Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 05

								


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BOOK V.


"FOOLS blind to truth; nor know their erring soul

   How much the half is better than the whole."

        --HESIOD: Op. et Dies, 40.

CHAPTER I.


Do as the Heavens have done; forget your evil;
With them, forgive yourself.--The Winter's Tale.


.  .  .  The sweet'st companion that e'er man
Bred his hopes out of.--Ibid.
THE curate of Brook-Green was sitting outside his door.  The vicarage
which he inhabited was a straggling, irregular, but picturesque
building,--humble enough to suit the means of the curate, yet large
enough to accommodate the vicar.  It had been built in an age when the
indigentes et pauperes for whom universities were founded supplied,
more than they do now, the fountains of the Christian ministry, when
pastor and flock were more on an equality.
From under a rude and arched porch, with an oaken settle on either side
for the poor visitor, the door opened at once upon the old-fashioned
parlour,--a homely but pleasant room, with one wide but low cottage
casement, beneath which stood the dark shining table that supported the
large Bible in its green baize cover; the Concordance, and the last
Sunday's sermon, in its jetty case.  There by the fireplace stood the
bachelor's round elbow-chair, with a needlework cushion at the back; a
walnut-tree bureau, another table or two, half a dozen plain chairs,
constituted the rest of the furniture, saving some two or three hundred
volumes, ranged in neat shelves on the clean wainscoted walls.  There was
another room, to which you ascended by two steps, communicating with this
parlour, smaller but finer, and inhabited only on festive days, when Lady
Vargrave, or some other quiet neighbour, came to drink tea with the good
curate.
An old housekeeper and her grandson--a young fellow of about two and
twenty, who tended the garden, milked the cow, and did in fact what he
was wanted to do--composed the establishment of the humble minister.
We have digressed from Mr. Aubrey himself.
The curate was seated, then, one fine summer morning, on a bench at the
left of his porch, screened from the sun by the cool boughs of a
chestnut-tree, the shadow of which half covered the little lawn that
separated the precincts of the house from those of silent Death and
everlasting Hope; above the irregular and moss-grown paling rose the
village church; and, through openings in the trees, beyond the
burial-ground, partially gleamed the white walls of Lady Vargrave's
cottage, and were seen at a distance the sails on the--



          "Mighty waters, rolling evermore."
The old man was calmly enjoying the beauty of the morning, the freshness
of the air, the warmth of the dancing beam, and not least, perhaps, his