The first great apparent change in a life is not always its real
beginning. It may be but the beginning of the beginning, as it were,
the first grand crash of the ice, the opening of the fountain. There
is more noise and more demonstration than when the full tide of waters
begins to swell into the broader channel, but it is not the great
crisis which it has the look of being. It is the commencement of a
process of which it is impossible to predict the end. This had been
emphatically the case with John Mitford when he was suddenly swept
out of his father’s house and out of all the traditions of his youth.
It seemed to him and to everybody that his life had then taken its
individual shape. When he returned to Fanshawe Regis, he went about
with new eyes, curiously observing everything which before he had
accepted without observation. Was it that he felt the new better? Was
it that he hankered after the old? These were questions which he could
not answer. The only thing he was quite sure of in respect to himself
was that he was uncertain about everything, and that life was no longer
sweet enough to make up for the darkness and troubles in it. With
this feeling in his mind he listened to his father’s sermons, seeing
everything in a different light, and went with his mother on her parish
work, carrying her basket, gazing wistfully in at the cottage windows,
wondering what was the good of it all. He had never questioned for a
moment the good of at least his mother’s ministrations until now. When
she came smiling out of one of the cottages it cast a gloom upon her
to find her boy, who had always been full of faith in her at least,
standing unresponsive, waiting for her outside. She looked him in the
eyes with her tender smile, and said, “Well, John?” as she gave back
the little basket into his hand.
“Well,” he said, with a sigh, “my good little mother! do you think it
is worth all the trouble you are taking, and all the trouble you have
taken since ever I remember?--that is what I want to know.”
“Yes, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, “that and a great deal more. Oh,
John, if I could feel that but one, only one, was brought back to God
by any means!”
“I think they are all very much the same as they used to be,” said
John. “I recollect when I was a small boy, there was always something
to be set right _there_.”
“That was the father, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford. “He was very
troublesome. He took more than was good for him, you know; and then he
used to be very unkind to his poor wife. Ah, John, some of these poor
women have a great deal to bear!”
“But the blackguard is dead now, heaven be praised!” said John.
“Oh, hush, my dear, hush, and don’t speak of an immortal soul like
that! Yes indeed, John, he has gone where he will be judged with
clearer sight than ours. But I wish I could hope things were really
mended,” said Mrs Mitford, shaking her head. She went on shaking her
head for a whole minute after she had stopped speaking, as if her hope
was a very slight one indeed.
“What is the matter now?”
“The boys are very tiresome, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, with a sigh.
“Somehow it seems natural to them to take to bad ways. You can’t think
how idle and lazy Jim is, though he used to be such a good boy when
he was in the choir, don’t you remember? He looked a perfect little
angel in his white surplice, but I fear he has been a very bad boy; and
Willie and his mother never do get on together. He is the only one that
can be depended upon in the least, and he talks of marrying and going
away.”
“You have not much satisfaction out of them,” said John, “though I know
you have always kept on doing all sorts of things for them. They ought
at least to be grateful to you.”
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, with anxious gravity, “I don’t like
to blame her--but I am afraid sometimes their mother is not very
judicious, poor woman. It sours one sadly to have so much misfortune.
She is always contradicting and crossing them for things that don’t
matter. I don’t like to blame her, she has had so much to put up with;
but still, you know--and of course it is discouraging, whatever one may
try to say.”
“And then there are the Littles,” said John, leading his mother on.
“Oh, the Littles, dear! I wish you would not speak of them. Every month
or so I think I have just got their mind up to the point of going to
church. If you but knew the number of bonnets that woman has had, and
shoes for the children, and even your papa’s last old greatcoat which
I got the tailor to alter for Robert. But it is never any good. And
though I pay myself for the children’s schooling, they never go. It is
enough to break one’s heart.”
“And Lizzie’s people are always a trouble to you,” said John.
“Ah, my dear, but then the old woman is a Dissenter,” said Mrs Mitford,
with alacrity; “and in such a case what can one do?”
“But, mother dear, with all these things before you, does it sometimes
strike you what a hopeless business it is?” cried John. “You have been
working in the parish for twenty years----”
“Twenty-five, my dear boy--since before you were born.”
“And what is it the better?” said John; “the same evils reappear just
in the same way--the same wickedness, and profanity, and indifference.
For all the change one can see, mother dear, all your work and fatigue
might never have been.”
“I must say so far as that goes I don’t agree with you at all, John,”
cried his mother, with a certain sharp ring in her voice. The colour
came to her cheeks and the water to her eyes. If it had been said to
her that her life itself had been a mistake and failure, she could not
have felt it more. Indeed the one implied the other; and if there was
any one thing that she had built upon in all her modest existence, it
was the difference in the parish. John’s words gave her such a shock
that she gasped after them with a sense of partial suffocation.
And then she did her best to restrain the momentary sharp thrill of
resentment; for how could she be angry with her boy? “My dear,” she
said, humbly, with the tears in her soft eyes, “I don’t suppose I have
done half or quarter what I ought to have done; but still if you had
seen the parish when we came---- If I had been a woman of more energy,
and cleverer than I am----”
“You cannot think it was that I meant,” cried John. “How you
mistake me, mother! It is because your work has been so perfect, so
unwearied--because it ought to have wrought miracles----”
“Oh, no, no, not that,” she said, recovering her tranquillity, and
smiling on her boy. “It has been very humble, my dear; but still, if
you had seen the parish when we came--the alehouse was more frequented
than the church a great deal--the children were not baptised--there
were things going on I could not speak of even to you. That very Robert
Little that we were speaking of--his father was the most inveterate
poacher in the whole country, always in prison or in trouble; the
eldest brother went for a soldier, and one of the girls---- Oh, John,
Fanshawe Regis is not Paradise, but things are better now.”
“My dear little mother! but they are not as good as they ought to be
after the work of all your life.”
“Don’t speak of me, my dear boy, as if I were everything,” said Mrs
Mitford; “think of your papa--and oh, John, think of what is far
beyond any of us. Think whose life it was that was given, not for the
righteous, but to save sinners; think who it was that said there was
joy in heaven over one that repented; and should we grudge a whole
lifetime if we could but be sure that one was saved? I hope that is
what I shall never, never, do.”
John drew his mother’s hand through his arm as she looked up in his
face, with her soft features all quivering with emotion. What more
could he say? She was not clever, nor very able to take a philosophical
view of the matter. She never stopped to ask herself, as he did,
whether this faulty, shifty, mean, unprofitable world was worth the
expenditure of that divine life eighteen hundred years ago, and of the
many lives since which have been half divine. All that;--and nothing
better come of it than the vice, and the hypocrisy, and mercenary
pretences at goodness, and brutal indifference to everything pure
and true, which were to be found in this very village, in the depth
of the rural country, in England that has been called Christian for
all these hundreds of years. So much--and so little to result from
it. Such were the thoughts that passed through John’s mind, mingled
with many another gloomy fancy. Adding up long lines of figures was
scarcely more unprofitable--could scarcely be of less use to the world.
When he thought of his father’s precise little sermons, his feelings
were different; for Dr Mitford spoke as a member of the Archæological
Society might be supposed to speak, being compelled to do so, to a
handful of bumpkins who could not, as he was well aware, understand a
word he said--and was content with having thus performed the “duty”
incumbent on him. _That_ might be mended so far as it went; but
who could mend the self-devotion, the unconscious gospel of a life
which his mother set before the eyes of the village? They knew that her
charity never failed, nor her interest in them, nor the tender service
which she was ready to give to the poorest, or even to the wickedest.
Twenty-five years this woman, who was as pure as the angels, had been
their servant, at their call night and day. Heaven and earth could not
produce a more perfect ministration, her son said to himself, as he
watched her coming and going; and yet what did it all come to? Had Mrs
Mitford seen the thoughts that were going on in his mind, she would
have shrunk from him with a certain horror. They were hard thoughts
both of God and man. What was the good of it? Nobody, it appeared to
John, was the better. If Fanshawe Regis, for one place, had been left
to itself, would it have made any difference? Such thoughts are hard
to bear, when a man has been trained into the habit of thinking that
much, almost everything, can be done for his neighbours if he will
but sufficiently exert himself. Here was a tender good woman who had
exerted herself all her life--and what was the end of it? Meanwhile
Mrs Mitford walked on cheerfully, holding her son’s arm, with a little
glow of devotion about her heart, thinking, what did it matter how much
labour was spent on the work if but the one stray lamb was brought back
to the fold? and pondering in the same breath a new argument by which
Robert Little, in the Doctor’s greatcoat, and his wife in one of her
own bonnets, could be got to come to church, and induced to send their
children to school.
Sometimes, however, John’s strange holiday, which nobody could quite
understand, was disturbed by immediate questions still more difficult.
Mrs Mitford did not say much, having discovered in her son’s eye at
the moment of his return that all was not well with him; but she
looked wistfully at him from time to time, and surprised him in the
midst of his frequent reveries with sudden glances of anxious inquiry
which spoke more distinctly than words. She did not mention Kate,
which was more significant than if she had spoken volumes; and when
the letters came in, in the morning, she would turn her head away not
to see whether her son expected anything, or if he was disappointed.
A mixture of love and pride was in her self-restraint. He should not
be forced to confide in her, she had resolved; she would exercise
the last and hardest of all maternal duties towards him, and leave
him to himself. But Dr Mitford had no such idea. He was busy at the
moment with something for the 'Gentleman’s Magazine,' which kept him
in his study for the first few days after John’s arrival; but as soon
as his article was off his mind, he began to talk to his son of his
prospects, as was natural. This happened in the library, where John was
sitting, exactly as he had been sitting that first morning when Kate
peeped in at the door and all the world was changed; though I cannot
tell whether the young man at first remembered that. Dr Mitford was
seated at the other end of the room, as he had been that day. A ray of
October sunshine shone in through one light of the great Elizabethan
window and fell in a long line upon the polished oak floor, on the
library carpet, on Dr Mitford’s white head, and as far as the wall on
the other side of him--a great broad arrow of light, with some colour
in it from the shield in the centre of the glass. Behind this was the
glimmer of a fire, and John, lifting his weary eyes from his book, or
his eyes from his weary book, he could scarcely have told which, became
suddenly aware of the absolute identity of the outside circumstances,
and held his breath and asked himself, had he dreamed it, or had that
interruption ever been? Was the door going to open and Kate to peep
in breathless, shy, daring, full of fun and temerity? or had she done
it, and turned all the world upside down? When he was asking himself
this question Dr Mitford laid down his pen; then he coughed his little
habitual cough, which was the well-understood sign between him and his
domestic world that he might be spoken to; then he was fretted by the
sunshine, and got up and drew the blind down; and then, having quite
finished his article, and feeling himself in a mood for a little talk,
he took a walk towards his son between the pillars that narrowed the
library in the middle, and looked like a great doorway. He did not
go straight to John, but paused on the way to remark upon some empty
corners, and to set right some books which had dropped out of their
exact places.
“I wish the doctor would return my Early English books,” he said,
approaching his son; “one ought to make a resolution against lending.
You might give me a day, John, just to look up what books are missing,
and who has them. I think you know them better than I do. But, by the
by, you have not told us how long you can stay.”
“I don’t think it matters much,” said John.
“You don’t think it matters much! but that looks as if you were not
taking any great trouble to make yourself missed. I don’t like that,”
said Dr Mitford, shaking his head: “depend upon it, my boy, you will
never secure proper appreciation until you show the people you are
among that another cannot fill your place.”
“But the fact is that a dozen others could fill my place, sir,” said
John, “quite as well as--very probably much better than I.”
“What! with Mr Crediton? and his daughter?” said Dr Mitford. He
thought he had made a joke, and turned away with a mild little laugh
to arrange and caress his folios. Then he went on talking with his
back to John--“I should be glad to know what you really think of it
now that you have had time to make the experiment. I don’t understand
the commercial mind myself. I don’t know that I could be brought
to understand it; but the opinion of an intelligence capable of
judging, and accustomed to trains of thought so different, could
not but be interesting. I should like to hear what you think of it
frankly. Somebody has made dog’s ears in this Shakespeare, which
is unpardonable,” said the Doctor, passing his hand with sudden
indignation over the folded edges. “I should like to know what your
opinion is.”
“I think I can get it straight, sir,” said John, “if you will trust the
book to me.”
“Thanks--and put a label on it, 'Not to be lent,'” said Dr Mitford.
“It is not to be expected, you know, that the most good-natured of men
should lend one of the earliest editions. What were we talking of? oh,
the bank. I hope you are quite satisfied that you can do your duty as
well or better in your own way than in the manner we had intended for
you. Nothing but that thought would have induced me to yield. It was
a disappointment, John,” said his father, turning round with a tall
volume in his hand--“I cannot deny that it was a great disappointment.
Do you really feel that you are able to do your duty better where you
are?”
“What is my duty, father?” said John, with a hoarseness in his voice.
And then it was Dr Mitford’s turn to show consternation. “Your duty,”
he faltered--“your duty? It does not say much for my teaching and your
mother’s if you have to ask that question at this time of day.”
This, it will be easy to see, was a very unsatisfactory sort of answer.
John got up too, feeling very heavy about the heart. “Relative duty is
easy enough,” he said; “but absolute duty, what is it? is there such a
thing? Is it not just as good both for myself and other people that I
should live for myself as I am doing, instead of living for God and my
neighbour like my mother? So far as I can see, it comes to exactly the
same thing.”
Dr Mitford looked at his son with an absolute astonishment that would
have been comical had John been able to see it. But then it was not so
much his son’s perplexity the Doctor thought of as that curious, quite
inexplicable reference. “Like your mother!” the Rector of Fanshawe
Regis said, with utter amazement. It took away his breath. He could not
even notice his son’s question in his consternation. “Yes,” said John,
not in the least perceiving the point, “what is the good? That is what
one asks one’s self; it does not seem to make any difference to the
world.”
Dr Mitford turned, and put up the dog’s-eared folio on its shelf. He
shook his head in his bewilderment, and gave a sigh of impatience.
“You young men have a way of talking and of thinking which I don’t
understand,” he said, still shaking his head. “I hope to goodness,
John, that you have not been led astray by those ridiculous fallacies
of Comtism. You may suppose that as you are not to be a clergyman
it does not matter what your opinions are; but it always matters.
A private Christian has as much need to be right as if he were an
archbishop; and I confess, after your careful training, I little
expected----a mere farrago of French sentiment and nonsense. Your
mother! what she has to do with the question I can’t understand.”
“And I am sure neither do I, sir,” said John, moved to a laugh, “nor
why you should set me down as a Comtist. I am not an anythingist, worse
luck--for then, perhaps, one might see a little more plainly what to
do.”
“If a young man, with the best education England can give, and friends
to consult, who, I flatter myself, are not idiots, cannot see what to
do, it does not say much for his sense,” said Dr Mitford, with some
indignation. “I suppose by all this I am to understand that you are
tired of the office drudgery and beginning to repent----”
“I don’t know that I have anything to repent of,” said John, who under
this questioning began to get rebellious, as sons are wont to do.
“I advise you to make up your mind,” said Dr Mitford, not without a
half-tone of contempt. “I never thought you were adapted for business.
If experience has shown you this, it is best to take steps at once. You
might not like, perhaps, to return to your original destination----”
“Father, this discussion is quite unnecessary,” said John, growing
red. “I am not tired of office drudgery. No trade, I suppose, is very
delightful just at first; and when one begins to think for one’s self,
there are many questions that arise in one’s mind. Yes, mother, I am
quite ready. I have been waiting for you this half-hour.”
“But not if your papa wants you, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, in her
white shawl, standing smiling upon them at the door.
“I can look after the Shakespeare when I come in,” said John. That
was exactly where Kate had stood peeping--Kate, who, when she was
old, would be just such another woman. Would she grow so by his side?
Could it ever be that she would come, in all the soft confidence of
proprietorship, and look in upon him as his mother did? All at once
it flashed upon him that such a thing might have been, in this very
place, in this very way, had he kept his traditionary place. He might
have been the Rector, putting up his folios, and she the Lady Bountiful
of the parish, as his mother was. This flashed across his mind at the
very moment when he was asking what use it was, and feeling that a life
spent in doing good was as much thrown away as a life spent in making
money. Strange inconsistency! And then he went and took the basket,
with its little vials of wine and carefully-packed dainties, out of his
mother’s hand.
Dr Mitford watched them going away with feelings more odd and strange
than he recollected to have experienced for years. He waited till the
door was closed, and then he turned abruptly to his books; but these
were not satisfactory for the moment, and by-and-by he gave them up
and walked impatiently to the window, and saw his wife’s white shawl
disappear from the garden gate, with her tall boy by her side shadowing
over her in the October sunshine. “His mother!” Dr Mitford said to
himself, with a certain snort of wonder and offence--and then went back
to his writing-table, and wrote a note to accompany his article to
Sylvanus Urban, who was a more comprehensible personage on the whole
than either wife or son.