Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/283

Rh of reading one every night before I go to bed."

"We Dissenters consider a chapter of the Bible the best thing to read before going to bed," said the lady with a sustained voice.

"I keep that for the noontide of my perceptions — for mental high water," said the schoolmaster. "Euclid is good enough after supper. Not that I deny myself a small portion of the Word," he added with a smile as he proceeded to open the door, when I feel very hungry for it."

"There is no one expecting you," persisted the lady, who could ill endure not to have her own way, even when she did not care for the matter concerned. "Who will be the wiser or the worse if you stay at home?"

"My dear lady," returned the schoolmaster, "when I have on good grounds made up my mind to a thing, I always feel as if I had promised God to do it; and indeed it amounts to the same thing very nearly. Such a resolve, then, is not to be unmade, except on equally good grounds with those upon which it was made. Having resolved to try whether I could not draw a little water of refreshment for souls which, if not thirsting, are but fainting the more, shall I allow a few drops of rain to prevent me?"

"Pray don't let me persuade you against your will," said his hostess, with a stately bend of her neck over her shoulder as she turned into the drawing-room.

Her guest went out into the rain, asking himself by what theory of the will his hostess could justify such a phrase — too simple to see that she had only thrown it out, as the cuttle-fish its ink, to cover her retreat.

But the weather had got a little into his brain: into his soul it was seldom allowed to intrude. He felt depressed and feeble and dull. But at the first corner he turned he met a little breath of wind. It blew the rain in his face and revived him a little, reminding him at the same time that he had not yet opened his umbrella. As he put it up he laughed. "Here I am," he said to himself, "lance in hand, spurring to meet my dragon!"

Once when he used a similar expression, Malcolm had asked him what he meant by his dragon. "I mean," replied the schoolmaster, "that huge slug, the commonplace. It is the wearifulest dragon to fight in the whole miscreation. Wound it as you may, the jelly mass of the monster closes, and the dull one is himself again — feeding all the time so cunningly that scarce one of the victims whom he has swallowed suspects that he is but pabulum slowly digesting in the belly of the monster."

If the schoolmaster's dragon, spread abroad as he lies, a vague dilution, everywhere throughout human haunts, has yet any head-quarters, where else can they be than in such places as that to which he was now making his way to fight him? What can be fuller of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace than a Dissenting chapel in London on the night of the weekly prayer-meeting, and that night a drizzly one?" The few lights fill the lower part with a dull, yellow, steamy glare, while the vast galleries, possessed by an ugly twilight, yawn above like the dreary openings of a disconsolate eternity. The pulpit rises into the dim, damp air, covered with brown holland, reminding one of desertion and charwomen, if not of a chamber of death and spiritual undertakers who have shrouded and coffined the truth. Gaping, empty, unsightly, the place is the very skull of the monster himself — the fittest place of all wherein to encounter the great slug, and deal him one of those death-blows which every sunrise, every repentance, every childbirth, every true love, deals him. Every hour he receives the blow that kills, but he takes long to die, for every hour he is right carefully fed and cherished by a whole army of purveyors, including every trade and profession, but officered chiefly by divines and men of science.

When the dominie entered all was still, and every light had a nimbus of illuminated vapor. There were hardly more than three present beyond the number Mr. Marshal had given him to expect; and their faces, some grim, some grimy, most of them troubled, and none blissful, seemed the nervous ganglions of the monster whose faintly-gelatinous bulk filled the place. He seated himself in a pew near the pulpit, communed with his own heart, and was still. Presently the ministering deacon, a humbler one, in the worldly sense than Mr. Marshal, for he kept a small ironmongery shop in the next street to the chapel, entered, twirling the wet from his umbrella as he came along one of the passages intersecting the pews. Stepping up into the desk which cowered humbly at the foot of the pulpit, he stood erect and cast his eyes around the small assembly. Discovering there no one that could lead in the singing, he chose out and read one of the monster's favorite hymns, in which never a sparkle of thought or a glow of 