MATTIE IN THE COUNTRY.
I now return to resume the regular thread of my story.
I do not know if my reader is half as much interested in Mattie as
I am. I doubt it very much. He will, most probably, like Poppie
better. But big-headed, strange, and conceited as Mattie was, she
was altogether a higher being than Poppie. She thought; Poppie only
received impressions. If she had more serious faults than Poppie, they
were faults that belonged to a more advanced stage of growth; diseased,
my reader may say, but diseased with a disease that fell in with,
almost belonged to, the untimely development. All Poppie's thoughts, to
speak roughly, came from without; all Mattie's from within. To complete
Mattie, she had to go back a little, and learn to receive impressions
too; to complete Poppie; she had to work upon the impressions she
received, and, so to speak, generate thoughts of her own. Mattie led
the life of a human being; Poppie of a human animal. Mattie lived;
Poppie was there. Poppie was the type of most people; Mattie of the
elect.
Lucy did not intend, in the sad circumstances in which she now was, to
say a word to her grandmother about Mrs. Morgenstern's proposal. But
it was brought about very naturally. As she entered the court she met
Mattie. The child had been once more to visit Mr. Spelt, but had found
the little nest so oppressive that she had begged to be put down again,
that she might go to her own room. Mr. Spelt was leaning over his door
and his crossed legs, for he could not stand up, looking anxiously
after her; and the child's face was so pale and sad, and she held her
little hand so pitifully to her big head, that Lucy could not help
feeling that the first necessity among her duties was to get Mattie
away.
After the fresh burst of her grandmother's grief at sight of her was
over, after Mr. Stopper had gone back to the counting-house, and she
had fallen into a silent rocking to and fro, Lucy ventured to speak.
"They're gone home, dear grannie," she said.
"And I shan't stay long behind them, my dear," grannie moaned.
"That's some comfort, isn't it, grannie?" said Lucy, for her own heart
was heavy, not for the dead, but for the living; heavy for her own
troubles, heavy for Thomas, about whom she felt very despondent, almost
despairing.
"Ah! you young people would be glad enough to have the old ones out
of the way," returned Mrs. Boxall, in the petulance of grief. "Have
patience, Lucy, have patience, child; it won't be long, and then you
can do as you like."
"Oh, grannie, grannie!" cried Lucy, bursting into tears. "I do
everything I like now. I only wanted to comfort you," she sobbed. "I
thought you would like to go too. _I_ wish I was dead."
"_You_, child!" exclaimed Mrs. Boxall; "why should you wish you was
dead? You don't know enough of life to wish for death." Then, as Lucy
went on sobbing, her tone changed--for she began to be concerned at her
distress. "What _is_ the matter with my darling?" she said. "Are you
ill, Lucy?"
Then Lucy went to her and kissed her, and knelt down, and laid her head
in the old woman's lap. And her grannie stroked her hair, and spoke
to her as if she had been one of her own babies, and, in seeking to
comfort her, forgot her own troubles for the moment.
"You've been doing too much for other people, Lucy," she said. "We must
think of you now. You must go to the sea-side for awhile. You shan't go
about giving lessons any more, my lamb. There is no need for that any
more, for they say all the money will be ours now."
And the old woman wept again at the thought of the source of their
coming prosperity.
"I should like to go to the country very much, if you would go too,
grannie."
"No, no, child, I don't want to go. I don't want any doing good to."
"But I don't like to leave you, grannie," objected Lucy.
"Never mind me, my dear. I shall be better alone for awhile. And I dare
say there will be some business to attend to."
And so they went on talking, till Lucy told her all about Mrs.
Morgenstern's plan, and how ill poor Mattie looked, and that she would
be glad to go away for a little while herself. Mrs. Boxall would
not consent to go, but she even urged Lucy to accept the proposed
arrangement, and proceeded at once to inquire into her wardrobe, and
talk about mourning.
Two days after, Lucy and Mattie met Mrs. Morgenstern and Miriam at
the London Bridge railway station. Mattie looked quite dazed, almost
stupid, with the noise and bustle; but when they were once in motion,
she heaved a deep sigh, and looked comforted. She said nothing,
however, for some time, and her countenance revealed no surprise.
Whatever was out of the usual way always oppressed Mattie--not excited
her; and, therefore, the more surprising anything was, the less did
it occasion any outward shape of surprise. But as they flashed into
the first tunnel, Lucy saw her start and shudder ere they vanished
from each other in the darkness. She put out her hand and took hold of
the child's. It was cold and trembling; but as she held it gently and
warmly in her own, it grew quite still. By the time the light began to
grow again, her face was peaceful, and when they emerged in the cutting
beyond, she was calm enough to speak the thought that had come to her
in the dark. With another sigh--
"I knew the country wasn't nice," she said.
"But you don't know what the country is yet," answered Lucy.
"I know quite enough of it," returned Mattie. "I like London best. I
wish I could see some shops."
Lucy did not proceed to argue the matter with her. She did not tell
her how unfair she was to judge the country by what lay between her
and it. As well might she have argued with Thomas that the bitterness
of the repentance from which he shrank was not the religion to which
she wanted to lead him; that religion itself was to him inconceivable;
and could but be known when he was in it. She had tried this plan with
him in their last interview before she left. She had herself, under the
earnest teaching of Mr. Fuller, and in the illumination of that Spirit
for which she prayed, learned many a spiritual lesson, had sought
eagerly, and therefore gained rapidly. For hers was one of the good
soils, well prepared beforehand for the seed of the redeeming truth of
God's love, and the Sonship of Christ, and his present power in the
human soul. And she had tried, I say, to make Thomas believe in the
blessedness of the man whoso iniquities are pardoned, whose sins are
covered, to whom the Lord imputeth not his transgressions; but Thomas
had replied only with some of the stock phrases of assent. A nature
such as his could not think of law and obedience save as restraint.
While he would be glad enough to have the weight of conscious
wrong-doing lifted off him, he could not see that in yielding his own
way and taking God's lay the only _freedom_ of which the human being,
made in the image of God, is capable.
Presently Mattie found another argument upon her side, that is, the
town-side of the question. She had been sitting for half an hour
watching the breath of the snorting engine, as it rushed out for a
stormy flight over the meek fields, faltered, lingered, faded, melted,
was gone.
"I told you so," said Mattie: "nothing lasts in the country."
"What are you looking at now?" asked Lucy, bending forward to see.
"Those white clouds," answered Mattie. "I've been expecting them to do
something for ever so long. And they never do anything, though they
begin in such a hurry. The green gets the better of them somehow. They
melt away into it, and are all gone."
"But they do the grass some good, I dare say," returned Lucy--"in hot
weather like this especially."
"Well, that's not what they set out for, anyhow," said Mattie. "They
look always as if they were just going to take grand shapes, and make
themselves up into an army, and go out and conquer the world."
"And then," suggested Lucy, yielding to the fancy of the child, "they
think better of it, and give themselves up, and die into the world to
do it good, instead of trampling it under their feet and hurting it."
"But how do they come to change their minds so soon?" asked Mattie,
beginning to smile; for this was the sort of intellectual duel in which
her little soul delighted.
"Oh, I don't think they do change their minds. I don't think they
ever meant to trample down the world. That was your notion, you know,
Mattie."
"Well, what do you think they set out for? Why do they rush out so
fiercely all at once?"
"I will tell you what I think," answered Lucy, without perceiving more
than the faintest glimmering of the human reality of what she said, "I
think they rush out of the hot place in which they are got ready to do
the fields good, in so much pain, that they toss themselves about in
strange ways, and people think they are fierce and angry when they are
only suffering--shot out into the air from a boiling kettle, you know,
Mattie."
"Ah! yes; I see," answered Mattie. "That's it, is it? Yes, I dare say.
Out of a kettle?"
Miriam had drawn near, and was listening, but she could make little of
all this, for her hour was not yet come to ask, or to understand such
questions.
"Yes, that great round thing in front of us is just a great kettle,"
said Lucy.
"Well, I will look at it when we get out. I thought there wasn't much
in the country. I suppose we shall get out again, though. This isn't
all the country, is it?"
Before they reached Hastings, Mattie was fast asleep. It was the
evening. She scarcely woke when they stopped for the last time. Lucy
carried her from the carriage to a cab, and when they arrived at the
lodgings where they were expected, made all haste to get her to bed and
asleep.
But she woke the earlier in the morning, and the first thing she was
aware of was the crowing of a very clear-throated cock, such a cock as
Henry Vaughan must have listened to in the morning of the day when he
wrote
"Father of lights! what sunnie seed,
What glance of day hast thou confined
Into this bird? To all the breed
This busie Ray thou hast assigned;
Their magnetisme works all night,
And dreams of Paradise and light."
She could not collect her thoughts for some time. She was aware that
a change had taken place, but what was it? Was she somebody else?
What did they use to call her? Then she remembered Mr. Spelt's shop,
and knew that she was Mattie Kitely. What then had happened to her?
Something certainly had happened, else how could the cock crow like
that? She was now aware that her eyes were open, but she did not know
that Lucy was in another bed in the same room watching her--whence
afterward, when she put Mattie's words and actions together, she
was able to give this interpretation of her thoughts. The room was
so different from anything she had been used to, that she could not
understand it. She crept out of bed and went to the window. There was
no blind to it, only curtains drawn close in front.
Now my reader must remember that when Mattie went to the window of
her own room at home she saw into Guild Court. The house in which
they now were was half way up one of the hills on the sides of which
great part of Hastings is built. The sun was not shining upon the
window at this hour of the morning, and therefore did not obstruct
the view. Hence when Mattie went between the curtains she saw nothing
but that loveliest of English seas--the Hastings sea--lying away out
into the sky, or rather, as it appeared to her unaccustomed gaze,
piled up like a hill against the sky, which domed it over, vast and
blue, and triumphant in sunlight--just a few white sails below and a
few white clouds above, to show how blue the sea and sky were in this
glory of an autumn morning. She saw nothing of the earth on which she
was upheld; only the sea and the sky. She started back with a feeling
that she could never describe; there was terror, and loneliness, and
helplessness in it. She turned and flew to her bed, but instead of
getting into it, fell down on her knees by the side of it, clutched
the bed-clothes, and sobbed and wept aloud. Lucy was by her side in
a moment, took her in her arms, carried her into her own bed, and
comforted her in her bosom.
Mattie had been all her life sitting in the camera-obscura of her own
microcosm, watching the shadows that went and came, and now first she
looked up and out upon the world beyond and above her. All her doings
had gone on in the world of her own imaginings; and although that
big brain of hers contained--no, I cannot say _contained_, but what
else am I to say?--a being greater than all that is seen, heard, or
handled, yet the outward show of divine imagination which now met her
eyes might well overpower that world within her. I fancy that, like
the blind to whom sight is given, she did not at first recognize the
difference between herself and it, but felt as if it was all inside
her and she did not know what to do with it. She would not have cried
at the sight of a rose, as Poppie did. I doubt whether Mattie's was
altogether such a refined nature as Poppie's--to begin with: she would
have rather patronized the rose-tree, and looked down upon it as a
presuming and rather unpleasant thing because it bore dying children;
and she needed, some time or other, and that was now, just such a sight
as this to take the conceit out of her. Less of a vision of the eternal
would not have been sufficient. Was it worth while? Yes. The whole
show of the universe was well spent to take an atom of the self out of
a child. God is at much trouble with us, but he never weighs material
expense against spiritual gain to one of his creatures. The whole
universe existed for Mattie. There is more than that that the Father
has not spared. And no human fault, the smallest, is overcome, save
by the bringing in of true, grand things. A sense of the infinite and
the near, the far yet impending, rebuked the conceit of Mattie to the
very core, and without her knowing why or how. She clung to Lucy as a
child would cling, and as, all through her illness, she had never clung
before.
"What is the matter with you, Mattie, dear?" asked Lucy, but asked in
vain. Mattie only clung to her the closer, and began a fresh utterance
of sobs. Lucy therefore held her peace for some time and waited. And in
the silence of that waiting she became aware that a lark was singing
somewhere out in the great blue vault.
"Listen to the lark singing so sweetly," she said at length. And Mattie
moved her head enough to show that she would listen, and lay still a
long while listening. At length she said, with a sob:
"What is a lark? I never saw one, Miss Burton."
"A bird like a sparrow. You know what a sparrow is, don't you, dear?"
"Yes. I have seen sparrows often in the court. They pick up dirt."
"Well, a lark is like a sparrow; only it doesn't pick up dirt, and
sings as you hear it. And it flies so far up into the sky that you
can't see it--you can only hear the song it scatters down upon the
earth."
"Oh, how dreadful!" said Mattie, burying her head again as if she would
shut out hearing and sight and all.
"What is it that is dreadful? I don't understand you, Mattie."
"To fly up into that awful place up there. Shall we have to do that
when we die?"
"It is not an awful place, dear. God is there, you know."
"But I am frightened. And if God is up there, I shall be frightened
at him too. It is so dreadful! I used to think that God could see me
when I was in London. But how he is to see me in this great place, with
so many things about, cocks and larks, and all, I can't think. I'm so
little! I'm hardly worth taking care of."
"But you remember, Mattie, what Somebody says--that God takes care of
every sparrow."
"Yes, but that's the sparrows, and they're in the town, you know," said
Mattie, with an access of her old fantastic perversity, flying for
succor, as it always does, to false logic.
Lucy saw that it was time to stop. The child's fear was gone for the
present, or she could not have talked such nonsense. It was just as
good, however, as the logic of most of those who worship the letter and
call it the word.
"Why don't you speak, Miss Burton?" asked Mattie at length, no doubt
conscience-stricken by her silence.
"Because you are talking nonsense now, Mattie."
"I thought that was it. But why should that make you not speak? for I
need the more to hear sense."
"No, Mattie. Mr. Fuller says that when people begin to talk falsely, it
is better to be quite silent, and let them say what they please, till
the sound of their own nonsense makes them ashamed."
"As it did me, Miss Burton, as soon as you wouldn't speak any more."
"He says it does no good to contradict them then, for they are not only
unworthy to hear the truth--that's not it--if they would hear it--but
they are not fit to hear it. They are not in a mood to get any good
from it; for they are holding the door open for the devil to come in,
and truth can't get in at the same door with the devil."
"Oh, how dreadful! To think of me talking like Syne!" said Mattie. "I
won't do it again, Miss Burton. Do tell me what Somebody said about
God and the sparrows. Didn't he say something about counting their
feathers? I think I remember Mr. Spelt reading that to me one night."
"He said something about counting your hairs, Mattie."
"_Mine?_"
"Well, he said it to all the people that would listen to him. I dare
say there were some that could not believe it because they did not care
to be told it."
"That's me, Miss Burton. But I won't do it again. Well--what more?"
"Only this, Mattie: that if God knows how many hairs you have got on
your head--"
"My big head," interrupted Mattie. "Well?"
"Yes, on your big head--if God knows that, you can't think you're too
small for him to look after you."
"I will try not to be frightened at the big sky any more, dear Miss
Burton; I will try."
In a few minutes she was fast asleep again.
Lucy's heart was none the less trustful that she had tried to increase
Mattie's faith. He who cared for the sparrows would surely hear her cry
for Thomas, nay, would surely look after Thomas himself. The father
did not forget the prodigal son all the time that he was away; did
not think of him only when he came back again, worn and sorrowful. In
teaching Mattie she had taught herself. She had been awake long before
her, turning over and over her troubled thoughts till they were all in
a raveled sleeve of care. Now she too fell fast asleep in her hope, and
when she awoke, her thoughts were all knit up again in an even resolve
to go on and do her duty, casting her care upon Him that cared for her.
And now Mattie's childhood commenced. She had had none as yet. Her
disputatiousness began to vanish. She could not indulge it in the
presence of the great sky, which grew upon her till she felt, as many
children and some conscience-stricken men have felt--that it was the
great eye of God looking at her; and although this feeling was chiefly
associated with awe at first, she soon began to love the sky, and to be
sorry and oppressed upon cloudy days when she could no longer look up
into it.
The next day they went down to the beach, in a quiet place, among
great stones, under the east cliff. Lucy sat down on one of them, and
began to read a book Mr. Fuller had lent her. Miriam was at a little
distance, picking up shells, and Mattie on another stone nearer the
sea. The tide was rising. Suddenly Mattie came scrambling in great
haste over all that lay between her and Lucy. Her face was pale,
scared, and eager.
"I'm so frightened again!" she said; "and I can't help it. The sea!
What does it mean?"
"What do you mean, Mattie?" returned Lucy, smiling.
"Well, it's roaring at me, and coming nearer and nearer, as if it
wanted to swallow me up. I don't like it."
"You must not be afraid of it. God made it, you know."
"Why does he let it roar at me, then?"
"I don't know. Perhaps to teach you not to be afraid."
Mattie said no more, stood a little while by Lucy, and then scrambled
back to her former place.
The next day, they managed with some difficulty to get up on the East
Hill; Mattie was very easily worn out, especially with climbing. She
gazed at the sea below her, the sky over her head, the smooth grass
under her feet, and gave one of her great sighs. Then she looked
troubled.
"I feel as if I hadn't any clothes on," she said.
"How is that, Mattie?"
"Well, I don't know. I feel as if I couldn't stand steady--as if I
hadn't anything to keep me up. In London, you know, the houses were
always beside to hold a body up, and keep them steady. But here, if it
weren't for Somebody, I should be so frightened for falling down--I
don't know where!"
Lucy smiled. She did not see then how exactly the child symbolized
those who think they have faith in God, and yet when one of the
swaddling bands of system or dogma to which they have been accustomed
is removed, or even only slackened, immediately feel as if there were
no God, as if the earth under their feet were a cloud, and the sky over
them a color, and nothing to trust in anywhere. They rest in their
swaddling bands, not in God. The loosening of these is God's gift to
them that they may grow. But first they are much afraid.
Still Mattie looked contemptuously on the flowers. Wandering along
the cliff, they came to a patch that was full of daisies. Miriam's
familiarity with the gorgeous productions of green-house and hot-house
had not injured her capacity for enjoying these peasants of flowers.
She rushed among them with a cry of pleasure, and began gathering them
eagerly. Mattie stood by with a look of condescending contempt upon her
pale face.
"Wouldn't you like to gather some daisies too, Mattie?" suggested Lucy.
"Where's the use?" said Mattie. "The poor things'll be withered in no
time. It's almost a shame to gather them, I do think."
"Well, you needn't gather them if you don't want to have them,"
returned Lucy. "But I wonder you don't like them, they are so pretty."
"But they don't last. I don't like things that die. I had a little talk
with Mr. Fuller about that."
Now Mr. Fuller had told Lucy what the child had said, and this had
resulted in a good deal of talk. Mr. Fuller was a great lover of
Wordsworth, and the book Lucy was now reading, the one he had lent her,
was Wordsworth's Poems. She had not found what she now answered, either
in Wordsworth's poems or in Mr. Fuller's conversation, but it came from
them both, mingling with her love to God, and her knowledge of the
Saviour's words, with the question of the child to set her mind working
with them all at once. She thought for a moment, and then said:
"Listen, Mattie. You don't dislike to hear me talk, do you?"
"No, indeed," answered Mattie.
"You like the words I say to you, then?"
"Yes, indeed," said Mattie, wondering what would come next.
"But my words die as soon as they are out of my mouth."
Mattie began to see a glimmering of something coming, and held her
peace and listened. Lucy went on.
"Well, the flowers are some of God's words, and they last longer than
mine."
"But I understand your words. I know what you want to say to me. And I
don't know the meaning of _them_."
"That's because you haven't looked at them long enough. You must
suppose them words in God's book, and try to read them and understand
them."
"I will try," said Mattie, and walked soberly toward Miriam.
But she did not begin to gather the daisies as Miriam was doing. She
lay down in the grass just as Chaucer tells us he used to do in the
mornings of May for the same purpose--to look at the daisy--"leaning on
my elbow and my side"; and thus she continued for some time. Then she
rose and came slowly back to Lucy.
"I can't tell what they mean," she said. "I have been trying very hard,
too."
"I don't know whether I understand them or not, myself. But I fancy we
get some good from what God shows us even when we don't understand it
much."
"They are such little things!" said Mattie. "I can hardly fancy them
worth making."
"God thinks them worth making, though, or he would not make them. He
wouldn't do anything that he did not care about doing. There's the lark
again. Listen to him, how glad he is. He is so happy that he can't
bear it without singing. If he couldn't sing it would break his heart,
I fancy. Do you think God would have made his heart so glad if he did
not care for his gladness, or given him such a song to sing--for he
must have made the song and taught it to the lark--the song is just
the lark's heart coming out in sounds--would he have made all the lark
if he did not care for it? And he would not have made the daisies so
pretty if their prettiness was not worth something in his eyes. And if
God cares for them, surely it is worth our while to care for them too."
Mattie listened very earnestly, went back to the daisies, and lay down
again beside a group of them. Miriam kept running about from one spot
to another, gathering them. What Mattie said, or what Miriam replied,
I do not know, but in a little while Mattie came to Lucy with a red
face--a rare show in her.
"I don't like Miss Miriam," she said. "She's not nice at all."
"Why, what's the matter?" asked Lucy, in some surprise, for the
children had got on very well together as yet. "What has she been
doing?"
"She doesn't care a bit for Somebody. I don't like her."
"But Somebody likes her."
To this Mattie returned no answer, but stood thoughtful. The blood
withdrew from her face to its fountain, and she went back to the
daisies once more.
The following day she began to gather flowers as other children do,
even to search for them as for hidden treasures. And if she did not
learn their meaning with her understanding, she must have learned it
with her heart, for she would gaze at some of them in a way that showed
plainly enough that she felt their beauty; and in the beauty, the
individual loveliness of such things, lies the dim lesson with which
they faintly tincture our being. No man can be quite the same he was
after having _loved_ a new flower.
Thus, by degrees, Mattie's thought and feeling were drawn outward. Her
health improved. Body and mind reacted on each other. She grew younger
and humbler. Every day her eyes were opened to some fresh beauty on
the earth, some new shadowing of the sea, some passing loveliness in
the heavens. She had hitherto refused the world as a thing she had not
proved; now she began to find herself at home in it, that is, to find
that it was not a strange world to which she had come, but a home;
not, indeed, the innermost, sacredest room of the house where the
Father sat, but still a home, full of his presence, his thoughts, his
designs. Is it any wonder that a child should prosper better in such a
world than in a catacomb filled with the coffined remains of thinking
men? I mean her father's book-shop. Here, God was ever before her in
the living forms of his thought, a power and a blessing. Every wind
that blew was his breath, and the type of his inner breathing upon the
human soul. Every morning was filled with his light, and the type of
the growing of that light which lighteth every man that cometh into the
world. And there are no natural types that do not dimly work their own
spiritual reality upon the open heart of a human being.
Before she left Hastings, Mattie was almost a child.