RACHEL.
Wingfold went straight to his friend Polwarth, and asked him if he would
allow him to bring Mr. Drew some evening to tea.
“You mean the linen-draper?” asked Polwarth. “Certainly, if you wish
it.”
“Some troubles are catching,” said the curate. “Drew has caught my
disease.”
“I am delighted to hear it. It would be hard to catch a better, and it’s
one a rich man, as they say he is, seldom does catch. But I always liked
his round, good-humoured, honest face. If I remember rightly, he had
a sore trial in his wife. It is generally understood that she ran
away with some fellow or other. But that was before he came to live in
Glaston.--Would you mind looking in upon Rachel for a few minutes, sir?
She is not so well to-day, and has not been out of her own room.”
“With all my heart,” answered Wingfold. “I am sorry to hear she is
suffering.”
“She is always suffering more or less,” said the little man. “But she
enjoys life notwithstanding, as you may clearly see. It is to her only
a mitigated good, and that, I trust, for the sake of an unmitigated
one.--Come this way, sir.”
He led the curate to the room next his own. It was a humble little
garret, but dainty with whiteness. One who did not thoroughly know
her, might have said it was like her life, colourless, but bright with
innocence and peace. The walls were white; the boards of the uncarpeted
floor were as white as scrubbing could make old deal; the curtains of
windows and bed were whiteness itself; the coverlet was white; so was
the face that looked smiling over the top of it from the one low white
pillow. But although Wingfold knew that face so well, he almost
started at the sight of it now: in the patience of its suffering it was
positively lovely. All that was painful to see was hidden; the crooked
little body lay at rest in the grave of the bed-clothes; the soul rose
from it, and looked, gracious with womanhood, in the eyes of the curate.
“I cannot give you my hand,” she said smiling, as he went softly towards
her, feeling like Moses when he put off his shoes, “for I have such a
pain in my arm, I cannot well raise it.”
The curate bowed reverentially, seated himself in a chair by her
bedside, and, like a true comforter, said nothing.
“Don’t be sorry for me, Mr. Wingfold,” said her sweet voice at length.
“The poor dwarfie, as the children call me, is not a creature to be
pitied. You don’t know how happy I am as I lie here, knowing my uncle is
in the next room, and will come the moment I call him--and that there
is one nearer still,” she added in a lower voice, almost in a whisper,
“whom I haven’t even to call. I am his, and he shall do with me just
as he likes. I fancy sometimes, when I have to lie still, that I am a
little sheep, tied hands and feet--I should have said all four feet,
if I am a sheep”--and here she gave a little merry laugh--“lying on an
altar--the bed here--burning away, in the flame of life, that consumes
the deathful body--burning, heart and soul and sense, up to the great
Father.--Forgive me, Mr. Wingfold, for talking about myself, but you
looked so miserable! and I knew it was your kind heart feeling for me.
But I need not, for that, have gone on at such a rate. I am ashamed of
myself!”
“On the contrary, I am exceedingly obliged to you for honouring me by
talking so freely,” said Wingfold. “It is a great satisfaction to find
that suffering is not necessarily unhappiness. I could be well content
to suffer also, Miss Polwarth, if with the suffering I might have the
same peace.”
“Sometimes I am troubled,” she answered; “but generally I am in peace,
and sometimes too happy to dare speak about it.--Would the persons you
and my uncle were talking about the other day--would they say all
my pleasant as well as my painful thoughts came from the same
cause--vibrations in my brain?”
“No doubt. They would say, I presume, that the pleasant thoughts
come from regular, and the unpleasant from irregular motions of its
particles. They must give the same origin to both. Would you be willing
to acknowledge that only your pleasant thoughts had a higher origin, and
that your painful ones came from physical sources?”
Because of a headache and depression of spirits, Wingfold had been
turning over similar questions in his own mind the night before.
“I see,” said the dwarfie--“I see. No. There are sad thoughts sometimes
which in their season I would not lose, for I would have their
influences with me always. In their season they are better than a host
of happy ones, and there is joy at the root of all. But if they did come
from physical causes, would it follow that they did not come from God?
Is he not the God of the dying as well as the God of the living?”
“If there be a God, Miss Polwarth,” returned Wingfold eagerly, “then is
he God everywhere, and not a maggot can die any more than a Shakespeare
be born without him. He is either enough, that is, all in all, or he is
not at all.”
“That is what I think--because it is best:--I can give no better
reason.”
“If there be a God, there can be no better reason,” said Wingfold.
This IF of Wingfold’s was, I need hardly now say, an IF of bare honesty,
and came of no desire to shake an unthinking confidence. Neither, had
it been of the other sort, could it have shaken Rachel’s, for her
confidence was full of thinking. As little could it shock her, for
she hardly missed a sentence that passed between her uncle and his new
friend. She made no reply, never imagining it her business to combat
the doubts of a man whom she knew to be eager after the truth, and being
guiltless of any tendency, because she believed, to condemn doubt as
wicked.
A short silence followed.
“How delightful it must be to feel well and strong!” said Rachel at
length. “I can’t help often thinking of Miss Lingard. It’s always
Miss Lingard comes up to me when I think of such things. Oh! ain’t she
beautiful and strong, Mr. Wingfold?--and sits on her horse as straight
as a rush! It does one good to see her. Just fancy me on a great tall
horse! What a bag of potatoes I should look!”
She burst into a merry laugh, and then came a few tears, which were
not all of the merriment of which she let them pass as the consequence,
remarking, as she wiped them away,
“But no one can tell, Mr. Wingfold,--and I’m sure Miss Lingard would be
astonished to hear--what pleasure I have while lying unable to move.
I suppose I benefit by what people call the law of compensation! How I
hate the word! As if THAT was the way the Father of Jesus Christ did,
and not his very best to get his children, elder brothers and prodigal
sons, home to his heart! You heard what my uncle said about dreams the
other day?” she resumed after a little pause.
“Yes. I thought it very sensible,” replied the curate.
“It all depends on the sort, don’t it?” said Rachel. “Some of mine I
would not give for a library. They make me grow, telling me things I
should never learn otherwise. I don’t mean any rubbish about future
events, and such like. Of all useless things a knowledge of the future
seems to me the most useless, for what are you to do with a thing before
it exists? Such a knowledge could only bewilder you as to the right way
to take--would make you see double instead of single. That’s not the
sort I mean at all.--You won’t laugh at me, Mr. Wingfold?”
“I can scarcely imagine anything less likely.”
“Then I don’t mind opening my toy-box to you.--In my dreams, for
instance, I am sometimes visited by such a sense of freedom as fills me
with a pure bliss unknown to my waking thoughts except as a rosy cloud
on the horizon. As if they were some heavenly corporation, my dreams
present me, not with the freedom of some poor little city like London,
but with the freedom of all space.”
The curate sat and listened with wonder--but with no sense of unfitness;
such speech and such thought suited well with the face that looked up
from the low pillow with its lovely eyes--for lovely they were, with a
light that had both flash and force.
“I don’t believe,” she went on, “that even Miss Lingard has more of
the blessed sense of freedom and strength and motion when she is on
horseback than I have when I am asleep. The very winds of my dreams will
make me so unspeakabably happy that I wake weeping. Do not tell me it is
gone then, for I continue so happy that I can hardly get to sleep again
to hunt for more joy. Don’t say it is an unreality--for where does
freedom lie? In the body or in the mind? What does it matter whether my
body be lying still or moving from one spot of space to another? What is
the good of motion but to produce the feeling of freedom? The feeling
is everything, and if I have it, that is all that I want. Bodily motion
would indeed disturb it for me--lay fetters on my spirit.--Sometimes,
again, I dream of a new flower--one never before beheld by mortal
eye--with some strange, wonderful quality in it, perhaps, that makes it
a treasure, like that flower of Milton’s invention--haemony--in Comus,
you know. But one curious thing is that that strange quality will never
be recalled in waking hours; so that what it was I can never tell--as if
it belonged to other regions than the life of this world: I retain
only the vaguest memory of its power, and marvel, and
preciousness.--Sometimes it is a little poem or a song I dream of, or
some strange musical instrument, perhaps like one of those I have seen
angels with in a photograph from an old picture. And somehow with the
instrument always comes the knowledge of how to play upon it. So you
see, sir, as it has pleased God to send me into the world as crooked as
a crab, and nearly as lame as a seal, it has pleased him also to give
me the health and riches of the night to strengthen me for the pains and
poverties of the day.--You rejoice in a beautiful thought when it comes
to you, Mr. Wingfold--do you not?”
“When it comes to me,” answered Wingfold significantly--almost
petulantly. Could it be that he envied the dwarf-girl?
“Then is the thought any worse because it comes in a shape?--or is the
feeling less of a feeling that it is born in a dream?”
“I need no convincing, I admit all you say,” returned Wingfold.
“Why are you so silent, then? You make me think you are objecting inside
to everything I am saying,” rejoined Rachel with a smile.
“Partly because I fear you are exciting yourself too much and will
suffer in consequence,” answered the curate, who had noted the rosy
flush on her face.
The same moment her uncle re-entered the room.
“I have been trying to convince Mr. Wingfold that there MAY be some good
in dreaming, uncle,” she said.
“Successfully?” asked Polwarth.
“Unnecessarily,” interjected Wingfold. “I required for conviction only
the facts. Why should I suppose that, if there be a God, he is driven
out of us by sleep?”
“It is an awful thing,” said Polwarth, “to think--that this feeble
individuality of ours, the offspring of God’s individuality, should have
some power, and even more will than power, to close its door against
him, and keep house without him!”
“But what sort of a house?” murmured Wingfold.
“Yes, uncle,” said Rachel; “but think how he keeps about us, haunting
the doors and windows like the very wind, watching to get in! And
sometimes he makes of himself a tempest, that both doors and windows fly
open, and he enters in fear and dismay.”
The prophetic in the uncle was the poetic in the niece.
“For you and me, uncle,” she went on, “he made the doors and windows so
rickety that they COULD not keep him out.”
“Ye are the temples of the Holy Ghost,” said the curate, almost
unconsciously.
“Some of us a little ruinous!” rejoined the girl.
So full was her soul of a lively devotion that she took the liberties of
a child of the house with sacred things.
“But, Mr. Wingfold,” she continued. “I must tell you one more curious
thing about my dreams: I NEVER dream of being crooked and dwarfish. I
don’t dream that I am straight either; I suppose I feel all right, and
therefore never think about it. That makes me fancy my soul must be
straight.--Don’t you think so, sir?”
“Indeed I do,” said Wingfold warmly.
“I’m afraid I shall be telling you some of my dreams some day.”
“We are rather given to that weakness,” said Polwarth,--“so much so as
to make me fear for our brains sometimes. But a crooked rose-tree may
yet bear a good rose.”
“Ah! you are thinking of my poor father, uncle, I know,” said Rachel.
“His was a straight stem and a fine rose, only overblown, perhaps.--I
don’t think I need be much afraid of that, for if I were to go out of
my mind, I should not have strength to live--unless indeed I knew God
through all the madness. I think my father did in a way.”
“It was quite plain he did,” answered her uncle, “and that in no
feeble way either.--Some day I must tell you,”--here he turned to
Wingfold--“about that brother of mine, Rachel’s father. I should even
like to show you a manuscript he left behind him--surely one of the
strangest ever written! It would be well worth printing if that would
ensure its falling into the hands of those who could read through the
madness.--But we have talked quite long enough for your head, child; I
will take Mr. Wingfold into the next room.”