With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone,
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done!
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.
--MATTHEW ARNOLD.
It was Sunday morning. The night was sinking out of the sky to lean
faint unto death upon the bosom of the earth. The great forms of the
trees, felt rather than seen, were darkness made visible. Among the
night of high elms round Warpington a single yellow light burned in an
upper window. It had been burning all night. And now, as the night
waned, the little light waned with it. At least, it was suddenly blown
out.
Hester came to the window and looked out. There was light, but there was
no dawn as yet. In the gray sky over the gray land the morning-star,
alone and splendid, kept watch in the east.
She sat down and leaned her brow against the pane. She did not know that
it was aching. She did not know that she was cold, exhausted; so
exhausted that the morning-star in the outer heaven and the morning-star
in her soul were to her the same. They stooped together, they merged
into one great light, heralding a perfect day presently to be.
The night was over, and that other long night of travail and patience
and faith, and strong rowing in darkness against the stream, was over,
too, at last--at last. _The book was finished_.
The tears fell slowly from Hester's eyes on to her clasped hands, those
blessed tears which no human hand shall ever intervene to wipe away.
To some of us Christ comes in the dawn of the spiritual life walking
upon the troubled waves of art. And we recognize Him, and would fain go
to meet Him. But our companions and our own fears dissuade us. They say
it is only a spirit, and that Christ does not walk on water, that the
land whither we are rowing is the place He has Himself appointed for us
to meet Him. So our little faith keeps us in the boat, or fails us in
the waves of that windswept sea.
It seemed to Hester as if once, long ago, shrinking and shivering, she
had stood in despair upon the shore of a great sea, and had heard a
voice from the other side say, "Come over." She had stopped her ears;
she had tried not to go. She had shrunk back a hundred times from the
cold touch of the water that each time she essayed let her trembling
foot through it. And now, after an interminable interval, after she had
trusted and doubted, had fallen and been sustained, had met the wind and
the rain, after she had sunk in despair and risen again, she knew not
how, now at length a great wave--the last--had cast her up half drowned
upon the shore. A miracle had happened. She had reached the other side,
and was lying in a great peace after the storm upon the solemn shore
under a great white star.
Hester sat motionless. The star paled and paled before the coming of a
greater than he. Across the pause which God has set 'twixt night and day
came the first word of the robin. It reached Hester's ear as from
another world--a world that had been left behind. The fragmentary notes
floated up to her from an immeasurable distance, like scattered bubbles
through deep water.
The day was coming. God's creatures of tree and field and hill took
form. Man's creature, the little stout church in their midst, thrust
once more its plebeian outline against God's sky. Dim shapes moved
athwart the vacancy of the meadows. Voices called through the gray.
Close against the eaves a secret was twittered, was passed from beak to
beak. In the nursery below a little twitter of waking children broke the
stillness of the house.
But Hester did not hear it. She had fallen into a deep sleep in the low
window-seat, with her pale forehead against the pane; a sleep so deep
that even the alarum of the baby did not rouse her, nor the entrance of
Emma with the hot water.
* * * * *
"James," said Mrs. Gresley, an hour later; as she and her husband
returned through the white mist from early celebration, "Hester was not
there. I thought she had promised to come."
"She had."
There was a moment's silence.
"Perhaps she is not well," said Mr. Gresley, closing the church-yard
gate into the garden.
Mrs. Gresley's heart swelled with a sense of injustice. She had often
been unwell, often in feeble health before the birth of her children,
but had she ever pleaded ill-health as an excuse for absenting herself
from one of the many services which her husband held to be the
main-spring of the religious life?
"I do not think she can be very unwell. She is standing by the magnolia
now," she said, her lip quivering, and withdrawing her hand from her
husband's arm. She almost hated the slight, graceful figure, which was
not of her world, which was, as she thought, coming between her and her
husband.
"I will speak seriously to her," said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who
recollected that he had "spoken seriously" to Hester many times at his
wife's instigation without visible result. And as he went alone to meet
his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to
say to her.
A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist,
parting it on either hand, and fell on Hester.
Hester, standing in a white gown under the veiled trees in a glade of
silver and trembling opal, which surely mortal foot had never trod,
seemed infinitely removed from him. Dimly he felt that she was at one
with this mysterious morning world, and that he, the owner, was an alien
and a trespasser in his own garden.
But a glimpse of his cucumber-frames in the background reassured him. He
advanced with a firmer step, as one among allies.
Hester did not hear him.
She was gazing with an absorption that shut out all other sights and
sounds at the solitary blossom on the magnolia-tree. Yesterday it had
been a bud; but to-day the great almond-white petals which guarded it,
overlapping each other so jealously, had opened wide, and the perfect
flower, keeping nothing back, had laid bare all its pure white soul
before its God.
As Mr. Gresley stopped beside her, Hester turned her little pinched,
ravaged face towards him and smiled. Something of the passionate
self-surrender of the flower was reflected in her eyes.
"Dear Hester," he said, seeing only the wan, drawn face. "Are you ill?"
"Yes--no. I don't think so," said Hester, tremulously, recalled suddenly
to herself. She looked hastily about her. The world of dew and silver
had deserted her, had broken like an iridescent bubble at a touch. The
magnolia withdrew itself. Hester found herself suddenly transplanted
into the prose of life, emphasized by a long clerical coat and a bed of
Brussels sprouts.
"I missed you," said Mr. Gresley, with emphasis.
"Where? When?" Hester's eyes had lost their fixed look and stared
vacantly at him.
Mr. Gresley tried to subdue his rising annoyance.
Hester was acting, pretending not to understand, and he saw through it.
"At God's altar," he said, gravely, the priest getting the upper hand of
the man.
"Have you not found me there?" said Hester, below her breath, but so low
that fortunately her brother did not catch the words, and was spared
their profanity.
"I will appeal to her better feelings," he said to himself. "They must
be there, if I can only touch them."
He did not know that in order to touch the better feelings of our
fellow-creatures we must be able to reach up to them, or by reason of
our low stature we may succeed only in appealing to the lowest in them,
in spite of our tiptoe good intentions. Is that why such appeals too
often meet with bitter sarcasm and indignation?
But fortunately a robust belief in the assiduities of the devil as the
cause of all failures, and a conviction that who-so opposed Mr. Gresley
opposed the Deity, supported and blindfolded the young Vicar in
emergencies of this kind.
He spoke earnestly and at length to his sister. He waved aside her timid
excuse that she had overslept herself after a sleepless night, and had
finished dressing but the moment before he found her in the garden. He
entreated her to put aside such insincerity as unworthy of her. He
reminded her of the long months she had spent at Warpington with its
peculiar spiritual opportunities; that he should be to blame if he did
not press upon her the first importance of the religious life, the
ever-present love of God, and the means of approaching Him through the
sacraments. He entreated her to join her prayers with his that she might
be saved from the worship of her own talent, which had shut out the
worship of God, from this dreadful indifference to holy things, and the
impatience of all religious teaching which he grieved to see in her.
He spoke well, the earnest, blind, would-be leader endeavoring to guide
her to the ditch from which he knew not how she had emerged,
passionately distressed at the opposition he met with as he would have
drawn her lovingly towards it.
The tears were in Hester's eyes, but the eyes themselves were as flint
seen through water. She stifled many fierce and cruel impulses to speak
as plainly as he did, to tell him that it was not religion that was
abhorent to her, but the form in which he presented it to her, and that
the sin against the Holy Ghost was disbelief, like his, in the religion
of others. But when have such words availed anything? When have they
been believed? Hester had a sharp tongue, and she was slowly learning to
beware of it as her worst enemy. She laid down many weapons before she
trusted herself to speak.
"It is good of you to care what becomes of me," she said, gently, but
her voice was cold. "I am sorry you regard me as you do. But from your
point of view you were right to speak--as--as you have done. I value the
affection that prompted it."
"She can't meet me fairly," said Mr. Gresley to himself, with sudden
anger at the meanness of such tactics. "They say she is so clever, and
she can't refute a word I say. She appears to yield and then defies me.
She always puts me off like that."
The sun had vanquished the mist, and in the brilliant light the two
figures moved silently, side by side, back to the house, one with
something very like rage in his heart, the rage that in bygone days
found expression in stake and fagot.
Perhaps the heaviest trouble which Hester was ever called upon to bear
had its mysterious beginnings on that morning of opal and gossamer when
the magnolia opened.