And Davidina, out of her newly inherited wealth, gave them £100 to start their housekeeping; returning herself to the parental roof, where she stayed till a couple of years later Mr. and Mrs. Trimblerigg senior shared an influenza and died in the same week, and in the same bed. After that, for some while Mr. Trimblerigg was comfortably rid of her. She developed a craze for travelling. But regularly every year, when a new child was born to them, Davidina sent them a present of £20. CHAPTER TEN _He Rides for a Fall_ It would not have been well for Mr. Trimblerigg--for his training as an adept in the art of getting on--had his early ministerial career been entirely without obstacles. Had circumstances not kept him on the jump, his native agility might possibly have diminished; but from the very beginning obstacles presented themselves, and they were not all of one kind. The first which confronted him was intellectual and temperamental. It had been all very well in his early novitiate to act as occasional lay-preacher to that sect of rigid Believers with bottle-necked minds; a callow and undogmatic theology was then permissible. But now, being called to the ministry, he must get to the heart of things, and let his light shine there. True Believers expected it; and elders from afar, men placed in authority, came to listen to this young and rising hope of a diminished community, in order to discover whether his oratory had weight and substance, or was merely words. It was Mr. Trimblerigg’s fixed intention to get himself driven out of that narrow communion so soon as he could afford it; but meantime he had to maintain the verbal verities of the faith, a difficult matter when his ministry extended to three discourses a week, two on the Sabbath and one every Wednesday. For awhile he kept himself going on the Song of Songs, the literal interpretation of which provided him with poetic flights and passages of local colour congenial to his youthful temperament. Poetry in the pulpit was a new thing. His spiritual interpretations of love attracted the courting couples of the neighbourhood; youth flocked to hear him, with occasional results which made the watchful elders uneasy. It is true that on Sunday evenings the chapel was always crowded, but his congregation of youths and maidens, coming from a distance, showed more punctuality in arriving than in returning home; and now and then, as a consequence, marriages had to be hasty. Before long Mr. Trimblerigg’s Watch Committee called upon him to talk less of love, with its bundles of myrrh, its vineyards and gardens of spice, and to concentrate a little more on those starker and more characteristic verities of the faith--sin, death, judgment and damnation.