Chapter 29 - Page 2

every gift of wit and ease was a pleasure and comfort. His mere physical attractions were a sort of joy. When Latimer caught sight of his own lank, ill-carried figure and his harshly rugged sallow face, he never failed to shrink from them and avert his eyes. To be the companion of a man whose every movement suggested strength and grace, whose skin was clear and healthful, his features well balanced and admirable in line--to be the friend of a human being built by nature as all human beings should be built if justice were done to them, was nourishment to his own starved needs.

When he assumed his charge at the squalid little town of Janway's Mills, his flock looked askance at him. He was not harsh of soul, but he was gloomy and had not the power to convey encouragement or comfort, though he laboured with strenuous conscientiousness. Among the sordid commonness of the every-day life of the mill hands and their families he lived and moved as Savonarola had moved and lived in the midst of the picturesque wickedness and splendidly coloured fanaticism of Italy in dim, rich centuries past; but his was the asceticism and stern self-denial of Savonarola without the uplifting power of passionate eloquence and fire which, through their tempest, awakened and shook human souls. He had no gifts of compelling fervor; he could not arouse or warm his hearers; he never touched them. He preached to them, he visited them at their homes, he prayed beside their dying and their dead, he gave such aid in their necessities as the narrowness of his means would allow, but none of them loved him or did more than stoically accept him and his services.

"Look at us as we stand together," he said to Baird on an evening when they stood side by side within range of an old-fashioned mirror. "Those things your reflection represents show me the things I was born without. I might make my life a daily crucifixion of self-denial and duty done at all costs, but I could not wear your smile or speak with your voice. I am a man, too," with smothered passion; "I am a man, too! And yet--what woman looks smilingly at me--what child draws near unafraid?"

"You are of the severe monastic temperament," answered Baird. "It is all a matter of temperament. Mine is facile and a slave to its emotions. Saints and martyrs are made of men like you--never of men such as I am."

"Are you sure of the value to the world of saints and martyrs?" said Latimer. "I am not. That is the worst of it."

"Ah! the world," Baird reflected. "If we dare to come back to the world--to count it as a factor----"

"It is only the world we know," Latimer said, his harsh voice unsteady; "the world's sorrow--the world's pain--the world's power to hurt and degrade itself. That is what seems to concern us--if we dare to say so--we, who were thrust into it against our