CATASTROPHE.
Gibbie went home as if Pearl-street had been the stairs of Glashgar,
and the Auld Hoose a mansion in the heavens. He seemed to float along
the way as one floats in a happy dream, where motion is born at once
of the will, without the intermediating mechanics of nerve, muscle,
and fulcrum. Love had been gathering and ever storing itself in his
heart so many years for this brown dove! now at last the rock was
smitten, and its treasure rushed forth to her service. In nothing was
it changed as it issued, save as the dark, silent, motionless water
of the cavern changes into the sparkling, singing, dancing rivulet.
Gibbie’s was love simple, unselfish, undemanding--not merely asking
for no return, but asking for no recognition, requiring not even that
its existence should be known. He was a rare one, who did not make the
common miserable blunder of taking the shadow cast by love--the desire,
namely, to be loved--for love itself; his love was a vertical sun,
and his own shadow was under his feet. Silly youths and maidens count
themselves martyrs of love, when they are but the pining witnesses
to a delicious and entrancing selfishness. But do not mistake me
through confounding, on the other hand, the desire to be loved--which
is neither wrong nor noble, any more than hunger is either wrong or
noble--and the delight in being loved, to be devoid of which a man must
be lost in an immeasurably deeper, in an evil, ruinous, yea, a fiendish
selfishness. Not to care for love is the still worse reaction from the
self-foiled and outworn greed of love. Gibbie’s love was a diamond
among gem-loves. There are men whose love to a friend is less selfish
than their love to the dearest woman; but Gibbie’s was not a love to
be less divine towards a woman than towards a man. One man’s love is
as different from another’s as the one is himself different from the
other. The love that dwells in one man is an angel, the love in another
is a bird, that in another a hog. Some would count worthless the love
of a man who loved everybody. There would be no distinction in being
loved by such a man!--and distinction, as a guarantee of their own
great worth, is what such seek. There are women who desire to be the
_sole_ object of a man’s affection, and are all their lives devoured
by unlawful jealousies. A love that had never gone forth upon human
being but themselves, would be to them the treasure to sell all that
they might buy. And the man who brought such a love might in truth be
all-absorbed therein himself: the poorest of creatures may well be
absorbed in the poorest of loves. A heart has to be taught to love,
and its first lesson, however well learnt, no more makes it perfect in
love, than the A B C makes a _savant_. The man who loves most will love
best. The man who throughly loves God and his neighbour is the only
man who will love a woman ideally--who can love her with the love God
thought of between them when he made man male and female. The man, I
repeat, who loves God with his very life, and his neighbour as Christ
loves him, is the man who alone is capable of grand, perfect, glorious
love to any woman. Because Gibbie’s love was towards everything human,
he was able to love Ginevra as Donal, poet and prophet, was not yet
grown able to love her. To that of the most passionate of unbelieving
lovers, Gibbie’s love was as the fire of a sun to that of a forest.
The fulness of a world of love-ways and love-thoughts was Gibbie’s.
In sweet affairs of loving-kindness, he was in his own kingdom, and
sat upon its throne. And it was this essential love, acknowledging
and embracing, as a necessity of its being, everything that could be
loved, which now concentrated its rays on the individual’s individual.
His love to Ginevra stood like a growing thicket of aromatic shrubs,
until her confession set the fire of heaven to it, and the flame that
consumes not, but gives life, arose and shot homeward. He had never
imagined, never hoped, never desired she should love him like that.
She had refused his friend, the strong, the noble, the beautiful,
Donal the poet, and it never could but from her own lips have found
way to his belief that she had turned her regard upon wee Sir Gibbie,
a nobody, who to himself was a mere burning heart running about in
tattered garments. His devotion to her had forestalled every pain with
its antidote of perfect love, had negatived every lack, had precluded
every desire, had shut all avenues of entrance against self. Even if “a
little thought unsound” should have chanced upon an entrance, it would
have found no soil to root and grow in: the soil for the harvest of
pain is that brought down from the peaks of pride by the torrents of
desire. Immeasurably the greater therefore was his delight, when the
warmth and odour of the love that had been from time to him immemorial
passing out from him in virtue of consolation and healing, came back
upon him in the softest and sweetest of flower-waking spring-winds.
Then indeed was his heart a bliss worth God’s making. The sum of
happiness in the city, if gathered that night into one wave, could not
have reached half-way to the crest of the mighty billow tossing itself
heavenward as it rushed along the ocean of Gibbie’s spirit.
He entered the close of the Auld Hoose. But the excess of his joy had
not yet turned to light, was not yet passing from him in physical
flame: whence then the glow that illumined the court? He looked up. The
windows of Mistress Croale’s bedroom were glaring with light! He opened
the door hurriedly and darted up. On the stair he was met by the smell
of burning, which grew stronger as he ascended. He opened Mistress
Croale’s door. The chintz curtains of her bed were flaming to the
ceiling. He darted to it. Mistress Croale was not in it. He jumped upon
it, and tore down the curtains and tester, trampling them under his
feet upon the blankets. He had almost finished, and, at the bottom of
the bed, was reaching up and pulling at the last of the flaming rags,
when a groan came to his ears. He looked down: there, at the foot of
the bed, on her back upon the floor, lay Mistress Croale in her satin
gown, with red swollen face, wide-open mouth, and half-open eyes, dead
drunk, a heap of ruin. A bit of glowing tinder fell on her forehead.
She opened her eyes, looked up, uttered a terrified cry, closed them,
and was again motionless, except for her breathing. On one side of her
lay a bottle, on the other a chamber-candlestick upset, with the candle
guttered into a mass.
With the help of the water-jugs, and the bath which stood ready in his
room, he succeeded at last in putting out the fire, and then turned his
attention to Mistress Croale. Her breathing had grown so stertorous
that he was alarmed, and getting more water, bathed her head, and laid
a wet handkerchief on it, after which he sat down and watched her.
It would have made a strange picture: the middle of the night, the
fire-blasted bed, the painful, ugly carcase on the floor, and the sad
yet--I had almost said _radiant_ youth, watching near. The slow night
passed.
The gray of the morning came, chill and cheerless. Mistress Croale
stirred, moved, crept up rather than rose to a sitting position, and
stretched herself yawning. Gibbie had risen and stood over her. She
caught sight of him; absolute terror distorted her sodden face; she
stared at him, then stared about her, like one who had suddenly waked
in hell. He took her by the arm. She obeyed, rose, and stood, fear
conquering the remnants of drunkenness, with her whisky-scorched eyes
following his every movement, as he got her cloak and bonnet. He put
them on her. She submitted like a child caught in wickedness, and
cowed by the capture. He led her from the house, out into the dark
morning, made her take his arm, and away they walked together, down to
the riverside. She gave a reel now and then, and sometimes her knees
would double under her; but Gibbie was no novice at the task, and
brought her safe to the door of her lodging--of which, in view of such
a possibility, he had been paying the rent all the time. He opened the
door with her pass-key, led her up the stair, unlocked the door of her
garret, placed her in a chair, and left her, closing the doors gently
behind him. Instinctively she sought her bed, fell upon it, and slept
again.
When she woke, her dim mind was haunted by a terrible vision of
resurrection and damnation, of which the only point she could plainly
recall, was an angel, as like Sir Gibbie as he could look, hanging in
the air above her, and sending out flames on all sides of him, which
burned her up, inside and out, shrivelling soul and body together.
As she lay thinking over it, with her eyes closed, suddenly she
remembered, with a pang of dismay, that she had got drunk and broken
her vow--that was the origin of the bad dream, and the dreadful
headache, and the burning at her heart! She must have water! Painfully
lifting herself upon one elbow, she opened her eyes. Then what a
bewilderment, and what a discovery, slow unfolding itself, were hers!
Like her first parents she had fallen; her paradise was gone; she lay
outside among the thorns and thistles before the gate. From being the
virtual mistress of a great house, she was back in her dreary lonely
garret! Re-exiled in shame from her briefly regained respectability,
from friendship and honourable life and the holding forth of help to
the world, she lay there a sow that had been washed, and washed in
vain! What a sight of disgrace was her grand satin gown--wet, and
scorched, and smeared with candle! and ugh! how it smelt of smoke and
burning and the dregs of whisky! And her lace!--She gazed at her finery
as an angel might on his feathers which the enemy had burned while he
slept on his watch.
She must have water! She got out of bed with difficulty, then for a
whole hour sat on the edge of it motionless, unsure that she was not
in hell. At last she wept--acrid tears, for very misery. She rose,
took off her satin and lace, put on a cotton gown, and was once more
a decent-looking poor body--except as to her glowing face and burning
eyes, which to bathe she had nothing but tears. Again she sat down,
and for a space did nothing, only suffered in ignominy. At last life
began to revive a little. She rose and moved about the room, staring
at the things in it as a ghost might stare at the grave-clothes on its
abandoned body. There on the table lay her keys; and what was that
under them?--A letter addressed to her. She opened it, and found five
pound-notes, with these words: “I promise to pay to Mrs. Croale five
pounds monthly, for nine months to come. Gilbert Galbraith.” She wept
again. He would never speak to her more! She had lost him at last--her
only friend!--her sole link to God and goodness and the kingdom of
heaven!--lost him for ever!
The day went on, cold and foggy without, colder and drearier within.
Sick and faint and disgusted, the poor heart had no atmosphere to beat
in save an infinite sense of failure and lost opportunity. She had fuel
enough in the room to make a little fire, and at length had summoned
resolve sufficient for the fetching of water from the street-pump.
She went to the cupboard to get a jug: she could not carry a pailful.
There in the corner stood her demon-friend! her own old familiar, the
black bottle! as if he had been patiently waiting for her all the
long dreary time she had been away! With a flash of fierce joy she
remembered she had left it half-full. She caught it up, and held it
between her and the fading light of the misty window: it was half-full
still!--One glass--a hair of the dog--would set her free from faintness
and sickness, disgust and misery! There was no one to find fault with
her now! She could do as she liked--there was no one to care!--nothing
to take fire!--She set the bottle on the table, because her hand shook,
and went again to the cupboard to get a glass. On the way--borne
upward on some heavenly current from the deeps of her soul, the face
of Gibbie, sorrowful because loving, like the face of the Son of Man,
met her. She turned, seized the bottle, and would have dashed it on the
hearthstone, but that a sudden resolve arrested her lifted arm: Gibbie
should see! She would be strong! That bottle should stand on that shelf
until the hour when she could show it him and say, “See the proof of
my victory!” She drove the cork fiercely in. When its top was level
with the neck, she set the bottle back in its place, and from that hour
it stood there, a temptation, a ceaseless warning, the monument of a
broken but reparable vow, a pledge of hope. It may not have been a
prudent measure. To a weak nature it would have involved certain ruin.
But there are natures that do better under difficulty; there are many
such. And with that fiend-like shape in her cupboard the one ambition
of Mistress Croale’s life was henceforth inextricably bound up: she
would turn that bottle into a witness for her against the judgment she
had deserved. Close by the cupboard door, like a kite or an owl nailed
up against a barn, she hung her soiled and dishonoured satin gown; and
the dusk having now gathered, took the jug, and fetched herself water.
Then, having set her kettle on the fire, she went out with her basket,
and bought bread, and butter. After a good cup of tea and some nice
toast, she went to bed again, much easier both in mind and body, and
slept.
In the morning she went to the market, opened her shop, and waited for
customers. Pleasure and surprise at her reappearance brought the old
ones quickly back. She was friendly and helpful to them as before; but
the slightest approach to inquiry as to where she had been or what
she had been doing, she met with simple obstinate silence. Gibbie’s
bounty and her faithful abstinence enabled her to add to her stock and
extend her trade. By and by she had the command of a little money; and
when in the late autumn there came a time of scarcity and disease, she
went about among the poor like a disciple of Sir Gibbie. Some said
that, from her knowledge of their ways, from her judgment, and by her
personal ministration of what, for her means, she gave more bountifully
than any, she did more to hearten their endurance, than all the ladies
together who administered money subscribed. It came to Sir Gibbie’s
ears, and rejoiced his heart: his old friend was on the King’s highway
still! In the mean time she saw nothing of him. Not once did he pass
her shop, where often her mental, and not unfrequently her bodily,
attitude was that of a watching lover. The second day, indeed, she saw
him at a little distance, and sorely her heart smote her, for one of
his hands was in a sling; but he crossed to the other side, plainly to
avoid her. She was none the less sure, however, that when she asked
him he would forgive her; and ask him she would, as soon as she had
satisfactory proof of repentance to show him.