DOWSING.
A few days later, towards evening, Mr. James Welsh arrived, after having
been absent from home. He had not told his wife or Arminell the cause of
his departure, nor whither he was going. When he returned, he informed
Arminell that he had been away on business, and that he wanted a word
with her in the parlour.
“There is no gas in the drawing-room. Will you have a lamp?” asked Mrs.
Welsh.
“Thank you. It will be unnecessary. At this time of the year it is not
dark, and the dusk is agreeable for a _tête-à-tête_. My business does
not need reference to papers.”
“Then I will go down and see about locking up the remains of the
plum-pudding. The girl has had her share set apart on a plate, and I
object to her consuming everything that goes out from dinner. There is
enough of the pudding left to serve up fried to-morrow.”
Arminell and Mr. Welsh mounted the steep stairs to the sitting-room. The
parlour was close and stuffy; Welsh went to the window and opened it a
little way.
“Do sit down, Miss Inglett,” he said, “there, on the sofa, with your
back to the window, if you are not afraid of a breath of air. This
twilight is restful to the eyes and grateful to the overwrought brain.
There is no need for candles.” He seated himself away from her, looking
in another direction, and said, “I suppose you can guess where I have
been?”
“Indeed I cannot, Mr. Welsh.”
“I have been at Orleigh. I thought I would like to be present at your
father’s funeral. Besides, I belong to the press, and my duties took me
there. Also, my sister is left a widow. You may not, perhaps, have heard
of the death of Captain Saltren?”
“Captain Saltren dead!”
“Yes, drowned in the old quarry pit.”
“I remember having once seen him there. He was a strange man. He went
there to say his prayers, and he prayed on a kind of raft of his own
construction. I suppose it gave way under him, or he overbalanced
himself.”
“Possibly. How he fell is not known. He was very strange in his manner
of late, so that the general opinion is that he was off his head. He had
visions, or fancied that he had.”
Arminell said no more on this matter. She was desirous of hearing about
her father’s funeral.
“I was present when Lord Lamerton was taken to his last rest,” said
Welsh; “you cannot have any conception what an amount of feeling was
elicited by his death. By me it was unexpected. I could not have
supposed that the people, as distinguished from the aristocracy, would
have been other than coldly respectful, but his lordship must have been
greatly beloved.” Welsh paused, and rubbed his chin. “Yes, much loved.
Of course, I had only seen one side of him, and that was the side I
cared to see, being a professional man, and professionally engaged to
see only one side. That is in the way of business, and just as a timber
merchant measures a tree, and estimates it by the amount of plank it
will make, regardless of its effect in the landscape, so it is with me.
I look on a man, especially a nobleman, from a commercial point of view,
and ask how many feet of type I can get out of him. I don’t consider him
for any other qualities he may have than those which serve my object.
But I will admit that there must have been a large amount of kindness
and sterling worth in his lordship, or there would not have been such a
demonstration at his funeral, and that not by a party, but general—not
cooked, but spontaneous. One expected to see the quality at the funeral,
but what surprised me was the real sorrow expressed by the people. Why,
bless you! what do you think? Because Captain Saltren had denounced his
lordship, and prophesied his death, the mob rolled stones down the cliff
on Chillacot and ruined the house and spoiled the garden.”
Pope Leo X. was inaccessible except to buffoons, and when a priest
desired an interview with his Holiness, but was unable to obtain one in
the ordinary manner, he dressed himself in motley, and as a clown
obtained immediate admission.
There are some people who suppose that every one else has the
peculiarities of Leo X., and who never approach their fellows, even when
they have to speak on matters of serious import, without putting on cap
and bells. They labour under the conviction that “the motley,” as Jaques
said to the Duke, “is the only wear,” especially when most inappropriate
to the matter of discourse.
Mr. Welsh was desirous of doing what was kind, of conveying to Arminell
what he knew was to her painful information, describing to her scenes
which must stir her emotions, but he could not assume a sympathetic and
serious tone. He was possessed by that perverse spirit which forces a
man to garnish his story, however tragic, with quirks and scraps of
illustration incongruous and out of taste. He was at heart full of pity
for Arminell; he had not gone to Orleigh on journalistic ends, though
not averse to paying his travelling expenses by turning what he had seen
into type, but he had gone for the girl’s sake, and only learned the
death of his brother-in-law on reaching Orleigh. He knew that she
hungered for information which she could not receive through the
channels formerly open to her. As he spoke to her, his heart swelled,
and he had some difficulty in controlling his emotion. Nevertheless, he
assumed a tone of half banter, that galled his own sense of propriety as
much as it jarred on Arminell. And this masquerade was assumed by him as
much to disguise his real self from himself as from the girl. Verily, in
our horror of hypocrisy, we are arrant hypocrites. Essayists and
satirists have united to wage a crusade against cant, and have succeeded
so completely that we dread the semblance of piety, kindliness,
sweetness, lest they be taken as an assumption only. In the reaction
against false appearances of goodness we have run into the opposite
extreme, and put on a false appearance of roughness, hardness, and
cynicism. Lest we should be taken to be apricots, with sweet outside and
hard interior, we affect to be walnuts, rugged and bitter. A woman poses
to herself in the glass, and adorns herself with jewelry to give
pleasure first to herself and then to others; but men cock their hats,
smut their noses, make grimaces in the glass, and having sneered at
their own buffoon appearance, pass off the same pranks on their
acquaintance. They will neither allow to themselves nor to others that
they acknowledge a serious interest in the drama of life, that they have
respect for what is noble, pity for what is suffering, reverence for
what is holy. They affect to cast burlesque into all relations of life,
as salt is put into all dishes, to make them palatable.
Arminell was not deceived by the manner of James Welsh; under the
affectation of selfishness and callousness she recognised the presence
of generous sympathy, just as she had seen the same quality under the
chatter and pretence of the wife.
At the beginning of this story we saw Arminell present at what we called
the grand transformation scene in the pantomime of life; now she had
reached another, and that a more startling, thorough-going
transformation scene. She saw the world and the performers therein
differently from the way in which she had seen them before, the world in
a real light, the performers in undress. She had got behind the scenes,
and into the green-room. Delusion was no longer possible; she saw the
framework of the scenery, the contrivances for the production of
effects, and the actors oiling their faces with cotton-wool to remove
the paint.
In former times there existed in England a profession which has become
extinct—the profession of dowsing. A dowser was a man who laid claim to
the peculiar gift of discernment of metal and of water. He was employed
to discover mines and springs. He took in his hands a forked hazel rod,
holding in each hand one of the branches. When he walked over a hidden
vein of metal, or a subterranean artery of water, the rod revolved in
his hands, and pointed downwards, and wherever it pointed, there he
ordered the sinking of a shaft or well.
But, although dowsing after minerals and fountains has ceased to be
practised, we still have among us moral dowsers, and it is even possible
for us to become adepts at dowsing ourselves.
The old dowsers insisted that their profession was not an art but an
inherent faculty. The dowser was born, not made. But in moral dowsing
this is not the case. The faculty can most certainly be acquired, but
only on one condition, that we begin with dowsing our own selves. _Fiat
experimentum in corpore vili._ Unconsciously Arminell had been invested
with this power; it had come on her at once, on that morning when her
folly, her error, had been revealed to her consciousness. From that
memorable moment, when she came to know herself as she really was, not
as she had fancied herself to be, the manner in which she viewed other
natures with which she was brought in contact was radically changed. She
found herself no longer as heretofore occupied with the outer surface,
its ups and downs, its fertility or its barrenness; the invisible rod
turned in her hands and revealed to her the hidden veins of ore and
motive currents. She saw the silver thread deep below the most
unpromising surface, the limpid spring under the most rugged exterior.
As she overlooked the superficial flaws in Mr. and Mrs. Welsh because
she recognised their substantial goodness, so did she begin now to
perceive what had before been unnoticed in the characters of her father
and step-mother. She had had eyes previously only for their foibles and
infirmities, now she saw how full of sterling qualities both had been,
of punctual fulfilment of duties, of conscientious discharge of the
obligations imposed on them by their position and wealth, of hearty
good-will for all with whom they were brought in contact. She had
disregarded her little half-brother, the present Baron Lamerton, because
he was only a child with childish thoughts, childish pursuits, and
childish prattle; and now she saw that his was a very tender, loving
spirit, which it would have been worth her while to cultivate. In the
first moment of disappointment, humiliation and anger, she had been
incensed against Jingles for having assisted her in perpetrating her
great mistake. She saw what a fool he had been, how conceited, how
ungrateful, but even over this forbidding soil the divining rod turned,
and revealed a vein of noble metal. If it had not been there, he would
not have accepted his humiliation with frankness and have shown so
decided a moral rebound.
When one who has the dowsing faculty is in the society of those who lack
it, and listens to their talk, their disparagement of others, the
captiousness with which they pick at trivial blemishes, sneer at
infirmities, blame short-comings, that person listens with a sort of
wonder at the blindness of the talkers, at their lack of perception,
because their eyes never penetrate below the surface, and a sort of pity
that they have never turned it inwards and searched themselves, not for
silver but for dross.
The knight Huldbrand, when riding through the Enchanted Wood, had his
eyes opened, and beneath the turf and the roots of the trees, he looked
through, as it were, a sheet of green glass, and saw the gold and silver
veins in the earth, and the spirits that worked at, and directed their
courses, opening sluices here and stopping currents there. So it is with
those invested with the dowsing gift—with them in the Enchanted Wood of
Life.
In the twilight room Arminell listened to Mr. Welsh’s story of the
funeral of her father, with tears running down her cheeks, regardless of
the manner in which the story was told, in the intensity of her interest
in the matter, and conscious of the intention of the narrator.
The death of Lord Lamerton had indeed evoked an amount of feeling and
regret that showed how deeply-rooted was the estimation in which his
good qualities were held, and how unreal was the agitation that had been
provoked against him.
The county papers of all political complexions gave laudatory notices of
the late nobleman. Every one who had come within range of his influence
had good words to say of him, and lamented his loss as that of a
relative. Selfish interest undoubtedly mixed with the general regret.
The sportsmen feared that the subscription to the foxhounds would not be
maintained on the same liberal scale; the parsons, that on the
occurrence of a vacancy in the Lamerton patronage, their claims would be
overlooked by the trustees; the medical men regretted that the death had
been too sudden to advantage them professionally; the benevolent
societies feared that the park would not be thrown open to them with the
same liberality; the young ladies that there would be no ball at Orleigh
next winter; the topers that they would not taste again the contents of
a famous cellar; the tradesmen that money would not be spent in the
little country town; the artisans that work would be abandoned and hands
discharged. Of course there was self-interest in the minds of those who
lamented the loss of Lord Lamerton, regret was not unmingled with
selfish feeling; but, then, what motives, what emotions are unmixed? The
coin of the realm is not pure, it consists of metal and alloy; and the
feelings that pass current among men are not less adulterated. But are
they the less estimable on that account? Would they pass if unmixed?
Would they be as poignant if pure? Why, the very prayers in which we
address Heaven have their stiffening of self-concern, and it is this
that gives them their force. Are they less acceptable on that account?
Popular feeling was doubly stirred and sympathy for the family greatly
deepened by the news of the almost simultaneous death of Miss Arminell
Inglett. The notice of her death had appeared first in the _Times_, and
then in all the papers; but the circumstances were only imperfectly
known. It was rumoured that the shock of the news of her father’s death
had affected her fatally—her heart having always been weak—whilst in
London staying with her aunt. Such an account had appeared in one of the
society papers, and perhaps Mr. Welsh could give the best explanation of
how it came there. This was reported at Orleigh. Others said she had
died at the second family place in Northamptonshire; all agreed that she
had been buried there beside her mother. Strange rumours had circulated
about Miss Inglett, but they had been traced to Mrs. Cribbage, and every
one knew that the tongue of that lady, like that of an ox, must be taken
with salt. Consequently the rumours died away, and were wholly
discredited.
And it was true that Arminell Inglett was dead. That is to say, the old
self-opinionated, supercilious, self-willed Arminell was no more.
In spring the new buds are sheathed in hard husks. One warm morning
after a shower they thrust aside these horny sheaths, and the tender
foliage appears. It was so with Arminell. She had hitherto worn her
better part, the generous qualities of her soul, in a hard and
ungracious shell; now this shell had fallen off, and they broke forth,
ready to expand and clothe her with a new and unexpected beauty.