The Warrielaw Jewel, page 25
“Though why Evelake?” asked the old school friend who understood his motives best. “I mean, I can understand dear old Bobs clicking with old Dithers.” Such was the reprehensible nickname given to the Bishop by an unnecessarily acute Sixth Form. “He’s a decent fellow, and Bobs isn’t particularly critical or perceptive and can’t take to parish work till he’s well. But he’s too easygoing and weak for you.”
“My own padre isn’t, and I shan’t come across the ecclesiastical brass hats as a curate. If you want to know, I suppose it’s because my wicked, offensive old forebears made their ungodly pile out of sweating Blacksea, and enslaving its people in mines a century ago, that I feel I owe it a sort of debt. Besides, I understand them down there as I’d never understand your cockneys and those North Country chaps, all burrs and blasphemy. I’m set on going to a man like Mayhew who gets on with Dissenters and cares more for principles than frills, more for Christ than the Church.”
And so Dick set out on the career which led him now to Evelake Palace for his Ordination.
“There’s a poem called the ‘Hound of Heaven’,” said Bobs, to whom poetry was a book you got for prizes rather than a book you read, a week later, “but you’re cut out for the Sleuth of Heaven all right, Dick, my boy.”
But this nebulous career was very far from the imagination of Dick as he mingled his pleasure at being back at the Palace, and his solemn thoughts of the coming ceremony, with the reflection that Sue was even more of a darling now than he remembered of old.
Published by Dean Street Press 2016
Copyright © 1933 Winifred Peck
Introduction copyright © 2016 Martin Edwards
All Rights Reserved
The right of Winifred Peck to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1933 by Faber & Faber
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 911413 90 5
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk
Peck,Winifred, The Warrielaw Jewel
