It was late when Rachel reached home. She found her step-mother sitting
up for her, rigid, amazed y indignant--so indignant, indeed, that though
she rated Rachel soundly for her audacity in presuming to stay out so
long without previous leave obtained, she quite forgot to inquire
particularly why she had not come home earlier. A series of disasters had
been occasioned by Rachel's absence; Jane and Mary had quarrelled, Mrs.
Gray had been kept an hour waiting for her supper, the beer had naturally
become flat and worthless, and whilst Mrs. Gray was sleeping--and how
could she help sleeping, being quite faint and exhausted with her long
vigil--puss had got up on the table and walked off with Rachel's polony.
There was a touch of quiet humour in Rachel, and with a demure smile, she
internally wondered why it was precisely her polony that had been
selected by puss, but aloud she merely declared that she could make an
excellent supper on bread and beer. Mrs. Gray, who held the reins of
domestic management in their little household, assured her that she had
better, for that nothing else was she going to get; she sat down
heroically determined to eat the whole of her polony in order to punish
and provoke her step-daughter; but somehow or other the half of that
dainty had, before the end of the meal, found its way to the plate of
Rachel, who, when she protested against this act of generosity, was
imperiously ordered to hold her tongue, which order she did not dare to
resist; for if Mrs. Gray's heart was mellow, her temper was sufficiently
tart.
The apprentices had long been gone to bed; as soon as supper was over,
Mrs. Gray intimated to Rachel the propriety of following their example.
Rachel ventured to demur meekly.
"I cannot, mother--I have work to finish."
"Then better have sat at home and finished it, than have gone gadding
about, and nearly got a pitch plaster on your mouth," grumbled Mrs. Gray,
who was a firm believer in pitch plasters, and abductions, and highway
robberies, and all sorts of horrors. "Mind you don't set the house a
fire," she added, retiring.
"Why, mother," said Rachel, smiling, "you treat me like a child, and I am
twenty-six."
"What about that? when you aint got no more sense than a baby."
Rachel did not venture to dispute, a proposition so distinctly stated.
She remained up, and sat sewing until her work was finished; she then
took out from some secret repository a small end of candle, lit it, and
extinguished the long candle, by the light of which she had been working.
From her pocket she took a small key; it opened a work-box, whence she
drew a shirt collar finely stitched; she worked until her eyes ached, but
she heeded it not, until they closed with involuntary fatigue and sleep,
and still she would not obey the voice of wearied nature; still she
stitched for love, like the poor shirtmaker for bread, until, without
previous warning, her candle end suddenly flickered, then expired in its
socket, and left her in darkness. Rachel gently opened the window, and
partly unclosed the shutter; the moon was riding in the sky above the old
house opposite, her pale clear light glided over its brown walls and the
quiet street, down into the silent parlour of Rachel. She looked around
her, moved at seeing familiar objects under an unusual aspect. In that
old chair she had often seen her father sitting; on such a moonlight
night as this she and Jane, then already declining, had sat by the
window, and looking at that same sky, had talked with youthful fervour of
high and eternal things. And now Jane knew the divine secrets she had
guessed from afar, and Thomas Gray, alas! was a stranger and an alien in
his own home.
"Who knows," thought Rachel, "but he will return some day? Who knows--
who can tell? Life is long, and hope is eternal. Ah! if he should come
back, even though he never looked at me, never spoke, blessed, thrice
blessed, should ever be held the day..." And a prayer, not framed in
words, but in deep feelings, gushed like a pure spring from her inmost
heart. But, indeed, when did she not pray? When was God divided from her
thoughts? When did prayer fail to prompt the kind, gentle words that fell
from her lips, or to lend its daily grace to a pure and blameless life?
For to her, God was not what He, alas! is to so many--an unapproachable
Deity, to be worshipped from afar, in fear and trembling, or a cold
though sublime abstraction. No, Jesus was her friend, her counsellor, her
refuge. There was familiarity and tenderness in her very love for Him;
and, though she scarcely knew it herself, a deep and fervent sense of His
divine humanity of those thirty-three years of earthly life, of toil, of
poverty, of trouble, and of sorrow which move our very hearts within us,
when we look from Bethlehem to Calvary, from the lowly birth in the
Manger to the bitter death on the Cross.
We might ask, were these the pages to raise such questions, why Jesus is
not more loved thus--as a friend, and a dear one, rather than as a cold
master to be served, not for love, but for wages. But let it rest.
Sufficient is it for us to know that not thus did Rachel Gray love him,
but with a love in which humility and tenderness equally blended.
After a meditative pause, she quietly put away her things by moonlight,
then again closed shutter and window, and softly stole up to the room
which she shared with her step-mother. She soon fell asleep, and dreamed
that she had gone to live with her father, who said to her, "Rachel!
Rachel!" So great was her joy, that she awoke. She found her mother
already up, and scolding her because she still slept.
"Mother," asked Rachel, leaning up on one elbow, "was it you who called
me, Rachel?"
"Why aint I been a calling of you this last hour?" asked Mrs. Gray, with
much asperity.
Rachel checked a sigh, and rose.
"Get up Jane--get up Mary," said Mrs. Gray, rapping soundly at the room
door of the two apprentices.
"Let them sleep a little longer, poor young things!" implored Rachel.
"No, that I won't," replied her mother, with great determination, "lazy
little creatures."
And to the imminent danger of her own knuckles, she rapped so
pertinaciously, that Jane and Mary were unable to feign deafness, and
replied, the former acting as spokeswoman, that Mrs. Gray needn't be
making all that noise; for that they heard her, and were getting up. "I
thought I'd make them hear me," muttered Mrs. Gray, hobbling down stairs.
There are some beings who lead lives so calm, that when they look back on
years, they seem to read the story of a few days; and of these was Rachel
Gray. Life for her flowed dull, monotonous and quiet, as that of a nun in
her cloister. The story of one day was the story of the next. A few
hopes, a few precious thoughts she treasured in her heart; but outwardly,
to work, to hear idle gossip, to eat, drink, and sleep, seemed her whole
portion, her destiny from mom till night, from birth to the grave.
Like every day passed this day. When it grew so dark that she could see
no more to work, she put her task by, and softly stole away to a little
back room up-stairs.
It was a very small room indeed, with a bed, where the apprentices slept;
a chest of drawers, a table, and two chairs:--many a closet is larger.
Its solitary window looked out on the little yard below; low walls,
against which grew Rachel's stocks and wall-flowers, enclosed it. From
the next house, there came the laughter and the screams too of children,
and of babies; and from a neighbouring forge, a loud, yet not unmusical
clanking, with which now and then, blended the rude voices of the men,
singing snatches of popular songs. Dimmed by the smoke of the forge, and
by the natural heaviness of a London atmosphere, the sky enclosed all;
yet, even through the smoke and haze, fair rosy gleams of the setting sun
shone in that London sky, and at the zenith there was a space of pure,
ethereal blue--soft, and very far from sinful and suffering earth, where
glittered in calm beauty a large and tranquil star.
Rachel sat by the window. She listened to earth: she looked at Heaven.
Her heart swelled with love, and prayer, and tenderness, and hope. Tears
of delight filled her eyes; she murmured to herself verses from psalms
and hymns--all praising God, all telling the beauty of God's creation.
Oh! pure and beautiful, indeed, would be the story of these your evening
musings, if we could lightly tell it here, Rachel Gray.
Reader, if to learn how a fine nature found its way through darkness and
mist, and some suffering to the highest, and to the noblest of the
delights God has granted to man--the religious and the intellectual; if,
we say, to learn this give you pleasure, you may read on to the end of
the chapter; if not, pass on at once to the next. These pages were not
written for you; and even though you should read them, feel and
understand them, you never will.
Our life is twofold; and of that double life, which, like all of us,
Rachel bore within her, we have as yet said but little. She was now
twenty six; a tall, thin, sallow woman, ungraceful, of shy manners, and
but little speech; but with a gentle face, a broad forehead, and large
brown eyes. By trade, she was a dress-maker, of small pretensions; her
father had forsaken her early, and her step-mother had reared her. This
much, knew the little world in which moved Rachel Gray, this much, and no
more. We may add, that this some little world had, in its wisdom,
pronounced Rachel Gray a fool.
Her education had been very limited. She knew how to read, and she could
write, but neither easily nor well. For though God had bestowed on her
the rare dower of a fine mind, He had not added to it the much more
common, though infinitely less precious gift, of a quick intellect. She
learned slowly, with great difficulty, with sore pain and trouble. Her
teachers, one and all, pronounced her dull; her step-mother was ashamed
of her, and to her dying day thought Rachel no better than a simpleton.
Rachel felt this keenly; but she had no means of self-defence. She had
not the least idea of how she could prove that she was not an idiot. One
of the characteristics of childhood and of youth is a painful inability,
an entire powerlessness of giving the form of speech to its deepest and
most fervent feelings. The infirmity generally dies off with years,
perhaps because also dies off the very strength of those feelings; but
even as they were to last for ever with Rachel Gray, so was that
infirmity destined to endure. Shy, sensitive, and nervous, she was a
noble book, sealed to all save God.
At eleven, her education, such as it was, was over. Rachel had to work,
and earn her bread. She was reared religiously, and hers was a deeply
religious nature. The misapplication of religion narrows still more a
narrow mind, but religion, taken in its true sense, enlarges a noble one.
Yet, not without strife, not without suffering, did Rachel make her way.
She was ignorant, and she was alone; how to ask advice she knew not, for
she could not explain herself. Sometimes she seemed to see the most
sublime truths, plain as in a book; at other times, they floated dark and
clouded before her gaze, or vanished in deep obscurity, and left her
alone and cast down. She suffered years, until, from her very sufferings,
perfect faith was born, and from faith unbounded trust in God, after
which her soul sank in deep and blessed peace.
And now, when rest was won, there came the want for more. Religion is
love. Rachel wanted thought, that child of the intellect, as love is the
child of the heart. She did not know herself what it was that she needed,
until she discovered and possessed it--until she could read a book, a
pamphlet, a scrap of verse, and brood over it, like a bird over her
young, not for hours, not for days, but for weeks--blest in that silent
meditation. Her mind was tenacious, but slow; she read few books--many
would have disturbed her. Sweeter and pleasanter was it to Rachel to
think over what she did read, and to treasure it up in the chambers of
her mind, than to fill those chambers with heaps of knowledge. Indeed for
knowledge Rachel cared comparatively little. In such as displayed more
clearly the glories of God's creation she delighted; but man's learning,
man's science, touched her not. To think was her delight; a silent,
solitary, forbidden pleasure, in which Rachel had to indulge by stealth.
For all this time, and especially since the death of her sister, she
suffered keenly from home troubles, from a little domestic persecution,
painful, pertinacious, and irritating. Mrs. Gray vaguely felt that her
daughter was not like other girls, and not knowing that she was in
reality very far beyond most; feeling, too, that Rachel was wholly unlike
herself, and jealously resenting the fact, she teased her unceasingly,
and did her best to interrupt the fits of meditation, which she did not
scruple to term "moping." When her mind was most haunted with some fine
thought, Rachel had to talk to her step-mother, to listen to her, and to
take care not to reply at random; if she failed in any of these
obligations, half-an-hour's lecture was the least penalty she could
expect. Dear to her, for this reason; were the few moments of solitude
she could call her own; dear to her was that little room, where she could
steal away at twilight time and think in peace.
Very unlike her age was this ignorant dress-maker of the nineteenth
century. Ask the men and women of the day to read volumes; why, there is
not a season but they go through the Herculean labour of swallowing down
histories written faster than time flies, novels by the dozen, essays,
philosophic and political, books of travels, of science, of statistics,
besides the nameless host of reviews, magazines, and papers, daily and
weekly. Ask them to study: why, what is there they do not know, from the
most futile accomplishment to the most abstruse science? Ask them too, if
you like, to enter life, to view it under all its aspects; why, they have
travelled over the whole earth; and life, they know from the palace down
to the hovel; but bid them think! They stare aghast: it is the task of
Sisyphus--the labour of the Danaide; as fast as thought enters their
mind, it goes out again. Bid them commune, one day with God and their own
hearts--they reply dejectedly that they cannot; for their intellect is
quick and brilliant, but their heart is cold. And thought springs from
the heart, and in her heart had Rachel Gray found it.
The task impossible to them was to her easy and delightful. Time wore on;
deeper and more exquisite grew what Rachel quaintly termed to herself
"the pleasure of thinking." And oh! she thought sometimes, and it was a
thought that made her heart bum, "Oh! that people only knew the pleasures
of thinking! Oh! if people would only think!" And mom, and noon, and
night, and bending over her work, or sitting at peaceful twilight time in
the little back room, Rachel thought; and thus she went on through life,
between those two fair sisters, Thought and Prayer.
Reader, hare you known many thinkers? We confess that we hare known many
men and women of keen and great intellect, some geniuses; but only one
real thinker have we known, only one who really thought for thought's own
sake, and that one was Rachel Gray.
And now, if she moves through this story, thinking much and doing little,
you know why.