I had been deluded, but not
cheated; and in my deep I saw yet a lower depth, into which I
_would_ not fall--for then I felt I should be lost indeed--that of
in any way repudiating my debts. But what was to be done I had no idea.
"I had studied for the church, and I now took holy orders. I had a few
pounds a year from my mother's property, which all went in part-payment
of the interest of my debt, I dared not trouble my father with any
communication on the subject of my embarrassment, for I knew that he
could not help me, and that the impossibility of doing so would make him
more unhappy than the wrong I had done in involving myself. I seized the
first offer of a curacy that presented itself. Its emoluments were just
one hundred pounds a-year, of which I had _not_ to return twenty
pounds, as some curates have had to do. Out of this I had to pay one
half, in interest for the thousand pounds. On the other half, and the
trifle my mother allowed me, I contrived to live.
"But the debt continued undiminished. It lay upon me as a mountain might
crush a little Titan. There was no cracking frost, no cutting stream, to
wear away, by slowest trituration, that mountain of folly and
wickedness. But what I suffered most from was the fact, that I must seem
to the poor of my parish unsympathetic and unkind. For although I still
managed to give away a little, it seemed to me such a small shabby sum,
every time that I drew my hand from my pocket, in which perhaps I had
left still less, that it was with a positive feeling of shame that I
offered it.
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