I seized the opportunity to run away, but not before I had
given her five shillings and made her write down my address, for I was a
little frightened by what she said. I told her if she thought her lodger
grew worse, she was to come and let me know.
Weeks went by and I did not see her again. Having done as much as I had,
I felt absolved from doing more, and let Ernest alone as thinking that he
and I should only bore one another.
He had now been ordained a little over four months, but these months had
not brought happiness or satisfaction with them. He had lived in a
clergyman's house all his life, and might have been expected perhaps to
have known pretty much what being a clergyman was like, and so he did--a
country clergyman; he had formed an ideal, however, as regards what a
town clergyman could do, and was trying in a feeble tentative way to
realise it, but somehow or other it always managed to escape him.
He lived among the poor, but he did not find that he got to know them.
The idea that they would come to him proved to be a mistaken one. He did
indeed visit a few tame pets whom his rector desired him to look after.
There was an old man and his wife who lived next door but one to Ernest
himself; then there was a plumber of the name of Chesterfield; an aged
lady of the name of Gover, blind and bed-ridden, who munched and munched
her feeble old toothless jaws as Ernest spoke or read to her, but who
could do little more; a Mr Brookes, a rag and bottle merchant in
Birdsey's Rents in the last stage of dropsy, and perhaps half a dozen or
so others.
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