第58章

But as a preacher also, for he meant always to preach in a striking manner, so as to have his congregation swelled by admirers from neighbouring parishes, and to produce a great sensation whenever he took occasional duty for a brother clergyman of minor gifts.The style of preaching he had chosen was the extemporaneous, which was held little short of the miraculous in rural parishes like King's Lorton.Some passages of Massillon and Bourdaloue, which he knew by heart, were really very effective when rolled out in Mr Stelling's deepest tones, but as comparatively feeble appeals of his own were delivered in the same loud and impressive manner, they were often thought quite as striking by his hearers.Mr Stelling's doctrine was of no particular school: if anything, it had a tinge of evangelicalism, for that was `the telling thing' just then in the diocese to which King's Lorton belonged.In short, Mr Stelling was a man who meant to rise in his profession, and to rise by merit, clearly, since he had no interest beyond what might be promised by a problematic relationship to a great lawyer who had not yet become Lord Chancellor.A clergyman who has such vigorous intentions naturally gets a little into debt at starting: it is not to be expected that he will live in the meagre style of a man who means to be a poor curate all his life, and if the few hundreds Mr Timpson advanced towards his daughter's fortune did not suffice for the purchase of handsome furniture together with a stock of wine, a grand piano, and the laying-out of a superior flower-garden, it followed in the most rigorous manner, either that these things must be procured by some other means, or else, that the Rev.Mr Stelling must go without them - which last alternative would be an absurd procrastination of the fruits of success, where success was certain.Mr Stelling was so broad-chested and resolute that he felt equal to anything: he would become celebrated by shaking the consciences of his hearers, and he would by and by edit a Greek play, and invent several new readings.He had not yet selected the play, for having been married little more than two years, his leisure time had been much occupied with attentions to Mrs Stelling; but he had told that fine woman what he meant to do some day, and she felt great confidence in her husband, as a man who understood everything of that sort.

But the immediate step to future success was to bring on Tom Tulliver during this first half-year; for, by a singular coincidence, there had been some negotiation concerning another pupil from the same neighbourhood, and it might further a decision in Mr Stelling's favour, if it were understood that young Tulliver, who, Mr Stelling observed in conjugal privacy, was rather a rough cub, had made prodigious progress in a short time.It was on this ground that he was severe with Tom about his lessons: he was clearly a boy whose powers would never be developed through the medium of the Latin grammar without the application of some sternness.Not that Mr Stelling was a harsh-tempered or unkind man - quite the contrary: he was jocose with Tom at table, and corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in the most playful manner: but poor Tom was only the more cowed and confused by this double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes at all like Mr Stelling's, and for the first time in his life he had a painful sense that he was all wrong somehow.When Mr Stelling said, as the roast beef was being uncovered, `Now, Tulliver! which would you rather decline, roast beef or the Latin for it?' - Tom, to whom in his coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown into a state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except the feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin: of course he answered, `Roast beef,'

- whereupon there followed much laughter and some practical joking with the plates, from which Tom gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused beef, and, in fact, made himself appear `a silly.' If he could have seen a fellow-pupil undergo these painful operations and survive them in good spirits, he might sooner have taken them as a matter of course.

But there are two expensive forms of education, either of which a parent may procure for his son by sending him as solitary pupil to a clergyman:

one is, the enjoyment of the reverend gentleman's undivided neglect; the other is, the endurance of the reverend gentleman's undivided attention.

It was the latter privilege for which Mr Tulliver paid a high price in Tom's initiatory months at King's Lorton.