CHAPTER I.

HELEN LINGARD.

A swift, gray November wind had taken every chimney of the house for

an organ-pipe, and was roaring in them all at once, quelling the more

distant and varied noises of the woods, which moaned and surged like a

sea. Helen Lingard had not been out all day. The morning, indeed, had

been fine, but she had been writing a long letter to her brother Leopold

at Cambridge, and had put off her walk in the neighbouring park till

after luncheon, and in the meantime the wind had risen, and brought with

it a haze that threatened rain. She was in admirable health, had never

had a day’s illness in her life, was hardly more afraid of getting

wet than a young farmer, and enjoyed wind, especially when she was on

horseback. Yet as she stood looking from her window, across a balcony

where shivered more than one autumnal plant that ought to have been

removed a week ago, out upon the old-fashioned garden and meadows

beyond, where each lonely tree bowed with drifting garments--I was going

to say, like a suppliant, but it was AWAY from its storming enemy--she

did not feel inclined to go out. That she was healthy was no reason why

she should be unimpressible, any more than that good temper should be

a reason for indifference to the behaviour of one’s friend. She always

felt happier in a new dress, when it was made to her mind and fitted

her body; and when the sun shone she was lighter-hearted than when it

rained: I had written MERRIER, but Helen was seldom merry, and had

she been made aware of the fact, and questioned why, would have

answered--Because she so seldom saw reason.

She was what all her friends called a sensible girl; but, as I say,

that was no reason why she should be an insensible girl as well, and

be subject to none of the influences of the weather. She did feel those

influences, and therefore it was that she turned away from the window

with the sense, rather than the conviction, that the fireside in her

own room was rendered even, more attractive by the unfriendly aspect

of things outside and the roar in the chimney, which happily was not

accompanied by a change in the current of the smoke.

The hours between luncheon and tea are confessedly dull, but dulness is

not inimical to a certain kind of comfort, and Helen liked to be that

way comfortable. Nor had she ever yet been aware of self-rebuke because

of the liking. Let us see what kind and degree of comfort she had in the

course of an hour and a half attained. And in discovering this I shall

be able to present her to my reader with a little more circumstance.

She sat before the fire in a rather masculine posture. I would not

willingly be rude, but the fact remains--a posture in which she

would not, I think, have sat for her photograph--leaning back in a

chintz-covered easy-chair, all the lines of direction about her parallel

with the lines of the chair, her arms lying on its arms, and the fingers

of each hand folded down over the end of each arm--square, straight,

right-angled,--gazing into the fire, with something of the look of a

sage, but one who has made no discovery.

She had just finished the novel of the day, and was suffering a mild

reaction--the milder, perhaps, that she was not altogether satisfied

with the consummation. For the heroine had, after much sorrow and

patient endurance, at length married a man whom she could not help

knowing to be not worth having. For the author even knew it, only such

was his reading of life, and such his theory of artistic duty, that what

it was a disappointment to Helen to peruse, it seemed to have been a

comfort to him to write. Indeed, her dissatisfaction went so far that,

although the fire kept burning away in perfect content before her,

enhanced by the bellowing complaint of the wind in the chimney, she yet

came nearer thinking than she had ever been in her life. Now thinking,

especially to one who tries it for the first time, is seldom, or never,

a quite comfortable operation, and hence Helen was very near becoming

actually uncomfortable. She was even on the borders of making the

unpleasant discovery that the business of life--and that not only for

North Pole expeditions, African explorers, pyramid-inspectors, and

such like, but for every man and woman born into the blindness of the

planet--is to discover; after which discovery there is little more

comfort to be had of the sort with which Helen was chiefly conversant.

But she escaped for the time after a very simple and primitive fashion,

although it was indeed a narrow escape.

Let me not be misunderstood, however, and supposed to imply that Helen

was dull in faculty, or that she contributed nothing to the bubbling of

the intellectual pool in the social gatherings at Glaston. Far from it.

When I say that she came near thinking, I say more for her than any

but the few who know what thinking is will understand, for that which

chiefly distinguishes man from those he calls the lower animals is

the faculty he most rarely exercises. True, Helen supposed she could

think--like other people, because the thoughts of other people

had passed through her in tolerable plenty, leaving many a phantom

conclusion behind; but this was THEIR thinking, not hers. She had

thought no more than was necessary now and then to the persuasion that

she saw what a sentence meant, after which, her acceptance or rejection

of what was contained in it, never more than lukewarm, depended solely

upon its relation to what she had somehow or other, she could seldom

have told how, come to regard as the proper style of opinion to hold

upon things in general.

The social matrix which up to this time had ministered to her

development, had some relations with Mayfair, it is true, but scanty

ones indeed with the universe; so that her present condition was like

that of the common bees, every one of which Nature fits for a queen,

but its nurses, prevent from growing one by providing for it a cell

too narrow for the unrolling of royalty, and supplying it with food

not potent enough for the nurture of the ideal--with this difference,

however, that the cramped and stinted thing comes out, if no queen, then

a working bee, and Helen, who might be both, was neither yet. If I were

at liberty to mention the books on her table, it would give a few of

my readers no small help towards the settling of her position in the

“valued file” of the young women of her generation; but there are

reasons against it.

She was the daughter of an officer, who, her mother dying when she

was born, committed her to the care of a widowed aunt, and almost

immediately left for India, where he rose to high rank, and somehow or

other amassed a considerable fortune, partly through his marriage with

a Hindoo lady, by whom he had one child, a boy some three years younger

than Helen. When he died, he left his fortune equally divided between

the two children.

Helen was now three-and-twenty, and her own mistress. Her appearance

suggested Norwegian blood, for she was tall, blue-eyed, and

dark-haired--but fair-skinned, with regular features, and an over

still-some who did not like her said hard--expression of countenance.

No one had ever called her NELLY; yet she had long remained a girl,

lingering on the broken borderland after several of her school

companions had become young matrons. Her drawing-master, a man of

some observation and insight, used to say Miss Lingard would wake up

somewhere about forty.

The cause of her so nearly touching the borders of thought this

afternoon, was, that she became suddenly aware of feeling bored. Now

Helen was even seldomer bored than merry, and this time she saw no

reason for it, neither had any person to lay the blame upon. She might

have said it was the weather, but the weather had never done it before.

Nor could it be want of society, for George Bascombe was to dine with

them. So was the curate, but he did not count for much. Neither was she

weary of herself. That, indeed, might be only a question of time, for

the most complete egotist, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte, must

at length get weary of his paltry self; but Helen, from the slow rate of

her expansion, was not old enough yet. Nor was she in any special sense

wrapt up in herself: it was only that she had never yet broken the

shell which continues to shut in so many human chickens, long after they

imagine themselves citizens of the real world.

Being somewhat bored then, and dimly aware that to be bored was out of

harmony with something or other, Helen was on the verge of thinking,

but, as I have said, escaped the snare in a very direct and simple

fashion: she went fast asleep, and never woke till her maid brought her

the cup of kitchen-tea from which the inmates of some houses derive the

strength to prepare for dinner.

CHAPTER II.

THOMAS WINGFOLD.

The morning, whose afternoon was thus stormy, had been fine, and the

curate went out for a walk. Had it been just as stormy, however, he

would have gone all the same. Not that he was a great walker, or,

indeed, fond of exercise of any sort, and his walking, as an Irishman

might say, was half sitting--on stiles and stones and fallen trees. He

was not in bad health, he was not lazy, or given to self-preservation,

but he had little impulse to activity of any sort. The springs in his

well of life did not seem to flow quite fast enough.

He strolled through Osterfield park, and down the deep descent to the

river, where, chilly as it was, he seated himself upon a large stone

on the bank, and knew that he was there, and that he had to answer

to Thomas Wingfold; but why he was there, and why he was not called

something else, he did not know. On each side of the stream rose a

steeply-sloping bank, on which grew many fern-bushes, now half withered,

and the sunlight upon them, this November morning, seemed as cold as the

wind that blew about their golden and green fronds. Over a rocky bottom

the stream went--talking rather than singing--down the valley towards

the town, where it seemed to linger a moment to embrace the old abbey

church, before it set out on its leisurely slide through the low level

to the sea. Its talk was chilly, and its ripples, which came half from

the obstructions in its channel below, and half from the wind that

ruffled it above, were not smiles, but wrinkles rather--even in the

sunshine. Thomas felt cold himself, but the cold was of the sort that

comes from the look rather than the feel of things. He did not, however,

much care how he felt--not enough, certainly, to have made him put on a

great-coat: he was not deeply interested in himself. With his stick, a

very ordinary bit of oak, he kept knocking pebbles into the water, and

listlessly watching them splash. The wind blew, the sun shone, the water

ran, the ferns waved, the clouds went drifting over his head, but he

never looked up, or took any notice of the doings of Mother Nature at

her house-work: everything seemed to him to be doing only what it had

got to do, because it had got it to do, and not because it cared about

it, or had any end in doing it. For he, like every other man, could read

nature only by his own lamp, and this was very much how he had hitherto

responded to the demands made upon him.

His life had not been a very interesting one, although early passages

in it had been painful. He had done fairly well at Oxford: it had

been expected of him, and he had answered expectation; he had not

distinguished himself, nor cared to do so. He had known from the first

that he was intended for the church, and had not objected, but received

it as his destiny--had even, in dim obedience, kept before his mental

vision the necessity of yielding to the heights and hollows of the mould

into which he was being thrust. But he had taken no great interest in

the matter.

The church was to him an ancient institution of such approved

respectability that it was able to communicate it, possessing

emoluments, and requiring observances. He had entered her service; she

was his mistress, and in return for the narrow shelter, humble fare,

and not quite too shabby garments she allotted him, he would perform her

hests--in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the house for

ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had never dreamed

of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of its unattainable

remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life or his position in

it, taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind of acceptance, and

laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even bare suffering. He had

a certain dull prejudice in favour of honesty, would not have told the

shadow of a lie to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, and yet was so

uninstructed in the things that constitute practical honesty that some

of his opinions would have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked

reading the prayers, for the making of them vocal in the church was

pleasant to him, and he had a not unmusical voice. He visited the

sick--with some repugnance, it is true, but without delay, and spoke to

them such religious commonplaces as occurred to him, depending mainly

on the prayers belonging to their condition for the right performance of

his office. He never thought about being a gentleman, but always behaved

like one.

I suspect that at this time there lay somewhere in his mind, keeping

generally well out of sight however, that is, below the skin of his

consciousness, the unacknowledged feeling that he had been hardly dealt

with. But at no time, even when it rose plainest, would he have dared to

add--by Providence. Had the temptation come, he would have banished it

and the feeling together.

He did not read much, browsed over his newspaper at breakfast with a

polite curiosity, sufficient to season the loneliness of his slice of

fried bacon, and took more interest in some of the naval intelligence

than in anything else. Indeed it would have been difficult for himself

even to say in what he did take a large interest. When leisure awoke a

question as to how he should employ it, he would generally take up his

Horace and read aloud one of his more mournful odes--with such attention

to the rhythm, I must add, as, although plentiful enough among scholars

in respect of the dead letter, is rarely found with them in respect of

the living vocal utterance.

Nor had he now sat long upon his stone, heedless of the world’s

preparations for winter, before he began repeating to himself the poet’s

Æquam memento rebus in arduis, which he had been trying much, but with

small success, to reproduce in similar English cadences, moved thereto

in part by the success of Tennyson in his O mighty-mouthed inventor of

harmonies--a thing as yet alone in the language, so far as I know. It

was perhaps a little strange that the curate should draw the strength of

which he was most conscious from the pages of a poet whose hereafter

was chiefly servicable to him--in virtue of its unsubstantiality

and poverty, the dreamlike thinness of its reality--in enhancing

the pleasures of the world of sun and air, cooling shade and songful

streams, the world of wine and jest, of forms that melted more slowly

from encircling arms, and eyes that did not so swiftly fade and

vanish in the distance. Yet when one reflects but for a moment on the

poverty-stricken expectations of Christians from their hereafter, I

cease to wonder at Wingfold; for human sympathy is lovely and pleasant,

and if a Christian priest and a pagan poet feel much in the same tone

concerning the affairs of a universe, why should they not comfort each

other by sitting down together in the dust?

“No hair it boots thee whether from Inachus

Ancient descended, or, of the poorest born,

Thy being drags, all bare and roofless--

Victim the same to the heartless Orcus.

All are on one road driven; for each of us

The urn is tossed, and, later or earlier,

The lot will drop and all be sentenced

Into the boat of eternal exile.”

Having thus far succeeded with these two stanzas, Wingfold rose, a

little pleased with himself, and climbed the bank above him, wading

through mingled sun and wind and ferns--so careless of their shivering

beauty and their coming exile, that a watcher might have said the

prospect of one day leaving behind him the shows of this upper world

could have no part in the curate’s sympathy with Horace.

CHAPTER III.

THE DINERS.

Mrs. Ramshorn, Helen’s aunt, was past the middle age of woman; had been

handsome and pleasing, had long ceased to be either; had but sparingly

recognised the fact, yet had recognised it, and felt aggrieved. Hence

in part it was that her mouth had gathered that peevish and wronged

expression which tends to produce a moral nausea in the beholder. If she

had but known how much uglier in the eyes of her fellow-mortals her own

discontent made her, than the severest operation of the laws of mortal

decay could have done, she might have tried to think less of her wrongs

and more of her privileges. As it was, her own face wronged her own

heart, which was still womanly, and capable of much pity--seldom

exercised. Her husband had been dean of Halystone, a man of insufficient

weight of character to have the right influence in the formation of his

wife’s. He had left her tolerably comfortable as to circumstances, but

childless. She loved Helen, whose even imperturbability had by mere

weight, as it might seem, gained such a power over her that she was

really mistress in the house without either of them knowing it.

Naturally desirous of keeping Helen’s fortune in the family, and having,

as I say, no son of her own, she had yet not far to look to find

a cousin capable, as she might well imagine, of rendering himself

acceptable to the heiress. He was the son of her younger sister,

married, like herself, to a dignitary of the Church, a canon of a

northern cathedral. This youth, therefore, Greorge Bascombe by name,

whose visible calling at present was to eat his way to the bar, she

often invited to Glaston; and on this Friday afternoon he was on his way

from London to spend the Saturday and Sunday with the two ladies. The

cousins liked each other, had not had more of each other’s society than

was favourable to their aunt’s designs, who was far too prudent to have

made as yet any reference to them, and stood altogether in as suitable

a relative position for falling in love with each other as Mrs. Ramshorn

could well have desired. Her chief, almost her only uneasiness, arose

from the important and but too evident fact, that Helen Lingard was not

a girl of the sort to fall readily in love. That, however, was of no

consequence, provided it did not come in the way of marrying her cousin,

who, her aunt felt confident, was better fitted to rouse her dormant

affections than any other youth she had ever seen, or was ever likely

to see. Upon this occasion she had asked Thomas Wingfold to meet him,

partly with the design that he should act as a foil to her nephew,

partly in order to do her duty by the church, to which she felt herself

belong not as a lay member, but in some undefined professional capacity,

in virtue of her departed dean. Wingfold had but lately come to the

parish, and, as he was merely curate, she had not been in haste to

invite him. On the other hand, he was the only clergyman officiating in

the abbey church, which was grand and old, with a miserable living and

a non-resident rector. He, to do him justice, paid nearly the amount

of the tithes in salary to his curate, and spent the rest on the church

material, of which, for certain reasons, he retained the incumbency, the

presentation to which belonged to his own family.

The curate presented himself at the dinner-hour in Mrs. Ramshorn’s

drawing-room, looking like any other gentleman, satisfied with his

share in the administration of things, and affecting nothing of the

professional either in dress, manner, or tone. Helen saw him for the

first time in private life, and, as she had expected, saw nothing

remarkable--a man who looked about thirty, was a little over the middle

height, and well enough constructed as men go, had a good forehead, a

questionable nose, clear grey eyes, long, mobile, sensitive mouth, large

chin, pale complexion, and straight black hair, and might have been a

lawyer just as well as a clergyman. A keener, that is, a more interested

eye than hers, might have discovered traces of suffering in the forms of

the wrinkles which, as he talked, would now and then flit like ripples

over his forehead; but Helen’s eyes seldom did more than slip over the

faces presented to her; and had it been otherwise, who could be expected

to pay much regard to Thomas Wingfold when George Bascombe was present?

There, indeed, stood a man by the corner of the mantelpiece!--tall and

handsome as an Apollo, and strong as the young Hercules, dressed in the

top of the plainest fashion, self-satisfied, but not offensively so,

good-natured, ready to smile, as clean in conscience, apparently, and as

large in sympathy, as his shirt-front. Everybody who knew him, counted

George Bascombe a genuine good fellow, and George himself knew little to

the contrary, while Helen knew nothing.

One who had only chanced to get a glimpse of her in her own room, as in

imagination my reader has done, would hardly have recognised her again

in the drawing-room. For in her own room she was but as she appeared

to herself in her mirror--dull, inanimate; but in the drawing-room her

reflection from living eyes and presences served to stir up what waking

life was in her. When she spoke, her face dawned with a clear, although

not warm light; and although it must be owned that when it was at rest,

the same over-stillness, amounting almost to dulness, the same seeming

immobility, ruled as before, yet, even when she was not speaking, the

rest was often broken by a smile--a genuine one, for although there was

much that was stiff, there was nothing artificial about Helen. Neither

was there much of the artificial about her cousin; for his good-nature,

and his smile, and whatever else appeared upon him, were all genuine

enough--the only thing in this respect not quite satisfactory to the

morally fastidious man being his tone in speaking. Whether he had caught

it at the university, or amongst his father’s clerical friends, or in

the professional society he now frequented, I cannot tell, but it had

been manufactured somewhere--after a large, scrolly kind of pattern,

sounding well-bred and dignified. I wonder how many speak with the

voices that really belong to them.

Plainly, to judge from the one Bascombe used, he was accustomed to lay

down the law, but in gentlemanly fashion, and not as if he cared a bit

about the thing in question himself. By the side of his easy carriage,

his broad chest, and towering Greek-shaped head, Thomas Wingfold

dwindled almost to vanishing--in a word, looked nobody. And besides his

inferiority in size and self-presentment, he had a slight hesitation

of manner, which seemed to anticipate, if not to court, the subordinate

position which most men, and most women too, were ready to assign him.

He said, “Don’t you think?” far oftener than “I think” and was always

more ready to fix his attention upon the strong points of an opponent’s

argument than to re-assert his own in slightly altered phrase like most

men, or even in fresh forms like a few; hence--self-assertion, either

modestly worn like a shirt of fine chain-armour, or gaunt and obtrusive

like plates of steel, being the strength of the ordinary man--what

could the curate appear but defenceless, therefore weak, and therefore

contemptible? The truth is, he had less self-conceit than a mortal’s

usual share, and was not yet possessed of any opinions interesting

enough to himself to seem worth defending with any approach to vivacity.

Bascombe and he bowed in response to their introduction with proper

indifference, after a moment’s solemn pause exchanged a sentence or two

which resembled an exercise in the proper use of a foreign language, and

then gave what attention Englishmen are capable of before dinner to the

two ladies--the elder of whom, I may just mention, was dressed in black

velvet with heavy Venetian lace, and the younger in black silk, with old

Honiton. Neither of them did much towards enlivening the conversation.

Mrs. Ramshorn, whose dinner had as yet gained in interest with her

years, sat peevishly longing for its arrival, but cast every now and

then a look of mild satisfaction upon her nephew, which, however, while

it made her eyes sweeter, did not much alter the expression of her

mouth. Helen improved, as she fancied, the arrangement of a few

green-house flowers in an ugly vase on the table.

At length the butler appeared, the curate took Mrs. Ramshorn, and the

cousins followed--making, in the judgment of the butler as he stood in

the hall, and the housekeeper as she peeped from the baise-covered door

that led to the still-room, as handsome a couple as mortal eyes need

wish to see. They looked nearly of an age, the lady the more stately,

the gentleman the more graceful, or, perhaps rather, ELEGANT, of the

two.

CHAPTER IV.

THEIR TALK.

During dinner, Bascombe had the talk mostly to himself, and rattled

well, occasionally rebuked by his aunt for some remark which might to

a clergyman appear objectionable; nor as a partisan was she altogether

satisfied with the curate that he did not seem inclined to take

clerical exception. He ate his dinner, quietly responding to Bascombe’s

sallies--which had usually more of vivacity than keenness, more of good

spirits than wit--with a curious flickering smile, or a single word of

agreement. It might have seemed that he was humouring a younger man, but

the truth was, the curate had not yet seen cause for opposing him.

How any friend could have come to send Helen poetry I cannot imagine,

but that very morning she had received by post a small volume of verse,

which, although just out, and by an unknown author, had already been

talked of in what are called literary circles. Wingfold had read some

extracts from the book that same morning, and was therefore not quite

unprepared when Helen asked him if he had seen it. He suggested that the

poems, if the few lines he had seen made a fair sample, were rather of

the wailful order.

“If there is one thing I despise more than another,” said Bascombe, “it

is to hear a man, a fellow with legs and arms, pour out his griefs into

the bosom of that most discreet of confidantes, Society, bewailing

his hard fate, and calling upon youths and maidens to fill their

watering-pots with tears, and with him water the sorrowful pansies and

undying rue of the race. I believe I am quoting.”

“I think you must be, George,” said Helen. “I never knew you venture so

near the edge of poetry before.”

“Ah, that is all you know of me, Miss Lingard!” returned Bascombe.

“--And then,” he resumed, turning again to Wingfold, “what is it they

complain of? That some girls preferred a better man perhaps, or that a

penny paper once told the truth of their poetry.”

“Or it may be only that it is their humour to be sad,” said Wingfold.

“But don’t you think,” he continued, “it is hardly worth while to be

indignant with them? Their verses are a relief to them, and do nobody

any harm.”

“They do all the boys and girls harm that read them, and themselves who

write them more harm than anybody, confirming them in tearful habits,

and teaching eyes unused to weep. I quote again, I believe, but from

whom I am innocent. If I ever had a grief, I should have along with it

the decency to keep it to myself.”

“I don’t doubt you would, George,” said his cousin, who seemed more

playfully inclined than usual. “But,” she added, with a smile, “would

your silence be voluntary, or enforced?”

“What!” returned Bascombe, “you think I could not plain my woes to

the moon? Why not I as well as another? I could roar you as ‘twere any

nightingale.”

“You have had your sorrows, then, George?”

“Never anything worse yet than a tailor’s bill, Helen, and I hope you

won’t provide me with any. I am not in love with decay. I remember a

fellow at Trinity, the merriest of all our set at a wine-party, who,

alone with his ink-pot, was for ever enacting the part of the

unheeded poet, complaining of the hard hearts and tuneless ears of his

generation. I went into his room once, and found him with the tears

running down his face, a pot of stout half empty on the table, and

his den all but opaque with tobacco-smoke, reciting, with sobs--I had

repeated the lines so often before they ceased to amuse me, that I can

never forget them--

‘Heard’st thou a quiver and clang?

In thy sleep did it make thee start?

‘Twas a chord in twain that sprang--

But the lyre-shell was my heart.’

He took a pull at the stout, laid his head on the table, and sobbed like

a locomotive.”

“But it’s not very bad--not bad at all, so far as I see,” said Helen,

who had a woman’s weakness for the side attacked, in addition to a human

partiality for fair play.

“No, not bad at all--for absolute nonsense,” said Bascombe.

“He had been reading Heine,” said Wingfold.

“And burlesquing him,” returned Bascombe. “Fancy hearing one of the

fellow’s heart-strings crack, and taking it for a string of his fiddle

in the press! By the way, what are the heart-strings? Have they any

anatomical synonym? But I have no doubt it was good poetry.”

“Do you think poetry and common sense necessarily opposed to each

other?” asked Wingfold.

“I confess a leaning to that opinion,” replied Bascombe, with a

half-conscious smile.

“What do you say of Horace, now?” suggested Wingfold.

“Unfortunately for me, you have mentioned the one poet for whom I have

any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense. He never

cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the bargain. But

common sense would be just as good in prose as in verse.”

“Possibly; but what we have of it in Horace would never have reached

us but for the forms into which he has cast it. How much more enticing

acorns in the cup are! I was watching two children picking them up

to-day.”

“That may be; there have always been more children than grown men,”

returned Bascombe. “For my part, I would sweep away all illusions, and

get at the heart of the affair.”

“But,” said Wingfold, with the look of one who, as he tries to say it,

is seeing a thing for the first time, “does not the acorn-cup belong to

the acorn? May not some of what you call illusions, be the finer, or at

least more ethereal qualities of the thing itself? You do not object to

music in church, for instance?”

Bascombe was on the point of saying he objected to it nowhere except

in church, but for his aunt’s sake, or rather for his own sake in his

aunt’s eyes, he restrained himself, and uttered his feelings only in a

peculiar smile, of import so mingled, that its meaning was illegible ere

it had quivered along his lip and vanished.

“I am no metaphysician,” he said, and Wingfold accepted the dismissal of

the subject.

Little passed between the two men over their wine; and as neither of

them cared to drink more than a couple of glasses, they soon rejoined

the ladies in the drawing-room.

Mrs. Ramshorn was taking her usual forty winks in her arm-chair, and

their entrance did not disturb her. Helen was turning over some music.

“I am looking for a song for you, George,” she said. “I want Mr.

Wingfold to hear you sing, lest he should take you for a man of stone

and lime.”

“Never mind looking,” returned her cousin. “I will sing one you have

never heard.”

And seating himself at the piano, he sang the following verses. They

were his own, a fact he would probably have allowed to creep out, had

they met with more sympathy. His voice was a full bass one, full of

tone.

“Each man has his lampful, his lampful of oil;

He may dull its glimmer with sorrow and toil;

He may leave it unlit, and let it dry,

Or wave it aloft, and hold it high:

For mine, it shall burn with a fearless flame

In the front of the darkness that has no name.

“Sunshine and Wind?--are ye there? Ho! ho!

Are ye comrades or lords, as ye shine and blow?

I care not, I! I will lift my head

Till ye shine and blow on my grassy bed.

See, brother Sun, I am shining too!

Wind, I am living as well as you!

“Though the sun go out like a vagrant spark,

And his daughter planets are left in the dark,

I care not, I! For why should I care?

I shall be hurtless, nor here nor there.

Sun and Wind, let us shine and shout,

For the day draws nigh when we all go out!”

“I don’t like the song,” said Helen, wrinkling her brows a little. “It

sounds--well, heathenish.”

She would, I fear, have said nothing of the sort, being used to that

kind of sound from her cousin, had not a clergyman been present. Yet

she said it from no hypocrisy, but simple regard to his professional

feelings,

“I sung it for Mr. Wingfold,” returned Bascombe. “It would have been a

song after Horace’s own heart.”

“Don’t you think,” rejoined the curate, “the defiant tone of your song

would have been strange to him? I confess that what I find chiefly

attractive in Horace is his sad submission to the inevitable.”

“Sad?” echoed Bascombe.

“Don’t you think so?”

“No. He makes the best of it, and as merrily as he can.”

“AS HE CAN, I grant you,” said Wingfold.

Here Mrs. Ramshorn woke, and the subject was dropped, leaving Mr.

Wingfold in some perplexity as to this young man and his talk, and what

the phenomenon signified. Was heathenism after all secretly cherished,

and about to become fashionable in English society? He saw little of its

phases, and for what he knew it might be so.

Helen sat down to the piano. Her time was perfect, and she never

blundered a note. She played well and woodenly, and had for her reward a

certain wooden satisfaction in her own performance. The music she chose

was good of its kind, but had more to do with the instrument than

the feelings, and was more dependent upon execution than expression.

Bascombe yawned behind his handkerchief, and Wingfold gazed at the

profile of the player, wondering how, with such fine features and

complexion, with such a fine-shaped and well-set head? her face should

be so far short of interesting. It seemed a face that had no story.

CHAPTER V.

A STAGGERING QUESTION.

It was time the curate should take his leave. Bascombe would go out

with him and have his last cigar. The wind had fallen, and the moon was

shining. A vague sense of contrast came over Wingfold, and as he stepped

on the pavement from the threshold of the high gates of wrought iron, he

turned involuntarily and looked back at the house. It was of red brick,

and flat-faced in the style of Queen Anne’s time, so that the light

could do nothing with it in the way of shadow, and dwelt only on the

dignity of its unpretentiousness. But aloft over its ridge the moon

floated in the softest, loveliest blue, with just a cloud here and there

to show how blue it was, and a sparkle where its blueness took fire in

a star. It was autumn, almost winter, below, and the creepers that clung

to the house waved in the now gentle wind like the straggling tresses of

old age; but above was a sky that might have overhung the last melting

of spring into summer. At the end of the street rose the great square

tower of the church, seeming larger than in the daylight. There was

something in it all that made the curate feel there ought to be more--as

if the night knew something he did not; and he yielded himself to its

invasion.

His companion having carefully lighted his cigar all round its extreme

periphery, took it from his mouth, regarded its glowing end with a smile

of satisfaction, and burst into a laugh. It was not a scornful laugh,

neither was it a merry or a humorous laugh; it was one of satisfaction

and amusement.

“Let me have a share in the fun,” said the curate.

“You have it,” said his companion--rudely, indeed, but not quite

offensively, and put his cigar in his mouth again.

Wingfold was not one to take umbrage easily. He was not important enough

in his own eyes for that, but he did not choose to go farther.

“That’s a fine old church,” he said, pointing to the dark mass invading

the blue--so solid, yet so clear in outline.

“I am glad the mason-work is to your mind,” returned Bascombe, almost

compassionately. “It must be some satisfaction, perhaps consolation to

you.”

Before he had thus concluded the sentence a little scorn had crept into

his tone.

“You make some allusion which I do not quite apprehend,” said the

curate.

“Now, I am going to be honest with you,” said Bascombe abruptly, and

stopping, he turned towards his companion, and took the full-flavoured

Havannah from his lips. “I like you,” he went on, “for you seem

reasonable; and besides, a man ought to speak out what he thinks. So

here goes!--Tell me honestly--do you believe one word of all that!”

And he in his turn pointed in the direction of the great tower.

The curate was taken by surprise and made no answer: it was as if he

had received a sudden blow in the face. Recovering himself presently,

however, he sought room to pass the question without direct encounter.

“How came the thing there?” he said, once more indicating the

church-tower.

“By faith, no doubt,” answered Bascombe, laughing,--“but not your faith;

no, nor the faith of any of the last few generations.”

“There are more churches built now, ten times over, than in any former

period of our history.”

“True; but of what sort? All imitation--never an original amongst them

all!”

“If they had found out the right way, why change it?”

“Good! But it is rather ominous for the claim of a divine origin to your

religion that it should be the only one thing that in these days takes

the crab’s move--backwards. You are indebted to your forefathers for

your would-be belief, as well as for their genuine churches. You hardly

know what your belief is. There is my aunt--as good a specimen as I know

of what you call a Christian!--so accustomed is she to think and speak

too after the forms of what you heard my cousin call heathenism, that

she would never have discovered, had she been as wide awake as she was

sound asleep, that the song I sung was anything but a good Christian

ballad.”

“Pardon me; I think you are wrong there.”

“What! did you never remark how these Christian people, who profess

to believe that their great man has conquered death, and all that

rubbish--did you never observe the way they look if the least allusion

is made to death, or the eternity they say they expect beyond it? Do

they not stare as if you had committed a breach of manners? Religion

itself is the same way: as much as you like about the church, but don’t

mention Christ! At the same time, to do them justice, it is only of

death in the abstract they decline to hear; they will listen to the news

of the death of a great and good man, without any such emotion. Look

at the poetry of death--I mean the way Christian poets write of it! A

dreamless sleep they call it--the bourne from whence, knows no waking.

‘She is gone for ever!’ cries the mother over her daughter. And that is

why such things are not to be mentioned, because in their hearts

they have no hope, and in their minds no courage to face the facts of

existence. We haven’t the pluck of the old fellows, who, that they might

look death himself in the face without dismay, accustomed themselves,

even at their banquets, to the sight of his most loathsome handiwork,

his most significant symbol--and enjoyed their wine the better for

it!--your friend Horace, for instance.”

“But your aunt now would never consent to such an interpretation of her

opinions. Nor do I allow that it is fair.”

“My dear sir, if there is one thing I pride myself upon, it is fair

play, and I grant you at once she would not. But I am speaking, not of

creeds, but of beliefs. And I assert that the forms of common Christian

speech regarding death come nearer those of Horace than your saint, the

old Jew, Saul of Tarsus.”

It did not occur to Wingfold that people generally speak from the

surfaces, not the depths of their minds, even when those depths are

moved; nor yet that possibly Mrs. Ramshorn was not the best type of a

Christian, even in his soft-walking congregation! In fact, nothing came

into his mind with which to meet what Bascombe said--the real force

whereof he could not help feeling--and he answered nothing. His

companion followed his apparent yielding with fresh pressure.

“In truth,” he said, “I do not believe that YOU believe more than an

atom here and there of what you profess. I am confident you have more

good sense by a great deal.”

“I am sorry to find that you place good sense above good faith, Mr.

Bascombe; but I am obliged by your good opinion, which, as I read it,

amounts to this--that I am one of the greatest humbugs you have the

misfortune to be acquainted with.”

“Ha! ha! ha!--No, no; I don’t say that. I know so well how to make

allowance for the prejudices a man has inherited from foolish ancestors,

and which have been instilled into him, as well, with his earliest

nourishment, both bodily and mental. But--come now--I do love open

dealing--I am myself open as the day--did you not take to the church as

a profession, in which you might eat a piece of bread--as somebody says

in your own blessed Bible--dry enough bread it may be, for the old lady

is not over-generous to her younger children--still a gentlemanly sort

of livelihood?”

Wingfold held his peace. It was incontestably with such a view that

he had signed the articles and sought holy orders--and that without a

single question as to truth or reality in either act.

“Your silence is honesty, Mr. Wingfold, and I honour you for it,” said

Bascombe. “It is an easy thing for a man in another profession to speak

his mind, but silence such as yours, casting a shadow backward over your

past, require courage: I honour you, sir.”

As he spoke, he laid his hand on Wingfold’s shoulder with the grasp of

an athlete.

“Can the sherry have anything to do with it?” thought the curate. The

fellow was, or seemed to be, years younger than himself! It was an

assurance unimaginable--yet there it stood--six feet of it good! He

glanced at the church tower. It had not vanished in mist! It still made

its own strong, clear mark on the eternal blue!

“I must not allow you to mistake my silence, Mr. Bascombe,” he answered

the same moment. “It is not easy to reply to such demands all at once.

It is not easy to say in times like these, and at a moment’s notice,

what or how much a man believes. But whatever my answer might be had I

time to consider it, my silence must at least not be interpreted to mean

that I do NOT believe as my profession indicates. That, at all events,

would be untrue.”

“Then I am to understand, Mr. Wingfold, that you neither believe nor

disbelieve the tenets of the church whose bread you eat?” said Bascombe,

with the air of a reprover of sin.

“I decline to place myself between the horns of any such dilemma,”

returned Wingfold, who was now more than a little annoyed at his

persistency in forcing his way within the precincts of another’s

personality.

“It is but one more proof--more than was necessary--to convince me that

the old system is a lie--a lie of the worst sort, seeing it may prevail

even to the self-deception of a man otherwise remarkable for honesty and

directness. Good night, Mr. Wingfold.”

With lifted hats, but no hand-shaking, the men parted.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CURATE IN THE CHURCHYARD.

Bascombe was chagrined to find that the persuasive eloquence with which

he hoped soon to play upon the convictions of jurymen at his own sweet

will, had not begotten even communicativenes, not to say confidence, in

the mind of a parson who knew himself fooled,--and partly that it

gave him cause to doubt how far it might be safe to urge his attack

in another and to him more important quarter. He had a passion for

convincing people, this Hercules of the new world. He sauntered slowly

back to his aunt’s, husbanding his cigar a little, and looking up at

the moon now and then,--not to admire the marvel of her shining, but to

think yet again what a fit type of an effete superstition she was, in

that she retained her power of fascination even in death.

Wingfold walked slowly away, with his eyes on the ground gliding from

under his footsteps. It was only eleven o’clock, but this the oldest

part of the town seemed already asleep. They had not met a single person

on their way, and hardly seen a lighted window. But he felt unwilling to

go home, which at first he was fain to attribute to his having drunk

a little more wine than was good for him, whence this feverishness and

restlessness so strange to his experience. In the churchyard, on the

other side of which his lodging lay, he turned aside from the flagged

path and sat down upon a gravestone, where he was hardly seated ere he

began to discover that it was something else than the wine which had

made him feel so uncomfortable. What an objectionable young fellow that

Bascombe was!--presuming and arrogant to a degree rare, he hoped, even

in a profession for which insolence was a qualification. What rendered

it worse was that his good nature--and indeed every one of his gifts,

which were all of the popular order--was subservient to an assumption

not only self-satisfied but obtrusive!--And yet--and yet--the

objectionable character of his self-constituted judge being clear as the

moon to the mind of the curate, was there not something in what he

had said? This much remained undeniable at least, that when the very

existence of the church was denounced as a humbug in the hearing of one

who ate her bread, and was her pledged servant, his very honesty had

kept that man from speaking a word in her behalf! Something must be

wrong somewhere: was it in him or in the church? In him assuredly,

whether in her or not. For had he not been unable to utter the simple

assertion that he did believe the things which, as the mouthpiece of

the church, he had been speaking in the name of the truth every

Sunday--would again speak the day after to-morrow? And now the point

was--WHY could he not say he believed them? He had never consciously

questioned them; he did not question them now; and yet, when a forward,

overbearing young infidel of a lawyer put it to him--plump--as if he

were in the witness-box, or rather indeed in the dock--did he believe a

word of what the church had set him to teach?--a strange something--was

it honesty?--if so, how dishonest had he not hitherto been?--was it

diffidence?--if so, how presumptuous his position in that church!--this

nondescript something seemed to raise a “viewless obstruction” in his

throat, and, having thus rendered him the first moment incapable

of speaking out like a man, had taught him the next--had it?--to

quibble--“like a priest” the lawyer-fellow would doubtless have said! He

must go home and study Paley--or perhaps Butler’s Analogy--he owed the

church something, and ought to be able to strike a blow for her. Or

would not Leighton be better? Or a more modern writer--say Neander, or

Coleridge, or perhaps Dr. Liddon? There were thousands able to fit

him out for the silencing of such foolish men as this Bascombe of the

shirt-front!

Wingfold found himself filled with contempt, but the next moment was

not sure whether this Bascombe or one Wingfold were the more legitimate

object of it. One thing was undeniable--his friends HAD put him into the

priest’s office, and he had yielded to go, that he might eat a piece

of bread. He had no love for it except by fits, when the beauty of an

anthem, or the composition of a collect, awoke in him a faint consenting

admiration, or a weak, responsive sympathy. Did he not, indeed,

sometimes despise himself, and that pretty heartily, for earning his

bread by work which any pious old woman could do better than he? True,

he attended to his duties; not merely “did church,” but his endeavour

also that all things should be done decently and in order. All the

same it remained a fact that if Barrister Bascombe were to stand up and

assert in full congregation--as no doubt he was perfectly prepared to

do--that there was no God anywhere in the universe, the Rev. Thomas

Wingfold could not, on the church’s part, prove to anybody that there

was;--dared not, indeed, so certain would he be of discomfiture, advance

a single argument on his side of the question. Was it even HIS side of

the question? Could he say he believed there was a God? Or was not this

all he knew--that there was a church of England, which paid him

for reading public prayers to a God in whom the congregation--and

himself--were supposed by some to believe, by others, Bascombe, for

instance, not?

These reflections were not pleasant, especially with Sunday so near.

For what if there were hundreds, yes, thousands of books, triumphantly

settling every question which an over-seething and ill-instructed brain

might by any chance suggest,--what could it boot?--how was a poor finite

mortal, with much the ordinary faculty and capacity, and but a

very small stock already stored, to set about reading, studying,

understanding, mastering, appropriating the contents of those thousands

of volumes necessary to the arming of him who, without pretending

himself the mighty champion to seek the dragon in his den, might yet

hope not to let the loathly worm swallow him, armour and all, at

one gulp in the highway? Add to this that--thought of all most

dismayful!--he had himself to convince first, the worst dragon of all to

kill, for bare honesty’s sake, in his own field; while, all the time

he was arming and fighting--like the waves of the flowing tide in

a sou’-wester, Sunday came in upon Sunday, roaring on his flat,

defenceless shore, Sunday behind Sunday rose towering, in awful

perspective, away to the verge of an infinite horizon--Sunday after

Sunday of dishonesty and sham--yes, hypocrisy, far worse than any

idolatry. To begin now, and in such circumstances, to study the

evidences of Christianity, were about as reasonable as to send a man,

whose children were crying for their dinner, off to China to make his

fortune!

He laughed the idea to scorn, discovered that a gravestone in a

November midnight was a cold chair for study, rose, stretched himself

disconsolately, almost despairingly, looked long at the persistent

solidity of the dark church and the waving line of its age-slackened

ridge, which, like a mountain-range, shot up suddenly in the tower and

ceased--then turning away left the houses of the dead crowded all about

the house of the resurrection. At the farther gate he turned yet again,

and gazed another moment on the tower. Towards the sky it towered, and

led his gaze upward. There still soared, yet rested, the same quiet

night with its delicate heaps of transparent blue, its cool-glowing

moon, its steely stars, and its something he did not understand. He went

home a little quieter of heart, as if he had heard from afar something

sweet and strange.

CHAPTER VII.

THE COUSINS.

George Bascombe was a peculiar development of the present century,

almost of the present generation. In the last century, beyond a doubt,

the description of such a man would have been incredible. I do not mean

that he was the worse or the better for that. There are types both of

good and of evil which to the past would have been incredible because

unintelligible.

It is very hard sometimes for a tolerably honest man, as we have just

seen in the case of Wingfold, to say what he believes, and it ought

to be yet harder to say what another man does not believe; therefore I

shall presume no farther concerning Bascombe in this respect than to say

that the thing he SEEMED most to believe was that he had a mission to

destroy the beliefs of everybody else. Whence he derived this mission he

would not have thought a reasonable question--would have answered that,

if any man knew any truth unknown to another, understood any truth

better, or could present it more clearly than another, the truth itself

was his commission of apostleship. And his stand was indubitably a firm

one. Only there was the question--whether his presumed commission was

verily truth or no. It must be allowed that a good deal turns upon that.

According to the judgment of some men who thought they knew him,

Bascombe was as yet--I will not say incapable of distinguishing, but

careless of the distinction between--not a fact and a law, perhaps, but

a law and a truth. They said also that he inveighed against the beliefs

of other people, without having ever seen more than a distorted shadow

of those beliefs--some of them he was not capable of seeing, they

said--only capable of denying. Now while he would have been perfectly

justified, they said, in asserting that he saw no truth in the things he

denied, was he justifiable in concluding that his not seeing a thing was

a proof of its non-existence--anything more, in fact, than a presumption

against its existence? or in denouncing every man who said he believed

this or that which Bascombe did not believe, as either a knave or

a fool, if not both in one? He would, they said, judge anybody--a

Shakespeare, a Bacon, a Milton--without a moment’s hesitation or a

quiver of reverence--judge men who, beside him, were as the living

ocean to a rose-diamond. If he was armed in honesty, the rivets were of

self-satisfaction. The suit, they allowed, was adamantine, unpierceable.

That region of a man’s nature which has to do with the unknown was in

Bascombe shut off by a wall without chink or cranny; he was unaware of

its existence. He had come out of the darkness, and was going back

into the darkness; all that lay between, plain and clear, he had to do

with--nothing more. He could not present to himself the idea of a man

who found it impossible to live without some dealings with the supernal.

To him a man’s imagination was of no higher calling than to amuse him

with its vagaries. He did not know, apparently, that Imagination had

been the guide to all the physical discoveries which he worshipped,

therefore could not reason that perhaps she might be able to carry a

glimmering light even into the forest of the supersensible.

How far he was original in the views he propounded, will, to those

who understand the times of which I write, be plain enough. The lively

reception of another man’s doctrine, especially if it comes over water

or across a few ages of semi-oblivion, and has to be gathered with

occasional help from a dictionary, raises many a man, in his own esteem,

to the same rank with its first propounder; after which he will propound

it so heartily himself as to forget the difference, and love it as his

own child.

It may seem strange that the son of a clergyman should take such a part

in the world’s affairs, but one who observes will discover that, at

college at least, the behaviour of sons of clergymen resembles in

general as little as that of any, and less than that of most, the

behaviour enjoined by the doctrines their fathers have to teach.

The cause of this is matter of consideration for those fathers. In

Bascombe’s case, it must be mentioned also that, instead of taking

freedom from prejudice as a portion of the natural accomplishment of a

gentleman, he prided himself upon it, and THEREFORE would often go dead

against the things presumed to be held by THE CLOTH, long before he had

begun to take his position as an iconoclast.

Lest I should, however, tire my reader with the delineations of a

character not of the most interesting, I shall, for the present, only

add that Bascombe had persuaded himself, and without much difficulty,

that he was one of the prophets of a new order of things. At Cambridge

he had been so regarded by a few who had lauded him as a mighty foe to

humbug--and in some true measure he deserved the praise. Since then he

had found a larger circle, and had even radiated of his light, such, as

it was, from the centres of London editorial offices. But all I have to

do with now is the fact that he had grown desirous to add his cousin,

Helen Lingard, to the number of those who believed in him, and over

whom, therefore, he exercised a prophet’s influence.

No doubt it added much to the attractiveness of the intellectual game

that the hunt was on the home grounds of such a proprietress as Helen--a

handsome, a gifted, and, above all, a ladylike young woman. To do

Bascombe justice, the fact that she was an heiress also had very little

weight in the matter. If he had ever had any thought of marrying her,

that thought was not consciously present to him when first he became

aware of his wish to convert her to his views of life. But, although he

was not in love with her, he admired her, and believed he saw in her one

that resembled himself.

As to Helen, although she was no more conscious of cause of

self-dissatisfaction than her cousin, she was not therefore positively

self-satisfied like him. For that her mind was not active enough.

If it seem, as it may, to some of my readers, difficult to believe that

she should have come to her years without encountering any questions,

giving life to any aspirations, or even forming any opinions that could

rightly be called her own, I would remind them that she had always had

good health, and that her intellectual faculties had been kept in full

and healthy exercise, nor had once afforded the suspicion of a tendency

towards artistic utterance in any direction. She was no mere dabbler

in anything: in music, for instance, she had studied thorough bass, and

studied it well; yet her playing was such as I have already described

it. She understood perspective, and could copy an etching, in pen and

ink, to a hair’s-breadth, yet her drawing was hard and mechanical. She

was pretty much at home in Euclid, and thoroughly enjoyed a geometric

relation, but had never yet shown her English master the slightest

pleasure in an analogy, or the smallest sympathy with any poetry higher

than such as very properly delights schoolboys. Ten thousand things

she knew without wondering at one of them. Any attempt to rouse her

admiration, she invariably received with quiet intelligence but no

response. Yet her drawing-master was convinced there lay a large soul

asleep somewhere below the calm grey morning of that wide-awake yet

reposeful intelligence.

As far as she knew--only she had never thought anything about it--she

was in harmony with creation animate and inanimate, and for what might

or might not be above creation, or at the back, or the heart, or the

mere root of it, how could she think about a something the idea of

which had never yet been presented to her by love or philosophy, or even

curiosity? As for any influence from the public offices of religion, a

contented soul may glide through them all for a long life, unstruck to

the last, buoyant and evasive as a bee amongst hailstones. And now her

cousin, unsolicited, was about to assume, if she should permit him, the

unspiritual direction of her being, so that she need never be troubled

from the quarter of the unknown.

Mrs. Ramshorn’s house had formerly been the manor-house, and, although

it now stood in an old street, with only a few yards of ground between

it and the road, it had a large and ancient garden behind it. A large

garden of any sort is valuable, but an ancient garden is invaluable, and

this one had retained a very antique loveliness. The quaint memorials

of its history lived on into the new, changed, unsympathetic time, and

stood there, aged, modest, and unabashed. Yet not one of the family

had ever cared for it on the ground of its old-fashionedness; its

preservation was owing merely to the fact that their gardener was

blessed with a wholesome stupidity rendering him incapable of unlearning

what his father, who had been gardener there before him, had had

marvellous difficulty in teaching him. We do not half appreciate the

benefits to the race that spring from honest dulness. The CLEVER people

are the ruin of everything.

Into this garden, Bascombe walked the next morning, after breakfast,

and Helen, who, next to the smell of a fir-wood fire, honestly liked the

odour of a good cigar, spying him from her balcony, which was the roof

of the veranda, where she was trimming the few remaining chrysanthemums

that stood outside the window of her room, ran down the little wooden

stair that led from it to the garden, and joined him. Nothing could just

at present have been more to his mind.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GARDEN.

“Take a cigar, Helen?” said George.

“No, thank you,” answered Helen; “I like it diluted.”

“I don’t see why ladies should not have things strong as men.”

“Not if they don’t want them. You can’t enjoy everything--I mean, one

can’t have the strong and the delicate both at once. I don’t believe a

smoker can have the same pleasure in smelling a rose that I have.”

“Isn’t it a pity we never can compare sensations?”

“I don’t think it matters much: everyone would have to keep to his own

after all.”

“That’s good, Helen! If ever man try to humbug you, he will find he

has lost his stirrups. If only there were enough like you left in this

miserable old hulk of a creation!”

It was an odd thing that when in the humour of finding fault, Bascombe

would not unfrequently speak of the cosmos as a creation. He was himself

unaware of the curious fact.

“You seem to have a standing quarrel with the creation, George! Yet one

might think you had as little ground as most people to complain of your

portion in it,” said Helen.

“Well, you know, I don’t complain for myself. I don’t pretend to think

I am specially ill-used. But I am not everybody. And then there’s such a

lot of born-fools in it!”

“If they are born-fools they can’t help it.”

“That may be; only it makes it none the pleasanter for other people;

but, unfortunately, they are not the only or the worst sort of fools.

For one born-fool there are a thousand wilful ones. For one man that

will honestly face an honest argument, there are ten thousand that will

dishonestly shirk it. There’s that curate-fellow now--Wingfold I think

aunt called him--look at him now!”

“I can’t see much in him to rouse indignation,” said Helen. “He seems a

very inoffensive man.”

“I don’t call it inoffensive when a man sells himself to the keeping up

of a system that----”

Here Bascombe checked himself, remembering that a sudden attack upon

what was, at least, the more was the pity, a time-honoured system, might

rouse a woman’s prejudices; and as Helen had already listened to a large

amount of undermining remark without perceiving the direction of his

tunnels, he resolved, before venturing an open assault, to make sure

that those prejudices stood, lightly borne, over an abyss of seething

objection. He had had his experiences as the prophet-pioneer of glad

tidings to the nations, and had before now, although such weakness

he could not anticipate in Helen, seen one whom he considered a most

promising pupil, turned suddenly away in a storm of terror and disgust.

“What a folly is it now,” he instantly resumed, leaving the general and

attacking a particular, “to think to make people good by promises and

threats--promises of a heaven that would bore the dullest among them

to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of which, if only half

conceived, would be enough to paralyse every nerve of healthy action in

the human system!”

“All nations have believed in a future state, either of reward or

punishment,” objected Helen.

“Mere Brocken-spectres of their own approbation or disapprobation of

themselves. And whither has it brought the race?”

“What then would you substitute for it, George?”

“Why substitute anything? Ought not men be good to one another because

they are made up of ones and others? Do you or I need threats and

promises to make us kind? And what right have we to judge others worse

than ourselves? Mutual compassion,” he went on, blowing out a mouthful

of smoke and then swelling his big chest with a huge lungsful of air,

“might be sufficient to teach poor ephemerals kindness and consideration

enough to last their time.”

“But how would you bring such reflections to bear?” asked Helen,

pertinently.

“I would reason thus: You must consider that you are but a part of the

whole, and that whatever you do to hurt the whole, or injure any of its

parts, will return upon you who form one of those parts.”

“How would that influence the man whose favourite amusement is to beat

his wife!”

“Not at all, I grant you. But that man is what he is from being born and

bred under a false and brutal system. Having deluged his delicate brain

with the poisonous fumes of adulterated liquor, and so roused all the

terrors of a phantom-haunted imagination, he sees hostile powers above

watching for his fall, and fiery ruin beneath gaping to receive him, and

in pure despair acts like the madman the priests and the publicans

have made him. Helen,” continued Bascombe with solemnity, regarding her

fixedly, “to deliver the race from the horrors of such falsehoods, which

by no means operate only on the vulgar and brutal, for to how many

of the most refined and delicate of human beings are not their lives

rendered bitter by the evil suggestions of lying systems--I care not

what they are called--philosophy, religion, society, I care not?--to

deliver men, I say, from such ghouls of the human brain, were indeed

to have lived! and in the consciousness of having spent his life in the

slaying of such dragons, a man may well go from the nameless past into

the nameless future rejoicing, careless even if his poor length of days

be shortened by his labours to leave blessing behind him, and, full of

courage even in the moment of final dissolution, cast her mockery back

into the face of mocking Life, and die her enemy, and the friend of

Death!”

George’s language was a little confused. Perhaps he mingled his ideas

a little for Helen’s sake--or rather for obscurity’s sake. Anyhow,

the mournful touch in it was not his own, but taken from the poems of

certain persons whose opinions resembled his, but floated on the surface

of mighty and sad hearts. Tall, stately, comfortable Helen walked

composedly by his side, softly shared his cigar, and thought what a

splendid pleader he would make. Perhaps to her it sounded rather finer

than it was, for its tone of unselfishness, the aroma of self-devotion

that floated about it, pleased and attracted her. Was not here a youth

in the prime of being and the dawn of success, handsome, and smoking

the oldest of Havannahs, who, so far from being enamoured of his own

existence, was anxious and careful about that of less favoured mortals,

for whose welfare indeed he was willing to sacrifice his life?--nothing

less could be what he meant. And how fine he looked as he said it, with

his head erect, and his nostrils quivering like those of a horse! For

his honesty, that was self-evident!

Perhaps, had she been capable of looking into it, the self-evident

honesty might have resolved itself into this--that he thoroughly

believed in himself; that he meant what he said; and that he offered her

nothing he did not prize and cleave to as his own.

To one who had read Darwin, and had chanced to see them as they walked

in their steady, stately young life among the ancient cedars and clipped

yews of the garden, with the rags and tatters of the ruined summer

hanging over and around them, they must have looked as fine an instance

of natural selection as the world had to show. And now in truth for

the first time, with any shadow of purpose, that is, did the thought of

Helen as a wife occur to Bascombe. She listened so well, was so ready

to take what he presented to her, was evidently so willing to become

a pupil, that he began to say to himself that here was the very woman

made--no, not made, that implied a maker--but for him, without the

MADE; that is, if ever he should bring himself by marriage to limit the

freedom to which man, the crown of the world, the blossom of nature,

the cauliflower of the spine, was predestined or doomed, without will in

himself or beyond himself, from an eternity of unthinking matter,

ever producing what was better than itself in the prolific darkness of

non-intent.

CHAPTER IX.

THE PARK.

At the bottom of Mrs. Ramshorn’s garden was a deep sunk fence, which

allowed a large meadow, a fragment of what had once been the manor-park,

to belong, so far as the eye was concerned, to the garden. Nor was this

all, for in the sunk fence was a door with a little tunnel, by which

they could pass at once from the garden to the meadow. So, the day being

wonderfully fine, Bascombe proposed to his cousin a walk in the park,

the close-paling of which, with a small door in it, whereto Mrs.

Ramshorn had the privilege of a key, was visible on the other side of

the meadow. The two keys had but to be fetched from the house, and in a

few minutes they were in the park. The turf was dry, the air was still,

and although the woods were very silent, and looked mournfully bare,

the grass drew nearer to the roots of the trees, and the sunshine filled

them with streaks of gold, blending lovelily with the bright green of

the moss that patched the older stems. Neither horses nor dogs say to

themselves, I suppose, that the sunshine makes them glad, yet both are

happier, after the rules of equine and canine existence, on a bright

day: neither Helen nor George could have understood a poem of Keats--not

to say Wordsworth--(I do not mean they would not have fancied they

did)--and yet the soul of nature that dwelt in these common shows did

not altogether fail of influence upon them.

“I wonder what the birds do with themselves all the winter,” said Helen.

“Eat berries, and make the best of it,” answered George.

“I mean what becomes of them all. We see so few of them.”

“About as many as you see in summer. Because you hear them you fancy you

see them.”

“But there is so little to hide them in winter.”

“Little is wanted to hide our dusky creatures.”

“They must have a hard time of it in frost and snow.”

“Oh! I don’t know,” returned George. “They enjoy life on the whole, I

believe. It ain’t such a very bad sort of a world as some people would

have it. Nature is cruel enough in some of her arrangements, it can’t be

denied. She don’t scruple to carry out her plans. It is nothing to her

that for the life of one great monster of a high-priest, millions upon

millions of submissive little fishes should be sacrificed; and then if

anybody come within the teeth of her machinery, don’t she mangle

him finely--with her fevers and her agues and her convulsions and

consumptions and what not? But still, barring her own necessities, and

the consequences of man’s ignorance and foolhardiness, she is on the

whole rather a good-natured old woman, and scatters a deal of tolerably

fair enjoyment around her.”

“One WOULD think the birds must be happy in summer, at least, to hear

them sing,” corroborated Helen.

“Yes, or to see them stripping a hawthorn bush in winter--always

provided the cat or the hawk don’t get hold of them. With that nature

does not trouble herself. Well, it’s soon over--with all of us,

and that’s a comfort. If men would only get rid of their cats and

hawks,--such as the fancy for instance, that all their suffering comes

of the will of a malignant power! That is the kind of thing that makes

the misery of the world!”

“I don’t quite see----” began Helen.

“We were talking about the birds in winter,” interrupted George, careful

not to swell too suddenly any of the air-bags with which he would float

Helen’s belief. He knew wisely, and he knew how, to leave a hint to work

while it was yet not half understood. By the time it was understood, it

would have grown a little familiar: the supposed pup when it turned out

a cub, would not be so terrible as if it had presented itself at once as

leonate.

And so they wandered across the park, talking easily.

“They’ve got on a good way since I was here last,” said George, as they

came in sight of the new house the new earl was building. “But they

don’t seem much in a hurry with it either.”

“Aunt says it is twenty years since the foundations were laid by the

uncle of the present earl,” said Helen; “and then for some reason or

other the thing was dropped.”

“Was there no house on the place before?”

“Oh! yes--not much of a house, though.”

“And they pulled it down, I suppose.”

“No; it stands there still.”

“Where?”

“Down in the hollow there--over those trees--about the worst place they

could have built in. Surely you have seen it! Poldie and I used to run

all over it.”

“No, I never saw it. Was it empty then?”

“Yes, or almost. I can remember some little attention paid to the

garden, but none to the house. It is just falling slowly to pieces.

Would you like to see it?”

“That I should,” returned Bascombe, who was always ready for any new

impression on his sensorium, and away they went to look at the old

house of Glaston as it was called, after some greatly older and probably

fortified place.

In the hollow all the water of the park gathered to a lake before

finding its way to the river Lythe. This lake was at the bottom of the

old garden, and the house at the top of it. The garden was walled on

the two sides, and the walls ran right down to the lake. There were

wonderful legends current amongst the children of Glaston concerning

that lake, its depth, and the creatures in it; and one terrible story,

which had been made a ballad of, about a lady drowned in a sack, whose

ghost might still be seen when the moon was old, haunting the gardens

and the house. Hence it came that none of them went near it, except

those few whose appetites for adventure now and then grew keen enough

to prevent their imaginations from rousing more fear than supplied the

proper relish of danger. The house itself even those few never dared to

enter.

Not so had it been with Helen and Leopold. The latter had imagination

enough to receive everything offered, but Helen was the leader, and she

had next to none. In her childhood she had heard the tales alluded to

from her nurses, but she had been to school since, and had learned not

to believe them; and certainly she was not one to be frightened at what

she did not believe. So when Leopold came in the holidays, the place

was one of their favoured haunts, and they knew every cubic yard in the

house.

“Here,” said Helen to her cousin, as she opened the door in a little

closet, and showed a dusky room which had no window but a small one high

up in the wall of a back staircase, “here is one room into which I never

could get Poldie without the greatest trouble. I gave it up at last, he

always trembled so till he got out again. I will show you such a curious

place at the other end of it.”

She led the way to a closet similar to that by which they had entered,

and directed Bascombe how to raise a trap which filled all the floor

of it so that it did not show. Under the trap was a sort of well, big

enough to hold three upon emergency.

“If only they could contrive to breathe,” said George. “It looks ugly.

If it had but a brain and a tongue it could tell tales.”

“Come,” said Helen. “I don’t know how it is, but I don’t like the look

of it myself now. Let us get into the open air again.”

Ascending from the hollow, and passing through a deep belt of trees that

surrounded it, they came again to the open park, and by-and-by reached

the road that led from the lodge to the new building, upon which they

presently encountered a strange couple.

CHAPTER X.

THE DWARFS.

The moment they had passed them, George turned to his cousin with a

countenance which bore moral indignation mingled with disgust. The

healthy instincts of the elect of his race were offended by the sight of

such physical failures, such mockeries of humanity as those.

The woman was little if anything over four feet in height. She was

crooked, had a high shoulder, and walked like a crab, one leg being

shorter than the other. Her companion walked quite straight, with a

certain appearance of dignity which he neither assumed nor could have

avoided, and which gave his gait the air of a march. He was not an inch

taller than the woman, had broad, square shoulders, pigeon-breast,

and invisible neck. He was twice her age, and they seemed father and

daughter. They heard his breathing, loud with asthma, as they went by.

“Poor things!” said Helen, with cold kindness.

“It is shameful!” said George, in a tone of righteous anger. “Such

creatures have no right to existence. The horrid manakin!”

“But, George!” said Helen, in expostulation, “the poor wretch can’t help

his deformity.”

“No; but what right had he to marry and perpetuate such odious misery!”

“You are too hasty: the young woman is his niece.”

“She ought to have been strangled the moment she was born--for the sake

of humanity. Monsters ought not to live.”

“Unfortunately they have all got mothers,” said Helen; and something in

her face made him fear he had gone too far.

“Don’t mistake me, dear Helen,” he said. “I would neither starve

nor drown them after they had reached the faculty of resenting such

treatment--of the justice of which,” he added, smiling, “I am afraid it

would be hard to convince them. But such people actually marry--I

have known cases,--and that ought to be provided against by suitable

enactments and penalties.”

“And so,” rejoined Helen, “because they are unhappy already, you would

heap unhappiness upon them?”

“Now, Helen, you must not be unfair to me any more than to your

hunchbacks. It is the good of the many I seek, and surely that is better

than the good of the few.”

“What I object to is, that it should be at the expense of the few--who

are least able to bear it.”

“The expense is trifling,” said Bascombe. “Grant that it would be better

for society that no such--or rather put it this way: grant that it would

be well for each individual that goes to make up society that he were

neither deformed, sickly, nor idiotic, and you mean the same that I do.

A given space of territory under given conditions will always maintain a

certain number of human beings; therefore such a law as I propose would

not mean that the number drawing the breath of heaven should, to take

the instance before us in illustration, be two less, but that a certain

two of them should not be such as he or she who passed now, creatures

whose existence is a burden to them, but such as you and I, Helen,

who may say without presumption that we are no disgrace to Nature’s

handicraft.”

Helen was not sensitive. She neither blushed nor cast down her eyes. But

his tenets, thus expounded, had nothing very repulsive in them so far as

she saw, and she made no further objection to them.

As they walked up the garden again, through the many lingering signs

of a more stately if less luxurious existence than that of their

generation, she was calmly listening to a lecture on the ground of law,

namely, the resignation of certain personal rights for the securing of

other and more important ones: she understood, was mildly interested,

and entirely satisfied.

They seated themselves in the summer-house, a little wooden room

under the down-sloping boughs of a huge cedar, and pursued their

conversation--or rather Bascombe pursued his monologue. A lively girl

would in all probability have been bored to death by him, but Helen

was not a lively girl, and was not bored at all. Ere they went into the

house she had heard, amongst a hundred other things of wisdom, his views

concerning crime and punishment--with which, good and bad, true

and false, I shall not trouble my reader, except in regard to one

point--that of the obligation to punish. Upon this point he was severe.

No person, he said, ought to allow any weakness of pity to prevent him

from bringing to punishment the person who broke the laws upon which the

well-being of the community depended. A man must remember that the good

of the whole, and not the fate of the individual, was to be regarded.

It was altogether a notable sort of tête-à-tête between two such perfect

specimens of the race, and as at length they entered the house, they

professed to each other to have much enjoyed their walk.

Holding the opinions he did, Bascombe was in one thing inconsistent: he

went to “divine service” on the Sunday with his aunt and cousin--not to

humour Helen’s prejudices, but those of Mrs. Ramshorn, who, belonging,

as I have said, to the profession, had strong opinions as to the

wickedness of not going to church. It was of no use, he said to himself,

trying to upset her ideas, for to succeed would only be to make her

miserable, and his design was to make the race happy. In the grand old

Abbey, therefore, they heard together morning prayers, the Litany, and

the Communion, all in one, after a weariful and lazy modern custom not

yet extinct, and then a dull, sensible sermon, short, and tolerably well

read, on the duty of forgiveness of injuries.

I dare say it did most of the people present a little good, undefinable

as the faint influences of starlight, to sit under that “high embowed

roof,” within that vast artistic isolation, through whose mighty

limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to feel the awful

infinitude of the parent space out of which it is scooped. I dare also

say that the tones of the mellow old organ spoke to something in many

of the listeners that lay deeper far than the plummet of their

self-knowledge had ever sounded. I think also that the prayers, the

reading of which, in respect of intelligence, was admirable, were not

only regarded as sacred utterances, but felt to be soothing influences

by not a few of those who made not the slightest effort to follow them

with their hearts; and I trust that on the whole their church-going

tended rather to make them better than to harden them. But as to the

main point, the stirring up of the children of the Highest to lay hold

of the skirts of their Father’s robe, the waking of the individual

conscience to say I WILL ARISE, and the strengthening of the captive

Will to break its bonds and stand free in the name of the eternal

creating Freedom--for nothing of that was there any special provision.

This belonged, in the nature of things, to the sermon, in which, if

anywhere, the voice of the indwelling Spirit might surely be heard--out

of his holy temple, if indeed that be the living soul of man, as St.

Paul believed; but there was no sign that the preacher regarded his

office as having any such end, although in his sermon lingered the

rudimentary tokens that such must have been the original intent of

pulpit-utterance.

On the way home, Bascombe made some objections to the discourse, partly

to show his aunt that he had been attending. He admitted that one might

forgive and forget what did not come within the scope of the law, but,

as he had said to Helen before, a man was bound, he said, to punish the

wrong which through him affected the community.

“George,” said his aunt, “I differ from you there. Nobody ought to go to

the law to punish an injury. I would forgive ever so many before I would

run the risk of the law. But as to FORGETTING an injury--some injuries

at least--no, that I never would!--And I don’t believe, let the young

man say what he will, that that is required of anyone.”

Helen said nothing. She had no enemies to forgive, no wrongs worth

remembering, and was not interested in the question. She thought it a

very good sermon indeed.

When Bascombe left for London in the morning, he carried with him the

lingering rustle of silk, the odour of lavender, and a certain blueness,

not of the sky, which seemed to have something behind it, as never did

the sky to him. He had never met woman so worthy of being his mate,

either as regarded the perfection of her form, or the hidden development

of her brain--evident in her capacity for the reception of truth, as his

own cousin, Helen Lingard. Might not the relationship account for the

fact?

Helen thought nothing to correspond. She considered George a fine

manly fellow. What bold and original ideas he had about everything! Her

brother was a baby to him! But then Leopold was such a love of a boy!

Such eyes and such a smile were not to be seen on this side the world.

Helen liked her cousin, was attached to her aunt, but loved her brother

Leopold, and loved nobody else. His Hindoo mother, high of caste, had

given him her lustrous eyes and pearly smile, which, the first moment

she saw him, won his sister’s heart. He was then but eight years old,

and she but eleven. Since then, he had been brought up by his father’s

elder brother, who had the family estate in Yorkshire, but he had spent

part of all his holidays with her, and they often wrote to each other.

Of late indeed his letters had not been many, and a rumour had reached

her that he was not doing quite satisfactorily at Cambridge, but she

explained it away to the full contentment of her own heart, and went on

building such castles as her poor aerolithic skill could command, with

Leopold ever and always as the sharer of her self-expansion.

CHAPTER XI.

THE CURATE AT HOME.

If we could arrive at the feelings of a fish of the northern ocean

around which the waters suddenly rose to tropical temperature, and

swarmed with strange forms of life, uncouth and threatening, we should

have a fair symbol of the mental condition in which Thomas Wingfold now

found himself. The spiritual fluid in which his being floated had become

all at once more potent, and he was in consequence uncomfortable. A

certain intermittent stinging, as if from the flashes of some moral

electricity, had begun to pass in various directions through the crude

and chaotic mass he called himself, and he felt strangely restless. It

never occurred to him--as how should it?--that he might have commenced

undergoing the most marvellous of all changes,--one so marvellous,

indeed, that for a man to foreknow its result or understand what he was

passing through, would be more strange than that a caterpillar should

recognise in the rainbow-winged butterfly hovering over the flower

at whose leaf he was gnawing, the perfected idea of his own potential

self--I mean the change of being born again. Nor were the symptoms such

as would necessarily have suggested, even to a man experienced in the

natural history of the infinite, that the process had commenced.

A restless night followed his reflections in the churchyard, and he did

not wake at all comfortable. Not that ever he had been in the way of

feeling comfortable. To him life had not been a land flowing with milk

and honey. He had had few smiles, and not many of those grasps of the

hand which let a man know another man is near him in the battle--for had

it not been something of a battle, how could he have come to the age of

six-and-twenty without being worse than he was? He would not have said:

“All these have I kept from my youth up;” but I can say that for several

of them he had shown fight, although only One knew anything of it. This

morning, then, it was not merely that he did not feel comfortable: he

was consciously uncomfortable. Things were getting too hot for him. That

infidel fellow had poked several most awkward questions at him--yes,

into him, and a good many more had in him--self arisen to meet them.

Usually he lay a little while before he came to himself; but this

morning he came to himself at once, and not liking the interview, jumped

out of bed as if he had hoped to leave himself there behind him.

He had always scorned lying, until one day, when still a boy at school,

he suddenly found that he had told a lie, after which he hated it--yet

now, if he was to believe--ah! whom? did not the positive fellow and his

own conscience say the same thing?--his profession, his very life was

a lie! the very bread he ate grew on the rank fields of falsehood!--No,

no; it was absurd! it could not be! What had he done to find himself

damned to such a depth? Yet the thing must be looked to. He batht

himself without remorse and never even shivered, though the water in his

tub was bitterly cold, dressed with more haste than precision, hurried

over his breakfast, neglected his newspaper, and took down a volume

of early church history. But he could not read: the thing was

hopeless--utterly. With the wolves of doubt and the jackals of shame

howling at his heels, how could he start for a thousand-mile race! For

God’s sake give him a weapon to turn and face them with! Evidence! all

of it that was to be had, was but such as one man received, another

man refused; and the popular acceptance was worth no more in respect of

Christianity than of Mahometanism, for how many had given the subject

at all better consideration than himself? And there was Sunday with its

wolves and jackals, and but a hedge between! He did not so much mind

reading the prayers: he was not accountable for what was in them,

although it was bad enough to stand up and read them. Happy thing he was

not a dissenter, for then he would have had to pretend to pray from his

own soul, which would have been too horrible! But there was the sermon!

That at least was supposed to contain, or to be presented as containing,

his own sentiments. Now what were his sentiments? For the life of him

he could not tell. Had he ANY sentiments, any opinions, any beliefs, any

unbeliefs? He had plenty of sermons--old, yellow, respectable sermons,

not lithographed, neither composed by mind nor copied out by hand

unknown, but in the neat writing of his old D.D. uncle, so legible that

he never felt it necessary to read them over beforehand--just saw that

he had the right one. A hundred and fifty-seven such sermons, the odd

one for the year that began on a Sunday, of unquestionable orthodoxy,

had his kind old uncle left him in his will, with the feeling probably

that he was not only setting him up in sermons for life, but giving him

a fair start as well in the race of which a stall in some high cathedral

was the goal. For his own part he had never made a sermon, at least

never one he had judged worth preaching to a congregation. He had rather

a high idea, he thought, of preaching, and these sermons of his uncle

he considered really excellent. Some of them, however, were altogether

doctrinal, some very polemical: of such he must now beware. He would see

of what kind was the next in order; he would read it and make sure it

contained nothing he was not, in some degree at least, prepared to hold

his face to and defend--if he could not absolutely swear he believed it

purely true.

He did as resolved. The first he took up was in defence of the

Athanasian creed! That would not do. He tried another. That was upon the

Inspiration of the Scriptures. He glanced through it--found Moses on a

level with St. Paul, and Jonah with St. John, and doubted greatly. There

might be a sense--but--! No, he would not meddle with it. He tried a

third: that was on the Authority of the Church. It would not do. He had

read each of all these sermons, at least once, to a congregation, with

perfect composure and following indifference, if not peace of mind, but

now he could not come on one with which he was even in sympathy--not

to say one of which he was certain that it was more true than false. At

last he took up the odd one--that which could come into use but once in

a week of years--and this was the sermon Bascombe heard and commented

upon. Having read it over, and found nothing to compromise him with his

conscience, which was like an irritable man trying to find his way in a

windy wood by means of a broken lantern, he laid all the rest aside and

felt a little relieved.

Wingfold had never neglected the private duty of a clergyman in regard

of morning and evening devotions, but was in the habit of dressing and

undressing his soul with the help of certain chosen contents of the

prayer-book--a somewhat circuitous mode of communicating with Him who

was so near him,--that is, if St. Paul was right in saying that he

lived, and moved, and was, IN Him; but that Saturday he knelt by his

bedside at noon, and began to pray or try to pray as he had never

prayed or tried to pray before. The perplexed man cried out within the

clergyman, and pressed for some acknowledgment from God of the being he

had made.

But--was it strange to tell? or if strange, was it not the most natural

result nevertheless?--almost the same moment he began to pray in this

truer fashion, the doubt rushed up in him like a torrent-spring from the

fountains of the great deep--Was there--could there be a God at all? a

real being who might actually hear his prayer? In this crowd of houses

and shops and churches, amidst buying and selling, and ploughing and

praising and backbiting, this endless pursuit of ends and of means to

ends, while yet even the wind that blew where it listed blew under

laws most fixed, and the courses of the stars were known to a

hair’s-breadth,--was there--could there be a silent invisible God

working his own will in it all? Was there a driver to that chariot

whose multitudinous horses seemed tearing away from the pole in all

directions? and was he indeed, although invisible and inaudible, guiding

that chariot, sure as the flight of a comet, straight to its goal? Or

was there a soul to that machine whose myriad wheels went grinding on

and on, grinding the stars into dust, matter into man, and man into

nothingness? Was there--could there be a living heart to the universe

that did positively hear him--poor, misplaced, dishonest, ignorant

Thomas Wingfold, who had presumed to undertake a work he neither could

perform nor had the courage to forsake, when out of the misery of the

grimy little cellar of his consciousness he cried aloud for light and

something to make a man of him? For now that Thomas had begun to doubt

like an honest being, every ugly thing within him began to show itself

to his awakened probity.

But honest and of good parentage as the doubts were, no sooner had

they shown themselves than the wings of the ascending prayers fluttered

feebly and failed. They sank slowly, fell, and lay as dead, while all

the wretchedness of his position rushed back upon him with redoubled

inroad. Here was a man who could not pray, and yet must go and read

prayers and preach in the old attesting church, as if he too were of

those who knew something of the secrets of the Almighty, and could bring

out from his treasury, if not things new and surprising, then things old

and precious! Ought he not to send round the bell-man to cry aloud that

there would be no service? But what right had he to lay his troubles,

the burden of his dishonesty, upon the shoulders of them who faithfully

believed, and who looked to him to break to them their daily bread? And

would not any attempt at a statement of the reasons he had for such an

outrageous breach of all decorum be taken for a denial of those things

concerning which he only desired most earnestly to know that they were

true. For he had received from somewhere, he knew not how or whence, a

genuine prejudice in favour of Christianity, while of those refractions

and distorted reflexes of it which go by its name and rightly disgust

many, he had had few of the tenets thrust upon his acceptance.

Thus into the dark pool of his dull submissive life, the bold words of

the unbeliever had fallen--a dead stone perhaps, but causing a thousand

motions in the living water. Question crowded upon question, and doubt

upon doubt, until he could bear it no longer, and starting from the

floor on which at last he had sunk prostrate, he rushed in all but

involuntary haste from the house, and scarcely knew where he was until,

in a sort, he came to himself some little distance from the town,

wandering hurriedly in field-paths.

CHAPTER XII.

AN INCIDENT.

It was a fair morning of All Hallows’ summer. The trees were nearly

despoiled, but the grass was green, and there was a memory of spring in

the low sad sunshine: even the sunshine, the gladdest thing in creation,

is sad sometimes. There was no wind, nothing to fight with, nothing to

turn his mind from its own miserable perplexities. How endlessly his

position as a clergyman, he thought, added to his miseries! Had he

been a man unpledged, he could have taken his own time to think out the

truths of his relations; as it was, he felt like a man in a coffin:

out he must get, but had not room to make a single vigorous effort for

freedom! It did not occur to him yet that, unpressed from without, his

honesty unstung, he might have taken more time to find out where he was

than would have been either honest or healthful.

He came to a stile where his path joined another that ran both ways,

and there seated himself, just as the same strange couple I have already

described as met by Miss Lingard and Mr. Bascombe approached and went

by. After they had gone a good way, he caught sight of something lying

in the path, and going to pick it up, found it was a small manuscript

volume.

With the pleasurable instinct of service, he hastened after them. They

heard him, and turning waited his approach. He took off his hat, and

presenting the book to the young woman, asked if she had dropped it.

Possibly, had they been ordinary people of the class to which they

seemed to belong, he would not have uncovered to them, for he naturally

shrunk from what might be looked upon as a display of courtesy, but

their deformity rendered it imperative. Her face flushed so at sight

of the book, that, in order to spare her uneasiness, Wingfold could not

help saying with a smile,

“Do not be alarmed: I have not read one word of it.”

She returned his smile with much sweetness, and said--

“I see I need not have been afraid.”

Her companion joined in thanks and apologies for having caused him so

much trouble. Wingfold assured them it had been but a pleasure. It

was far from a scrutinizing look with which he regarded them, but the

interview left him with the feeling that their faces were refined and

intelligent, and their speech was good. Again he lifted his rather

shabby hat, the man responded with equal politeness in removing from a

great grey head one rather better, and they turned from each other and

went their ways, the sight of their malformation arousing in the curate

no such questions as those with which it had agitated the tongue, if not

the heart, of George Bascombe, to widen the scope of his perplexities.

He had heard the loud breathing of the man, and seen the projecting eyes

of the woman, but he never said to himself therefore that they were more

hardly dealt with than he. Had such a thought occurred to him, he would

have comforted the pain of his sympathy with the reflection that at

least neither of them was a curate of the church of England who knew

positively nothing of the foundation upon which that church professed to

stand.

How he got through the Sunday he never could have told. What times a man

may get through--he knows not how! As soon as it was over, it was all

a mist--from which gleamed or gloomed large the face of George Bascombe

with its keen unbelieving eyes and scornful lips. All the time he was

reading the prayers and lessons, all the time he was reading his uncle’s

sermon, he had not only been aware of those eyes, but aware also of what

lay behind them--seeing and reading the reflex of himself in Bascombe’s

brain; but nothing more whatever could he recall.

Like finger-posts dim seen, on a moorland journey, through the gathering

fogs, Sunday after Sunday passed. I will not request my reader to

accompany me across the confusions upon which was blowing that wind

whose breath was causing a world to pass from chaos to cosmos. One who

has ever gone through any experience of the kind himself, will be able

to imagine it; to one who has not, my descriptions would be of small

service: he would but shrink from the representation as diseased and of

no general interest. And he would be so far right, that the interest in

such things must be most particular and individual, or none at all.

The weeks passed and seemed to bring him no light, only increased

earnestness in the search after it. Some assurance he must find soon,

else he would resign his curacy, and look out for a situation as tutor.

Of course all this he ought to have gone through long ago! But how can

a man go through anything till his hour be come? Saul of Tarsus

was sitting at the feet of Gamaliel when our Lord said to his

apostles--“Yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think

that he doeth God service.” Wingfold had all this time been skirting the

wall of the kingdom of heaven without even knowing that there was a wall

there, not to say seeing a gate in it. The fault lay with those who had

brought him up to the church as to the profession of medicine, or the

bar, or the drapery business--as if it lay on one level of choice with

other human callings. Nor were the honoured of the church who had taught

him free from blame, who never warned him to put his shoes from off his

feet for the holiness of the ground. But how were they to warn him, if

they had sowed and reaped and gathered into barns on that ground, and

had never discovered therein treasure more holy than libraries, incomes,

and the visits of royalty? As to visions of truth that make a man sigh

with joy, and enlarge his heart with more than human tenderness--how

many of those men had ever found such treasure in the fields of the

church? How many of them knew save by hearsay whether there be any

Holy Ghost! How then were they to warn other men from the dangers of

following in their footsteps and becoming such as they? Where, in a

general ignorance and community of fault, shall we begin to blame?

Wingfold had no time to accuse anyone after the first gush of

bitterness. He had to awake from the dead and cry for light, and was

soon in the bitter agony of the cataleptic struggle between life and

death.

He thought afterwards, when the time had passed, that surely in this

period of darkness he had been visited and upheld by a power whose

presence and even influence escaped his consciousness. He knew not how

else he could have got through it. Also he remembered that strange helps

had come to him; that the aspects of nature then wonderfully softened

towards him, that then first he began to feel sympathy with her ways

and shows, and to see in them all the working of a diffused humanity. He

remembered how once a hawthorn bud set him weeping; and how once, as he

went miserable to church, a child looked up in his face and smiled, and

how in the strength of that smile he had walked boldly to the lectern.

He never knew how long he had been in the strange birth agony, in which

the soul is as it were at once the mother that bears and the child that

is born.

CHAPTER XIII.

A REPORT OF PROGRESS.

In the meantime George Bascombe came and went; every visit he showed

clearer notions as to what he was for, and what he was against; every

visit he found Helen more worthy and desirable than theretofore, and

flattered himself he made progress in the conveyance of his opinions and

judgments over into her mind. His various accomplishments went far in

aid of his design. There was hardly anything Helen could do that George

could not do as well, and some he could do better, while there were many

things George was at home in which were sealed to her. The satisfaction

of teaching such a pupil he found great. When at length he began to make

love to her, Helen found it rather agreeable than otherwise; and, if

there was a little more MAKING in it than some women would have liked,

Helen was not sufficiently in love with him to detect its presence.

Still the pleasure of his preference was such that it opened her mind

with a favourable prejudice towards whatever in the shape of theory or

doctrine he would have her receive; and much that a more experienced

mind would have rejected because of its evident results in practice,

was by her accepted in the ignorance which confined her regard of his

propositions to their intellectual relations, and prevented her from

following them into their influences upon life, which would have

reflected light upon their character. For life in its real sense was to

her as yet little more definite and present than a dream that waits for

the coming night. Hence, when her cousin at length ventured to attack

even those doctrines which all women who have received a Christian

education would naturally be expected to revere the most, she was able

to listen to him unshocked. But she little thought, or he either, that

it was only in virtue of what Christian teaching she had had that she

was capable of appreciating what was grand in his doctrine of living for

posterity without a hope of good result to self beyond the consciousness

that future generations of perishing men and women would be a little

more comfortable, and perhaps a little less faulty therefrom. She did

not reflect, either, that no one’s theory concerning death is of much

weight in his youth while life FEELS interminable, or that the gift of

comfort during a life of so little value that the giver can part with

it without regret, is scarcely one to be looked upon as a mighty

benefaction.

“But truth is truth,” George would have replied.

What you profess to teach them might be a fact, but could never be a

truth, I answer. And the very value which you falsely put upon facts

you have learned to attribute to them from the supposed existence of

something at the root of all facts--namely, TRUTHS, or eternal laws of

being. Still, if you believe that men will be happier from learning your

discovery that there is no God, preach it, and prosper in proportion to

its truth. No; that from my pen would be a curse--no, preach it not,

I say, until you have searched all spaces of space, up and down, in

greatness and smallness--where I grant indeed, but you cannot know, that

you will not find him--and all regions of thought and feeling, all the

unknown mental universe of possible discovery--preach it not until you

have searched that also, I say, lest what you count a truth should prove

to be no fact, and there should after all be somewhere, somehow, a very,

living God, a Truth indeed, in whom is the universe. If you say, “But I

am convinced there is none,” I answer--You may be convinced that there

is no God such as this or that in whom men imagine they believe, but you

cannot be convinced there is no God.

Meantime George did not forget the present of this life in its future,

continued particular about his cigars and his wine, ate his dinners with

what some would call a good conscience and I would call a dull one, were

I sure it was not a good digestion they really meant, and kept reading

hard and to purpose.

Matters as between the two made no rapid advance. George went on loving

Helen more than any other woman, and Helen went on liking George next

best to her brother Leopold. Whether it came of prudence, of which

George possessed not a little, of coldness of temperament, or a pride

that would first be sure of acceptance, I do not know, but he made no

formal offer yet of handing himself over to Helen, and certainly Helen

was in no haste to hear, more than he to utter, the irrevocable.

CHAPTER XIV.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

One Tuesday morning, in the spring, the curate received by the local

post the following letter dated from The Park-Gate.

“Respected Sir,

“An obligation on my part which you have no doubt forgotten gives

me courage to address you on a matter which seems to me of no small

consequence concerning yourself. You do not know me, and the name at the

end of my letter will have for you not a single association. The matter

itself must be its own excuse.

“I sat in a free seat at the Abbey church last Sunday morning. I had

not listened long to the sermon ere I began to fancy I foresaw what was

coming, and in a few minutes more I seemed to recognise it as one of

Jeremy Taylor’s. When I came home, I found that the best portions of

one of his sermons had, in the one you read, been wrought up with other

material.

“If, sir, I imagined you to be one of such as would willingly have that

regarded as their own which was better than they could produce, and

would with contentment receive any resulting congratulations, I should

feel that I was only doing you a wrong if I gave you a hint which might

aid you in avoiding detection; for the sooner the truth concerning such

a one was known, and the judgment of society brought to bear upon

it, the better for him, whether the result were justification or the

contrary. But I have read that in your countenance and demeanour which

convinces me that, however custom and the presence of worldly elements

in the community to which you belong may have influenced your judgment,

you require only to be set thinking of a matter, to follow your

conscience with regard to whatever you may find involved in it. I have

the honour to be, respected sir,

“Your obedient servant and well-wisher,

“Joseph Polwarth.”

Wingfold sat staring at the letter, slightly stunned. The feeling which

first grew recognizable in the chaos it had caused, was vexation at

having so committed himself; the next, annoyance with his dead old uncle

for having led him into such a scrape. There in the good doctor’s own

handwriting lay the sermon, looking nowise different from the rest! Had

he forgotten his marks of quotation? Or to that sermon did he always

have a few words of extempore introduction? For himself he was as

ignorant of Jeremy Taylor as of Zoroaster. It could not be that that was

his uncle’s mode of making his sermons? Was it possible they could all

be pieces of literary mosaic? It was very annoying. If the fact came to

be known, it would certainly be said that he had attempted to pass off

Jeremy Taylor’s for his own--as if he would have the impudence to make

the attempt, and with such a well-known writer! But what difference did

it make whether the writer was well or ill known? None, except as to

the relative probabilities of escape and discovery! And should the

accusation be brought against him, how was he to answer it? By burdening

the reputation of his departed uncle with the odium of the fault? Was

it worse in his uncle to use Jeremy Taylor than in himself to use his

uncle? Or would his remonstrants accept the translocation of blame?

Would the church-going or chapel-going inhabitants of Glaston remain

mute when it came to be discovered that since his appointment he had not

once preached a sermon of his own? How was it that knowing all about it

in the background of his mind, he had never come to think of it before?

It was true that, admirer of his uncle as he was, he had never imagined

himself reaping any laurels from the credit of his sermons; it was

equally true however that he had not told a single person of the hidden

cistern whence he drew his large discourse. But what could it matter to

any man, so long as a good sermon was preached, where it came from?

He did not occupy the pulpit in virtue of his personality, but of his

office, and it was not a place for the display of originality, but for

dispensing the bread of life.--From the stores of other people?--Yes,

certainly--if other people’s bread was better, and no one the worse

for his taking it. “For me, I have none,” he said to himself. Why

then should that letter have made him uncomfortable? What had he to be

ashamed of? Why should he object to being found out? What did he want

to conceal? Did not everybody know that very few clergymen really made

their own sermons? Was it not absurd, this mute agreement that, although

all men knew to the contrary, it must appear to be taken for granted

that a man’s sermons were of his own mental production? Still more

absurd as well as cruel was the way in which they sacrificed to the

known falsehood by the contempt they poured upon any fellow the moment

they were able to say of productions which never could have been his,

that they were by this man or that man, or bought at this shop or that

shop in Great Queen Street or Booksellers’ Row. After that he was an

enduring object for the pointed finger of a mild scorn. It was nothing

but the old Spartan game of--steal as you will and enjoy as you can:

you are nothing the worse; but woe to you if you are caught in the act!

There WAS something contemptible about the whole thing. He was a greater

humbug than he had believed himself, for upon this humbug which he now

found himself despising he had himself been acting diligently! It dawned

upon him that, while there was nothing wrong in preaching his uncle’s

sermons, there was evil in yielding to cast any veil, even the most

transparent, over the fact that the sermons were not his own.

CHAPTER XV

THE PARK GATE.

He had however one considerate, even friendly parishioner, it seemed,

whom it became him at least to thank for his openness. He ceased to pace

the room, sat down at his writing-table, and acknowledged Mr. Polwarth’s

letter, expressing his obligation for its contents, and saying that he

would do himself the honour of calling upon him that afternoon, in the

hope of being allowed to say for himself what little could be said,

and of receiving counsel in regard to the difficulty wherein he found

himself. He sent the note by his land-lady’s boy, and as soon as he

had finished his lunch, which meant his dinner, for he could no longer

afford to dull his soul in its best time for reading and thinking, he

set out to find Park Gate, which he took for some row of dwellings in

the suburbs.

Going in the direction pointed out, and finding he had left all the

houses behind him, he stopped at the gate of Osterfield Park to make

further inquiry. The door of the lodge was opened by one whom he took,

for the first half second, to be a child, but recognized the next as the

same young woman whose book he had picked up in the fields a few months

before. He had never seen her since, but her deformity and her face

together had made it easy to remember her.

“We have met before,” he said, in answer to her courtesy and smile, “and

you must now do me a small favour if you can.”

“I shall be most happy, sir. Please come in,” she answered.

“I am sorry I cannot at this moment, as I have an engagement. Can you

tell me where Mr. Polwarth of the Park Gate lives?”

The girl’s smile of sweetness changed to one of amusement as she

repeated, in a gentle voice through which ran a thread of suffering,

“Come in, sir, please. My uncle’s name is Joseph Polwarth, and this is

the gate to Osterfield Park. People know it as the Park-gate.”

The house was not one of those trim, modern park-lodges, all angles and

peaks, which one sees everywhere now-a-days, but a low cottage, with

a very thick, wig-like thatch, into which rose two astonished eyebrows

over the stare of two half-awake dormer-windows. On the front of it

were young leaves and old hips enough to show that in summer it must be

covered with roses.

Wingfold entered at once, and followed her through the kitchen, upon

which the door immediately opened, a bright place, with stone floor, and

shining things on the walls, to a neat little parlour, cozy and rather

dark, with a small window to the garden behind, and a smell of last

year’s roses.

“My uncle will be here in a few minutes,” she said, placing a chair for

him. “I would have had a fire here, but my uncle always talks better

amongst his books. He expected you, but my lord’s steward sent for him

up to the new house.”

He took the chair she offered him, and sat down to wait. He had not much

of the gift of making talk--a questionable accomplishment,--and he never

could approach his so-called inferiors but as his equals, the fact being

that in their presence he never felt any difference. Notwithstanding his

ignorance of the lore of Christianity, Thomas Wingfold was, in regard to

some things, gifted with what I am tempted to call a divine stupidity.

Many of the distinctions and privileges after which men follow, and

of the annoyances and slights over which they fume, were to the curate

inappreciable: he did not and could not see them.

“So you are warders of the gate here, Miss Polwarth?” he said, assuming

that to be her name, and rightly, when the young woman, who had for a

moment left the room, returned.

“Yes,” she answered, “we have kept it now for about eight years,

sir.--It is no hard task. But I fancy there will be a little more to do

when the house is finished.”

“It is a long way for you to go to church.”

“It would be, sir; but I do not go,” she said.

“Your uncle does.”

“Not very often, sir.”

She left the door open and kept coming and going between the kitchen and

the parlour, busy about house affairs. Wingfold sat and watched her as

he had opportunity with growing interest.

She had the full-sized head that is so often set on a small body, and

it looked yet larger from the quantity of rich brown hair upon it--hair

which some ladies would have given their income to possess. Clearly

too it gave pleasure to its owner, for it was becomingly as well

as carefully and modestly dressed. Her face seemed to Wingfold more

interesting every fresh peep he had of it, until at last he pronounced

it to himself one of the sweetest he had ever seen. Its prevailing

expression was of placidity, and something that was not contentment

merely: I would term it satisfaction, were I sure that my reader would

call up the very antipode of SELF-satisfaction. And yet there were lines

of past and shadows of present suffering upon it. The only sign however

that her poor crooked body was not at present totally forgotten, was a

slight shy undulation that now and then flickered along the lines of her

sensitive mouth, seeming to indicate a shadowy dim-defined thought,

or rather feeling, of apology, as if she would disarm prejudice by an

expression of sorrow that she could not help the pain and annoyance her

unsightliness must occasion. Every feature in her thin face was good,

and seemed, individually almost, to speak of a loving spirit, yet he

could see ground for suspecting that keen expressions of a quick temper

could be no strangers upon those delicately modelled forms. Her hands

and feet were both as to size and shape those of a mere child.

He was still studying her like a book which a boy reads by stealth, when

with slow step her uncle entered the room.

Wingfold rose and held out his hand.

“You are welcome, sir,” said Polwarth, modestly, with the strong grasp

of a small firm hand. “Will you walk upstairs with me, where we shall

be undisturbed? My niece has, I hope, already made my apologies for not

being at home to receive you.--Rachel, my child, will you get us a

cup of tea, and by the time it is ready we shall have got through our

business, I daresay.”

The face of Wingfold’s host and new friend in expression a good

deal resembled that of his niece, but bore traces of yet greater

suffering--bodily, and it might be mental as well. It did not look quite

old enough for the whiteness of the plentiful hair that crowned it, and

yet there was that in it which might account for the whiteness.

His voice was a little dry and husky, streaked as it were with the

asthma whose sounds made that big disproportioned chest seem like the

cave of the east wind; but it had a tone of dignity and decision in it,

quite in harmony with both matter and style of his letter, and before

Wingfold had followed him to the top of the steep narrow straight

staircase, all sense of incongruity in him had vanished from his mind.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE ATTIC.

The little man led the way into a tolerably large room, with

down-sloping ceiling on both sides, lighted by a small window in the

gable, near the fireplace, and a dormer window as well. The low walls,

up to the slope, were filled with books; books lay on the table, on the

bed, on chairs, and in corners everywhere.

“Aha!” said Wingfold, as he entered and cast his eyes around, “there is

no room for surprise that you should have found me out so easily, Mr.

Polwarth! Here you have a legion of detectives for such rascals.”

The little man turned, and for a moment looked at him with a doubtful

and somewhat pained expression, as if he had not been prepared for such

an entrance on a solemn question; but a moment’s reading of the curate’s

honest face, which by this time had a good deal more print upon it than

would have been found there six months agone, sufficed; the cloud melted

into a smile, and he said cordially,

“It is very kind of you, sir, to take my presumption in such good part.

Pray sit down, sir. You will find that chair a comfortable one.”

“Presumption!” echoed Wingfold. “The presumption was all on my part, and

the kindness on yours. But you must first hear my explanation, such as

it is. It makes the matter hardly a jot the better, only a man would not

willingly look worse, or better either, than he is, and besides, we must

understand each other if we would be friends. However unlikely it may

seem to you, Mr. Polwarth, I really do share the common weakness of

wanting to be taken exactly for what I am, neither more nor less.”

“It is a noble weakness, and far enough from common, I am sorry to

think,” returned Polwarth.

The curate then told the gate-keeper of his uncle’s legacy, and his own

ignorance of Jeremy Taylor.

“But,” he concluded, “since you set me about it, my judgment has

capsized itself, and it now seems to me worse to use my uncle’s sermons

than to have used the bishop’s, which anyone might discover to be what

they are.”

“I see no harm in either,” said Polwarth, “provided only it be above

board. I believe some clergymen think the only evil lies in detection.

I doubt if they ever escape it, and believe the amount of successful

deception in that kind to be very small indeed. Many in a congregation

can tell, by a kind of instinct, whether a man be preaching his own

sermons or not. But the worse evil appears to me to lie in the tacit

understanding that a sermon must SEEM to be a man’s own, although all in

the congregation know, and the would-be preacher knows that they know,

that it is none of his.”

“Then you mean, Mr. Polwarth, that I should solemnly acquaint my

congregation next Sunday with the fact that the sermon I am about to

read to them is one of many left me by my worthy uncle, Jonah Driftwood,

D.D., who, on his death-bed, expressed the hope that I should support

their teaching by my example, for, having gone over them some ten or

fifteen times in the course of his incumbency, and bettered each every

time until he could do no more for it, he did not think, save by my

example, I could carry further the enforcement of the truths they

contained:--shall I tell them all that?”

Polwarth laughed, but with a certain seriousness in his merriment, which

however took nothing from its genuineness, indeed seemed rather to add

thereto.

“It would hardly be needful to enter so fully into particulars,” he

said. “It would be enough to let them know that you wished it understood

between them and you, that you did not profess to teach them anything of

yourself, but merely to bring to bear upon them the teaching of others.

It would raise complaints and objections, doubtless; but for that you

must be prepared if you would do anything right.”

Wingfold was silent, thoughtful, saying to himself--“How straight an

honest bow can shoot!--But this involves something awful. To stand up in

that pulpit and speak about myself! I who, even if I had any opinions,

could never see reason for presenting them to other people! It’s

my office, is it--not me? Then I wish my Office would write his own

sermons. He can read the prayers well enough!”

All his life, a little heave of pent-up humour would now and then shake

his burden into a more comfortable position upon his bending shoulders.

He gave a forlorn laugh.

“But,” resumed the small man, “have you never preached a sermon of your

own thinking--I don’t mean of your own making--one that came out of the

commentaries, which are, I am told, the mines whither some of our most

noted preachers go to dig for their first inspirations--but one that

came out of your own heart--your delight in something you had found out,

or something you felt much?”

“No,” answered Wingfold; “I have nothing, never had anything worth

giving to another; and it would seem to me very unreasonable to subject

a helpless congregation to the blundering attempts of such a fellow to

put into the forms of reasonable speech things he really knows nothing

about.”

“You must know about some things which it might do them good to be

reminded of--even if they know them already,” said Polwarth. “I cannot

imagine that a man who looks things in the face as you do, the moment

they confront you, has not lived at all, has never met with anything

in his history which has taught him something other people need to be

taught. I profess myself a believer in preaching, and consider that in

so far as the church of England has ceased to be a preaching church--and

I don’t call nine-tenths of what goes by the name of it PREACHING--she

has forgotten a mighty part of her high calling. Of course a man to whom

no message has been personally given, has no right to take the place of

a prophet--and cannot, save by more or less of simulation--but there

is room for teachers as well as prophets, and the more need of teachers

that the prophets are so few; and a man may right honestly be a

clergyman who teaches the people, though he may possess none of the

gifts of prophecy.”

“I do not now see well how you are leading me,” said Wingfold,

considerably astonished at both the aptness and fluency with which a man

in his host’s position was able to express himself. “Pray, what do you

mean by PROPHECY?”

“I mean what I take to be the sense in which St. Paul uses the word--I

mean the highest kind of preaching. But I will come to the point

practically: a man, I say, who does not feel in his soul that he has

something to tell his people, should straightway turn his energy to

the providing of such food for them as he finds feed himself. In

other words, if he has nothing new in his own treasure, let him bring

something old out of another man’s. If his own soul is unfed, he can

hardly be expected to find food for other people, and has no business

in any pulpit, but ought to betake himself to some other

employment--whatever he may have been predestined to--I mean, made fit

for.”

“Then do you intend that a man SHOULD make up his sermons from the books

he reads?”

“Yes, if he cannot do better. But then I would have him read--not with

his sermon in his eye, but with his people in his heart. Men in business

and professions have so little time for reading or thinking--and idle

people have still less--that their means of grace, as the theologians

say, are confined to discipline without nourishment, whence their

religion, if they have any, is often from mere atrophy but a skeleton;

and the office of preaching is, after all, to wake them up lest their

sleep turn to death; next, to make them hungry, and lastly, to supply

that hunger; and for all these things, the pastor has to take thought.

If he feed not the flock of God, then is he an hireling and no

shepherd.”

At this moment, Rachel entered with a small tea-tray: she could carry

only little things, and a few at a time. She cast a glance of almost

loving solicitude at the young man who now sat before her uncle with

head bowed, and self-abasement on his honest countenance, then a look

almost of expostulation at her uncle, as if interceding for a culprit,

and begging the master not to be too hard upon him. But the little man

smiled--such a sweet smile of re-assurance, that her face returned at

once to its prevailing expression of content. She cleared a place on the

table, set down her tray, and went to bring cups and saucers.

CHAPTER XVII.

POLWARTH’S PLAN.

“I think I understand you now,” said Wingfold, after the little pause

occasioned by the young woman’s entrance. “You would have a man who

cannot be original, deal honestly in second-hand goods. Or perhaps

rather, he should say to the congregation--‘This is not home-made bread

I offer you, but something better. I got it from this or that baker’s

shop. I have eaten of it myself, and it has agreed well with me and

done me good. If you chew it well, I don’t doubt you also will find it

good.’--Is that something like what you would have, Mr. Polwarth?”

“Precisely,” answered the gate-keeper. “But,” he added, after a moment’s

delay, “I should be sorry if you stopped there.”

“Stopped there!” echoed Wingfold. “The question is whether I can begin

there. You have no idea how ignorant I am--how little I have read!”

“I have some idea of both, I fancy. I must have known considerably less

than you at your age, for I was never at a university.”

“But perhaps even then you had more of the knowledge which, they say,

life only can give.”

“I have it now at all events. But of that everyone has enough who lives

his life. Those who gain no experience are those who shirk the king’s

highway, for fear of encountering the Duty seated by the roadside.”

“You ought to be a clergyman yourself, sir,” said Wingfold, humbly. “How

is it that such as I----”

Here he checked himself, knowing something of how it was.

“I hope I ought to be just what I am, neither more nor less,” replied

Polwarth. “As to being a clergyman, Moses had a better idea about such

things, at least so far as concerns outsides, than you seem to have, Mr.

Wingfold. He would never have let a man who in size and shape is a mere

mockery of the human, stand up to minister to the congregation. But if

you will let me help you, I shall be most grateful; for of late I have

been oppressed with the thought that I serve no one but myself and my

niece. I am in mortal fear of growing selfish under the weight of my

privileges.”

A fit of asthmatic coughing seized him, and grew in severity until

he seemed struggling for his life. It was at the worst when his niece

entered, but she showed no alarm, only concern, and did nothing but go

up to him and lay her hand on his back between his shoulders till the

fit was over. The instant the convulsion ceased, its pain dissolved in a

smile.

Wingfold uttered some lame expressions of regret that he should suffer

so much.

“It is really nothing to distress you, or me either, Mr. Wingfold,” said

the little man. “Shall we have a cup of tea, and then resume our talk?”

“The fact, I find, Mr. Polwarth,” said the curate, giving the result

of what had been passing through his mind, and too absorbed in that to

reply to the invitation, “is, that I must not, and indeed cannot give

you half-confidences. I will tell you all that troubles me, for it is

plain that you know something of which I am ignorant,--something which,

I have great hopes, will turn out to be the very thing I need to know.

May I speak? Will you let me talk about myself?”

“I am entirely at your service, Mr. Wingfold,” returned Polwarth, and

seeing the curate did not touch his tea, placed his own cup again on the

table.

The young woman got down like a child from the chair upon which she

had perched herself at the table, and with a kind look at Wingfold, was

about to leave the room.

“No, no, Miss Polwarth!” said the curate, rising; “I shall not be able

to go on if I feel that I have sent you away--and your tea untouched

too! What a selfish and ungrateful fellow I am! I did not even observe

that you had given me tea! But you would pardon me if you knew what

I have been going through. If you don’t mind staying, we can talk and

drink our tea at the same time. I am very fond of tea, when it is so

good as I see yours is. I only fear I may have to say some things that

will shock you.”

“I will stay till then,” replied Rachel, with a smile, and climbed again

upon her chair. “I am not much afraid. My uncle says things sometimes

fit to make a Pharisee’s hair stand on his head, but somehow they make

my heart burn inside me.--May I stop, uncle?--I should like so much!”

“Certainly, my child, if Mr. Wingfold will not feel your presence a

restraint.”

“Not in the least,” said the curate.

Miss Polwarth helped them to bread and butter, and a brief silence

followed.

“I was brought up to the church,” said Wingfold at length, playing with

his teaspoon, and looking down on the table. “It’s an awful shame such a

thing should have been, but I don’t find out that anybody in particular

was to blame for it. Things are all wrong that way, in general, I doubt.

I pass my examinations with decency, distinguish myself in nothing,

go before the bishop, am admitted a deacon, after a year am ordained a

priest, and after another year or two of false preaching and of parish

work, suddenly find myself curate in charge of a grand old abbey church;

but as to what the whole thing means in practical relation with myself

as a human being, I am as ignorant as Simon Magus, without his excuse.

Do not mistake me. I think I could stand an examination on the doctrines

of the church, as contained in the articles, and prayer-book generally.

But for all they have done for me, I might as well have never heard of

them.”

“Don’t be quite sure of that, Mr. Wingfold. At least, they have brought

you to inquire if there be anything in them.”

“Mr. Polwarth,” returned Wingfold abruptly, “I cannot even prove there

is a God!”

“But the church of England exists for the sake of teaching Christianity,

not proving that there is a God.”

“What is Christianity, then?”

“God in Christ, and Christ in man.”

“What is the use of that if there be no God?”

“None whatever.”

“Mr. Polwarth, can you prove there is a God?”

“No.”

“Then if you don’t believe there is a God--I don’t know what is to

become of me,” said the curate, in a tone of deep disappointment, and

rose to go.

“Mr. Wingfold,” said the little man, with a smile and a deep breath

as of delight at the thought that was moving in him, “I know him in my

heart, and he is all in all to me. You did not ask whether I believed in

him, but whether I could prove that there was a God. As well ask a fly,

which has not yet crawled about the world, if he can prove that it is

round!”

“Pardon me, and have patience with me,” said Wingfold, resuming his

seat. “I am a fool. But it is life or death to me.”

“I would we were all such fools!--But please ask me no more questions;

or ask me as many as you will, but expect no answers just yet. I want to

know more of your mind first.”

“Well, I will ask questions, but press for no answers.--If you cannot

prove there is a God, do you know for certain that such a one as Jesus

Christ ever lived? Can it be proved with positive certainty? I say

nothing of what they call the doctrines of Christianity, or the

authority of the church, or the sacraments, or anything of that sort.

Such questions are at present of no interest to me. And yet the fact

that they do not interest me, were enough to prove me in as false and

despicable a position as ever man found himself occupying--as arrant

a hypocrite and deceiver as any god-personating priest in the Delphic

temple.--I had rather a man despised than excused me, Mr. Polwarth, for

I am at issue with myself, and love not my past.”

“I shall do neither, Mr. Wingfold. Go on, if you please, sir. I am more

deeply interested than I can tell you.”

“Some few months ago then, I met a young man who takes for granted the

opposite of all that I had up to that time taken for granted, and which

now I want to be able to prove. He spoke with contempt of my profession.

I could not defend my profession, and of course had to despise myself.

I began to think. I began to pray--if you will excuse me for mentioning

it. My whole past life appeared like the figures that glide over the

field of a camera obscura--not an abiding fact in it all. A cloud

gathered about me, and hangs about me still. I call, but no voice

answers me out of the darkness, and at times I am in despair. I would,

for the love and peace of honesty, give up the profession, but I shrink

from forsaking what I may yet possibly find--though I fear, I fear--to

be as true as I wish to find it. Something, I know not what, holds me to

it--some dim vague affection, possibly mere prejudice, aided by a love

for music, and the other sweet sounds of our prayers and responses. Nor

would I willingly be supposed to deny what I dare not say--indeed know

not how to say I believe, not knowing what it is. I should nevertheless

have abandoned everything months ago, had I not felt bound by my

agreement to serve my rector for a year. You are the only one of the

congregation who has shown me any humanity, and I beg of you to be my

friend and help me. What shall I do? After the avowal you have made, I

may well ask you again, How am I to know that there is a God?”

“It were a more pertinent question, sir,” returned Polwarth,--“If there

be a God, how am I to find him?--And, as I hinted before, there is

another question--one you have already put--more pertinent to your

position as an English clergyman: Was there ever such a man as Jesus

Christ?--Those, I think, were your own words: what do you mean by SUCH a

man?”

“Such as he is represented in the New Testament.”

“From that representation, what description would you give of him now?

What is that SUCH? What sort of person, supposing the story true, would

you take this Jesus, from that story, to have been?”

Wingfold thought for a while.

“I am a worse humbug than I fancied,” he said. “I cannot tell what he

was. My thoughts of him are so vague and indistinct that it would take

me a long time to render myself able to answer your question.”

“Perhaps longer still than you think, sir. It took me a very long

time.--”

CHAPTER XVIII.

JOSEPH POLWARTH.

“Shall I tell you,” the gate-keeper went on, “something of my life, in

return of the confidence you have honoured me with?”

“Nothing could be more to my mind,” answered Wingfold. “And I trust,” he

added, “it is no unworthy curiosity that makes me anxious to understand

how you have come to know so much.”

“Indeed it is not that I know much,” said the little man. “On the

contrary I am the most ignorant person of my acquaintance. You would be

astonished to discover what I don’t know. But the thing is that I know

what is worth knowing. Yet I get not a crumb more than my daily bread

by it--I mean the bread by which the inner man lives. The man who gives

himself to making money, will seldom fail of becoming a rich man; and it

would be hard if a man who gave himself to find wherewithal to still the

deepest cravings of his best self, should not be able to find that

bread of life. I tried to make a little money by book-selling once: I

failed--not to pay my debts, but to make the money; I could not go into

it heartily, or give it thought enough, so it was all right I should not

succeed; but what I did and do make my object, does not disappoint me.

“My ancestors, as my name indicates, were of and in Cornwall, where they

held large property. Forgive the seeming boast--it is but fact, and can

reflect little enough on one like me. Scorn and pain mingled with mighty

hope is a grand prescription for weaning the heart from the judgments

and aspirations of this world. Later ancestors were, not many

generations ago, the proprietors of this very property of Osterfield,

which the uncle of the present Lord de Barre bought, and to which I,

their descendant, am gate-keeper. What with gambling, drinking, and

worse, they deserved to lose it. The results of their lawlessness are

ours: we are what and where you see us. With the inherited poison, the

Father gave the antidote. Rachel, my child, am I not right when I say

that you thank God with me for having THUS visited the iniquities of the

fathers upon the children?”

“I do, uncle; you know I do--from the bottom of my heart,” replied

Rachel in a low tender voice.

A great solemnity came upon the spirit of Wingfold, and for a moment he

felt as if he sat wrapt in a cloud of sacred marvel, beyond and around

which lay a gulf of music too perfect to touch his sense. But presently

Polwarth resumed:

“My father was in appearance a remarkably fine man, tall and stately. Of

him I have little to say. If he did not do well, my grandfather must be

censured first. He had a sister very like Rachel here. Poor Aunt Lottie!

She was not so happy as my little one. My brothers were all fine men

like himself, yet they all died young except my brother Robert. He too

is dead now, thank God, and I trust he is in peace. I had almost begun

to fear with himself that he would never die. And yet he was but fifty.

He left me my Rachel with her twenty pounds a year. I have thirty of

my own, and this cottage we have rent-free for attending to the gate.

I shall tell you more about my brother some day. There are none of the

family left now but myself and Rachel. God in his mercy is about to let

it cease.

“I was sent to one of our smaller public schools--mainly, I believe,

because I was an eyesore to my handsome father. There I made, I fancy,

about as good a beginning as wretched health, and the miseries of a

sensitive nature, ever conscious of exposure, without mother or home to

hide its feebleness and deformity, would permit. For then first I

felt myself an outcast. I was the butt of all the coarser-minded of my

schoolfellows, and the kindness of some could but partially make up for

it. On the other hand, I had no haunting and irritating sense of wrong,

such as I believe not a few of my fellows in deformity feel--no burning

indignation, or fierce impulse to retaliate on those who injured me,

or on the society that scorned me. The isolation that belonged to my

condition wrought indeed to the intensifying of my individuality, but

that again intensified my consciousness of need more than of wrong,

until the passion blossomed almost into assurance, and at length I

sought even with agony the aid to which my wretchedness seemed to have a

right. My longing was mainly for a refuge, for some corner into which

I might creep, where I should be concealed and so at rest. The sole

triumph I coveted over my persecutors was to know that they could not

find me--that I had a friend stronger than they. It is no wonder I

should not remember when I began to pray, and hope that God heard me.

I used to fancy to myself that I lay in his hand and peeped through his

fingers at my foes. That was at night, for my deformity brought me one

blessed comfort--that I had no bedfellow. This I felt at first as both

a sad deprivation and a painful rejection, but I learned to pray the

sooner for the loneliness, and the heartier from the solitude which was

as a chamber with closed door.

“I do not know what I might have taken to had I been made like other

people, or what plans my mother cherished for me. But it soon became

evident, as time passed and I grew no taller but more mis-shapen, that

to bring me up to a profession would be but to render my deformity the

more painful to myself. I spent, therefore, the first three years

after I left school at home, keeping out of my father’s way as much as

possible, and cleaving fast to my mother. When she died, she left her

little property between me and my brother. He had been brought up to my

father’s profession--that of an engineer. My father could not touch

the principal of this money, but neither, while he lived, could we the

interest. I hardly know how I lived for the next three or four years--it

must have been almost on charity, I think. My father was never at home,

and but for the old woman who had been our only attendant all my life,

I think very likely I should have starved. I spent my time mostly in

reading--whatever I could lay my hands upon--and that not carelessly,

but with such reflection as I was capable of. One thing I may

mention, as showing how I was still carried in the same direction as

before--that, without any natural turn for handicraft, I constructed

for myself a secret place of carpenter’s work in a corner of the garret,

small indeed, but big enough for a couch on which I could lie, and a

table as long as the couch. That was all the furniture. The walls were

lined from top to bottom with books, mostly gathered from those lying

about the house. Cunningly was the entrance to this nest contrived: I

doubt if anyone may have found it yet. If some imaginative, dreamy boy

has come upon it, what a find it must have been to him! I could envy him

the pleasure. There I always went to say my prayers and read my bible.

But sometimes The Arabian Nights, or some other book of entrancing human

invention, would come between, and make me neglect both, and then I

would feel bad and forsaken;--for as yet I knew little of the heart to

which I cried for shelter and warmth and defence.

“Somewhere in this time at length, I began to feel dissatisfied, even

displeased with myself. At first the feeling was vague, altogether

undefined--a mere sense that I did not fit into things, that I was not

what I ought to be, what was somehow and by the Authority required of

me. This went on, began to gather roots rather than send them out,

grew towards something more definite. I began to be aware that, heavy

affliction as it was to be made so different from my fellows, my outward

deformity was but a picture of my inward condition. There nothing was

right. Many things which in theory I condemned, and in others despised,

were yet a part of myself, or, at best, part of evil disease cleaving

fast unto me. I found myself envious and revengeful and conceited. I

discovered that I looked down on people whom I thought less clever

than myself. Once I caught myself scorning a young fellow to whose

disadvantage I knew nothing, except that God had made him handsome

enough for a woman. All at once one day, with a sickening conviction

it came upon me--with one of those sudden slackenings of the cord of

self-consciousness, in which it doubles back quivering, and seems to

break, while the man for an instant beholds his individuality apart from

himself, is generally frightened at it, and always disgusted--a strange

and indeed awful experience, which if it lasted longer than its allotted

moment, might well drive a man mad who had no God to whom to offer back

his individuality, in appeal against his double consciousness--it was

in one of these cataleptic fits of the spirit, I say, that I first saw

plainly what a contemptible little wretch I was, and writhed in the

bright agony of conscious worthlessness.

“I now concluded that I had been nothing but a pharisee and a hypocrite,

praying with a bad heart, and that God saw me just as detestable as I

saw myself, and despised me and was angry with me. I read my bible more

diligently than ever for a time, found in it nothing but denunciation

and wrath, and soon dropped it in despair. I had already ceased to pray.

“One day a little boy mocked me. I flew into a rage, and, rendered

by passion for the moment fleet and strong, pursued and caught him.

Whatever may be a man’s condition of defence against evil, I have learnt

that he cannot keep the good out of him. When the boy found himself in

my clutches, he turned on me a look of such terror that it disarmed me

at once, and, confounded and distressed to see a human being in such

abject fear, a state which in my own experience I knew to be horrible,

ashamed also that it should be before such a one as myself, I would

have let him go instantly, but that I could not without first having

comforted him. But not a word of mine could get into his ears, and I saw

at length that he was so PRE-possessed, that every tone of kindness I

uttered, sounded to him a threat: nothing would do but let him go. The

moment he found himself free, he fled headlong into the pond, got out

again, ran home, and told, with perfect truthfulness I believe, though

absolute inaccuracy, that I threw him in. After this I tried to govern

my temper, but found that the more I tried, the more even that I

succeeded outwardly, that is, succeeded in suppressing the signs and

deeds of wrath, the less could I keep down the wrath in my soul. I then

tried never to think about myself at all, and read and read--not the

bible--more and more, in order to forget myself. But ever through all my

reading and thinking I was aware of the lack of harmony at the heart

of me: I was not that which it was well to be; I was not at peace;

I lacked; was distorted; I was sick. Such were my feelings, not my

reflections. All that time is as the memory of an unlovely dream--a

dream of confusion and pain.

“One evening, in the twilight, I lay alone in my little den, not

thinking, but with mind surrendered and passive to what might come into

it. It was very hot--indeed sultry. My little skylight was open, but not

a breath of air entered. What preceded I do not know, but the face of

the terrified boy rose before me, or in me rather, and all at once

I found myself eagerly, painfully, at length almost in an agony,

persuading him that I would not hurt him, but meant well and friendlily

towards him. Again I had just let him go in despair, when the sweetest,

gentlest, most refreshing little waft of air came in at the window and

just went BEING, hardly moving, over my forehead. Its greeting was more

delicate than even my mother’s kiss, and yet it cooled my whole body.

Now whatever, or whencesoever the link, if any be supposed needful to

account for the fact, it kept below in the secret places of the springs,

for I saw it not; but the next thought of which I was aware was--What if

I misunderstood God the same way the boy had misunderstood me! and the

next thing was to take my New Testament from the shelf on which I had

laid it aside.

“Another evening of that same summer, I said to myself that I would

begin at the beginning and read it through. I had no definite idea in

the resolve; it seemed a good thing to do, and I would do it. It would

serve towards keeping up my connection in a way with THINGS ABOVE.

I began, but did not that night get through the first chapter of St.

Matthew. Conscientiously I read every word of the genealogy, but when

I came to the twenty-third verse and read: ‘Thou shalt call his name

Jesus; FOR HE SHALL SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS,’ I fell on my

knees. No system of theology had come between me and a common-sense

reading of the book. I did not for a moment imagine that to be saved

from my sins meant to be saved from the punishment of them. That would

have been no glad tidings to me. My sinfulness was ever before me, and

often my sins too, and I loved them not, yet could not free myself of

them. They were in me and of me, and how was I to part myself from that

which came to me with my consciousness, which asserted itself in me as

one with my consciousness? I could not get behind myself so as to reach

its root. But here was news of one who came from behind that root itself

to deliver me from that in me which made being a bad thing! Ah, Mr.

Wingfold! what if, after all the discoveries made, and all the theories

set up and pulled down, amid all the commonplaces men call common sense,

notwithstanding all the over-powering and excluding self-assertion of

things that are seen, ever crying, ‘Here we are, and save us there is

nothing: the Unseen is the Unreal!’--what if, I say, notwithstanding

all this, it should yet be that the strongest weapon a man can wield is

prayer to one who made him! What if the man who lifts up his heart to

the unknown God even, be entering, amid the mockery of men who worship

what they call natural law and science, into the region whence issues

every law, and where the very material of science is born!

“To tell you all that followed, if I could recall and narrate it in

order, would take hours. Suffice it that from that moment I was a

student, a disciple. Soon to me also came then the two questions: HOW DO

I KNOW THAT THERE IS A GOD AT ALL? and--HOW AM I TO KNOW THAT SUCH A MAN

AS JESUS EVERY LIVED? I could answer neither. But in the meantime I was

reading the story--was drawn to the man there presented--and was trying

to understand his being, and character, and principles of life and

action. And, to sum all in a word, many months had not passed ere I

had forgotten to seek an answer to either question: they were in fact

questions no longer: I had seen the man Christ Jesus, and in him had

known the Father of him and of me. My dear sir, no conviction can be

got, or if it could be got, would be of any sufficing value, through

that dealer in second-hand goods, the intellect. If by it we could prove

there is a God, it would be of small avail indeed: we must see him and

know him, to know that he was not a demon. But I know no other way of

knowing that there is a God but that which reveals WHAT he is--the only

idea that could be God--shows him in his own self-proving existence--and

that way is Jesus Christ as he revealed himself on earth, and as he is

revealed afresh to every heart that seeks to know the truth concerning

him.”

A pause followed, a solemn one, and then again Polwarth spoke:

“Either the whole frame of existence,” he said, “is a wretched,

miserable unfitness, a chaos with dreams of a world, a chaos in which

the higher is for ever subject to the lower, or it is an embodied idea

growing towards perfection in him who is the one perfect creative Idea,

the Father of lights, who suffers himself that he may bring his many

sons into the glory which is his own glory.”

CHAPTER XIX.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.

“But,” said Wingfold--“only pray do not think I am opposing you; I am in

the straits you have left so far behind: how am I to know that I should

not merely have wrought myself up to the believing of that which I

should like to be true?”

“Leave that question, my dear sir, until you know what that really is

which you want to believe. I do not imagine that you have more than the

merest glimmer of the nature of that concerning which you, for the very

reason that you know not what it is, most rationally doubt. Is a man to

refuse to withdraw his curtains lest some flash in his own eyes should

deceive him with a vision of morning while yet it is night? The truth

to the soul is as light to the eyes: you may be deceived, and mistake

something else for light, but you can never fail to know the light when

it really comes.”

“What then would you have of me?--what am I to DO?” said Wingfold, who,

having found his master, was docile as a child, but had not laid firm

enough hold upon what he had last said.

“I repeat,” said Polwarth, “that the community whose servant you are was

not founded to promulgate or defend the doctrine of the existence of a

Deity, but to perpetuate the assertion of a man that he was the son

and only revealer of the Father of men, a fact, if it be a fact, which

precludes the question of the existence of a God, because it includes

the answer to it. Your business, therefore, even as one who finds

himself in your unfortunate position as a clergyman, is to make yourself

acquainted with that man: he will be to you nobody save in revealing,

through knowledge of his inmost heart, the Father to you. Take then your

New Testament as if you had never seen it before, and read--to find out.

If in him you fail to meet God, then go to your consciousness of the

race, your metaphysics, your Plato, your Spinosa. Till then, this point

remains: there was a man who said he knew him, and that if you would

give heed to him, you too should know him. The record left of him is

indeed scanty, yet enough to disclose what manner of man he was--his

principles, his ways of looking at things, his thoughts of his Father

and his brethren and the relations between them, of man’s business in

life, his destiny, and his hopes.”

“I see plainly,” answered the curate, “that what you say, I must do.

But how, while on duty as a clergyman, I DO NOT KNOW. How am I, with the

sense of the unreality of my position ever growing upon me, and my utter

inability to supply the wants of the congregation, save from my uncle’s

store of dry provender, which it takes me a great part of my time so to

modify as, in using it, to avoid direct lying--with all this pressing

upon me, and making me restless and irritable and self-contemptuous,

how AM I to set myself to such solemn work, wherein a man must surely be

clear-eyed and single-hearted, if he would succeed in his quest?--I must

resign my curacy.”

Mr. Polwarth thought a little.

“It would be well, I think, to retain it for a time at least while you

search,” he said. “If you do not within a month see prospect of finding

him, then resign. In any case, your continuance in the service must

depend on your knowledge of the lord of it, and his will concerning

you.”

“May not a prejudice in favour of my profession blind and deceive me?”

“I think it will rather make YOU doubtful of conclusions that support

it.”

“I will go and try,” said Wingfold, rising; “but I fear I am not the man

to make discoveries in such high regions.”

“You are the man to find what fits your own need if the thing be there,”

said Polwarth. “But to ease your mind for the task: I know pretty well

some of our best English writers of the more practical and poetic sort

in theology--the two qualities go together--and if you will do me the

favour to come again to-morrow, I shall be able, I trust, to provide you

wherewithal to feed your flock, free of that duplicity which, be it

as common as the surplice, and as fully connived as laughed at by that

flock, is yet duplicity. There is no law that sermons shall be the

preacher’s own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of

humbug. Pardon the word.”

“I will not attempt to thank you,” said Wingfold, “but I will do as

you tell me. You are the first real friend I have ever had--except my

brother, who is dead.”

“Perhaps you have had more friends than you are aware of. You owe

something to the man, for instance, who, with his outspoken antagonism,

roused you first to a sense of what was lacking to you.”

“I hope I shall be grateful to God for it some day,” returned Wingfold.

“I cannot say that I feel much obligation to Mr. Bascombe. And yet

when I think of it,--perhaps--I don’t know--what ought a man to be more

grateful for than honesty?”

After a word of arrangement for next day the curate took his leave,

assuredly with a stronger feeling of simple genuine respect than he had

ever yet felt for man. Rachel bade him good night with her fine eyes

filled with tears, which suited their expression, for they always seemed

to be looking through sorrow to something beyond it.

“If this be a type of the way the sins of the fathers are visited upon

the children,” said the curate to himself, “there must be more in the

progression of history than political economy can explain. It would

drive us to believe in an economy wherein rather the well-being of the

whole was the result of individual treatment, and not the well-being of

the individual the result of the management of the whole?”

I will not count the milestones along the road on which Wingfold now

began to journey. Some of the stages, however, will appear in the course

of my story. When he came to any stiff bit of collar-work, the little

man generally appeared with an extra horse. Every day during the rest of

that week he saw his new friends.

CHAPTER XX.

A STRANGE SERMON.

On the Sunday the curate walked across the churchyard to the morning

prayer very much as if the bells, instead of ringing the people to

church, had been tolling for his execution. But if he was going to be

hanged, he would at least die like a gentleman, confessing his sin. Only

he would it were bed-time, and all well. He trembled so when he stood up

to read that he could not tell whether or not he was speaking in a voice

audible to the congregation. But as his hour drew near, the courage

to meet it drew near also, and when at length he ascended the pulpit

stairs, he was able to cast a glance across the sea of heads to learn

whether the little man was in the poor seats. But he looked for the big

head in vain.

When he read his text, it was to a congregation as listless and

indifferent as it was wont to be. He had not gone far, however, before

that change of mental condition was visible in the faces before him,

which a troop of horses would have shown by a general forward swivelling

of the ears. Wonderful to tell, they were actually listening. But in

truth it was no wonder, for seldom in any, and assuredly never in that

church, had there been heard such an exordium to a sermon.

His text was--“Confessing your faults one to another.” Having read it

with a return of the former trembling, and paused, his brain suddenly

seemed for a moment to reel under a wave of extinction that struck

it, then to float away upon it, and then to dissolve in it, as it

interpenetrated its whole mass, annihilating thought and utterance

together. But with a mighty effort of the will, in which he seemed to

come as near as man could come to the willing of his own existence, he

recovered himself and went on. To do justice to this effort, my reader

must remember that he was a shy man, and that he knew his congregation

but too well for an unsympathetic one--whether from their fault or his

own mattered little for the nonce. It had been hard enough to make up

his mind to the attempt when alone in his study, or rather, to tell the

truth, in his chamber, but to carry out his resolve in the face of

so many faces, and in spite of a cowardly brain, was an effort and a

victory indeed. Yet after all, upon second thoughts, I see that the

true resolve was the victory, sweeping shyness and every other opposing

weakness along with it. But it wanted courage of yet another sort to

make of his resolve a fact, and his courage, in that kind as well, had

never yet been put to the test or trained by trial. He had not been a

fighting boy at school; he had never had the chance of riding to hounds;

he had never been in a shipwreck, or a house on fire; had never been

waked from a sound sleep with a demand for his watch and money; yet one

who had passed creditably through all these trials, might still have

carried a doubting conscience to his grave rather than face what

Wingfold now confronted.

From the manuscript before him he read thus:

“‘Confess your faults one to another.’--This command of the apostle,

my hearers, ought to justify me in doing what I fear some of you may

consider almost as a breach of morals--talking of myself in the pulpit.

But in the pulpit has a wrong been done, and in the pulpit shall it be

confessed. From Sunday to Sunday, standing on this spot, I have read to

you, without word of explanation, as if they formed the message I had

sought and found for you, the thoughts and words of another. Doubtless

they were better than any I could have given you from my own mind or

experience, and the act had been a righteous one, had I told you the

truth concerning them. But that truth I did not tell you.--At last,

through words of honest expostulation, the voice of a friend whose

wounds are faithful, I have been aroused to a knowledge of the wrong I

have been doing. Therefore I now confess it. I am sorry. I will do so no

more.

“But, brethren, I have only a little garden on a bare hill-side, and

it hath never yet borne me any fruit fit to offer for your acceptance;

also, my heart is troubled about many things, and God hath humbled me.

I beg of you, therefore, to bear with me for a little while, if, doing

what is but lawful and expedient both, I break through the bonds of

custom in order to provide you with food convenient for you. Should I

fail in this, I shall make room for a better man. But for your bread of

this day, I go gleaning openly in other men’s fields--fields into which

I could not have found my way, in time at least for your necessities,

and where I could not have gathered such full ears of wheat, barley, and

oats but for the more than assistance of the same friend who warned me

of the wrong I was doing both you and myself. Right ancient fields are

some of them, where yet the ears lie thick for the gleaner. To continue

my metaphor: I will lay each handful before you with the name of the

field where I gathered it; and together they will serve to show what

some of the wisest and best shepherds of the English flock have believed

concerning the duty of confessing our faults.” He then proceeded to read

the extracts which Mr. Polwarth had helped him to find--and arrange, not

chronologically, but after an idea of growth. Each handful, as he called

it, he prefaced with one or two words concerning him in whose field he

had gleaned it.

His voice steadied and strengthened as he read. Renewed contact with the

minds of those vanished teachers gave him a delight which infused itself

into the uttered words, and made them also joyful; and if the curate

preached to no one else in the congregation, certainly he preached to

himself, and before it was done had entered into a thorough enjoyment of

the sermon.

A few in the congregation were disappointed because they had looked for

a justification and enforcement of the confessional, thinking the

change in the curate could only have come from that portion of the

ecclesiastical heavens towards which they themselves turned their faces.

A few others were scandalized at such an innovation on the part of a

young man who was only a curate. Many however declared that it was

the most interesting sermon they had ever heard in their lives--which

perhaps was not saying much.

Mrs. Ramshorn made a class by herself. Not having yet learned to like

Wingfold, and being herself one of the craft, with a knowledge of not

a few of the secrets of the clerical--prison-house, shall I call it,

or green-room?--she was indignant with the presumptuous young man who

degraded the pulpit to a level with the dock. Who cared for him? What

was it to a congregation of respectable people, many of them belonging

to the first county families, that he, a mere curate, should have

committed what he fancied a crime against them! He should have waited

until it had been laid to his charge. Couldn’t he repent of his sins,

whatever they were, without making a boast of them in the pulpit, and

exposing them to the eyes of a whole congregation? She had known people

make a stock-in-trade of their sins! What was it to them whether the

washy stuff he gave them by way of sermons was his own foolishness or

some other noodle’s! Nobody would have troubled himself to inquire into

his honesty, if he had but held his foolish tongue. Better men than

he had preached other people’s sermons and never thought it worth

mentioning. And what worse were the people? The only harm lay in letting

them know it; that brought the profession into disgrace, and prevented

the good the sermon would otherwise have done, besides giving the

enemies of the truth a handle against the church. And then such a thing

to call a sermon! As well take a string of blown eggs to market! Thus

she expatiated, half the way home, before either of her companions found

an opportunity of saying a word.

“I am sorry to differ from you, aunt,” said Helen. “I thought the sermon

a very interesting one. He read beautifully.”

“For my part,” said Bascombe, who was now a regular visitor from

Saturdays to Mondays, “I used to think the fellow a muff, but, by Jove!

I’ve changed my mind. If ever there was a plucky thing to do, that was

one, and there ain’t many men, let me tell you, aunt, who would have the

pluck for it.--It’s my belief, Helen,” he went on, turning to her and

speaking in a lower tone, “I’ve had the honour of doing that fellow some

good. I gave him my mind about honesty pretty plainly the first time I

saw him. And who can tell what may come next when a fellow once starts

in the right way! We shall have him with us before long. I must look

out for something for him, for of course he’ll be in a devil of a fix

without his profession.”

“I am so glad you think with me, George!” said Helen. “There was always

something I was inclined to like about Mr. Wingfold. Indeed I should

have liked him quite if he had not been so painfully modest.”

“Notwithstanding his sheepishness, though,” returned Bascombe, “there

was a sort of quiet self-satisfaction about him, and the way he always

said Don’t you think? as if he were Socrates taking advantage of Mr.

Green and softly guiding him into a trap, which I confess made me set

him down as conceited; but, as I say, I begin to change my mind. By

Jove! he must have worked pretty hard too in the dust-bins to get

together all those bits of gay rag and resplendent crockery!”

“You heard him say he had help,” said Helen.

“No, I don’t remember that.”

“It came just after that pretty simile about gleaning in old fields.”

“I remember the simile, for I thought it a very absurd one--as if fields

would lie gleanable for generations!”

“To be sure--now you point it out!” acquiesced Helen.

“The grain would have sprouted and borne harvests a hundred. If a man

will use figures, he should be careful to give them legs. I wonder whom

he got to help him--not the rector, I suppose?”

“The rector!” echoed Mrs. Ramshorn, who had been listening to the young

people’s remarks with a smile of quiet scorn on her lip, thinking what

an advantage was experience, even if it could not make up for the loss

of youth and beauty--“The last man in the world to lend himself to such

a miserable makeshift and pretence! Without brains enough even to fancy

himself able to write a sermon of his own, he flies to the dead,--to

their very coffins as it were--and I will not say STEALS from them, for

he does it openly, not having even shame enough to conceal his shame!”

“I like a man to hold his face to what he does, or thinks either,” said

Bascombe.

“Ah, George!” returned his aunt, in tones of wisdom, “by the time you

have had my experience, you will have learned a little prudence.”

Meantime, so far as his aunt was concerned, George did use prudence, for

in her presence he did not hold his face to what he thought. He said

to himself it would do her no good. She was so prejudiced! and it might

interfere with his visits.--She, for her part, never had the slightest

doubt of his orthodoxy: was he not the son of a clergyman and canon?--a

grandson of the church herself?

CHAPTER XXI.

A THUNDERBOLT.

Sometimes a thunderbolt, as men call it, will shoot from a clear sky;

and sometimes into the midst of a peaceful family, or a yet quieter

individuality, without warning of gathered storm above, or lightest

tremble of earthquake beneath, will fall a terrible fact, and from the

moment everything is changed. That family or that life is no more what

it was--probably never more can be what it was. Better it ought to be,

worse it may be--which, depends upon itself. But its spiritual weather

is altered. The air is thick with cloud, and cannot weep itself clear.

There may come a gorgeous sunset though.

It were a truism for one who believes in God to say that such

catastrophes, so rending, so frightful, never come but where they are

needed. The Power of Life is not content that they who live in and by

him should live poorly and contemptibly. If the presence of low thoughts

which he repudiates, yet makes a man miserable, how must it be with

him if they who live and move and have their being in him are mean and

repulsive, or alienated through self-sufficiency and slowness of heart?

I cannot report much progress in Helen during the months of winter and

spring. But if one wakes at last, wakes at all, who shall dare cast the

stone at him--that he ought to have awaked sooner? What man who is

awake will dare to say that he roused himself the first moment it became

possible to him? The main and plain and worst, perhaps only condemnation

is--that when people do wake they do not get up. At the same time,

however, I can hardly doubt that Helen was keeping the law of a progress

slow as the growth of an iron-tree.

Nothing had ever yet troubled her. She had never been in love, could

hardly be said to be in love now. She went regularly to church, and I

believe said her prayers night and morning--yet felt no indignation at

the doctrines and theories propounded by George Bascombe. She regarded

them as “George’s ideas,” and never cared to ask whether they were true

or not, at the same time that they were becoming to her by degrees as

like truth as falsehood can ever be. For to the untruthful mind the

false CAN seem the true. Meantime she was not even capable of giving him

the credit he deserved, in that, holding the opinions he held, he

yet advocated a life spent for the community--without, as I presume,

deriving much inspiration thereto from what he himself would represent

as the ground of all conscientious action, the consideration, namely, of

its reaction upon its originator. Still farther was it from entering the

field of her vision that possibly some of the good which distinguished

George’s unbelief from that of his brother ephemera of the last century,

was owing to the deeper working of that leaven which he denounced as the

poisonous root whence sprung all the evil diseases that gnawed at the

heart of society.

One night she sat late, making her aunt a cap. The one sign of

originality in her was the character of her millinery, of which kind of

creation she was fond, displaying therein both invention as to form,

and perception as to effect, combined with lightness and deftness of

execution. She was desirous of completing it before the next morning,

which was that of her aunt’s birthday. They had had friends to dine

with them who had stayed rather late, and it was now getting towards one

o’clock. But Helen was not easily tired, and was not given to abandoning

what she had undertaken; so she sat working away, and thinking, not

of George Bascombe, but of one whom she loved better--far better--her

brother Leopold. But she was thinking of him not quite so comfortably

as usual. Certain anxieties she had ground for concerning him had grown

stronger, for the time since she heard from him had grown very long.

All at once her work ceased, her hands were arrested, her posture grew

rigid: she was listening. HAD she heard a noise outside her window? My

reader may remember that it opened on a balcony, which was at the same

time the roof of a veranda that went along the back of the house, and

had a stair at one end to the garden.

Helen was not easily frightened, and had stopped her needle only that

she might listen the better. She heard nothing. Of course it was but

a fancy! Her hands went on again with their work.--But that was really

very like a tap at the window! And now her heart did beat a little

faster, if not with fear, then with something very like it, in which

perhaps some foreboding was mingled. But she was not a woman to lay

down her arms upon the inroad of a vague terror. She quietly rose,

and, saying to herself it must be one of the pigeons that haunted the

balcony, laid her work on the table, and went to the window. As she

drew one of the curtains a little aside to peep, the tap was plainly and

hurriedly though softly repeated, and at once she swept it back. There

was the dim shadow of a man’s head upon the blind, cast there by an old

withered moon low in the west! Perhaps it was something in the shape of

the shadow that made her pull up the blind so hurriedly, and yet with

something of the awe with which we take “the face-cloth from the face.”

Yes, there was a face!--frightful, not as that of a corpse, but as that

of a spectre from whose soul the scars of his mortal end have never

passed away. Helen did not scream--her throat seemed to close and her

heart to cease. But her eyes continued movelessly fixed on the face even

after she knew it was the face of her brother, and the eyes of the

face kept staring back into hers through the glass with such a look of

concentrated eagerness that they seemed no more organs of vision, but

caves of hunger, nor was there a movement of the lips towards speech.

The two gazed at each other for a moment of rigid silence. The glass

that separated them might have been the veil that divides those who call

themselves the living from those whom they call the dead.

It was but a moment by the clock, though to the after-consciousness it

seemed space immeasurable. She came to herself, and slowly, noiselessly,

though with tremulous hand, undid the sash, and opened the window.

Nothing divided them now, yet he stood as before, staring into her face.

Presently his lips began to move, but no words came from them.

In Helen, horror had already roused the instinct of secrecy. She put

out her two hands, took his face between them, and said in a hurried

whisper, calling him by the pet name she had given him when a child,

“Come in, Poldie, and tell me all about it.”

Her voice seemed to wake him. Slowly, with the movements of one half

paralyzed, he shoved and dragged himself over the windowsill, dropped

himself on the floor inside, and lay there, looking up in her face like

a hunted animal, that hoped he had found a refuge, but doubted. Seeing

him so exhausted, she turned from him to go and get some brandy, but a

low cry of agony drew her back. His head was raised from the floor and

his hands were stretched out, while his face entreated her, as plainly

as if he had spoken, not to leave him. She knelt and would have kissed

him, but he turned his face from her with an expression which seemed of

disgust.

“Poldie,” she said, “I MUST go and get you something. Don’t be afraid.

They are all sound asleep.”

The grasp with which he had clutched her dress relaxed, and his hand

fell by his side. She rose at once and went, creeping through the

slumberous house, light and noiseless as a shadow, but with a heart

that seemed not her own lying hard in her bosom. As she went she had to

struggle both to rouse and to compose herself, for she could not think.

An age seemed to have passed since she heard the clock strike twelve.

One thing was clear--her brother had been doing something wrong, and

dreading discovery, had fled to her. The moment this conviction made

itself plain to her, she drew herself up with the great deep breath of

a vow, as strong as it was silent and undefined, that he should not have

come to her in vain. Silent-footed as a beast of prey, silent-handed as

a thief, lithe in her movements, her eye flashing with the new-kindled

instinct of motherhood to the orphan of her father, it was as if her

soul had been suddenly raised to a white heat, which rendered her body

elastic and responsive.

CHAPTER XXII.

LEOPOLD.

She re-entered her room with the gait of a new-born goddess treading

the air. Her brother was yet prostrate where she had left him. He raised

himself on his elbow, seized with trembling hand the glass she offered

him, swallowed the brandy at a gulp, and sank again on the floor. The

next instant he sprang to his feet, cast a terrified look at the window,

bounded to the door and locked it, then ran to his sister, threw his

arms about her, and clung to her like a trembling child. But ever his

eyes kept turning to the window.

Though now twenty years of age, and at his full height, he was hardly

so tall as Helen. Swarthy of complexion, his hair dark as the night, his

eyes large and lustrous, with what Milton calls “quel sereno fulgor d’

amabil nero,” his frame nervous and slender, he looked compact and small

beside her.

She did her utmost to quiet him, unconsciously using the same words and

tones with which she had soothed his passions when he was a child. All

at once he raised his head and drew himself back from her arms with a

look of horror, then put his hand over his eyes, as if her face had been

a mirror and he had seen himself in it.

“What is that on your wristband, Leopold?” she asked. “Have you hurt

yourself?”

The youth cast an indescribable look on his hand, but it was not that

which turned Helen so deadly sick: with her question had come to her

the ghastly suspicion that the blood she saw was not his, and she felt

guilty of an unpardonable, wicked wrong against him. But she would

never, never believe it! A sister suspect her only brother of such a

crime! Yet her arms dropped and let him go. She stepped back a pace, and

of themselves, as it were, her eyes went wandering and questioning all

over him, and saw that his clothes were torn and soiled--stained--who

could tell with what?

He stood for a moment still and submissive to their search, with face

downcast. Then, suddenly flashing his eyes on her, he said, in a voice

that seemed to force its way through earth that choked it back,

“Helen, I am a murderer, and they are after me. They will be here before

daylight.”

He dropped on his knees, and clasped hers.

“O sister! sister! save me, save me!” he cried in a voice of agony.

Helen stood without response, for to stand took all her strength. How

long she fought that horrible sickness, knowing that, if she moved an

inch, turned from it a moment, yielded a hair’s-breadth, it would throw

her senseless on the floor, and the noise of her fall would rouse the

house, she never could even conjecture. All was dark before her, as if

her gaze had been on the underside of her coffin-lid, and her brain sank

and swayed and swung in the coils of the white snake that was sucking at

her heart. At length the darkness thinned; it grew a gray mist; the

face of her boy-brother glimmered up through it, like that of Dives in

hell-fire to his guardian-angel as he hung lax-winged and faint in the

ascending smoke. The mist thinned, and at length she caught a glimmer

of his pleading, despairing, self-horrified eyes: all the mother in her

nature rushed to the aid of her struggling will; her heart gave a great

heave; the blood ascended to her white brain, and flushed it with rosy

life; her body was once more reconciled and obedient; her hand went

forth, took his head between them, and pressed it against her.

“Poldie, dear,” she said, “be calm and reasonable, and I will do all I

can for you. Here, take this.--And now, answer me one question”

“You won’t give me up, Helen?”

“No. I will not.”

“Swear it, Helen.”

“Ah, my poor Poldie! is it come to this between you and me?”

“Swear it, Helen.”

“So help me God, I will not!” returned Helen, looking up.

Leopold rose, and again stood quietly before her, but again with

downbent head, like a prisoner about to receive sentence.

“Do you mean what you said a moment since--that the police are in search

of you?” asked Helen, with forced calmness.

“They must be. They must have been after me for days--I don’t know how

many. They will be here soon. I can’t think how I have escaped them so

long. Hark! Isn’t that a noise at the street-door?--No, no.--There’s a

shadow on the curtains!--No! it’s my eyes; they’ve cheated me a thousand

times. Helen! I did not try to hide her; they must have found her long

ago.”

“My God!” cried Helen; but checked the scream that sought to follow the

cry.

“There was an old shaft near,” he went on, hurriedly. “If I had thrown

her down that, they would never have found her, for there must be

choke-damp at the bottom of it enough to kill a thousand of them. But I

could not bear the thought of sending the lovely thing down there--even

to save my life.”

He was growing wild again; but the horror had again laid hold upon

Helen, and she stood speechless, staring at him.

“Hide me--hide me, Helen!” he pleaded. “Perhaps you think I am mad.

Would to God I were! Sometimes I think I must be. But this I tell you

is no madman’s fancy. If you take it for that, you will bring me to the

gallows. So, if you will see me hanged,----”

He sat down and folded his arms.

“Hush! Poldie, hush!” cried Helen, in an agonized whisper. “I am only

thinking what I can best do. I cannot hide you here, for if my aunt

knew, she would betray you by her terrors; and if she did not know, and

those men came, she would help them to search every corner of the house.

Otherwise there might be a chance.”

Again she was silent for a few moments; then, seeming suddenly to have

made up her mind, went softly to the door.

“Don’t leave me!” cried Leopold.

“Hush! I must. I know now what to do. Be quiet here until I come back.”

Slowly, cautiously, she unlocked it, and left the room. In three or four

minutes she returned, carrying a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine.

To her dismay Leopold had vanished. Presently he came creeping out from

under the bed, looking so abject that Helen could not help a pang of

shame. But the next moment the love of the sister, the tender compassion

of the woman, returned in full tide, and swallowed up the unsightly

thing. The more abject he was, the more was he to be pitied and

ministered to.

“Here, Poldie,” she said, “you carry the bread, and I will take the

wine. You must eat something, or you will be ill.”

As she spoke she locked the door again. Then she put a dark shawl over

her head, and fastened it under her chin. Her white face shone out from

it like the moon from a dark cloud.

“Follow me, Poldie,” she said, and putting out the candles, went to the

window.

He obeyed without question, carrying the loaf she had put into his

hands. The window-sash rested on a little door; she opened it, and

stepped on the balcony. As soon as her brother had followed her, she

closed it again, drew down the sash, and led the way to the garden, and

so, by the door in the sunk fence, out upon the meadows.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE REFUGE.

The night was very dusky, but Helen knew perfectly the way she was

going. A strange excitement possessed her, and lifted her above all

personal fear. The instant she found herself in the open air, her

faculties seemed to come preternaturally awake, and her judgment to grow

quite cool. She congratulated herself that there had been no rain, and

the ground would not betray their steps. There was enough of light in

the sky to see the trees against it, and partly by their outlines

she guided herself to the door in the park-paling, whence she went

as straight as she could for the deserted house. Remembering well

her brother’s old dislike to the place, she said nothing of their

destination; but, when he suddenly stopped, she knew that it had dawned

upon him. For one moment he hung back, but a stronger and more definite

fear lay behind, and he went on.

Emerging from the trees on the edge of the hollow, they looked down,

but it was too dark to see the mass of the house, or the slightest gleam

from the surface of the lake. All was silent as a deserted churchyard,

and they went down the slope as if it had been the descent to Hades.

Arrived at the wall of the garden, they followed its buttressed length

until they came to a tall narrow gate of wrought iron, almost consumed

with rust, and standing half open. By this they passed into the desolate

garden, whose misery in the daytime was like that of a ruined soul, but

now hidden in the night’s black mantle. Through the straggling bushes

with their arms they forced and with their feet they felt their way to

the front door of the house, the steps to which, from the effects of

various floods, were all out of the level in different directions. The

door was unlocked as usual, needing only a strong push to open it, and

they entered. How awfully still it seemed!--much stiller than the open

air, though that had seemed noiseless. There was not a rat or a black

beetle in the place. They groped their way through the hall, and up the

wide staircase, which gave not one crack in answer to their needlessly

careful footsteps: not a soul was within a mile of them. Helen had taken

Leopold by the hand, and she now led him straight to the closet whence

the hidden room opened. He made no resistance, for the covering wings of

the darkness had protection in them. How desolate must the soul be that

welcomes such protection! But when, knowing that thence no ray could

reach the outside, she struck a light, and the spot where he had so

often shuddered was laid bare to his soul, he gave a cry and turned and

would have rushed away. Helen caught him, he yielded, and allowed her

to lead him into the room. There she lighted a candle, and as it came

gradually alive, it shed a pale yellow light around, and revealed a bare

chamber, with a bedstead and the remains of a moth-eaten mattress in

a corner. Leopold threw himself upon it, uttering a sound that more

resembled a choked scream than a groan. Helen sat down beside him, took

his head on her lap, and sought to soothe him with such tender loving

words as had never before found birth in her heart, not to say crossed

her lips. She took from her pocket a dainty morsel, and tried to make

him eat, but in vain. Then she poured him out a cupful of wine. He

drank it eagerly, and asked for more, which she would not give him. But

instead of comforting him, it seemed only to rouse him to fresh horror.

He clung to his sister as a child clings to the nurse who has just been

telling him an evil tale, and ever his face would keep turning from her

to the door with a look of frightful anticipation. She consoled him with

all her ingenuity, assured him that for the present he was perfectly

safe, and, thinking it would encourage a sense of concealment, reminded

him of the trap in the floor of the closet and the little chamber

underneath. But at that he started up with glaring eyes.

“Helen! I remember now,” he cried. “I knew it at the time! Don’t you

know I never could endure the place? I foresaw, as plainly as I see you

now, that one day I should be crouching here for safety with a hideous

crime on my conscience. I told you so, Helen, at the time. Oh! how could

you bring me here?”

He threw himself down again, and hid his face on her lap.

With a fresh inroad of dismay Helen thought he must be going mad, for

this was the merest trick of his imagination. Certainly he had always

dreaded the place, but never a word of that sort had he said to her. Yet

there was a shadow of possible comfort in the thought--for, what if the

whole thing should prove an hallucination! But whether real or not, she

must have his story.

“Come, dearest Poldie, darling brother!” she said, “you have not yet

told me what it is. What is the terrible thing you have done? I daresay

it’s nothing so very bad after all!”

“There’s the light coming!” he said, in a dull hollow voice, “--The

morning! always the morning coming again!”

“No, no, dear Poldie!” she returned. “There is no window here--at least

it only looks on the back stair, high above heads; and the morning is a

long way off.”

“How far?” he asked, staring in her eyes--“twenty years? That was just

when I was born! Oh that I could enter a second time into my mother’s

womb, and never be born! Why are we sent into this cursed world? I would

God had never made it. What was the good? Couldn’t he have let well

alone?”

He was silent. She must get him to sleep.

It was as if a second soul had been given her to supplement the first,

and enable her to meet what would otherwise have been the exorbitant

demands now made upon her. With an effort of the will such as she could

never before have even imagined, she controlled the anguish of her own

spirit, and, softly stroking the head of the poor lad, which had again

sought her lap, compelled herself to sing him for lullaby a song of

which in his childhood he had been very fond, and with which, in all the

importance of imagined motherhood, she had often sung him to sleep. And

the old influence was potent yet. In a few minutes the fingers which

clutched her hand relaxed, and she knew by his breathing that he slept.

She sat still as a stone, not daring to move, hardly daring breathe

enough to keep her alive, lest she should rouse him from his few blessed

moments of self-nothingness, during which the tide of the all-infolding

ocean of peace was free to flow into the fire-torn cave of his bosom.

She sat motionless thus, until it seemed as if for very weariness she

must drop in a heap on the floor, but that the aches and pains which

went through her in all directions held her body together like ties and

rivets. She had never before known what weariness was, and now she knew

it for all her life. But like an irritant, her worn body clung about her

soul and dulled it to its own grief, thus helping it to a pitiful kind

of repose. How long she sat thus she could not tell--she had no means of

knowing, but it seemed hours on hours, and yet, though the nights were

now short, the darkness had not begun to thin. But when she thought how

little access the light had to that room, she began to grow uneasy lest

she should be missed from her own, or seen on her way back to it. At

length some involuntary movement woke him. He started to his feet with

a look of wild gladness. But there was scarcely time to recognise it

before it vanished.

“My God, it is true then!” he shrieked. “O Helen, I dreamed that I

was innocent--that I had but dreamed I had done it. Tell me that I’m

dreaming now. Tell me! tell me!--Tell me that I am no murderer!”

As he spoke, he seized her shoulder with a fierce grasp, and shook her

as if trying to wake her from the silence of a lethargy.

“I hope you are innocent, my darling. But in any case I will do all I

can to protect you,” said Helen. “Only I shall never be able unless you

control yourself sufficiently to let me go home.”

“No, Helen!” he cried; “you must not leave me. If you do, I shall go

mad. SHE will come instead.”

Helen shuddered inwardly, but kept her outward composure.

“If I stay with you, just think, dearest, what will happen,” she said.

“I shall be missed, and all the country will be raised to look for me.

They will think I have been--“--She checked herself.

“And so you might be--so might anyone,” he cried, “so long as I am

loose--like the Rajah’s man-eating horse. O God! It has come to this!”

And he hid his face in his hands.

“And then you see, my Poldie,” Helen went on as calmly as she could,

“they would come here and find us; and I don’t know what might come

next.”

“Yes, yes, Helen! Go, go directly. Leave me this instant,” he said,

hurriedly, and took her by the shoulders, as if he would push her from

the room, but went on talking. “It must be, I know; but when the light

comes I shall go mad. Would to God I might, for the day is worse than

the darkness; then I see my own black against the light. Now go, Helen.

But you WILL come back to me as soon as ever you can? How shall I know

when to begin to look for you? What o’clock is it? My watch has never

been--since--. Ugh! the light will be here soon. Helen, I know now

what hell is.--Ah! Yes.”--As he spoke he had been feeling in one of his

pockets.--“I will not be taken alive.--Can you whistle, Helen?”

“Yes, Poldie,” answered Helen, trembling. “Don’t you remember teaching

me?”

“Yes, yes.--Then, when you come near the house, whistle, and go on

whistling, for if I hear a step without any whistling, I shall kill

myself.”

“What have you got there?” she asked in renewed terror, noticing that he

kept his hand in the breast pocket of his coat.

“Only the knife,” he answered calmly.

“Give it to me,” she said, calmly too.

He laughed, and the laugh was more terrible than any cry.

“No; I’m not so green as that,” he said. “My knife is my only friend!

Who is to take care of me when you are away? Ha! ha!”

She saw that the comfort of the knife must not be denied him. Nor did

she fear any visit that might drive him to its use--except indeed the

police WERE to come upon him--and then--what better could he do? she

thought.

“Well, well, I will not plague you,” she said. “Lie down and I will

cover you with my shawl, and you can fancy it my arms round you. I will

come to you as soon as ever I can.”

He obeyed. She spread her shawl over him and kissed him.

“Thank you, Helen,” he said quietly.

“Pray to God to deliver you, dear,” she said.

“He can do that only by killing me,” he returned. “I will pray for that.

But do you go, Helen. I will try to bear my misery for your sake.”

He followed her from the room with eyes out of which looked the very

demon of silent despair.

I will not further attempt to set forth his feelings. The incredible,

the impossible, had become a fact-AND HE WAS THE MAN. He who knows the

relief of waking from a dream of crime to the jubilation of recovered

innocence, to the sunlight that blots out the thing as untrue, may by

help of that conceive the misery of a delicate nature suddenly filled

with the clear assurance of horrible guilt. Such a misery no waking but

one that annihilated the past could ever console. Yes, there is yet an

awaking--if a man might but attain unto it--an awaking into a region

whose very fields are full of the harmony sovereign to console, not

merely for having suffered--that needs little consoling, but for having

inflicted the deepest wrong.

The moment Helen was out of sight, Leopold drew a small silver box from

an inner pocket, eyed it with the eager look of a hungry animal, took

from it a portion of a certain something, put it in his mouth, closed

his eyes, and lay still.

CHAPTER XXIV.

HELEN WITH A SECRET.

When Helen came out into the corridor, she saw that the day was

breaking. A dim, dreary light filled the dismal house, but the candle

had prevented her from perceiving the little of it that could enter

that room withdrawn. A pang of fear shot to her soul, and like a belated

spectre or a roused somnambulist she fled across the park. It was all

so like a horrible dream, from which she must wake in bed! yet she knew

there was no such hope for her. Her darling lay in that frightful house,

and if anyone should see her, it might be death to him. But yet it was

very early, and two hours would pass before any of the workmen would be

on their way to the new house. Yet, like a murderer shaken out of the

earth by the light, she fled. When she was safe in her own room, ere she

could get into bed, she once more turned deadly sick, and next knew by

the agonies of coming to herself that she had fainted.

A troubled, weary, EXCITED sleep followed. She woke with many a start,

as if she had sinned in sleeping, and instantly for very weariness,

dozed off again. How kind is weariness sometimes! It is like the

Father’s hand laid a little heavy on the heart to make it still. But her

dreams were full of torture, and even when she had no definite dream,

she was haunted by the vague presence of blood. It was considerably past

her usual time for rising when at length she heard her maid in the room.

She got up wearily, but beyond the heaviest of hearts and a general

sense of misery, nothing ailed her. Nor even did her head ache.

But she had lived an age since she woke last; and the wonder was, not

that she felt so different, but that she should be aware of being the

same person as before notwithstanding all that had passed. Her business

now was to keep herself from thinking until breakfast should be over.

She must hold the “ebony box” of last night close shut even from her own

eyes, lest the demons of which it was full should rush out and darken

the world about her. She hurried to her bath for strength: the friendly

water would rouse her to the present, make the past recede like a dream,

and give her courage to face the future. Her very body seemed defiled

by the knowledge that was within it. Alas! how must poor Leopold feel,

then! But she must not think.

All the time she was dressing, her thoughts kept hovering round the

awful thing like moths around a foul flame, from which she could not

drive them away. Ever and again she said to herself that she must not,

yet ever and again she found herself peeping through the chinks of the

thought-chamber at the terrible thing inside--the form of which she

could not see--saw only the colour--red,--red mingled with ghastly

whiteness. In all the world, her best-loved, her brother, the child of

her grandfather, was the only one who knew how that thing came there.

But while Helen’s being was in such tumult that she could never more be

the cool, indifferent, self-contented person she had hitherto been,

her old habits and forms of existence were now of endless help to the

retaining of her composure and the covering of her secret. A dim gleam

of gladness woke in her at the sight of the unfinished cap, than which

she could not have a better excuse for her lateness, and when she showed

it to her aunt with the wish of many happy returns of the day, no second

glance from Mrs. Ramshorn added to her uneasiness.

But oh, how terribly the time crept in its going! for she dared not

approach the deserted house while the daylight kept watching it like a

dog; and what if Leopold should have destroyed himself in the madness

of his despair before she could go to him! She had not a friend to help

her. George Bascombe?--she shuddered at the thought of him. With his

grand ideas of duty, he would be for giving up Leopold that very moment!

Naturally the clergyman was the one to go to--and Mr. Wingfold had

himself done wrong. But he had confessed it! No--he was a poor creature,

and would not hold his tongue! She shook at every knock at the door,

every ring at the bell, lest it should be the police. To be sure, he had

been comparatively little there, and naturally they would seek him

first at Goldswyre--but where next? At Glaston, of course. Every time a

servant entered the room she turned away, lest her ears should make her

countenance a traitor. The police might be watching the house, and might

follow her when she went to him! With her opera-glass, she examined the

meadow, then ran to the bottom of the garden, and lying down, peered

over the sunk fence. But not a human being was in sight. Next she put

on her bonnet, with the pretence of shopping, to see if there were any

suspicious-looking persons in the street. But she did not meet a

single person unknown to her between her aunt’s door and Mr. Drew the

linendraper’s. There she bought a pair of gloves, and walked quietly

back, passing the house, and going on to the Abbey, without meeting one

person at whom she had to look twice.

All the time her consciousness was like a single intense point of light

in the middle of a darkness it could do nothing to illuminate. She knew

nothing but that her brother lay in that horrible empty house, and that,

if his words were not the ravings of a maniac, the law, whether it yet

suspected him or not, was certainly after him, and if it had not yet

struck upon his trail, was every moment on the point of finding it, and

must sooner or later come up with him. She MUST save him--all that was

left of him to save! But poor Helen knew very little about saving.

One thing more she became suddenly aware of as she re-entered the

house--the possession of a power of dissimulation, of hiding herself,

hitherto strange to her, for hitherto she had had nothing, hardly even

a passing dislike to conceal. The consciousness brought only exultation

with it, for her nature was not yet delicate enough to feel the jar of

the thought that neither words nor looks must any more be an index to

what lay within her.

CHAPTER XXV.

A DAYLIGHT VISIT.

But she could not rest. When would the weary day be over, and the

longed-for rather than welcome night appear? Again she went into the

garden, and down to the end of it, and looked out over the meadow. Not

a creature was in sight, except a red and white cow, a child gathering

buttercups, and a few rooks crossing from one field to another. It was a

glorious day; the sun seemed the very centre of conscious peace. And now

first, strange to say, Helen began to know the bliss of bare existence

under a divine sky, in the midst of a divine air, the two making

a divine summer, which throbbed with the presence of the creative

spirit--but as something apart from her now, something she had had, but

had lost, which could never more be hers. How could she ever be glad

again, with such a frightful fact in her soul! Away there beyond those

trees lay her unhappy brother, in the lonely house, now haunted indeed.

Perhaps he lay there dead! The horrors of the morning, or his own hand,

might have slain him. She must go to him. She would defy the very sun,

and go in the face of the universe. Was he not her brother?--Was there

no help anywhere? no mantle for this sense of soul-nakedness that had

made her feel as if her awful secret might be read a mile away, lying

crimson and livid in the bottom of her heart. She dared hardly think of

it, lest the very act should betray the thing of darkness to the world

of light around her. Nothing but the atmosphere of another innocent soul

could shield hers, and she had no friend. What did people do when their

brothers did awful deeds? She had heard of praying to God--had

indeed herself told her brother to pray, but it was all folly--worse,

priestcraft. As if such things AND a God could exist together! Yet,

even with the thought of denial in her mind, she looked up, and gazed

earnestly into the wide innocent mighty space, as if by searching

she might find some one. Perhaps she OUGHT to pray. She could see no

likelihood of a God, and yet something pushed her towards prayer. What

if all this had come upon her and Poldie because she never prayed! If

there were such horrible things in the world, although she had never

dreamed of them--if they could come so near her, into her very soul,

making her feel like a murderess, might there not be a God also, though

she knew nothing of his whereabouts or how to reach him and gain a

hearing? Certainly if things went with such hellish possibilities at

the heart of them, and there was no hand at all to restrain or guide

or restore, the world was a good deal worse place than either the

Methodists or the Positivists made it out to be. In the form of

feelings, not of words, hardly even of thoughts, things like these

passed through her mind as she stood on the top of the sunk fence and

gazed across the flat of sunny green before her. She could almost have

slain herself to be rid of her knowledge and the awful consciousness

that was its result. SHE would have found no difficulty in that line of

Macbeth:--“To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself.”--But all this

time there was her brother! She MUST go to him. “God hide me,” she cried

within her. “But how can he hide me,” she thought, “when I am hiding a

murderer?” “O God,” she cried again, and this time in an audible murmur,

“I am his sister, thou knowest!” Then she turned, walked back to the

house, and sought her aunt.

“I have got a little headache,” she said quite coolly, “and I want a

long walk. Don’t wait luncheon for me. It is such a glorious day! I

shall go by the Millpool road, and across the park. Good-bye till tea,

or perhaps dinner-time even.”

“Hadn’t you better have a ride and be back to luncheon? I shan’t want

Jones to-day,” said her aunt mournfully, who, although she had almost

given up birthdays, thought her niece need not quite desert her on the

disagreeable occasion.

“I’m not in the humour for riding, aunt. Nothing will do me good but a

walk. I shall put some luncheon in my bag.”

She went quietly out by the front door, walked slowly, softly, statelily

along the street and out of the town, and entered the park by the

lodge-gate. She saw Rachel at her work in the kitchen as she passed, and

heard her singing in a low and weak but very sweet voice, which went to

her heart like a sting, making the tall, handsome, rich lady envy the

poor distorted atom who, through all the fogs of her winter, had yet

something in her that sought such utterance. But, indeed, if all her

misery had been swept away like a dream, Helen might yet have envied the

dwarf ten times more than she did now, had she but known how they stood

compared with each other. For the being of Helen to that of Rachel was

as a single, untwined primary cell to a finished brain; as the peeping

of a chicken to the song of a lark--I had almost said, to a sonata of

Beethoven.

“Good day, Rachel,” she said, calling as she passed, in a kindly, even

then rather condescending voice, through the open door, where a pail of

water, just set down, stood rocking the sun on its heaving surface, and

flashing it out again into the ocean of the light. It seemed to poor

Helen a squalid abode, but it was a home-like palace, and fairly

furnished, in comparison with the suburban villa and shop-upholstery

which typified the house of her spirit--now haunted by a terrible secret

walking through its rooms, and laying a bloody hand upon all their

whitenesses.

There was no sound all the way as she went but the noise of the birds,

and an occasional clank from the new building far away. At last, with

beating heart and scared soul, she was within the high garden-wall,

making her way through the rank growth of weeds and bushes to the dismal

house. She entered trembling, and the air felt as if death had been

before her. Hardly would her limbs carry her, but with slow step she

reached the hidden room. He lay as she had left him. Was he asleep, or

dead? She crept near and laid her hand on his forehead. He started to

his feet in an agony of fright. She soothed and reassured him as best

she was able. When the paroxysm relaxed--

“You didn’t whistle,” he said.

“No; I forgot,” answered Helen, shocked at her own carelessness. “But if

I had, you would not have heard me: you were fast asleep.”

“A good thing I was! And yet no! I wish I had heard you, for then by

this time I should have been beyond their reach.”

Impulsively he showed her the short dangerous looking weapon he carried.

Helen stretched out her hand to take it, but he hurriedly replaced it in

his pocket.

“I will find some water for you to wash with,” said Helen. “There used

to be a well in the garden, I remember. I have brought you a shirt.”

With some difficulty she found the well, all but lost in matted weeds

under an ivy-tod, and in the saucer of a flower-pot she carried him some

water, and put the garment with the horrible spot in her bag, to take

it away and destroy it. Then she made him eat and drink. He did whatever

she told him, with a dull, yet doglike obedience. His condition was

much changed; he had a stupefied look, and seemed only half awake to his

terrible situation. Yet he answered what questions she put to him

even too readily--with an indifferent matter-of-factness, indeed, more

dreadful than any most passionate outburst. But at the root of the

apparent apathy lay despair and remorse,--weary, like gorged and

sleeping tigers far back in their dens. Only the dull torpedo of misery

was awake, lying motionless on the bottom of the deepest pool of his

spirit.

The mood was favourable to the drawing of his story from him, but there

are more particulars in the narrative I am now going to give than Helen

at that time learned.

CHAPTER XXVI.

LEOPOLD’S STORY.

While yet a mere boy, scarcely more than sixteen, Leopold had made

acquaintance with the family of a certain manufacturer, who, having

retired from business with a rapidly-gained fortune, had some years

before purchased an estate a few miles from Goldswyre, his uncle’s

place. Their settling in the neighbourhood was not welcome to the

old-fashioned, long-rooted family of the Lingards; but although they

had not called upon them, they could not help meeting them occasionally.

Leopold’s association with them commenced just after he had left Eton,

between which time and his going up to Cambridge he spent a year in

reading with his cousins’ tutor. It was at a ball he first saw Emmeline,

the eldest of the family. She had but lately returned from a school at

which from the first she had had for her bedfellow a black ewe. It

was not a place where any blackness under that of pitch was likely to

attract notice, being one of those very ordinary and very common schools

where everything is done that is done, first for manners, then for

accomplishments, and lastly for information, leaving all the higher

faculties and endowments of the human being as entirely unconsidered

as if they had no existence. Taste, feeling, judgment, imagination,

conscience, are in such places left to look after themselves, and

the considerations presented to them, and duties required of them as

religious, are only fitted to lower still farther such moral standard as

they may possess. Schools of this kind send out, as their quota of the

supply of mothers for the ages to come, young women who will consult a

book of etiquette as to what is ladylike; who always think what is the

mode, never what is beautiful; who read romances in which the wickedness

is equalled only by the shallowness; who write questions to weekly

papers concerning points of behaviour, and place their whole, or chief

delight in making themselves attractive to men. Some such girls look

lady-like and interesting, and many of them are skilled in the arts that

meet their fullest development in a nature whose sense of existence

is rounded by its own reflection in the mirror of self-consciousness

falsified by vanity. Once understood, they are for a sadness or a

loathing, after the nature that understands them; till then, they are to

the beholder such as they desire to appear, while under the fair outside

lies a nature whose vulgarity, if the most thorough of changes do not in

the meantime supervene, will manifest itself hideously on the approach

of middle age, that is, by the time when habituation shall have

destroyed the restraints of diffidence. Receiving ever fresh and best

assurance of their own consequence in the attention and admiration

of men, such girls are seldom capable of any real attachment, and the

marvel is that so few of them comparatively disgrace themselves after

marriage.

Whether it was the swarthy side of his nature, early ripened under the

hot Indian sun, that found itself irresistibly drawn to the widening of

its humanity in the flaxen fairness of Emmeline, or the Saxon element

in him seeking back to its family--it might indeed have been both, our

nature admitting of such marvellous complexity in its unity,--he fell

in love with her, if not in the noblest yet in a very genuine, though

at the same time very passionate way; and as she had, to use a Scots

proverb, a crop for all corn, his attentions were acceptable to her. Had

she been true-hearted enough to know anything of that love whose name

was for ever suffering profanation upon her lips, she would, being at

least a year and a half older than he, have been too much of a woman to

encourage his approaches--would have felt he was a boy and must not be

allowed to fancy himself a man. But to be just, he did look to

English eyes older than he was. And then he was very handsome,

distinguished-looking, of a good family, which could in no sense be said

of her,--and with high connections--at the same time a natural contrast

to herself, and personally attractive to her. The first moment she saw

his great black eyes blaze, she accepted the homage, laid it on the

altar of her self-worship, and ever after sought to see them lighted

up afresh in worship of her only divinity. To be feelingly aware of her

power over him, to play upon him as on an instrument, to make his cheek

pale or glow, his eyes flash or fill, as she pleased, was a game almost

too delightful.

One of the most potent means for producing the humano-atmospheric play

in which her soul thus rejoiced, and one whose operation was to none

better known than to Emmeline, was jealousy, and for its generation she

had all possible facilities--for there could not be a woman in regard

of whom jealousy was more justifiable on any ground except that of being

worth it. So far as it will reach, however, it must be remembered, in

mitigation of judgment, that she had no gauge in herself equal to the

representation of a tithe of the misery whose signs served to lift

her to the very Paradise of falsehood: she knew not what she did, and

possibly knowledge might have found in her some pity and abstinence. But

when a woman, in her own nature cold, takes delight in rousing passion,

she will, selfishly confident in her own safety, go to strange lengths

in kindling and fanning the flame which is the death of the other.

It is far from my intention to follow the disagreeable topic across

the pathless swamp through which an elaboration of its phases would

necessarily drag me. Of morbid anatomy, save for the setting forth of

cure, I am not fond, and here there is nothing to be said of cure. What

concerns me as a narrator is, that Emmeline consoled and irritated and

re-consoled Leopold, until she had him her very slave, and the more

her slave that by that time he knew something of her character. The

knowledge took from him what little repose she had left him; he did no

more good at school, and went to Cambridge with the conviction that

the woman to whom he had given his soul, would be doing things in his

absence the sight of which would drive him mad. Yet somehow he continued

to live, reassured now and then by the loving letters she wrote to

him, and relieving his own heart while he fostered her falsehood by the

passionate replies he made to them.

From a sad accident of his childhood, he had become acquainted with

something of the influences of a certain baneful drug, to the use of

which one of his attendants was addicted, and now at college, partly

from curiosity, partly from a desire to undergo its effects, but chiefly

in order to escape from ever-gnawing and passionate thought, he began to

make EXPERIMENTS in its use. Experiment called for repetition--in order

to verification, said the fiend,--and repetition led first to a longing

after its effects, and next to a mad appetite for the thing itself; so

that, by the time of which my narrative treats, he was on the verge of

absolute slavery to its use, and in imminent peril of having to pass the

rest of his life in alternations of ecstasy and agony, divided by dull

spaces of misery, the ecstasies growing rarer and rarer, and the agonies

more and more frequent, intense, and lasting; until at length the

dethroned Apollo found himself chained to a pillar of his own ruined

temple, which the sirocco was fast filling with desert sand.

CHAPTER XXVII.

LEOPOLD’S STORY CONCLUDED.

He knew from her letters that they were going to give a ball, at which

as many as pleased should be welcome in fancy dresses, and masked if

they chose. The night before it he had a dream, under the influence of

his familiar no doubt, which made him so miserable and jealous that

he longed to see her as a wounded man longs for water, and the thought

arose of going down to the ball, not exactly in disguise, for he had no

mind to act a part, but masked so that he should not be recognised

as uninvited, and should have an opportunity of watching Emmeline,

concerning whose engagement with a young cavalry officer there had

lately been reports, which, however, before his dream, had caused him

less uneasiness than many such preceding. The same moment the thought

was a resolve.

I must mention that no one whatever knew the degree of his intimacy with

Emmeline, or that he had any ground for considering her engaged to him.

Secrecy added much to the zest of Emmeline’s pleasures. Everyone knew

that he was a devoted admirer--but therein to be classed with a host.

For concealment, he contented himself with a large travelling-cloak, a

tall felt hat, and a black silk mask.

He entered the grounds with an arrival of guests, and knowing the place

perfectly, contrived to see something of her behaviour, while he watched

for an opportunity of speaking to her alone,--a quest of unlikely

success. Hour after hour he watched, and all the time never spoke or was

spoken to.

Those who are acquainted with the mode of operation of the drug to which

I have referred, are aware that a man may be fully under its influences

without betraying to the ordinary observer that he is in a condition

differing from that of other men. But, in the living dream wherein he

walks, his feeling of time and of space is so enlarged, or perhaps, I

rather think, so subdivided to the consciousness, that everything about

him seems infinite both in duration and extent; the action of a second

has in it a multitudinous gradation of progress, and a line of space

is marked out into millionths, of every one of which the consciousness

takes note. At the same time his senses are open to every impression

from things around him, only they appear to him in a strangely exalted

metamorphosis, the reflex of his own mental exaltation either in bliss

or torture, while the fancies of a man mingle with the facts thus

introduced and modify and are in turn modified by them; whereby out of

the chaos arises the mountain of an Earthly Paradise, whose roots are in

the depths of hell; and whether the man be with the divine air and the

clear rivers and the thousand-hued flowers on the top, or down in the

ice-lake with the tears frozen to hard lumps in the hollows of his eyes

so that he can no more have even the poor consolation of weeping, is but

the turning of a hair, so far at least as his will has to do with it.

The least intrusion of anything painful, of any jar that cannot be

wrought into the general harmony of the vision, will suddenly alter its

character, and from the seventh heaven of speechless bliss the man

may fall plumb down into gulfs of horrible and torturing, it may be

loathsome imaginings.

Now Leopold had taken a dose of the drug on his journey, and it was

later than usual, probably because of the motion, ere it began to take

effect. He had indeed ceased to look for any result from it, when all

at once, as he stood amongst the laburnums and lilacs of a rather late

spring, something seemed to burst in his brain, and that moment he was

Endymion waiting for Diana in her interlunar grove, while the music of

the spheres made the blossoms of a stately yet flowering forest, tremble

all with conscious delight.

Emboldened by his new condition, he drew nigh the house. They were then

passing from the ball to the supper-room, and he found the tumult so

distasteful to his mood of still ecstasy that he would not have entered

had he not remembered that he had in his pocket a note ready if needful

to slip into her hand, containing only the words, “Meet me for one long

minute at the circle,”--a spot well known to both: he threw his cloak

Spanish fashion over his left shoulder, slouched his hat, and

entering stood in a shadowy spot she must pass in going to or from the

supper-room. There he waited, with the note hid in his hand--a long

time, yet not a weary one, such visions of loveliness passed before his

entranced gaze. At length SHE also passed--lovely as the Diana whose

dress she had copied--not quite so perfectly as she had abjured her

manners. She leaned trustingly on the arm of some one, but Leopold never

even looked at him. He slid the note into her hand, which hung ungloved

as inviting confidences. With an instinct quickened and sharpened

tenfold by much practice, her fingers instantly closed upon it, but, not

a muscle belonging to any other part of her betrayed the intrusion of a

foreign body: I do not believe her heart gave one beat the more to

the next minute. She passed graceful on, her swan’s-neck shining; and

Leopold hastened out to one of the windows of the ball-room, there to

feast his eyes upon her loveliness. But when he caught sight of her

whirling in the waltz with the officer of dragoons whose name he had

heard coupled with hers, and saw her flash on him the light and power

of eyes which were to him the windows of all the heaven he knew, as they

swam together in the joy of the rhythm, of the motion, of the music,

suddenly the whole frame of the dream wherein he wandered, trembled,

shook, fell down into the dreary vaults that underlie all the airy

castles that have other foundation than the will of the eternal Builder.

With the suddenness of the dark that follows the lightning, the music

changed to a dissonant clash of multitudinous cymbals, the resounding

clang of brazen doors, and the hundred-toned screams of souls in

torture. The same moment, from halls of infinite scope, where the very

air was a soft tumult of veiled melodies ever and anon twisted into

inextricable knots of harmony--under whose skyey domes he swept upborne

by chords of sound throbbing up against great wings mighty as thought

yet in their motions as easy and subtle, he found himself lying on the

floor of a huge vault, whose black slabs were worn into many hollows by

the bare feet of the damned as they went and came between the chambers

of their torture opening off upon every side, whence issued all kinds

of sickening cries, and mingled with the music to which, with whips of

steel, hellish executioners urged the dance whose every motion was an

agony. His soul fainted within him, and the vision changed. When he came

to himself, he lay on the little plot of grass amongst the lilacs and

laburnums where he had asked Emmeline to meet him. Fevered with jealousy

and the horrible drug, his mouth was parched like an old purse, and he

found himself chewing at the grass to ease its burning and drought.

But presently the evil thing resumed its sway and fancies usurped over

facts. He thought he was lying in an Indian jungle, close by the cave of

a beautiful tigress, which crouched within, waiting the first sting of

reviving hunger to devour him. He could hear her breathing as she slept,

but he was fascinated, paralyzed, and could not escape, knowing that,

even if with mighty effort he succeeded in moving a finger, the motion

would suffice to wake her, and she would spring upon him and tear him to

pieces. Years upon years passed thus, and he still lay on the grass in

the jungle, and still the beautiful tigress slept. But however far apart

the knots upon the string of time may lie, they must pass: an angel in

white stood over him, his fears vanished, the waving of her wings

cooled him, and she was the angel whom he had loved and loved from all

eternity, in whom was his ever-and-only rest. She lifted him to his

feet, gave him her hand, they walked away, and the tigress was asleep

for ever. For miles and miles, as it seemed to his exaltation, they

wandered away into the woods, to wander in them for ever, the same

violet blue, flashing with roseate stars, for ever looking in through

the tree-tops, and the great leafy branches hushing, ever hushing them,

as with the voices of child-watching mothers, into peace, whose depth is

bliss.

“Have you nothing to say now I am come?” said the angel.

“I have said all. I am at rest,” answered the mortal.

“I am going to be married to Captain Hodges,” said the angel.

And with the word, the forests of heaven vanished, and the halls of

Eblis did not take their place:--a worse hell was there--the cold

reality of an earth abjured, and a worthless maiden walking by his side.

He stood and turned to her. The shock had mastered the drug. They were

only in the little wooded hollow, a hundred yards from the house. The

blood throbbed in his head as from the piston of an engine. A horrid

sound of dance-music was in his ears. Emmeline, his own, stood in her

white dress, looking up in his face, with the words just parted from her

lips, “I am going to be married to Captain Hodges.” The next moment she

threw her arms round his neck, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him,

and clung to him.

“Poor Leopold!” she said, and looked in his face with her electric

battery at full power; “does it make him miserable, then?--But you know

it could not have gone on like this between you and me for ever! It was

very dear while it lasted, but it must come to an end.”

Was there a glimmer of real pity and sadness in those wondrous eyes? She

laughed--was it a laugh of despair or of exultation?--and hid her

face on his bosom. And what was it that awoke in Leopold? Had the drug

resumed its power over him? Was it rage at her mockery, or infinite

compassion for her despair? Would he slay a demon, or ransom a spirit

from hateful bonds? Would he save a woman from disgrace and misery to

come? or punish her for the vilest falsehood? Who can tell? for Leopold

himself never could. Whatever the feeling was, its own violence erased

it from his memory, and left him with a knife in his hand, and Emmeline

lying motionless at his feet. It was a knife the Scotch highlanders call

a skean-dhu, sharp-pointed as a needle, sharp-edged as a razor, and with

one blow of it he had cleft her heart, and she never cried or laughed

any more in that body whose charms she had degraded to the vile

servitude of her vanity. The next thing he remembered was standing on

the edge of the shaft of a deserted coalpit, ready to cast himself down.

Whence came the change of resolve, he could not tell, but he threw in

his cloak and mask, and fled. The one thought in his miserable brain

was his sister. Having murdered one woman, he was fleeing to another for

refuge. Helen would save him.

How he had found his way to his haven, he had not an idea. Searching the

newspapers, Helen heard that a week had elapsed between the “mysterious

murder of a young lady in Yorkshire” and the night on which he came to

her window.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

SISTERHOOD.

“Well, Poldie, after all I would rather be you than she!” cried Helen

indignantly, when she had learned the whole story.

It was far from the wisest thing to say, but she meant it, and clasped

her brother to her bosom.

Straightway the poor fellow began to search for all that man could utter

in excuse, nay in justification, not of himself, but of the woman he

had murdered, appropriating all the blame. But Helen had recognised in

Emmeline the selfishness which is the essential murderer, nor did it

render her more lenient towards her that the same moment, with a start

of horror, she caught a transient glimpse of the same in herself. But

the discovery wrought in the other direction, and the tenderness she now

lavished upon Leopold left all his hopes far behind. Her brother’s sin

had broken wide the feebly-flowing springs of her conscience, and she

saw that in idleness and ease and drowsiness of soul, she had been

forgetting and neglecting even the being she loved best in the universe.

In the rushing confluence of love, truth, and indignation, to atone for

years of half-love, half-indifference, as the past now appeared to

her, she would have spoiled him terribly, heaping on him caresses and

assurances that he was far the less guilty and the more injured of the

two; but Leopold’s strength was exhausted, and he fell back in a faint.

While she was occupied with his restoration many things passed through

her mind. Amongst the rest she saw it would be impossible for her to

look after him sufficiently where he was, that the difficulty of feeding

him even would be great, that very likely he was on the borders of an

illness, when he would require constant attention, that the danger of

discovery was great--in short, that some better measures must be taken

for his protection and the possibility of her ministrations. If she had

but a friend to consult! Ever that thought returned. Alas! she had none

on whose counsel or discretion either she could depend. When at length

he opened his eyes, she told him she must leave him now, but when it

was dark she would come again, and stay with him till dawn. Feebly he

assented, seeming but half aware of what she said, and again closed his

eyes. While he lay thus, she gained possession of his knife. It left its

sheath behind it, and she put it naked in her pocket. As she went from

the room, feeling like a mother abandoning her child in a wolf-haunted

forest, his eyes followed her to the door with a longing, wild, hungry

look, and she felt the look following her still through the wood and

across the park and into her chamber, while the knife in her pocket felt

like a spellbound demon waiting his chance to work them both a mischief.

She locked her door and took it out, and as she put it carefully away,

fearful lest any attempt to destroy it might lead to its discovery,

she caught sight of her brother’s name engraved in full upon the silver

mounting of the handle. “What if he had left it behind him!” she thought

with a shudder.

But a reassuring strength had risen in her mind with Leopold’s

disclosure. More than once on her way home she caught herself reasoning

that the poor boy had not been to blame at all--that he could not help

it--that she had deserved nothing less. Her conscience speedily told her

that in consenting to such a thought, she herself would be a murderess.

Love her brother she must; excuse him she might, for honest excuse is

only justice; but to uphold the deed would be to take the part of hell

against heaven. Still the murder did not, would not seem so frightful

after she had heard the whole tale, and she found it now required far

less effort to face her aunt. If she was not the protectress of the

innocent, she was of the grievously wronged, and the worst wrong done

him was the crime he had been driven to do. She lay down and slept until

dinner time, woke refreshed, and sustained her part during the slow

meal, heartened by the expectation of seeing her brother again and in

circumstance of less anxiety when the friendly darkness had come, and

all eyes but theirs were closed. She talked to her aunt and a lady who

dined with them as if she had the freest heart in the world; the

time passed; the converse waned; the hour arrived; adieus were said;

drowsiness came. All the world of Glaston was asleep; the night on her

nest was brooding upon the egg of to-morrow; the moon was in darkness;

and the wind was blowing upon Helen’s hot forehead, as she slid like a

thief across the park.

Her mind was in a tumult of mingled feelings, all gathered about the

form of her precious brother. One moment she felt herself ministering to

the father she had loved so dearly, in protecting his son; the next the

thought of her father had vanished, and all was love for the boy whose

memories filled the shadow of her childhood; about whom she had dreamed

night after night as he crossed the great sea to come to her; who had

crept into her arms timidly, and straightway turned into the daintiest

merriest playmate; who had charmed her even in his hot-blooded rages,

when he rushed at her with whatever was in his hand at the moment. Then

she had laughed and dared him; now she shuddered to remember. Again,

and this was the feeling that generally prevailed, she was a vessel

overflowing with the mere woman-passion of protection: the wronged,

abused, maddened, oppressed, hunted human thing was dependent upon her,

and her alone, for any help or safety he was ever to find. Sometimes it

was the love of a mother for her sick child; sometimes that of a tigress

crouching over her wounded cub and licking its hurts. All was coloured

with admiration of his beauty and grace, and mingled with boundless pity

for their sad overclouding and defeature! Nor was the sense of wrong to

herself in wrong to her own flesh and blood wanting. The sum of all was

a passionate devotion of her being to the service of her brother.

I suspect that at root the loves of the noble wife, the great-souled

mother, and the true sister, are one. Anyhow, they are all but glints on

the ruffled waters of humanity of the one changeless enduring Light.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE SICK-CHAMBER.

She had reached the little iron gate, which hung on one hinge only, and

was lifting it from the ground to push it open, when sudden through the

stillness came a frightful cry. Had they found him already? Was it

a life-and-death struggle going on within? For one moment she stood

rooted; the next she flew to the door. When she entered the hall,

however, the place was silent as a crypt. Could it have been her

imagination? Again, curdling her blood with horror, came the tearing

cry, a sort of shout of agony. All in the dark, she flew up the stair,

calling him by name, fell twice, rose as if on wings, and flew again

until she reached the room. There all was silence and darkness. With

trembling hands she found her match-box and struck a light, uttering

all the time every soothing word she could think of, while her heart

quavered in momentary terror of another shriek. It came just as the

match flamed up in her fingers, and an answering shriek from her bosom

tore its way through her clenched teeth, and she shuddered like one

in an ague. There sat her brother on the edge of the bedstead staring

before him with fixed eyes and terror-stricken countenance. He had not

heard her enter, and saw neither the light nor her who held it. She made

haste to light the candle, with mighty effort talking to him still, in

gasps and chokings, but in vain; the ghastly face continued unchanged,

and the wide-open eyes remained fixed. She seated herself beside him,

and threw her arms around him. It was like embracing a marble statue,

so moveless, so irresponsive was he. But presently he gave a kind of

shudder, the tension of his frame relaxed, and the soul which had been

absorbed in its own visions, came forward to its windows, cast from them

a fleeting glance, then dropped the curtains.

“Is it you, Helen?” he said, shuddering, as he closed his eyes and laid

his head on her shoulder. His breath was like that of a furnace. His

skin seemed on fire. She felt his pulse: it was galloping. He was in a

fever--brain-fever, probably, and what was she to do? A thought came

to her. Yes, it was the only possible thing. She would take him home.

There, with the help of the household, she might have a chance of

concealing him--a poor one, certainly! but here, how was she even to

keep him to the house in his raving fits?

“Poldie, dear!” she said, “you must come with me. I am going to take you

to my own room, where I can nurse you properly, and need not leave you.

Do you think you could walk as far?”

“Walk! Yes--quite well: why not?”

“I am afraid you are going to be ill, Poldie; but, however ill you may

feel, you must promise me to try and make as little noise as you can,

and never cry out if you can help it. When I do like this,” she went on,

laying her finger on his lips, “you must be silent altogether.”

“I will do whatever you tell me, Helen, if you will only promise not to

leave me, and, when they come for me, to give me poison.”

She promised, and made haste to obliterate every sign that the room

had been occupied. She then took his arm and led him out. He was very

quiet--too quiet and submissive, she thought--seemed sleepy, revived

a little when they reached the open air, presently grew terrified, and

kept starting and looking about him as they crossed the park, but never

spoke a word. By the door in the sunk fence they reached the garden, and

were soon in Helen’s chamber, where she left him to get into bed while

she went to acquaint her aunt of his presence in the house. Hard

and unreasonable, like most human beings, where her prejudices were

concerned, she had, like all other women, sympathy with those kinds of

suffering which by experience she understood. Mental distress was beyond

her, but for the solace of another’s pain she would even have endured

a portion herself. When therefore, she heard Helen’s story, how her

brother had come to her window, that he was ill with brain-fever, as she

thought, and talked wildly, she quite approved of her having put him to

bed in her own room, and would have got up to help in nursing him. But

Helen persuaded her to have her night’s rest, and begged her to join

with her in warning the servants not to mention his presence in the

house, on the ground that it might get abroad that he was out of his

mind. They were all old and tolerably faithful, and Leopold had been

from childhood such a favourite, that she hoped thus to secure their

silence.

“But, child, he must have the doctor,” said her aunt.

“Yes, but I will manage him. What a good thing old Mr. Bird is gone! He

was such a gossip! We must call in the new doctor, Mr. Faber. I shall

see that he understands. He has his practice to make, and will mind what

I say.”

“Why, child, you are as cunning as an old witch!” said her aunt. “It

is very awkward,” she went on. “What miserable creatures men are--from

first to last! Out of one scrape into another from babies to old men!

Would you believe it, my dear?--your uncle, one of the best of men, and

most exemplary of clergymen--why, I had to put on his stockings for him

every day he got up! Not that my services stopped there either, I can

tell you! Latterly I wrote more than half his sermons for him. He never

would preach the same sermon twice, you see. He made that a point of

honour; and the consequence was that at last he had to come to me. His

sermons were nothing the losers, I trust, or our congregation either. I

used the same commentaries he did, and you would hardly believe how much

I enjoyed the work.--Poor dear boy! we must do what we can for him.”

“I will call you if I find it necessary, aunt. I must go to him now,

for he cannot bear me out of his sight. Don’t please send for the doctor

till I see you again.”

When she got back to her room, to her great relief she found Leopold

asleep. The comfort of the bed after his terrible exhaustion and the

hardships he had undergone, had combined with the drug under whose

influences he had more or less been ever since first he appeared at

Helen’s window, and he slept soundly.

But when he woke, he was in a high fever, and Mr. Faber was summoned.

He found the state of his patient such that no amount of wild utterance

could have surprised him. His brain was burning and his mind all abroad:

he tossed from side to side and talked vehemently--but even to Helen

unintelligibly.

Mr. Faber had not attended medical classes and walked the hospitals

without undergoing the influences of the unbelief prevailing in those

regions, where, on the strength of a little knowledge of the human

frame, cartloads of puerile ignorance and anile vulgarity, not to

mention obscenity, are uttered in the name of truth by men who know

nothing whatever of the things that belong to the deeper nature believed

in by the devout and simple, and professed also by many who are perhaps

yet farther from a knowledge of its affairs than those who thus treat

them with contempt. When therefore he came to practise in Glaston,

he brought his quota of yeast into the old bottle of that ancient and

slumberous town. But as he had to gain for himself a practice, he was

prudent enough to make no display of the cherished emptiness of his

swept and garnished rooms. I do not mean to blame him. He did not fancy

himself the holder of any Mephistophelean commission for the general

annihilation of belief like George Bascombe, only one from nature’s

bureau of ways and means for the cure of the ailing body--which, indeed,

to him, comprised all there was of humanity. He had a cold, hard,

business-like manner, which, however admirable on some grounds,

destroyed any hope Helen had cherished of finding in him one to whom she

might disclose her situation.

He proved himself both wise and skilful, yet it was weeks before

Leopold began to mend. By the time the fever left him, he was in such

a prostrate condition, that it was very doubtful whether yet he could

live, and Helen had had to draw largely even upon her fine stock of

health.

Her ministration continued most exhausting. Yet now she thought of her

life as she had never thought of it before, namely as a thing of worth.

It had grown precious to her since it had become the stay of Leopold’s.

Notwithstanding the terrible state of suspense and horror in which she

now lived, seeming to herself at times an actual sharer in her brother’s

guilt, she would yet occasionally find herself exulting in the thought

of being the guardian angel he called her. Now that by his bedside hour

plodded after hour in something of sameness and much of weariness, she

yet looked back on her past as on the history of a slug.

During all the time she scarcely saw her cousin George, and indeed, she

could hardly tell why, shrunk from him. In the cold, bright, shadowless,

north-windy day of his presence, there was little consolation to be

gathered, and for strength--to face him made a fresh demand upon

the little she had. Her physical being had certainly lost. But the

countenance which, after a long interval of absence, the curate at

length one morning descried in the midst of the congregation, had, along

with its pallor and look of hidden and suppressed trouble, gathered

the expression of a higher order of existence. Not that she had drawn a

single consoling draught from any one of the wells of religion, or

now sought the church for the sake of any reminder of something found

precious: the great quiet place drew her merely with the offer of its

two hours’ restful stillness. The thing which had elevated her was

simply the fact that, without any thought, not to say knowledge of him,

she had yet been doing the will of the Heart of the world. True she had

been but following her instinct, and ministering--not to humanity from

an enlarged affection, but only to the one being she best loved in the

world--a small merit surely!--yet was it the beginning of the way of

God, the lovely way, and therefore the face of the maiden had begun

to shine with a light which no splendour of physical health, no

consciousness of beauty, however just, could have kindled there.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE CURATE’S PROGRESS.

The visits of Wingfold to the little people at the gate not only became

frequent, but more and more interesting to him, and as his office

occasioned few demands on his attention, Polwarth had plenty of time to

give to one who sought instruction in those things which were his very

passion. He had never yet had any pupil but his niece, and to find

another, and one whose soul was so eager after that of which he had such

long-gathered store to dispense, was a keen, pure, and solemn delight.

It was that for which he had so often prayed--an outlet for the living

waters of his spirit into dry and thirsty lands. He had not much faculty

for writing, although now and then he would relieve his heart in verse;

and if he had a somewhat remarkable gift of discourse, to attempt public

utterance would have been but a vain exposure of his person to vulgar

mockery. In Wingfold he had found a man docile and obedient, both

thirsting after, and recognizant of the truth, and if he might but aid

him in unsealing the well of truth in his own soul, the healing waters

might from him flow far and near. Not as the little Zacchæus who pieced

his own shortness with the length of the sycamore tree, so to rise

above his taller brethren and see Jesus, little Polwarth would lift

tall Wingfold on his shoulders, first to see, and then cry aloud to his

brethren who was at hand.

For two or three Sundays, the curate, largely assisted by his friend,

fed his flock with his gleanings from other men’s harvests, and already,

though it had not yet come to his knowledge, one consequence was,

that complaints, running together, made a pool of discontent, and

a semi-public meeting had been held, wherein was discussed, and not

finally negatived, the propriety of communicating with the rector on

the subject. Some however held that, as the incumbent paid so little

attention to his flock, it would be better to appeal to the bishop, and

acquaint him with the destitution of that portion of his oversight. But

things presently took a new turn, at first surprising, soon alarming to

some, and at length, to not a few, appalling.

Obedient to Polwarth’s instructions, Wingfold had taken to his New

Testament. At first, as he read and sought to understand, ever and anon

some small difficulty, notably, foremost of all, the discrepancy in

the genealogies--I mention it merely to show the sort of difficulty I

mean--would insect-like shoot out of the darkness, and sting him in the

face. Some of these he pursued, encountered, crushed--and found he had

gained next to nothing by the victory; and Polwarth soon persuaded

him to let such, alone for the present, seeing they involved nothing

concerning the man at a knowledge of whom it was his business to arrive.

But when it came to the perplexity caused by some of the sayings of

Jesus himself, it was another matter. He MUST understand these, he

thought, or fail to understand the man. Here Polwarth told him that, if,

after all, he seemed to fail, he must conclude that possibly the meaning

of the words was beyond him, and that the understanding of them depended

on a more advanced knowledge of Jesus himself; for, while words reveal

the speaker, they must yet lie in the light of something already known

of the speaker to be themselves intelligible. Between the mind and

the understanding of certain hard utterances, therefore, there must of

necessity lie a gradation of easier steps. And here Polwarth was tempted

to give him a far more important, because more immediately practical

hint, but refrained, from the dread of weakening, by PRESENTATION, the

force of a truth which, in DISCOVERY, would have its full effect. For he

was confident that the curate, in the temper which was now his, must

ere long come immediately upon the truth towards which he was tempted to

point him.

On one occasion when Wingfold had asked him whether he saw the meaning

of a certain saying of our Lord, Polwarth answered thus:

“I think I do, but whether I could at present make you see it, I cannot

tell. I suspect it is one of those concerning which I have already said

that you have yet to understand Jesus better before you can understand

them. Let me, just to make the nature of what I state clearer to you,

ask you one question: tell me, if you can, what, primarily, did Jesus,

from his own account of himself, come into the world to do?”

“To save it,” answered Wingfold.

“I think you are wrong,” returned Polwarth. “Mind I said PRIMARILY. You

will yourself come to the same conclusion by and by. Either our Lord was

a phantom--a heresy of potent working in the minds of many who would be

fierce in its repudiation--or he was a very man, uttering the heart of

his life that it might become the life of his brethren; and if so, an

honest man can never ultimately fail of getting at what he means. I

have seen him described somewhere as a man dominated by the passion of

humanity--or something like that. The description does not, to my mind,

even shadow the truth. Another passion, if such I may dare to call it,

was the light of his life, dominating even that which would yet have

been enough to make him lay down his life.”

Wingfold went away pondering.

Though Polwarth read little concerning religion except the New

Testament, he could yet have directed Wingfold to several books which

might have lent him good aid in his quest after the real likeness of the

man he sought; but he greatly desired that on the soul of his friend the

dawn should break over the mountains of Judæa--the light, I mean,

flow from the words themselves of the Son of Man. Sometimes he grew so

excited about his pupil and his progress, and looked so anxiously for

the news of light in his darkness, that he could not rest at home, but

would be out all day in the park--praying, his niece believed, for the

young parson. And little did Wingfold suspect that, now and again when

his lamp was burning far into the night because he struggled with some

hard saying, the little man was going round and round the house,

like one muttering charms, only they were prayers for his friend: ill

satisfied with his own feeble affection, he would supplement it with its

origin, would lay hold upon the riches of the Godhead, crying for his

friend to “the first stock-father of gentleness;”--folly all, and fair

subject of laughter to such as George Bascombe, if there be no God;

but as Polwarth, with his whole, healthy, holy soul believed there is a

God--it was for him but simple common sense.

Still no daybreak--and now the miracles had grown troublesome! Could Mr.

Polwarth honestly say that he found no difficulty in believing things

so altogether out of the common order of events, and so buried in the

darkness and dust of antiquity that investigation was impossible?

Mr. Polwarth could not say that he had found no such difficulty.

“Then why should the weight of the story,” said Wingfold, “the weight

of its proof, I mean, to minds like ours, coming so long after, and by

their education incapacitated for believing in such things, in a time

when the law of everything is searched into---”

“And as yet very likely as far from understood as ever,” interposed but

not interrupted Polwarth.

“Why should the weight of its proof, I ask, be laid upon such improbable

things as miracles? That they are necessarily improbable, I presume you

will admit.”

“Having premised that I believe every one recorded,” said Polwarth, “I

heartily admit their improbability. But the WEIGHT of proof is not, and

never was laid upon them. Our Lord did not make much of them, and did

them far more for the individual concerned than for the sake of the

beholders. I will not however talk to you about them now. I will merely

say that it is not through the miracles you will find the Lord, though,

having found him, you will find him there also. The question for you is

not, Are the miracles true? but, Was Jesus true? Again I say, you must

find him--the man himself. When you have found him, I may perhaps retort

upon you the question--Can you believe such improbable things as the

miracles, Mr. Wingfold?”

The little man showed pretty plainly by the set of his lips that

he meant to say no more, and again Wingfold had, with considerable

dissatisfaction and no answer, to go back to his New Testament.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE CURATE MAKES A DISCOVERY.

At length, one day, as he was working with a harmony, comparing certain

passages between themselves, and as variedly given in the gospels, he

fell into a half-thinking, half-dreaming mood, in which his eyes, for

some time unconsciously, rested on the verse, “Ye will not come unto me

that ye might have life:” it mingled itself with his brooding, and by

and by, though yet he was brooding rather than meditating, the form of

Jesus had gathered, in the stillness of his mental quiescence, so much

of reality that at length he found himself thinking of him as of a

true-hearted man, mightily in earnest to help his fellows, who could not

get them to mind what he told them.

“Ah!” said the curate to himself, “if I had but seen him, would not I

have minded him!--would I not have haunted his steps, with question upon

question, until I got at the truth!”

Again the more definite thought vanished in the seething chaos of

reverie, which dured unbroken for a time,--until again suddenly rose

from memory to consciousness and attention the words: “Why call ye me

Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”

“Good God!” he exclaimed, “here am I bothering over words, and

questioning about this and that, as if I were testing his fitness for

a post I had to offer him, and he all the time claiming my obedience! I

cannot even, on the spur of the moment at least, tell one thing he wants

me to do; and as to doing anything because he told me--not once did

I ever! But then how am I to obey him until I am sure of his right to

command? I just want to know whether I am to call him Lord or not. No,

that won’t do either, for he says, Why even of yourselves judge ye not

what is right? And do I not know--have I ever even doubted that what

he said we ought to do was the right thing to do? Yet here have I, all

these years, been calling myself a Christian, ministering, forsooth, in

the temple of Christ, as if he were a heathen divinity, who cared for

songs and prayers and sacrifices, and cannot honestly say I ever once in

my life did a thing because he said so, although the record is full of

his earnest, even pleading words! I have NOT been an honest man, and

how should a dishonest man be a judge over that man who said he was the

Christ of God? Would it be any wonder if the things he uttered should be

too high and noble to be by such a man recognized as truth?”

With this, yet another saying dawned upon, him: IF ANY MAN WILL DO HIS

WILL, HE SHALL KNOW OF THE DOCTRINE, WHETHER IT BE OF GOD, OR WHETHER I

SPEAK OF MYSELF.

He went into his closet and shut to the door--came out again, and went

straight to visit a certain grievous old woman.

The next open result was, that, on the following Sunday, a man went up

into the pulpit who, for the first time in his life, believed he had

something to say to his fellow-sinners. It was not now the sacred spoil

of the best of gleaning or catering that he bore thither with him, but

the message given him by a light in his own inward parts, discovering

therein the darkness and the wrong.

He opened no sermon-case, nor read words from any book, save, with

trembling voice, these:

“WHY CALL YE ME LORD, LORD, AND DO NOT THE THINGS WHICH I SAY?”

I pause for a moment in my narrative to request the sympathy of such

readers as may be capable of affording it, for a man whose honesty makes

him appear egotistic. When a man, finding himself in a false position,

is yet anxious to do the duties of that position until such time as, if

he should not in the meantime have verified it, and become able to fill

it with honesty, he may honourably leave it, I think he may well be

pardoned if, of inward necessity, he should refer to himself in a place

where such reference may be either the greatest impiety, or the outcome

of the truest devotion. In him it was neither: it was honesty--and

absorption in the startled gaze of a love that believed it had caught a

glimmer of the passing garment of the Truth. Thus strengthened--might I

not say inspired? for what is the love of truth and the joy therein,

if not a breathing into the soul of the breath of life from the God

of truth?--he looked round upon his congregation as he had never dared

until now--saw face after face, and knew it--saw amongst the rest that

of Helen Lingard, so sadly yet not pitifully altered, with a doubt if

it could be she; trembled a little with a new excitement, which one less

modest or less wise might have taken--how foolishly!--instead of

the truth perceived, for the inspiration of the spirit; and, sternly

suppressing the emotion, said,

“My hearers, I come before you this morning to utter the first word of

truth it has ever been given to ME to utter.”

His hearers stared both mentally and corporeally.

“Is he going to deny the Bible?” said some.

--“It will be the last,” said others, “if the rector hear in time how

you have been disgracing yourself and profaning his pulpit.”

“And,” the curate went on, “it would be as a fire in my bones did I

attempt to keep it back.

“In my room, three days ago, I was reading the strange story of the man

who appeared in Palestine saying that he was the Son of God, and came

upon those words of his which I have now read in your hearing. At their

sound the accuser, Conscience, awoke in my bosom, and asked, ‘Doest thou

the things he saith to thee?’ And I thought with myself,--‘Have I this

day done anything he says to me?--when did I do anything I had heard of

him? Did I ever’--to this it came at last--‘Did I ever, in all my life,

do one thing because he said to me DO THIS?’ And the answer was NO,

NEVER. Yet there I was, not only calling myself a Christian, but on the

strength of my Christianity, it was to be presumed, living amongst

you, and received by you, as your helper on the way to the heavenly

kingdom--a living falsehood, walking and talking amongst you!”

“What a wretch!” said one man to himself, who made a large part of his

living by the sale of under-garments whose every stitch was an untacking

of the body from the soul of a seamstress. “Bah!” said some. “A

hypocrite, by his own confession!” said others. “Exceedingly improper!”

said Mrs. Ramshorn. “Unheard-of and most unclerical behaviour! And

actually to confess such paganism!” For Helen, she waked up a little,

began to listen, and wondered what he had been saying that a wind seemed

to have blown rustling among the heads of the congregation.

“Having made this confession,” Wingfold proceeded, “you will understand

that whatever I now say, I say to and of myself as much as to and of any

other to whom it may apply.”

He then proceeded to show that faith and obedience are one and the same

spirit, passing as it were from room to room in the same heart: what in

the heart we call faith, in the will we call obedience. He showed that

the Lord refused absolutely the faith that found its vent at the lips

in the worshipping words, and not at the limbs in obedient action--which

some present pronounced bad theology, while others said to themselves

surely that at least was common sense. For Helen, what she heard might

be interesting to clergymen, or people like her aunt who had to do with

such matters, but to her it was less than nothing and vanity, whose

brother lay at home “sick in heart and sick in head.”

But hard thoughts of him could not stay the fountain of Wingfold’s

utterance, which filled as it flowed. Eager after a right presentation

of what truth he saw, he dwelt on the mockery it would be of any man to

call him the wisest, the best, the kindest, yea and the dearest of men,

yet never heed either the smallest request or the most urgent entreaty

he made.

“A Socinian!” said Mrs. Ramshorn.

“There’s stuff in the fellow!” said the rector’s churchwarden, who had

been brought up a Wesleyan.

“He’d make a fellow fancy he did believe all his grandmother told him!”

thought Bascombe.

As he went on, the awakened curate grew almost eloquent. His face shone

with earnestness. Even Helen found her gaze fixed upon him, though she

had not a notion what he was talking about. He closed at length with

these words:

“After the confession I have now made to you, a confession which I have

also entreated everyone to whom it belongs to make to himself and his

God, it follows that I dare not call myself a Christian. How should such

a one as I know anything about that which, if it be true at all, is the

loftiest, the one all-absorbing truth in the universe? How should such a

fellow as I”--he went on, growing scornful at himself in the presence

of the truth--“judge of its sacred probabilities? or, having led such a

life of simony, be heard when he declares that such a pretended message

from God to men seems too good to be true? The things therein contained

I declare good, yet went not and did them. Therefore am I altogether out

of court, and must not be heard in the matter.

“No, my hearers, I call not myself a Christian, but I call everyone here

who obeys the word of Jesus, who restrains anger, who declines judgment,

who practises generosity, who loves his enemies, who prays for his

slanderers, to witness my vow, that I will henceforth try to obey him,

in the hope that he whom he called God and his Father, will reveal to

him whom you call your Lord Jesus Christ, that into my darkness I may

receive the light of the world!”

“A professed infidel!” said Mrs. Ramshorn. “A clever one too! That was

a fine trap he laid for us, to prove us all atheists as well as himself!

As if any mere mortal COULD obey the instructions of the Saviour! He was

divine; we are but human!”

She might have added, “And but poor creatures as such,” but did not go

so far, believing herself more than an average specimen.

But there was one shining face which, like a rising sun of love and

light and truth, “pillowed his chin,” not “on an orient wave,” but on

the book-board of a free seat. The eyes of it were full of tears, and

the heart behind it was giving that God and Father thanks, for this

was more, far more than he had even hoped for, save in the indefinite

future. The light was no longer present as warmth or vivification alone,

but had begun to shine as light in the heart of his friend, to whom

now, praised be God! the way lay open into all truth. And when the words

came, in a voice that once more trembled with emotion--“Now to God the

Father,”--he bent down his face, and the poor, stunted, distorted frame

and great grey head were grievously shaken with the sobs of a mighty

gladness. Truth in the inward parts looked out upon him from the face

of one who stood before the people their self-denied teacher! How would

they receive it? It mattered not. Those whom the Father had drawn, would

hear.

Polwarth neither sought the curate in the vestry, waited for him at the

church-door, nor followed him to his lodging. He was not of those who

compliment a man on his fine sermon. How grandly careless are some men

of the risk of ruin their praises are to their friends! “Let God praise

him!” said Polwarth; “I will only dare to love him.” He would not toy

with his friend’s waking Psyche.

CHAPTER XXXII.

HOPES.

It was the first Sunday Helen had gone to church since her brother came

to her. On the previous Sunday he had passed some crisis and begun to

improve, and by the end of the week was so quiet, that longing for

a change of atmosphere, and believing he might be left with the

housekeeper, she had gone to church. On her return she heard he was no

worse, although he had “been a-frettin’ after her.” She hurried to him

as if he had been her baby.

“What do you go to church for?” he asked, half-petulantly, like a spoilt

child, with languid eyes whence the hard fire had vanished. “What’s the

use of it?”

He looked at her, waiting an answer.

“Not much,” replied Helen. “I like the quiet and the music. That’s all.”

He seemed disappointed, and lay still for a few moments.

“In old times,” he said at last, “the churches used to be a refuge: I

suppose that is why one can’t help feeling as if some safety were to be

got from them yet.--Was your cousin George there this morning?”

“Yes, he went with us,” answered Helen.

“I should like to see him. I want somebody to talk to.”

Helen was silent. She was more occupied however in answering to herself

the question why she shrank so decidedly from bringing Bascombe into the

sick-room, than in thinking what she should say to Leopold. The truth

was the truth, and why should she object to Leopold’s knowing, or at

least being told as well as herself, that he need fear no punishment in

the next world, whatever he might have to encounter in this; that there

was no frightful God who hated wrong-doing to be terrified at; that even

the badness of his own action need not distress him, for he and it would

pass away as the blood he had shed had already vanished from the earth?

Ought it not to encourage the poor fellow?--But to what? To live on

and endure his misery, or to put an end to it and himself at once? Or

perhaps to plunge into vice that he might escape the consciousness of

guilt and the dread of the law?

I will not say that exactly such a train of thought as this passed

through her mind, but of whatever sort it was, it brought her no nearer

to a desire for the light of George Bascombe’s presence by the bedside

of her guilty brother. At the same time her partiality for her cousin

made her justify his exclusion thus: “George is so good himself, he

is only fit for the company of good people. He would not in the least

understand my poor Poldie, and would be too hard upon him.”

Since her brother’s appearance, in fact, she had seen very little of her

cousin, and this not merely because her presence was so much required in

the sick-chamber, but because she was herself unwilling to meet him.

She had felt, almost without knowing it, that his character was

unsympathetic, and that his loud, cold good-nature could never recognise

or justify such love as she bore to her brother! Nor was this all; for,

remembering how he had upon one occasion expressed himself with regard

to criminals, she feared even to look in his face, lest his keen,

questioning, unsparing eye should read in her soul that she was the

sister of a murderer.

Before this time however a hint of light had appeared in the clouds that

enwrapped her and Leopold: she had begun to doubt whether he had really

committed the crime of which he accused himself. There had been no

inquiry after him, except from his uncle, concerning his absence from

Cambridge, for which his sudden attack of brain fever served as

more than sufficient excuse. That there had been such a murder, the

newspapers left her no room to question--but might not the relation in

which he stood to the victim--the horror of her death, the insidious

approaches of the fever, and the influences of that hateful drug, have

combined to call up an hallucination of blood-guiltiness? And what at

length all but satisfied her of the truth of her conjecture was that,

when he began to recover, Leopold seemed himself in doubt at times

whether his sense of guilt had not its origin in some one or other of

the many dreams which had haunted him throughout his illness, knowing

only too well that it was long since dreams had become to him more real

than the greater part of what was going on around him. To this blurring

and confusing of consciousness it probably contributed, that, in the

first stages of the fever, he was under the influence of the same drug

which had been working upon his brain up to the very moment when he

committed the crime.

During the week the hope had almost settled into conviction; and one

consequence was that, although she was not a whit more inclined to

introduce George Bascombe to the sick-chamber, she found herself not

only equal, but no longer averse to meeting him; and on the following

Saturday, when he presented himself as usual, come to spend the Sunday,

she listened to her aunt, and consented to go out with him for a

ride--in the evening, however, when Mrs. Rainshorn herself, who had

shown Leopold great and genuine kindness, would be able to sit with him.

They therefore had dinner early, and Helen went again to her brother’s

room, unwilling to leave him a moment until she gave up her charge to

her aunt.

They had tea together, and Leopold was very quiet. It is wonderful

with what success the mind will accommodate itself, in its effort after

peace, to the presence of the most torturing thought. But Helen took

this quietness for a sign of innocence, not knowing that the state of

the feelings is neither test nor gauge of guilt. The nearer perfection

a character is, the louder is the cry of conscience at the appearance of

fault; and, on the other hand, the worst criminals have had the easiest

minds.

Helen also was quiet, and fell into a dreamy mood, watching her brother,

who every now and then turned on her a look of love and gratitude which

moved her heart to its very depths. Not until she heard the horses

coming round from the stable, did she rise to go and change her dress.

“I shall not be long away from you, Poldie,” she said.

“Do not forget me, Helen,” he returned. “If you forget me, an enemy will

think of me.”

His love comforted her, and yet further strengthened her faith in his

innocence; and it was with a kind of half-repose, timid, wavering, and

glad, upon her countenance--how different from the old, dull, wooden

quiescence!--that she joined her cousin in the hall. A moment, and he

had lifted her to the saddle, and was mounted by her side.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE RIDE.

A soft west wind, issuing as from the heart of a golden vase filled with

roses, met them the instant they turned out of the street, walking their

horses towards the park-gate.

Something--was it in the evening, or was it in his own soul?--had

prevailed to the momentary silencing of George Bascombe:--it may have

been but the influence of the cigar which Helen had begged him to

finish. Helen too was silent: she felt as if the low red sun, straight

into which they seemed to be riding, blotted out her being in the level

torrent of his usurping radiance. Neither of them spoke a word until

they had passed through the gate into the park.

It was a perfect English summer evening--warm, but not sultry. As they

walked their horses up the carriage way, the sun went down, and as if he

had fallen like a live coal into some celestial magazine of colour and

glow, straightway blazed up a slow explosion of crimson and green in

a golden triumph--pure fire, the smoke and fuel gone, and the radiance

alone left. And now Helen received the second lesson of her initiation

into the life of nature: she became aware that the whole evening was

thinking around her, and as the dusk grew deeper and the night grew

closer, the world seemed to have grown dark with its thinking. Of

late Helen had been driven herself to think--if not deeply, yet

intensely--and so knew what it was like, and felt at home with the

twilight.

They turned from the drive on to the turf. Their horses tossed up their

heads, and set off, unchecked, at a good pelting gallop, across the open

park. On Helen’s cheek the wind blew cooling, strong, and kind. As if

flowing from some fountain above, in an unseen unbanked river, down

through the stiller ocean of the air, it seemed to bring to her a vague

promise, almost a precognition, of peace--which, however, only set her

longing after something--she knew not what--something of which she

only knew that it would fill the longing the wind had brought her. The

longing grew and extended--went stretching on and on into an infinite

of rest. And as they still galloped, and the light-maddened colours sank

into smoky peach, and yellow green, and blue gray, the something swelled

and swelled in her soul, and pulled and pulled at her heart, until the

tears were running down her face: for fear Bascombe should see them, she

gave her horse the rein, and fled from him into the friendly dusk that

seemed to grade time into eternity.

Suddenly she found herself close to a clump of trees, which overhung the

deserted house. She had made a great circuit without knowing it. A pang

shot to her heart, and her tears ceased to flow. The night, silent with

thought, held THAT also in its bosom! She drew rein, turned, and waited

for Bascombe.

“What a chase you’ve given me, Helen!” he cried, while yet pounding away

some score of yards off.

“A wild-goose one you mean, cousin?”

“It would have been if I had thought to catch you on this ancient

cocktail.”

“Don’t abuse the old horse, George: he has seen better days. I would

gladly have mounted you more to your mind, but you know I could

not--except indeed I had given you my Fanny, and taken the old horse

myself. I have ridden him.”

“The lady ought always to be the better mounted,” returned George

coolly. “For my part, I much prefer it, because then I need not be

anxious about whether I am boring her or not: if I am, she can run

away.”

“You cannot suppose I thought you a bore to-night. A more sweetly silent

gentleman none could wish for squire.”

“Then it was my silence bored you.--Shall I tell you what I was thinking

about?”

“If you like. I was thinking how pleasant it would be to ride on and on

into eternity,” said Helen.

“That feeling of continuity,” returned George, “is a proof of the

painlessness of departure. No one can ever know when he ceases to be,

because then he is not; and that is how some men come to fancy they feel

as if they were going to live for ever. But the worst of it is that

they no sooner fancy it, than it seems to them a probable as well as

delightful thing to go on and on and never cease. This comes of the

man’s having no consciousness of ceasing, and when one is comfortable,

it always seems good to go on. A child is never willing to turn from

the dish of which he is eating to another. It is more he wants, not

another.”

“That is if he likes it,” said Helen.

“Everybody likes it,” said George, “--more or less.”

“I am not so sure of EVERYbody,” replied Helen. “Do you imagine that

twisted little dwarf-woman that opened the gate for us is content with

her lot?”

“No, that is impossible--while she sees you and remains what she is.

But I said nothing of contentment. I was but thinking of the fools

who, whether content or not, yet want to live for ever, and so, very

conveniently, take their longing for immortality, which they call an

idea innate in the human heart, for a proof that immortality is their

rightful inheritance.”

“How then do you account for the existence and universality of the

idea?” asked Helen, who had happened lately to come upon some arguments

on the other side.

But while she spoke thus indifferently she felt in her heart like one

who wakes from a delicious swim in the fairest of rivers, to find that

the clothes have slipped from the bed to the floor:--that was all his

river and all his swim!

“I account for its existence as I have just said; and for its

universality by denying it. It is NOT universal, for _I_ haven’t it.”

“At least you will not deny that men, even when miserable, shrink from

dying?”

“Anything, everything is unpleasant out of its due time. I will

allow, for the sake of argument, that the thought of dying is always

unpleasant. But wherefore so? Because, in the very act of thinking it,

the idea must always be taken from the time that suits with it--namely,

its own time, when it will at length, and ought at length to come--and

placed in the midst of the lively present, with which assuredly it does

not suit. To life, death must be always hateful. In the rush and turmoil

of effort, how distasteful even the cave of the hermit--let ever such a

splendid view spread abroad before its mouth! But when it comes it will

be pleasant enough, for then its time will have come also--the man will

be prepared for it by decay and cessation. If one were to tell me that

he had that endless longing for immortality, of which hitherto I have

only heard at second hand, I would explain it to him thus:--Your life,

I would say, not being yet complete, still growing, feels in itself the

onward impulse of growth, and, unable to think of itself as other than

complete, interprets that onward impulse as belonging to the time around

it instead of the nature within it. Or rather let me say, the man feels

in himself the elements of more, and not being able to grasp the notion

of his own completeness, which is so far from him, transposes the

feeling of growth and sets it beyond himself, translating it at the same

time into an instinct of duration, a longing after what he calls eternal

life. But when the man is complete, then comes decay and brings its

own contentment with it--as will also death, when it arrives in its own

proper season of fulness and ripeness.”

Helen said nothing in reply. She thought her cousin very clever, but

could not enjoy what he said--not in the face of that sky, and in the

yet lingering reflection of the feelings it had waked in her. He might

be right, but now at least she wanted no more of it. She even felt as if

she would rather cherish a sweet deception for the comfort of the

moment in which the weaver’s shuttle flew, than take to her bosom a cold

killing fact.

Such were indeed an unworthy feeling to follow! Of all things let us

have the truth--even of fact! But to deny what we cannot prove, not

even casts into our ice-house a spadeful of snow. What if the warm hope

denied should be the truth after all? What if it was the truth in

it that drew the soul towards it by its indwelling reality, and its

relations with her being, even while she took blame for suffering

herself to be enticed by a sweet deception? Alas indeed for men if the

life and the truth are not one, but fight against each other! Surely it

says something for the divine nature of him that denies the divine, when

he yet cleaves to what he thinks the truth, although it denies the life,

and blots the way to the better from every chart!

“And what were you thinking of, George?” said Helen, willing to change

the subject.

“I was thinking,” he answered, “let me see!--oh! yes--I was thinking

of that very singular case of murder. You must have seen it in the

newspapers. I have long had a doubt whether I were better fitted for a

barrister or a detective. I can’t keep my mind off a puzzling case.--You

must have heard of this one--the girl they found lying in her ball-dress

in the middle of a wood--stabbed to the heart?”

“I do remember something of it,” answered Helen, gathering a little

courage to put into her voice from the fact that her cousin could hardly

see her face. “Then the murderer has not been discovered?”

“That is the point of interest. Not a trace of him! Not a soul suspected

even!”

Helen drew a deep breath.

“Had it been in Rome, now,” George went on. “But in a quiet country

place in England! The thing seems incredible! So artistically done!--no

struggle!--just one blow right to the heart, and the assassin gone as if

by magic!--no weapon dropped!--nothing to give a clue! The whole thing

suggests a practised hand.--But why such a one for the victim? Had it

been some false member of a secret society thus immolated, one could

understand it. But a merry girl at a ball!--it IS strange! I SHOULD like

to try the unravelling of it.”

“Has nothing then been done?” said Helen with a gasp, to hide which she

moved in her saddle, as if readjusting her habit.

“Oh, everything--of course. There was instant pursuit on the discovery

of the body, but they seem to have got on the track of the

wrong man--or, indeed, for anything certain, of no man at all. A

coast-guardsman says that, on the night or rather morning in question,

he was approaching a little cove on the shore, not above a mile from the

scene of the tragedy, with an eye upon what seemed to be two fishermen

preparing to launch their boat, when he saw a third man come running

down the steep slope from the pastures above, and jump into the stern

of it. Ere he could reach the spot, they were off, and had hoisted two

lugsails. The moon was in the first of her last quarter, and gave

light enough for what he reported. But, when inquiries founded on this

evidence were made, nothing whatever could be discovered concerning boat

or men. The next morning no fishing-boat was lacking, and no fisherman

would confess to having gone from that cove. The marks of the boat’s

keel, and of the men’s feet, on the sand, if ever there were any, had

been washed out by the tide. It was concluded that the thing had been

pre-arranged and provided for, and that the murderer had escaped,

probably to Holland. Thereupon telegrams were shot in all directions,

but no news could be gathered of any suspicious landing on the opposite

coast. There the matter rests, or at least has rested for many weeks.

Neither parents, relatives, nor friends appear to have a suspicion of

anyone.”

“Are there no conjectures as to motives?” asked Helen, feeling with joy

her power of dissimulation gather strength.

“No end of them. She was a beautiful creature, they say, sweet-tempered

as a dove, and of course fond of admiration--whence the conjectures all

turn on jealousy. The most likely thing seems, that she had some squire

of low degree, of whom neither parents nor friends knew anything. That

they themselves suspect this, appears likely from their more than apathy

with regard to the discovery of the villain. I am strongly inclined to

take the matter in hand myself.”

“We must get him out of the country as soon as possible,” thought Helen.

“I should hardly have thought it worthy of your gifts, George,” she

said, “to turn police-man. For my part, I should not relish hunting down

any poor wretch.”

“The sacrifice of individual choice is a claim society has upon each

of its members,” returned Bascombe. “Every murderer hanged, or better,

imprisoned for life, is a gain to the community.”

Helen said no more, and presently turned homewards, on the plea that she

must not be longer absent from her invalid.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

VOLUME II.

CHAPTER I.

RACHEL AND HER UNCLE.

It was nearly dark when they arrived again at the lodge. Rachel opened

the gate for them. Without even a THANK YOU, they rode out. She stood

for a moment gazing after them through the dusk, then turned with a

sigh, and went into the kitchen, where her uncle sat by the fire with a

book in his hand.

“How I should like to be as well made as Miss Lingard!” she said,

seating herself by the lamp that stood on the deal-table. “It MUST be

a fine thing to be strong and tall, and able to look this way and that

without turning all your body along with your head, like the old man

that gathers the leeches in Wordsworth’s poem. And what it must be to

sit on a horse as she does! You should have seen her go flying like the

very wind across the park! You would have thought she and her horse were

cut out of the same piece. I’m dreadfully envious, uncle.”

“No, my child; I know you better than you do yourself. There is a great

difference between _I_ WISH _I_ WAS and _I_ SHOULD LIKE TO BE--as much

as between a grumble and a prayer. To be content is not to be satisfied.

No one ought to be satisfied with the imperfect. It is God’s will

that we should bear, and contentedly--because in hope, looking for the

redemption of the body. And we know he has a ready servant who will one

day set us free.”

“Yes, uncle; I understand. You know I enjoy life: how could I help it

and you with me? But I don’t think I ever go through the churchyard

without feeling a sort of triumph. ‘There’s for you!’ I say sometimes

to the little crooked shadow that creeps along by my side across the

graves. ‘You’ll soon be caught and put inside!’--But how am I to tell

I mayn’t be crooked in the next world as well as this? That’s what

troubles me at times. There might be some necessity for it, you know.”

“Then will there be patience to bear it there also; that you may be

sure of. But I do not fear. It were more likely that those who have

not thanked God, but prided themselves that they were beautiful in

this world, should be crooked in the next. It would be like Dives and

Lazarus, you know. But God does what is best for them as well as for

us. We shall find one day that beauty and riches were the best thing for

those to whom they were given, as deformity and poverty were the best

for us.”

“I wonder what sort of person I should have been if I had had a straight

spine!” said Rachel laughing.

“Hardly one so dear to your deformed uncle,” said her companion in

ugliness.

“Then I’m glad I am as I am,” rejoined Rachel.

“This conscious individuality of ours,” said Polwarth, after a

thoughtful silence, “is to me an awful thing--the one thing that

seems in humanity like the onliness of God. Mine terrifies me

sometimes--looking a stranger to me--a limiting of myself--a breaking in

upon my existence--like a volcanic outburst into the blue Sicilian air.

When it thus manifests itself, I find no refuge but the offering of

it back to him who thought it worth making. I say to him: ‘Lord, it

is thine, not mine;--see to it, Lord. Thou and thy eternity are mine,

Father of Jesus Christ.’”

He covered his eyes with his hands, and his lips grew white, and

trembled. Thought had turned into prayer, and both were silent for a

space. Rachel was the first to speak.

“I think I understand, uncle,” she said. “I don’t mind being God’s

dwarf. But I would rather be made after his own image; this can’t be it.

I should like to be made over again.”

“And if the hope we are saved by be no mockery, if St. Paul was not the

fool of his own radiant imaginings, you will be, my child.--But now let

us forget our miserable bodies. Come up to my room, and I will read you

a few lines that came to me this morning in the park.”

“Won’t you wait for Mr. Wingfold, uncle? He will be here yet, I think.

It can’t be ten o’clock. He always looks in on Saturdays as he goes home

from his walk. I should like you to read them to him too. They will do

him good, I know.”

“I would, my dear, willingly, if I thought he would care for them. But

I don’t think he would. They are not good enough verses. He has been

brought up on Horace, and, I fear, counts the best poetry the neatest.”

“I think you must be mistaken there, uncle; I have heard him talk

delightfully about poetry.”

“You must excuse me if I am shy of reading my poor work to any but

yourself, Rachel. My heart was wo much in it, and the subject is so

sacred--”

“I am sorry you should think your pearls too good to cast before Mr.

Wingfold, uncle,” said Rachel, with a touch of disappointed temper.

“Nay, nay, child,” returned Polwarth, “that was not a good thing to say.

What gives me concern is, that there is so much of the rough dirty shell

sticking about them, that to show them would be to wrong the truth in

them.”

Rachel seldom took long to repent. She came slowly to her uncle, where

he stood with the lamp in his hand, looking in his face with a heavenly

contrition, and saying nothing. When she reached him, she dropped on her

knees, and kissed the hand that hung by his side. Her temper was poor

Rachel’s one sore-felt trouble.

Polwarth stooped and kissed her on the forehead, raised her, and leading

her to the stair, stood aside to let her go first. But when she had been

naughty Rachel would never go before her uncle, and she drew back. With

a smile of intelligence he yielded and led the way. But ere they had

climbed to the top, Rachel heard Mr. Wingfold’s step, and went down

again to receive him.