Properly speaking he wasn’t ’minimus’ in his preaching days; but once there were three Richmonds in the field, as Dr. Dunstan used to say, and after Richmond major went to Sandhurst, young Richmond ought to have become ’minor,’ and very much wanted to, but nobody could get into the way of changing it. Even when he was left all alone and Richmond minor left to go into a tea merchant’s office, chaps still called him ’minimus.’
His father was a clergyman who had risen into a rural dean; but Morrison, who lived at Exeter and understood a frightful deal about religious people, said that, while a very good thing in its way, a rural dean was mere dust beside a cathedral dean. He seemed to think really, though I don’t know whether it is true, that a minor canon is almost as classy as a rural dean, if not quite. Anyway, the father of Richmond minimus was one, and, until Morrison explained that it was nothing to make a fuss about, we were all rather interested. No doubt it was through his father that Richmond got his preaching power. He was going into the Church himself some day, and looked forward to being something out of the common in course of time. He said that he always felt a great liking for church—even from his earliest years—and had never been known to object to going, though his brothers—especially the one now training to become a tea merchant—had not in the least cared for it.
He was a frightfully good kid, and Mathers always said he would die young, or else get consumption, if there was any truth in the stories we were allowed to read on Sunday afternoons. In these, which were different to week-day stories, there were many deaths. And sometimes the bad boys died and sometimes the good ones; but they died in a very different way. The good ones died in the lap of luxury, with their friends crying round the bed, and grapes and clergymen, and pretty well everything to make it all right; but the bad ones were smashed like flies, owing to setting machinery in motion; or fell over cliffs birds’-nesting; or got taken up by policemen. The difference was that the good ones died from sheer bad health. They had hectic coughs or something of that kind, and nobody could cure them—in fact, nobody ever seemed to try to; but the bad boys were always as hard as nuts and never had hectic coughs or anything. In fact, they would all be alive now if they had only gone to church on Sundays and not always chosen that day for adventures. In these adventures they invariably got mucked up, excepting when occasionally they were saved by good boys coming home from church, or sometimes even by good girls; which Stopford said must have been worse than death, owing to his hatred of girls.