me singular pleasure
to hear his large voice do justice to 'Duncrannon' and 'Cambus-
Kenneth', and wake the echoes with 'Rhoderigh Vich Alphine dhu,
ho! ieroe!' I almost gasped with excitement, while a shudder
floated down my backbone, when we came to:
A sharp and shrieking echo gave,
Coir-Uriskin, thy goblin cave!
And the grey pass where birches wave,
On Beala-nam-bo,
a passage which seemed to me to achieve the ideal of sublime
romance. My thoughts were occupied all day long with the
adventures of Fitzjames and the denizens of Ellen's Isle. It
became an obsession, and when I was asked whether I remembered
the name of the cottage where the minister of the Bible
Christians lodged, I answered, dreamily, 'Yes,--Beala-nambo.'
Seeing me so much fascinated, thrown indeed into a temporary
frenzy, by the epic poetry of Sir Walter Scott, my stepmother
asked my Father whether I might not start reading the Waverley
Novels. But he refused to permit this, on the ground that those
tales gave false and disturbing pictures of life, and would lead
away my attention from heavenly things. I do not fully apprehend
what distinction he drew between the poems, which he permitted,
and the novels, which he refused. But I suppose he regarded a
work in verse as more artificial, and therefore less likely to
make a realistic impression, than one in prose. There is
something quaint in the conscientious scruple which allows _The
Lord of the Isles_ and excludes _Rob Roy_.
But stranger still, and amounting almost to a whim, was his
sudden decision that, although I might not touch the novels of
Scott, I was free to read those of Dickens. I recollect that my
stepmother showed some surprise at this, and that my Father
explained to her that Dickens 'exposes the passion of love in a
ridiculous light.' She did not seem to follow this
recommendation, which indeed tends to the ultra-subtle, but she
procured for me a copy of _Pickwick_, by which I was instantly and
gloriously enslaved. My shouts of laughing at the richer passages
were almost scandalous, and led to my being reproved for
disturbing my Father while engaged, in an upper room, in the
study of God's Word. I must have expended months on the perusal
of _Pickwick_, for I used to rush through a chapter, and then read
it over again very slowly, word for word, and then shut my eyes
to realize the figures and the action.
I suppose no child will ever again enjoy that rapture of
unresisting humorous appreciation of 'Pickwick'. I felt myself to
be in the company of a gentleman so extremely funny that I began
to laugh before he began to speak; no sooner did he remark 'the
sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw,' than I was in
fits of hilarity. My retirement in our sequestered corner of life
made me, perhaps, even in this matter, somewhat old-fashioned,
and possibly I was the latest of the generation who accepted Mr.
Pickwick with an unquestioning and hysterical abandonment.
Certainly few young people now seem sensitive, as I was, and as
thousands before me had been, to the quality of his fascination.
It was curious that living in a household where a certain
delicate art of painting was diligently cultivated, I had yet
never seen a real picture, and was scarcely familiar with the
design of one in engraving. My stepmother, however, brought a
flavour of the fine arts with her; a kind of aesthetic odour,
like that of lavender, clung to her as she moved. She had known
authentic artists in her youth; she had watched Old Crome
painting, and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less
a person than Cotman. She painted small watercolour landscapes
herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich
convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys gently
washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the elect might be dimly
reminded of _Liber Studiorum_, and woodland scenes over which the
ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not exciting art,
but it was, so far as it went, in its lady-like reserve, the real
thing. Our sea-anemones, our tropic birds, our bits of spongy
rock filled and sprayed with corallines, had been very
conscientious and skilful, but, essentially, so far as art was
concerned, the wrong thing.
Thus I began to acquire, without understanding the value of it,
some conception of the elegant phases of early English
watercolour painting, and there was one singular piece of a
marble well brimming with water, and a greyish-blue sky over it,
and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet brooms, menacing the
middle distance, which Cotman himself had painted; and this
seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when
it was hoisted to a place on our drawing-room wall.
But still I had never seen a subject-picture, although my
stepmother used to talk of the joys of the Royal Academy, and it
was therefore with a considerable sense of excitement that I
went, with my Father, to examine Mr. Holman Hunt's 'Finding of
Christ in the Temple' which at this time was announced to be on
public show at our neighbouring town. We paid our shillings and
ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing
object, in which a strong top-light raked the large and
uncompromising picture. We looked at it for some time in silence,
and then my Father pointed out to me various details, such as the
phylacteries and the mitres, and the robes which distinguished
the high priest.
Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, expressed
astonishment and dislike of what they called the 'Preraphaelite'
treatment, but we were not affected by that. Indeed, if anything,
the exact, minute and hard execution of Mr. Hunt was in sympathy
with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using when we
painted butterflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments
side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro. This large,
bright, comprehensive picture made a very deep impression upon
me, not exactly as a work of art, but as a brilliant natural
specimen. I was pleased to have seen it, as I was pleased to have
seen the comet, and the whale which was brought to our front door
on a truck. It was a prominent addition to my experience.
The slender expansions of my interest which were now budding
hither and thither do not seem to have alarmed my Father at all.
His views were short; if I appeared to be contented and obedient,
if I responded pleasantly when he appealed to me, he was not
concerned to discover the source of my cheerfulness. He put it
down to my happy sense of joy in Christ, a reflection of the
sunshine of grace beaming upon me through no intervening clouds
of sin or doubt. The 'saints' were, as a rule, very easy to
comprehend; their emotions lay upon the surface. If they were
gay, it was because they had no burden on their consciences,
while, if they were depressed, the symptom might be depended upon
as showing that their consciences were troubling them, and if
they were indifferent and cold, it was certain that they were
losing their faith and becoming hostile to godliness. It was
almost a mechanical matter with these simple souls. But, although
I was so much younger, I was more complex and more crafty than
the peasant 'saints'. My Father, not a very subtle psychologist,
applied to me the same formulas which served him well at the
chapel, but in my case the results were less uniformly
successful.
The excitement of school-life and the enlargement of my circle of
interests, combined to make Sunday, by contrast, a very tedious
occasion. The absence of every species of recreation on the
Lord's Day grew to be a burden which might scarcely be borne. I
have said that my freedom during the week had now become
considerable; if I was at home punctually at meal times, the rest
of my leisure was not challenged. But this liberty, which in the
summer holidays came to surpass that of 'fishes that tipple in
the deep', was put into more and more painful contrast with the
unbroken servitude of Sunday.
My Father objected very strongly to the expression Sabbath-day,
as it is commonly used by Presbyterians and others. He said,
quite justly, that it was an inaccurate modern innovation, that
Sabbath was Saturday, the Seventh day of the week, not the first,
a Jewish festival and not a Christian commemoration. Yet his
exaggerated view with regard to the observance of the First Day,
namely, that it must be exclusively occupied with public and
private exercises of divine worship, was based much more upon a
Jewish than upon a Christian law. In fact, I do not remember that
my Father ever produced a definite argument from the New
Testament in support of his excessive passivity on the Lord's
Day. He followed the early Puritan practice, except that he did
not extend his observance, as I believe the old Puritans did,
from sunset on Saturday to sunset on Sunday.
The observance of the Lord's Day has already become universally
so lax that I think there may be some value in preserving an
accurate record of how our Sundays were spent five and forty
years ago. We came down to breakfast at the usual time. My Father
prayed briefly before we began the meal; after it, the bell was
rung, and, before the breakfast was cleared away, we had a
lengthy service of exposition and prayer with the servants. If
the weather was fine, we then walked about the garden, doing
nothing, for about half an hour. We then sat, each in a separate
room, with our Bibles open and some commentary on the text beside
us, and prepared our minds for the morning service. A little
before 11 a.m. we sallied forth, carrying our Bibles and hymn-
books, and went through the morning-service of two hours at the
Room; this was the central event of Sunday.
We then came back to dinner,--curiously enough to a hot dinner,
always, with a joint, vegetables and puddings, so that the cook
at least must have been busily at work,--and after it my Father
and my stepmother took a nap, each in a different room, while I
slipped out into the garden for a little while, but never
venturing farther afield. In the middle of the afternoon, my
stepmother and I proceeded up the village to Sunday School, where
I was early promoted to the tuition of a few very little boys. We
returned in time for tea, immediately after which we all marched
forth, again armed as in the morning, with Bibles and hymn-books,
and we went though the evening-service, at which my Father
preached. The hour was now already past my weekday bedtime, but
we had another service to attend, the Believers' Prayer Meeting,
which commonly occupied forty minutes more. Then we used to creep
home, I often so tired that the weariness was like physical pain,
and I was permitted, without further 'worship', to slip upstairs
to bed.
What made these Sundays, the observance of which was absolutely
uniform, so peculiarly trying was that I was not permitted the
indulgence of any secular respite. I might not open a scientific
book, nor make a drawing, nor examine a specimen. I was not
allowed to go into the road, except to proceed with my parents to
the Room, nor to discuss worldly subjects at meals, nor to enter
the little chamber where I kept my treasures. I was hotly and
tightly dressed in black, all day long, as though ready at any
moment to attend a funeral with decorum. Sometimes, towards
evening, I used to feel the monotony and weariness of my position
to be almost unendurable, but at this time I was meek, and I
bowed to what I supposed to be the order of the universe.