of his mind were not so dim with good living as one
might have feared from the look of those in his head: in the glass of
loyalty he now saw himself a defaulter; in the scales of honor he
weighed and found himself wanting. Of true discipleship was not now the
question: he had not behaved like an honorable gentleman to Jesus
Christ. It was only in a spasm of terror St. Peter had denied him: John
Bevis had for nigh forty years been taking his pay, and for the last
thirty at least had done nothing in return. Either Jesus Christ did not
care, and then what was the church?--what the whole system of things
called Christianity?--or he did care, and what then was John Bevis in
the eyes of his Master? When they reached home, he went neither to the
stable nor the study, but, without even lighting a cigar, walked out on
the neighboring heath, where he found the universe rather gray about
him. When he returned he tried to behave as usual, but his wife saw that
he scarcely ate at supper, and left half of his brandy and water. She
set it down to the annoyance the curate had caused him, and wisely
forbore troubling him with questions.

CHAPTER X.

MR. DRAKE'S ARBOR.

While the curate was preaching that same Sunday morning, in the cool
cavernous church, with its great lights overhead, Walter Drake--the old
minister, he was now called by his disloyal congregation--sat in a
little arbor looking out on the river that flowed through the town to
the sea. Green grass went down from where he sat to the very water's
brink. It was a spot the old man loved, for there his best thoughts came
to him. There was in him a good deal of the stuff of which poets are
made, and since trouble overtook him, the river had more and more
gathered to itself the aspect of that in the Pilgrim's Progress; and
often, as he sat thus almost on its edge, he fancied himself waiting
the welcome summoms to go home. It was a tidal river, with many changes.
Now it flowed with a full, calm current, conquering the tide, like life
sweeping death with it down into the bosom of the eternal. Now it seemed
to stand still, as if aghast at the inroad of the awful thing; and then
the minister would bethink himself that it was the tide of the eternal
rising in the narrow earthly channel: men, he said to himself, called it
_death_, because they did not know what it was, or the loveliness of its
quickening energy. It fails on their sense by the might of its grand
excess, and