Love stories; Nobility -- Great Britain -- Fiction; Switzerland -- Fiction
“I have never seen this clerical gentleman and know nothing of his
views, or anything about him. But if you recommend him, my dear Sir
Samuel, it is enough for me, since I always judge of a man by his
friends. Perhaps you will furnish me, or rather my lawyers, with the
necessary particulars, and I will see that the matter is put through.
Now, to come to more important business, as to this Board of which I am
chairman,” &c.
The end of it was that Sir Samuel, flattered by such deference, became a
member of the Board and Sir Samuel’s nephew became rector of Monk’s
Acre.
Such appointments, like marriages, are made in Heaven—at least that
seems to be the doctrine of the English Church, which is content to act
thereon. In this particular instance the results were quite good. The
Rev. Mr. Knight, the nephew of the opulent Sir Samuel, proved to be an
excellent and hard-working clergyman. He was low-church, and narrow
almost to the point of Calvinism, but intensely earnest and
conscientious; one who looked upon the world as a place of sin and woe
through which we must labour and pass on, a difficult path beset with
rocks and thorns, leading to the unmeasured plains of Heaven. Also he
was an educated man who had taken high degrees at college, and really
learned in his way. While he was a curate, working very hard in a great
seaport town, he had married the daughter of another clergyman of the
city, who died in a sudden fashion as the result of an accident,
leaving the girl an orphan. She was not pure English as her mother had
been a Dane, but on both sides her descent was high, as indeed was that
of Mr. Knight himself.
This union, contracted on the husband’s part largely from motives that
might be called charitable, since he had promised his deceased colleague
on his death bed to befriend the daughter, was but moderately
successful. The wife had the characteristics of her race; largeness and
liberality of view, high aspirations for humanity, considerable
intelligence, and a certain tendency towards mysticism of the
Swedenborgian type, qualities that her husband neither shared nor could
appreciate. It was perhaps as well, therefore that she died at the
birth of her only son, Godfrey, three years after her marriage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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