pleasure. The firmament, instead of being a mere muddle--beautiful,
indeed, she had always thought it--had a plan in it. She marked where
one particularly bright star was showing itself in the south-east--it
was Sirius; and in the night she rose softly, drew aside the blind, saw
him again due south, and recognised the similarity of the arc with that
which her husband had constructed with his withies and wire. She lay
down again, thinking, as she went off to sleep, that still that silent,
eternal march went on. At four she again awoke from light slumber, and
crept to the blind again. Another portion of the same arc had been
traversed, and Sirius with his jewelled flashes was beginning to
descend. She thought she should like to see him actually sink, and she
waited and waited till he had disappeared, till the first tint of dawn
was discernible in the east, and that almost indistinguishable murmur
was heard which precedes the day. She then once more lay down, and
when she rose, she was richer by a very simple conception, but still
richer. She felt as a novice might feel who had been initiated, and
had been intrusted at least with the preliminary secrets of her
community. She owed her initiation to Mr. Armstrong, but also to her
husband. Experts no doubt may smile, and so may the young people who,
in these days of universal knowledge, have got up astronomy for
examinations, but nevertheless, in the profounder study of the science
there is perhaps no pleasure so sweet and so awful as that which
arises, not when books are read about it, but when the heavens are
first actually watched, when the movement of the Bear is first actually
seen for ourselves, and with the morning Arcturus is discerned
punctually over the eastern horizon; when the advance of the stars
westwards through the year, marking the path of the earth in its orbit,
is noted, and the moon's path also becomes intelligible.
Mr. Armstrong had long desired to make an orrery for the purpose of
instructing a few children and friends, but had never done anything
towards it, partly for lack of time, and partly for lack of skill with
joinery tools. He now, however, had in Farrow at once a willing pupil
and an artist, and the work went forward in Farrow's house, Miriam
watching its progress with great interest. She could even contribute
her share, and the graduation of the rim was left to her, a task she
performed with accuracy after a few failures in pencil. It was a
handsome instrument when it was completed. The relative distances of
the planets from the sun could not be preserved, nor their relative
magnitudes; but what was of more importance, their relative velocities
in their orbits were maintained. The day came when the machine was to
be first used. Miriam insisted that there should be no experiments
with it beforehand. She desired, even at the risk of disappointment,
to see a dramatic start into existence. She did not wish her pleasure
to be spoiled and her excitement to be diminished by trials. Her
husband humoured her, but secretly he took care that every preventible
chance of a breakdown should be removed. When she was absent, he
tested every pinion and every cog, eased a wheel here and an axle
there, and in truth what he had to do in this way with file and
sandpaper was almost equal to the labour spent upon saw and chisel.
Infinite adjustment was necessary to make the idea a noiseless, smooth
practical success, and infinite precautions had to be taken and devices
invented which were not foreseen when the drawing first appeared on
paper. With some of these difficulties Miriam, of course, was
acquainted. They would not probably have been so great to a
professional instrument-maker, but they were very considerable to an
amateur. Farrow selected the best-seasoned wood he could find, but it
frequently happened that after it was cut it warped a little, and the
slightest want of truth threw all the connected part out of gear.
Miriam learned something when she saw that a wheel whose revolution was
not in a perfect plane could give rise to so much annoyance, and she
learned something also when she saw how her husband, in the true spirit
of a genuine craftsman, remained discontented if there was the
slightest looseness in a bearing.
"Do you think it matters?" said she.
"Matters! Don't you see that if it goes on it gets worse? Every
wobble increases the next, and not only so, it sets the whole thing
wobbling."
"Couldn't you manage to put a piece on? Suppose you lined that hole
with something."
"Oh, no! Not the slightest use; out it must come, and a new one must
be put in."
At length the day came for the start. Farrow had made a trial by
himself the night before, and nothing could be better. Mr. Armstrong
came over, and after tea they all three went upstairs into the large
garret which had been used as a workshop. The great handle was taken
down and fitted into its place, Mr. Armstrong standing at one end and
Miriam and her husband at the other. Obedient to the impulse, every
planet at once answered; Mercury with haste, and Saturn with such
deliberation that scarcely any motion was perceptible. The Earth spun
its diurnal round, the Moon went forward in her monthly orbit. The
lighted ground-glass globe which did duty for the sun showed night and
day and the seasons. Miriam was transported, when suddenly there was a
jerk and a stop. Something was wrong, and Farrow, who was fortunately
turning with great caution, gave a cry such as a man might utter who
was suddenly struck a heavy blow. He recovered himself instantly, and
luckily at the very first glance saw what was the matter. The nicety
of his own handicraft was the cause of the disaster. A shaving not
much thicker than a piece of writing-paper had dropped between two
cogs. A gentle touch of a quarter of an inch backwards released it.
"Hooray!" he cried in his mad delight, and the mimic planets
recommenced their journeys as silently almost as their great archetypes
outside.
"Strange," he said with a smile, "that such a chip as that should upset
the whole solar system."
Miriam looked at him for a moment inquiringly, and then fell to
watching the orrery again. Slowly the moon waxed and waned. Slowly
the winter departed from our latitude on the little ball representing
our dwelling-place, and the summer came; and as she still watched,
slowly and almost unconsciously her arms crept round her husband's
waist.
"That is a fair representation," said Mr. Armstrong, "of all that is
directly connected with us, excepting, of course, as I have told you,
that we could not keep the distances." A little later on, although he
disapproved of "gaping," as he called it, he taught Miriam so much of
geometry as was sufficient to make her understand what he meant when he
told her that a fixed star yielded no parallax, and that the earth was
consequently the merest speck of dust in the universe. She found his
simple trigonometry very, very hard, but to her husband it was easy,
and with his help she succeeded.
One afternoon, wet and dreary, Miriam had taken up her book. There was
nothing to do in the shop, and Mr. Farrow entered the parlour in one of
his idle moods, repeating the same behaviour which had so often
distressed Miriam when she was reading anything for which he did not
care. She had recovered from the dust upstairs a ragged volume in
paper boards, and she was musing over the lines--
"But bound and fixed in fettered solitude
To pine, the prey of every changing mood."
The poem was about as remote in its whole conception and treatment from
Mr. Farrow as it could well be, and his monkey-tricks exasperated her.
She shut her book in wrath and misery, left the room, dressed, and went
out. The sky had cleared, and just after the sunset there lay a long
lake of tenderest bluish-green above the horizon in the west, bounded
on its upper coast by the dark grey cloud which the wind was slowly
bearing eastward. In the midst of that lake of bluish-green lay Venus,
glittering like molten silver. Miriam's first thought was her husband.
She always thought of him when she looked at planets or stars, because
he was so intimately connected with them in her mind. She waited till
it was late and she then turned homewards. A man overtook her whom she
recognised at once as Fitchew the jobbing gardener, porter, rough
carpenter, creature of all work in Cowfold, one of the honestest souls
in the place. He had his never-failing black pipe in his mouth, which
he removed for a moment in order to bid her good-night. She kept up
with him, for it was dusk, and she was glad to walk by his side.
Fitchews had lived in Cowfold for centuries. An old parson always
maintained that the name was originally Fitz-Hugh, but this particular
representative of the family was certainly not a Fitz-Hugh but a
Fitchew, save that he was as independent as a baron, and,
notwithstanding his poverty, cared little or nothing what people
thought about him. He could neither read nor write, and was full of
the most obstinate and absurd prejudices. He was incredulous of
everything which was said to him by people with any education, but what
he had heard from those who were as uneducated as himself, or the
beliefs, if such they can be called, which grew in his skull
mysteriously, by spontaneous generation, he held most tenaciously. His
literature was Cowfold, the people, the animals, the inanimate objects
of which it was made up, and his criticism on these was often just. He
never could be persuaded to enter either church or chapel. Of the
arguments for Christianity, of the undesigned coincidences in the
Bible, of the evidence from prophecy, of the metaphysical necessity for
an incarnation and atonement, he knew nothing, and it was a marvel to
all respectable young persons how Fitchew, whose ignorance would
disgrace a charity child, and who did not know that the world was
round, or the date of the battle of Hastings, should set himself up
against those who were so superior to him.
"What should we say," observed the superintendent of the Dissenting
Sunday-school one day to one of his classes, having Fitchew in his
mind, "of a man who, if he was on a voyage in a ship commanded by a
captain with a knowledge of navigation, should refuse in a storm to
obey orders, affirming that they were all of no use, and should betake
himself to his own little raft?"
Curiously enough, the Sunday before, the vicar, having the Dissenter in
his mind, had said just the same of "unlettered schismatics," as he
called them.
Fitchew always had one argument for those friends who strove to convert
him. "I don't see as them that goes to church are any better than them
as don't. What's he know about it?" meaning the parson or the
minister, as the case might be.
Fitchew was very rough and coarse, and rather grasping in his dealings
with those who employed him, not so much because he was naturally mean,
but because he was always determined that well-dressed folk should not
"put on him." Nevertheless, he was in his way sympathetic and even
tender, particularly to those persons who suffered as he did, for he
was afflicted with a kind of nervous dyspepsia, not infrequent even
amongst the poor, and it kept him awake at night and gave him the
"horrors."
"Well, Fitchew, are you any better?" said Miriam.
"Bad just now. Ain't had no regular sleep for a fortnight. Last night
it was awful. I kicked about and sat up; the noise in my ears was
something, I can tell you; and then the wind in me! It's my belief
that that there noise in my ears is the wind a coming out through them.
I couldn't stand it any longer, and I got up and walked up and down the
road. Would you believe it, the missus never stirred; there she lay
like a stone, and when I came in she says to me, 'Wot's the matter with
you?' That's just like her. She goes to bed, turns round, and never
knows nothing of anything till the morning. I could, have druv my head
agin the door-post."
"Well, she cannot help sleeping."
"No," after a long pause, "that's true enough. I tell you what it
is--_I_ don't want to live for ever."
"Cannot you do anything to help yourself? Have you seen the doctor?"
"Doctor!" in great scorn. "He's no more use than that there dog behind
me, nor yet half so much. I am better when I am at work, that's all as
I can tell."
"Have you had plenty to do lately?"
"No, not much. Folk are allers after me in the summer-time, but in the
winter, when their gardens don't want doing, they never have nothing to
say to me. There's one thing about my missus, though. She's precious
careful. I never touches the money part of the business. So we get's
along."
Miriam knew the "missus" well. She was a little thin-lipped woman,
who, notwithstanding her poverty, was most particularly clean. No
speck of dirt was to be seen on her person or in her cottage, but she
was as hard as flint. She never showed the least affection for her
husband. They had married late in life--why, nobody could tell--and
had one child, a girl, whom the mother seemed to disregard just as she
did her husband, saving that she dressed her and washed her with the
same care which she bestowed on her kettle and candlesticks.
"It's a good thing for you, Fitchew, that she is what she is."
Fitchew hesitated for some time.
"Yes, well, I said to myself, after I'd had a cup of tea and something
to eat this morning--I didn't say it afore then, though--that it might
be wuss. If she was allus a slaverin' on me and a pityin' me, it
wouldn't do me no good; and then we are as we are, and we must make the
best of it."
When Miriam parted from Fitchew she had still ten minutes' walk.
Before the ten minutes had expired the black veil of rain-cloud was
rolled still farther to the east, and the crescent of the young moon
gleamed in the dying twilight.
It poured with rain nevertheless during the night Miriam lay and
listened, thinking it would be wet and miserable on the following day.
She dropped off to sleep, and at four she rose and went to the window
and opened it wide. In streamed the fresh south-west morning air,
pure, delicious, scented with all that was sweet from fields and woods,
and the bearer inland even as far as Cowfold of Atlantic vitality,
dissipating fogs, disinfecting poisons--the Life-Giver.
She put on her clothes silently, went downstairs and opened the
back-door. The ever-watchful dog, hearing in his deepest slumbers the
slightest noise, moved in his kennel, but recognised her at once and
was still. She called to him to follow her, and he joyfully obeyed.
He would have broken out into tumultuous barking if she had not
silenced him instantly, and he was forced to content himself with
leaping up at her and leaving marks of his paws all over her cloak.
Not a soul was to be seen, and she went on undisturbed till she came to
her favourite spot where she had first met Mr. Armstrong. She paced
about for a little while, and then sat down and once more watched the
dawn. It was not a clear sky, but barred towards the east with cloud,
the rain-cloud of the night. She watched and watched, and thought
after her fashion, mostly with incoherence, but with rapidity and
intensity. At last came the first flash of scarlet upon the bars, and
the dead storm contributed its own share to the growing beauty. The
rooks were now astir, and flew, one after the other, in an irregular
line eastwards black against the sky. Still the colour spread, until
at last it began to rise into pure light, and in a moment more the
first glowing point of the disc was above the horizon. Miriam fell on
her knees against the little seat and sobbed, and the dog, wondering,
came and sat by her and licked her face with tender pity. Presently
she recovered, rose, went home, let herself in softly before her
husband was downstairs, and prepared the breakfast. He soon appeared,
was in the best of spirits, and laughed at her being able to leave the
room without waking him. She looked happy, but was rather quiet at
their meal; and after he had caressed the cat for a little while, he
pitched her, as he had done before, on Miriam's lap. She was about to
get up to cut some bread and butter, and she went behind him and kissed
the top of his head. He turned round, his eyes sparkling, and tried to
lay hold of her, but she stepped backward and eluded him. He mused a
little, and when she sat down he said in a tone which for him was
strangely serious--
"Thank you, my dear; that was very, very sweet."
MICHAEL TREVANION.
Michael Trevanion was a well-to-do stonemason in the town of Perran in
Cornwall. He was both working-man and master, and he sat at one end of
the heavy stone-saw, with David Trevenna, his servant, at the other, each
under his little canopy to protect them a trifle from the sun and rain,
slowly and in full view of the purple Cornish sea, sawing the stone for
hours together: the water dripped slowly on the saw from a little can
above to keep the steel cool, and occasionally they interchanged a word
or two--always on terms of perfect equality, although David took wages
weekly and Michael paid them. Michael was now a man of about five and
forty. He had married young and had two children, of whom the eldest was
a youth just one and twenty. Michael was called by his enemies
Antinomian. He was fervently religious, upright, temperate, but given
somewhat to moodiness and passion. He was singularly shy of talking
about his own troubles, of which he had more than his share at home, but
often strange clouds cast shadows upon him, and the reasons he gave for
the change observable in him were curiously incompetent to explain such
results. David, who had watched him from the other end of the saw for
twenty years, knew perfectly what these attacks of melancholy or wrath
meant, and that, though their assigned cause lay in the block before them
or the weather, the real cause was indoors. His trouble was made worse,
because he could not understand why he received no relief, although he
had so often laid himself open before the Lord, and wrestled for help in
prayer. In his younger days he had been subject to great temptation.
One night he had nearly fallen, but an Invisible Power seized him. "It
was no more I," he said, "than if somebody had come and laid hold of me
by the scruff of my neck," and he was forced away in terror upstairs to
his bedroom, where he went on his knees in agony, and the Devil left him,
and he became calm and pure. But no such efficient help was given him in
the trial of his life. He knew in his better moments, that the refusal
of grace was the Lord's own doing, and he supposed that it was due to His
love and desire to try him; but upon this assurance he could not
continually rest. It slipped away from under him, and at times he felt
himself to be no stronger than the merest man of the world.
His case was very simple and very common--the simplest, commonest case in
life. He married, as we have said, when he was young, before he knew
what he was doing, and after he had been married twelvemonths, he found
he did not care for his wife. When they became engaged, he was in the
pride of youth, but curbed by his religion. He mistook passion for love;
reason was dumb, and had nothing to do with his choice; he made the one,
irretrievable false step and was ruined. No strong antipathy developed
itself; there were no quarrels, but there was a complete absence of
anything like confidence. Michael had never for years really consulted
his wife in any difficulty, because he knew he could not get any advice
worth a moment's consideration; and he often contrasted his lot with that
of David, who had a helpmate like that of the left arm to the right, who
knew everything about his affairs, advised him in every perplexity, and
cheered him when cast down--a woman on whom he really depended. As David
knew well enough, although he never put it in the form of a proposition,
there is no joy sweeter than that begotten by the dependence of the man
upon the woman for something she can supply but he cannot--not affection
only, but assistance.
Michael, as we have said, had two children, a girl and a boy, the boy
being the eldest. Against neither could he ever utter a word of
complaint. They were honest and faithful. But the girl, Eliza, although
unlike her mother, was still less like her father, and had a plain mind,
that is to say, a mind endowed with good average common sense, but
unrelieved by any touch of genius or poetry. Her intellect was solid but
ordinary--a kind of homely brown intellect, untouched by sunset or
sunrise tint. A strain of the mother was in her, modified by the
influence of the father, and the result was a product like neither father
nor mother, so cunning are the ways of spiritual chemistry. The boy,
Robert Trevanion, on the contrary, was his father; not only with no
apparent mixture of the mother, but his father intensified. The outside
fact was of far less consequence to him than the self-created medium
through which it was seen, and his happiness depended much more
intimately on himself as he chanced to be at the time than on the world
around him. He was apprenticed to his father, and the two were bound
together by the tie of companionship and friendship, intertwined with
filial and paternal love. What Eliza said, although it was right and
proper, never interested the father; but when Robert spoke, Michael
invariably looked at him, and often reflected upon his words for hours.
There was in the town of Perran a girl named Susan Shipton. Michael knew
very little of the family, save that her father was a draper and went to
church. Susan was reputed to be one of the beauties of Perran, although
opinion was divided. She had--what were not common in Cornwall--light
flaxen hair, blue eyes, and a rosy face, somewhat inclined to be plump.
The Shiptons lay completely outside Michael's circle. They were mere
formalists in religion, fond of pleasure, and Susan especially was much
given to gaiety, went to picnics and dances, rowed herself about in the
bay with her friends, and sauntered about the town with her father and
mother on Sunday afternoon. She was also fond of bathing, and was a good
swimmer. Michael hardly knew how to put his objection into words, but he
nevertheless had a horror of women who could swim. It seemed to him an
ungodly accomplishment. He did not believe for a moment that St. Paul
would have sanctioned it, and he sternly forbade Eliza the use of one of
the bathing-machines which had lately been introduced into Perran for the
benefit of the few visitors who had discovered its charms.
It was a summer's morning in June, and Robert had gone along the shore on
business to a house which was being built a little way out of the town.
The tide was running out fast to the eastward. A small river came down
into the bay, and the current was sweeping round the rocks to the left in
a great curve at a distance of about two hundred yards from the beach.
Inside the curve was smooth water, which lay calmly rippling in the sun,
while at its edge the buoys marking the channel were swaying to and fro,
and the stream lifted itself against them, swung past them, with bright
multitudinous eddies, and went out to sea. Half-way in the shallows was
one of the bathing-machines, and Robert saw that a girl whom he could not
recognise was having a bathe. She swam well, and presently she started
off straight outwards. Robert watched her for a moment, and saw her go
closer and closer to the dangerous line. He knew she could not see it so
well as he could, and he knew too that the buoys which were placed to
guide small craft into the harbour were well in the channel, and that at
least twenty yards this side of them the ebb would be felt, and with such
force that no woman could make headway against it. Suddenly he saw that
her course was deflected to the left, and he knew that unless some help
could arrive she would be lost. In an instant his coat, waistcoat, and
boots were off, and he was rushing over the sandy shallows, which
fortunately stretched out a hundred yards before he was out of his depth.
Susan--for it was Miss Shipton--had now perceived her peril and had
turned round, but she was overpowered, and he heard a shriek for help.
Raising himself out of the water as far as he could, he called out and
signalled to her not to go dead against the tide, or even to try and
return, but to go on and edge her way to its margin, and so make for the
point. This she tried to do, but her strength began to fail--the drift
was too much for her. Meanwhile Robert went after her. He was one of
the best swimmers in Perran, but when he felt the cooler, deeper water,
he was suddenly seized with a kind of fainting and a mist passed over his
eyes. He looked at the land, and he was in a moment convinced he should
never set foot on it again. He was on the point of sinking, when he
bethought himself that if he was to die, he might just as well die after
having put forth all his strength; and in an instant, as if touched by
some divine spell, the agitation ceased, and he was himself again. In
three minutes more he was by Susan's side, had gripped her by the
bathing-dress at the back of the neck, and had managed to avail himself
of a little swirl which turned inwards just before the rocks were
reached. They were safe. She nearly swooned, but recovered herself
after a fit of sobbing.
"I owe you my life, Mr. Trevanion; you've saved me--you've saved me."