The rector of the parish was an Oxford
M.A., of the usual decorously stereotyped conventional pattern; but in
point even of earthly knowledge and earthly consideration, said the
congregation at Patmos Chapel, "he is not worthy to unloose the latchet
of our pastor's shoe." For Professor Milliter was universally allowed to
be the greatest living authority in England on comparative anatomy, the
rising successor of Cuvier, and Owen, and Milne-Edwards, and Carpenter,
in the general knowledge of animal structure. Mortiscombe, as everybody knows, is the favourite little suburban
watering-place, close by the busy streets and noisy wharves of a great
English manufacturing centre. It is at Mortiscombe that the Western
Counties College of Science is situated, away from the smoke and bustle
of the whirring city: and it was in the Western Counties College of
Science that Cyril Milliter ably filled the newly founded chair of
Comparative Anatomy. When he was first appointed, indeed, people
grumbled a little at the idea of a Professor at the College undertaking
every Sunday to preach in a common conventicle to a low assembly of
vulgar fanatics, as in their charitable Christian fashion they loved to
call the Gospel Evangelists. But Cyril Milliter was a man of character
and determination: he had fully made up his own mind upon theological
questions; and having once cast in his lot with the obscure sect of
Gospel Evangelists, to which his parents had belonged before him, he was
not to be turned aside from his purpose by the coarse gibes of the
ordinary public or the cynical incredulity of more cultivated but
scarcely more tolerant polite society. "Not a Gospel Evangelist really
and truly: you must surely be joking, Mr. Milliter," young ladies said
to him at evening parties with undisguised astonishment; "why, they're
just a lot of ignorant mill-hands, you know, who meet together in an
upper room somewhere down in Ford's Passage to hear sermons from some
ignorant lay preacher." "Quite so," Cyril Milliter would answer quietly; "and _I_ am the
ignorant lay preacher who has been appointed to deliver those sermons to
them. I was brought up among the Gospel Evangelists as a child, and now
that I am a man my mature judgment has made me still continue among
them." Mortiscombe is well known to be a very advanced and liberal-minded
place; so, after a time, people ceased to talk about the curious
singularity of Cyril Milliter's Sunday occupation. All through the week
the young professor lectured to his class on dry bones and the other
cheerful stock-in-trade of his own department; and on Sundays he walked
down erect, Bible in hand, to his little meeting-room, and there
fervently expounded the Word, as it approved itself to his soul and
conscience, before the handful of earnest artisans who composed his
faithful but scanty congregation. A fiery and enthusiastic preacher was
Cyril Milliter, devoured with zeal for what seemed to him the right
doctrine. "There is only one thing worth living for in this fallen
world," he used to say to his little group of attentive hearers, "and
that is Truth. Truth, as it reveals itself in the book of nature, must
be our quest during the working week: Truth, as it reveals itself in the
written Word, must be our quest on these happy blessed seventh-day
Sabbaths." There was a high eager light in his eye as he spoke, mingled
with a clear intellectual honesty in his sharply cut features, which
gave at once the stamp of reality to that plain profession of his
simple, manly, earnest creed. One other subject, however, beside the pursuit of truth, just at that
moment deeply interested Cyril Milliter; and that subject assumed bodily
form in the pretty little person of Netta Leaworthy. Right in front of
Cyril, as he expounded the Word every Sunday morning, sat a modest,
demure, dimpled English girl, with a complexion like a blushing
apple-blossom, and a mouth like the sunny side of a white-heart cherry. She was only the daughter of an intelligent mill-hand, a foreman at one
of the great factories in the neighbouring city, was dainty,
whitefingered, sweet-voiced little Netta; but there was a Puritan
freshness and demureness and simplicity about her that fairly won the
heart of the enthusiastic young professor. Society at Mortiscombe had
made itself most agreeable to Cyril Milliter, in spite of his
heterodoxy, as Society always does to eligible young bachelors of good
education; and it had thrown its daughters decorously in his way, by
asking him to all its dinners, dances, and at-homes, with most profuse
and urgent hospitality. But in spite of all the wiles of the most
experienced among Society's mothers, Cyril Milliter had positively had
the bad taste to fix his choice at last upon nobody better than simple,
unaffected, charming little Netta. For one sunny Sunday morning, after worship, Cyril had turned out into
the fields behind the Common, for a quiet stroll among the birds and
flowers: when, close by the stile in the upper meadow, he came
unexpectedly upon Netta Leaworthy, alone upon the grass with her own
fancies. She was pulling an ox-eye daisy carelessly to pieces as he
passed, and he stopped a minute unperceived beside the hedge, to watch
her deft fingers taking out one ray after another quickly from the
blossom to the words of a foolish childish charm. Netta blushed crimson
when she saw she was observed at that silly pastime, and Cyril thought
to himself he had never seen anything in his life more lovely than the
blushing girl at that moment. Learned and educated as he was, he had
sprung himself from among the ranks of the many, and his heart was with
them still rather than with the rich, the noble, and the mighty. "I will
never marry among the daughters of Heth," he said to himself gently, as
he paused beside her: "I will take to myself rather a wife and a
helpmate from among the Lord's own chosen people." "Ah, Miss Leaworthy," he went on aloud, smiling sympathetically at her
embarrassment, "you are following up the last relics of a dying
superstition, are you? 'One for money, two for health, Three for love,
and four for wealth.' Is that how the old saw goes? I thought so. And
which of the four blessings now has your daisy promised you I wonder?" The tone he spoke in was so very different from that which he had just
been using in the chapel at worship that Netta felt instinctively what
it foreboded; and her heart fluttered tremulously as she answered in the
quietest voice she could command, "I haven't finished it yet, Mr.
Milliter; I have made five rounds already, and have a lot of rays left
still in the middle of the daisy." Cyril took it from her, laughingly, and went on with the rhyme--his
conscience upbraiding him in an undertone of feeling meanwhile for such
an unworthy paltering with old-world superstition--till he had gone
twice round the spell, and finished abruptly with "Three for love!" "Love it is!" he cried gaily. "A good omen!