The Curate had not traversed all this maze of meditations, which made him feel very miserable--for of all things he hated suspiciousness, and that £100, though needed so sadly, would be obtained at too high a cost, if the cost were his faith in womankind--when, lo, his own church-tower rose grandly before him, its buttresses and stringing courses capped with sparkling snow, and the yew-tree by the battlements feathered with the same, and away to the east the ivy mantle of the Abbey, laced and bespangled with the like caprice of beauty, showered from the glittering stores of heaven.
He put on a spurt through the twinkling air, and the frozen snow crushed beneath his rapid feet; and presently he had shaken hands with Muggridge, and Fay in her nightgown made a reckless leap from the height of ten stairs into his gladsome arms.
Now Sergeant Jakes was not allowed to chastise any boys on Sunday. This made the day hang very heavy on his hands; and as misfortunes never come single, the sacred day robbed him of another fine resource. For Mr. Penniloe would not permit even Muggridge, the pious, the sage, and the prim, to receive any visitors--superciliously called by the front-door people "followers"--upon that blessed day of rest, when surely the sweeter side of human nature is fostered and inspirited, from reading-desk and lectern, from gallery and from pulpit.
However even clergymen are inconsistent, as their own wives acknowledge confidentially; and Mr. Penniloe's lectures upon Solomon's Song--a treatise then greatly admired, as a noble allegory, by High Churchmen--were not enforced at home by any warmth of practice. Thus stood the law; and of all offences upon the Sergeant's Hecatologue, mutiny was the most heinous; therefore he could not mutiny.
But surely if Mr. Penniloe could have received, or conceived, a germ of the faintest suspicion concerning this faithful soldier's alternatives on the afternoon of the Sabbath--as Churchmen still entitled it--he would have thrown open every door of kitchen, back-kitchen, scullery, and even pantry to him, that his foot might be kept from so offending. Ay, and more than his foot, his breast, and arm--the only arm he had, and therefore leaving no other blameless.