Scenes of Clerical Life: Epilogue

Epilogue

This was Mr. Gilfil's love-story, which lay far back from the time when
he sat, worn and grey, by his lonely fireside in Shepperton Vicarage.
Rich brown locks, passionate love, and deep early sorrow, strangely
different as they seem from the scanty white hairs, the apathetic
content, and the unexpectant quiescence of old age, are but part of the
same life's journey; as the bright Italian plains, with the sweet _Addio_
of their beckoning maidens, are part of the same day's travel that brings
us to the other side of the mountain, between the sombre rocky walls and
among the guttural voices of the Valais.

To those who were familiar only with the grey-haired Vicar, jogging
leisurely along on his old chestnut cob, it would perhaps have been hard
to believe that he had ever been the Maynard Gilfil who, with a heart
full of passion and tenderness, had urged his black Kitty to her swiftest
gallop on the way to Callam, or that the old gentleman of caustic tongue,
and bucolic tastes, and sparing habits, had known all the deep secrets of
devoted love, had struggled through its days and nights of anguish, and
trembled under its unspeakable joys.

And indeed the Mr. Gilfil of those late Shepperton days had more of the
knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint
of in the open-eyed loving Maynard. But it is with men as with trees: if
you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their
young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss,
some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding
into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an
irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow,
which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into
plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our
harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb
is withered.

And so the dear old Vicar, though he had something of the knotted
whimsical character of the poor lopped oak, had yet been sketched out by
nature as a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the
finest; and in the grey-haired man who filled his pocket with sugar-plums
for the little children, whose most biting words were directed against
the evil doing of the rich man, and who, with all his social pipes and
slipshod talk, never sank below the highest level of his parishioners'
respect, there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender
nature that had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its
life-current in a first and only love--the love of Tina.

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