CHAPTER X
The reader has, doubtless, by this time judged with much severity
not only Catharine, but Mr. Cardew. It is admitted to the full that
they are both most unsatisfactory and most improbable. Is it likely
that in a sleepy Midland town, such as Eastthorpe, knowing nothing
but the common respectabilities of the middle of this century, the
daughter of an ironmonger would fall in love with a married
clergyman? Perhaps to their present biographer it seems more
remarkable than to his readers. He remembers what the Eastern
Midlands were like fifty years ago and they do not. They are
thinking of Eastthorpe of the present day, of its schoolgirls who
are examined in Keats and Shelley, of the Sunday morning walks
there, and of the, so to speak, smelling acquaintance with sceptical
books and theories which half the population now boasts. But
Eastthorpe, when Mr. Cardew was at Abchurch, was totally different.
It knew what it was for parsons to go wrong. It had not forgotten a
former rector and the young woman at the Bell. What talk there was
about that affair! Happily his friends were well connected: they
exerted themselves, and he obtained a larger sphere of usefulness
two hundred miles away. Mr. Cardew, however, was not that rector,
and Catharine was not the pretty waitress, and it is time now to
tell the promised early history of Mr. Cardew.
He was the son of a well-to-do London merchant, who lived in
Stockwell, in a large, white house, with a garden of a couple of
acres, shaded by a noble cedar in its midst.
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