"Oh I shall be content to be a little better up in what has been done." And
his eyes rested on a shelf of books, half of which, little worn but much
faded, were of the florid "gift" order and belonged to the house. Of those
among them that were his own most were common specimens of the reference
sort, not excluding an old Bradshaw and a catalogue of the town-library.
"We've not even a Set of our own. Of the Works," he explained in quick
repudiation of the sense, perhaps more obvious, in which she might have
taken it.
As a proof of their scant range of possessions this sounded almost abject,
till the painful flush with which they met on the admission melted
presently into a different glow. It was just for that kind of poorness that
their new situation was, by its intrinsic charm, to console them. And Mrs.
Gedge had a happy thought. "Wouldn't the Library more or less have them?"
"Oh no, we've nothing of that sort: for what do you take us?" This,
however, was but the play of Gedge's high spirits: the form both depression
and exhilaration most frequently took with him being a bitterness on the
subject of the literary taste of Blackport. No one was so deeply acquainted
with it. It acted with him in fact as so lurid a sign of the future that
the charm of the thought of removal was sharply enhanced by the prospect of
escape from it. The institution he served didn't of course deserve the
particular reproach into which his irony had flowered; and indeed if the
several Sets in which the Works were present were a trifle dusty, the dust
was a little his own fault. To make up for that now he had the vision of
immediately giving his time to the study of them; he saw himself indeed,
inflamed with a new passion, earnestly commenting and collating. Mrs.
Gedge, who had suggested that, till their move should come, they ought to
read Him regularly of an evening--certain as they were to do it still more
when in closer quarters with Him--Mrs. Gedge felt also, in her degree, the
spell; so that the very happiest time of their anxious life was perhaps to
have been the series of lamplight hours, after supper, in which,
alternately taking the book, they declaimed, they almost performed, their
beneficent author. He became speedily more than their author--their
personal friend, their universal light, their final authority and divinity.
Where in the world, they were already asking themselves, would they have
been without Him? By the time their appointment arrived in form their
relation to Him had immensely developed. It was amusing to Morris Gedge
that he had so lately blushed for his ignorance, and he made this remark to
his wife during the last hour they were able to give their study before
proceeding, across half the country, to the scene of their romantic future.
It was as if, in deep close throbs, in cool after-waves that broke of a
sudden and bathed his mind, all possession and comprehension and sympathy,
all the truth and the life and the story, had come to him, and come, as the
newspapers said, to stay. "It's absurd," he didn't hesitate to say, "to
talk of our not 'knowing.' So far as we don't it's because we're dunces.
He's _in_ the thing, over His ears, and the more we get into it the more
we're with Him. I seem to myself at any rate," he declared, "to _see_ Him
in it as if He were painted on the wall."
"Oh _doesn't_ one rather, the dear thing? And don't you feel where it is?"
Mrs. Gedge finely asked. "We see Him because we love Him--that's what we
do. How can we not, the old darling--with what He's doing for us? There's
no light"--she had a sententious turn--"like true affection."
"Yes, I suppose that's it. And yet," her husband mused, "I see, confound
me, the faults."
"That's because you're so critical. You see them, but you don't mind them.
You see them, but you forgive them. You mustn't mention them _there_. We
shan't, you know, be there for _that_."
"Dear no!" he laughed: "we'll chuck out any one who hints at them."