LITMIR.BIZ

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      On a certain day in November, a misty day with sharpness under the mist, a gentleman was walking out of the little town of St. Ives, which stood black and bleak above the bleak, black waters of the Ouse and the mournful clusters of bare, drooping willows.

      It was late in the afternoon, and there chanced to be no one abroad in the grazing lands outside the town save this one gentleman who walked eastward towards the damp, vaporous fen country.

      The horizon was brought within a few yards of him by the confining mist, and, as he walked farther from St. Ives, the town began to be also rapidly lost and absorbed in the general dull greyness, so that when he turned at last (sharply and as if with some set purpose or some lively inner prompting), the dwelling-houses, the river, bounded by the barns and palings, had all disappeared, and there remained only visible the erect tall steeple of the church, pointing into the grey sky from the dark obscured willows and dark obscured town and unseen river.

      And though he walked rapidly, yet this tower and steeple of the old, humble, enduring church continued long in sight, for it was uplifted into the higher, clearer air, and was in itself substantial and massive.

      For the high-wrought mood of this gentleman who, as he advanced farther into utter solitude, so continually looked back, this steeple of God's mansion had a deep spiritual meaning; it rose out of darkness and vapour and obscurity as the mandate of God rose, the one clear thing, out of the confusions and strifes and clamours of the world.

      The mandate of God, ay—surely the one thing that mattered, the one thing to be followed and obeyed—and when the summons and command were clear there was great joy in obedience; but what when, as now, the order was not given, when God remained mute and the soul of His creature was enclosed in darkness even as town and fields were now enclosed in the cloudy exhumations of the earth?

      When the steeple was at last hidden from his keenest glance, the gentleman stopped and, leaning against a paling, gazed over the short expanse of foggy ground visible to him, alone and terribly lonely in his soul.

      A deep melancholy lay upon him, a melancholy almost inseparable from his unbending, austere, and sombre creed, a melancholy of the spirit, black and awful, neither to be ignored nor reasoned with—a spiritual disease to which he had been prone since his earliest youth, and which became at times almost intolerable and scarcely to be endured by any mortal, however stout-hearted.

      Had any one come up through the November mist and noticed and observed this gentleman leaning on the rough willow paling, he would have seen nothing to suggest a gloomy mystic nor one struggling with the anguished tribulations of the soul.

      He was, to the outward eye, a man in the prime of life, of the type commonly accepted as English, and, indeed, possible to no other nation in the world, of medium height and the appearance of medium strength, his obvious gentility gracing his plain, sober, frieze clothes, and the little sword at his side giving the one courtly touch to his habit, which otherwise, with plain band and ribbonless hat, might have seemed too much that of a mere farmer, for his high boots, now mud-caked, had seen good service. He wore no gloves on his browned hands, and his hair, of the dusk English brown, was cut in a country fashion, and worn no longer than his shoulders.

      His face was unusual, yet might have been that of an ordinary man, the features powerful, the nose bluntly aquiline, the mouth set steadily, the Saxon grey-blue eyes rather overbrowed, giving the countenance a glooming air, the chin and jaw massive, the complexion tanned to the glowing natural colour of a healthy fair man past any bloom of youth, and unused to the softness of town life.

      Not a handsome face, but not uncomely, and remarkable chiefly (now, at least) for a certain quiet look, not a slumbering look, but rather the look of one whose soul is locked and sealed.

      Such was his appearance, and his history was as simple and unpretending as his visage and his attire; nothing had ever happened to him that he should stand there now sunk in torments of melancholy. His life had been smooth, uneventful, successful; he had been born and bred in Huntingdon, and never gone beyond the borders of that county save when he had sat, a silent borough Member, in His Majesty's last Parliament at Westminster, nine years ago, and he was in that happy position of being well known and respected, in his own little world, as one of the largest landowners in St. Ives, and utterly unknown to the great world where fame is distraction and confusion. He was tranquil in an honourable obscurity, happy in his wife, his children, of an old well-placed family, well connected, and of considerable local influence and fair repute. He could himself remember that His late Majesty, twice coming through Huntingdon, had each time been entertained by his grandfather at his manor house, on the first occasion with much splendour, when the King came from Scotland to take up his new crown.

      In his own business he had prospered; the lands he had bought at St. Ives and which he farmed himself, reclaiming them with patience from the fen, had well repaid his labour, and he might count himself well off, and even, for this quiet spot, wealthy.

      Therefore it might have been supposed that this man, midway now through life, would have considered his honourable labour, his honourable profits, his serene existence, his fair placement and good report among his neighbours, his prospect of quietness and respect and comfort to the end of his days, and have been content, for he was without ambition.

      But he was not satisfied with his own material happiness, for great new forces and powers were abroad in the world struggling together, and this struggle echoed again and again in the heart of the man who stood against the willow paling, gazing into the November mist that shrouded Erith Bulwark and the fen country.

      The country had been long at peace, lulled and tranquil after that great triumph of the Reformation of the Church, and that demonstration of material power which had silenced the pretensions of Spain and warned the world what England was.

      But Elizabeth was now a generation dead, and the grandson of the Papist Mary sat on the Tudor's throne with a Frenchwoman, a Mary and a Papist too, beside him, and the Church was becoming again corrupt, the power of the bishops daily higher, troubles in Church and State increasing, liberty, civil and religious, threatened—for the King and his ministers had governed nine years without a Parliament, contrary to the laws and ordinances of the realm of England.

      This Huntingdonshire gentleman knew that the devil was in these things, that God was surely with the oppressed, with those who sought and found a purer worship, with those, daily increasing, who accepted that teaching of John Calvin which had inspired the Hollanders to throw off the bloody yoke of Alva and the Inquisition, with those who had ventured to plead humbly for liberty of conscience at the conference of Hampton and had been denied by King and bishops with threats and scorn, and had gone about since, ridiculed and persecuted, nicknamed "Puritans."

      This man knew this as he knew the King and the bishops, the ministers, and the followers of these, were dealing with things idolatrous and horrible, stepping into the fore-courts of hell.

      Ay, and taking the nation with them. How was that to be prevented—which way did God appoint?

      That was the question which troubled the personal melancholy of the man in whose heart it flashed—for the King was King by Divine appointment, and if he had lent his weight and authority to these ways of misrule and oppression, idolatry and Papistry, who was to argue with him or withstand him?

      Who was to appeal from the King to God?

      The man in the frieze habit was conscious of a burning flame or light in himself which urged him to step forward for this distracted England's succour. But he received no summons. The face of the Lord was veiled and he was but a poor soul, possibly damned, with no knowledge of what destiny the Highest had prepared for him. He felt himself in blackest chaos; his soul, which had ever striven to obtain God's grace, now seemed tossed far from mercy on the black waters of despair.

      To him, and especially in this mood, the present world was nothing; he was not given to metaphor, but in his thoughts he compared the world to a little plank he had once seen stretched across a deep and angry stream, and arched above with fairest blossoming trees. The plank in itself was insignificant, and

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