speak to her, and either remove or certify his apprehensions. Nearer yet
and nearer they came. Her courage and strength were giving way together,
and she should be at his mercy. She darted into a shop, sank on a chair
by the counter, and begged for a glass of water. A young woman ran to
fetch it, while Mr. Drew went upstairs for a glass of wine. Returning
with it he came from behind the counter, and approached the lady where
she sat leaning her head upon it.
Meantime the curate also had entered the shop, and placed himself where
he might, unseen by her, await her departure, for he could not speak to
her there. He had her full in sight when Mr. Drew went up to her.
“Do me the favour, madam,” he said--but said no more. For at the sound
of his voice, the lady gave a violent start, and raising her head looked
at him. The wine-glass dropped from his hand. She gave a half-choked
cry, and sped from the shop.
The curate was on the spring after her when he was arrested by the
look of the draper: he stood fixed where she had left him, white and
trembling as if he had seen a ghost. He went up to him, and said in a
whisper:
“Who is she?”
“Mrs. Drew,” answered the draper, and the curate was after her like a
greyhound.
A little crowd of the shop-people gathered in consternation about their
master.
“Pick up those pieces of glass, and call Jacob to wipe the floor,” he
said--then walked to the door, and stood staring after the curate as he
all but ran to overtake the swiftly gliding figure.
The woman, ignorant that her pursuer was again upon her track, and
hardly any longer knowing what she did, hurried blindly towards the
churchyard. Presently the curate relaxed his speed, hoping she would
enter it, when he would have her in a fit place for the interview upon
which he was, if possible, more determined than ever, now that he had
gained, so unexpectedly, such an absolute hold of her. “She must
be Emmeline’s mother,” he said to himself, “--fit mother for such a
daughter.” The moment he caught sight of the visage lifted from its
regard of the sleeping youth, he had suspected the fact. He had not had
time to analyze its expression, but there was something dreadful in it.
A bold question would determine the suspicion.
She entered the churchyard, saw the Abbey door open, and hastened to it.
She was in a state of bewilderment and terror that would have crazed a
weaker woman. In the porch she cast a glance behind her: there again was
her pursuer! She sprang into the church. A woman was dusting a pew not
far from the door.
“Who is that coming?” she asked, in a tone and with a mien that appalled
Mrs. Jenkins. She had but to stretch her neck a little to see through
the porch.
“Why, it be only the parson, ma’am!” she answered.
“Then I shall hide myself, over there, and you must tell him I went out
by that other door. Here’s a sovereign for you.”
“I thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Jenkins, looking wistfully at the
sovereign, which was a great sum of money to a sexton’s wife with
children, then instantly going on with her dusting; “but it ain’t no use
tryin’ of tricks with our parson. HE ain’t one of your Mollies. A man as
don’t play no tricks with hisself, as I heerd a gentleman say, it ain’t
no use tryin’ no tricks with HIM.”
Almost while she spoke, the curate entered. The suppliant drew herself
up, and endeavoured to look both dignified and injured.
“Would you oblige me by walking this way for a moment?” he said, coming
straight to her.
Without a word she followed him, a long way up the church, to the stone
screen which divided the chancel from the nave. There, in sight of Mrs.
Jenkins, but so far off that she could not hear a word said, he asked
her to take a seat on the steps that led up to the door in the centre of
the screen. Again she obeyed, and Wingfold sat down near her.
“Are you Emmeline’s mother?” he said.
The gasp, the expression of eye and cheek, the whole startled response
of the woman, revealed that he had struck the truth. But she made no
answer.
“You had better be open with me,” he said, “for I mean to be very open
with you.”
She stared at him, but either could not, or would not speak. Probably it
was caution: she must hear more.
The curate was already excited, and I fear now got a little angry, for
the woman was not pleasant to his eyes.
“I want to tell you,” he said, “that the poor youth whom your daughter’s
behaviour made a murderer of,--”
She gave a cry, and turned like ashes. The curate was ashamed of
himself.
“It seems cruel,” he said, “but it is the truth. I say he is now
dying--will be gone after her in a few weeks. The same blow killed both,
only one has taken longer to die. No end can be served by bringing him
to justice. Indeed if he were arrested, he would but die on the way to
prison. I have followed you to persuade you, if I can, to leave him to
his fate and not urge it on. If ever man was sorry, or suffered for his
crime,--”
“And pray what is that to me, sir?” cried the avenging mother, who,
finding herself entreated, straightway became arrogant. “Will it give me
back my child? The villain took her precious life without giving her a
moment to prepare for eternity, and you ask me--her mother--to let him
go free! I will not. I have vowed vengeance, and I will have it.”
“Allow me to say that if you die in that spirit, you will be far worse
prepared for eternity than I trust your poor daughter was.”
“What is that to you? If I choose to run the risk, it is my business.
I tell you it shall not be my fault if the wretch is not brought to the
gallows.”
“But he cannot live to reach it. The necessary preliminaries would waste
all that is left of his life. I only ask of you to let him die in what
peace is possible to him. We must forgive our enemies, you know. But
indeed he is no enemy of yours.”
“No enemy of mine! The man who murdered my child no enemy of mine! I
am his enemy then, and that he shall find. If I cannot bring him to the
gallows, I can at least make every man and woman in the country point
the finger of scorn and hatred at him. I can bring him and all his to
disgrace and ruin. Their pride indeed! They were far too grand to visit
me, but not to send a murderer into my family. I am in my rights, and I
will have justice. We shall see if they are too grand to have a nephew
hung! My poor lovely innocent! I will have justice on the foul villain.
Cringing shall not turn me.”
Her lips were white, and her teeth set. She rose with the slow movement
of one whose intent, if it had blossomed in passion, was yet rooted in
determination, and turned to leave the church.
“It might hamper your proceedings a little,” said Wingfold, “if in the
meantime a charge of bigamy were brought against yourself, MRS. DREW!”
Her back was towards the curate, and for a moment she stood like another
pillar of salt. Then she began to tremble, and laid hold of the carved
top of a bench. But her strength failed her completely; she sank on her
knees and fell on the floor with a deep moan.
The curate called Mrs. Jenkins and sent her for water. With some
difficulty they brought her to herself.
She rose, shuddered, drew her shawl about her, and said to the woman,
“I am sorry to give so much trouble. When does the next train start for
London?”
“Within an hour,” answered the curate. “I will see you safe to it.”
“Excuse me; I prefer going alone.”
“That I cannot permit.”
“I must go to my lodgings first.”
“I will go with you.”
She cast on him a look of questioning hate, yielded, and laid two
fingers on his offered arm.
They walked out of the church together and to the cottage where, for
privacy, she had lodged. There he left her for half an hour, and,
yielding to her own necessities and not his entreaties, she took some
refreshment. In the glowing sullenness of foiled revenge, the smoke of
which was crossed every now and then by a flash of hate, she sat until
he returned.
“Before I go with you to the train,” said the curate, re-entering, “you
must give me your word to leave young Lingard unmolested. I know my
friend Mr. Drew has no desire to trouble you, but I am equally confident
that he will do whatever I ask him. If you will not promise me, from the
moment you get into the train you shall be watched.--Do you promise?”
She was silent, with cold gleaming eyes, for a time, then said,
“How am I to know that this is not a trick to save his life?”
“You saw him; you could see he is dying. I tell you I do not think he
can live a month. His disease is making rapid progress. He must go with
the first of the cold weather.”
She could not help believing him.
“I promise,” she said. “But you are cruel to compel a mother to forgive
the villain that stabbed her daughter to the heart.”
“If the poor lad were not dying, I should see that he gave himself up,
as indeed he set out to do some weeks ago, but was frustrated by his
friends. He is dying for love of her. I believe I say so with truth.
Pity and love and remorse and horror of his deed have brought him to the
state you saw him in. To be honest with you, he might have got better
enough to be tortured for a while in a madhouse, for no jury would have
brought him in anything but insane at the time, with the evidence that
would have been adduced; but in his anxiety to see me one day--for his
friends at that time did not favour my visits, because I encouraged him
to surrender--he got out of the house alone to come to me, but fainted
in the churchyard, and lay on the damp earth for the better part of an
hour, I fancy, before we found him. Still, had it not been for the
state of his mind, he might have got over that too.--As you hope to be
forgiven, you must forgive him.”
He held out his hand to her. She was a little softened, and gave him
hers.
“Allow me one word more,” said the curate, “and then we shall go: Our
crimes are friends that will hunt us either to the bosom of God, or the
pit of hell.”
She looked down, but her look was still sullen and proud.
The curate rose, took up her bag, went with her to the station, got her
ticket, and saw her off.
Then he hastened back to Drew, and told him the whole story.
“Poor woman!” said her husband. “--But God only knows how much _I_ am to
blame for all this. If I had behaved better to her she might never have
left me, and your poor young friend would now be well and happy.”
“Perhaps consuming his soul to a cinder with that odious drug,” said
Wingfold. “‘Tis true, as Edgar in King Lear says:
The gods are just,
and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us;
but he takes our sins on himself, and while he drives them out of us
with a whip of scorpions he will yet make them work his ends. He defeats
our sins, makes them prisoners, forces them into the service of good,
chains them like galley-slaves to the rowing-benches of the gospel-ship,
or sets them like ugly gurgoyles or corbels or brackets in the walls
of his temples.--No, that last figure I retract. I don’t like it. It
implies their continuance.”
“Poor woman!” said Mr. Drew again, who for once had been inattentive to
the curate. “Well! she is sorely punished too.”
“She will be worse punished yet,” said the curate, “if I can read the
signs of character. SHE is not repentant yet--though I did spy in her
just once a touch of softening.”
“It is an awful retribution,” said the draper, “and I may yet have to
bear my share--God help me!”
“I suspect it is the weight of her own crime that makes her so fierce
to avenge her daughter. I doubt if anything makes one so unforgiving as
guilt unrepented of.”
“Well, I must try to find out where she is, and keep an eye upon her.”
“That will be easy enough. But why?”
“Because, if, as you think, there is more evil in store for her, I
may yet have it in my power to do her some service.--I wonder if Mr.
Polwarth would call that DIVINE SERVICE,” he added, with one of his
sunny smiles.
“Indeed he would,” answered the curate.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE BEDSIDE.
George Bascombe, when he went to Paris, had no thought of deserting
Helen. But he had good ground for fearing that it might be ruinous both
to Lingard and himself to undertake his defence. From Paris he wrote
often to Helen, and she replied--not so often, yet often enough to
satisfy him; and as soon as she was convinced that Leopold could not
recover, she let him know, whereupon he instantly began his preparations
for returning.
Before he came, the weather had changed once more. It was now cold,
and the cold had begun at once to tell upon the invalid. There are some
natures to which cold, moral, spiritual, or physical, is lethal, and
Lingard’s was of the class. When the dying leaves began to shiver in
the breath of the coming winter, the very brightness of the sun to look
gleamy, and nature to put on the unfriendly aspect of a world not made
for living in but for shutting out--when all things took the turn of
reminding man that his life lay not in them, Leopold began to shrink and
withdraw. He could not face the ghastly persistence of the winter, which
would come, let all the souls of the summer-nations shrink and protest
as they might; let them creep shivering to Hades; he would have his day.
His sufferings were now considerable, but he never complained. Restless
and fevered and sick at heart, it was yet more from the necessity of a
lovely nature than from any virtue of will that he was so easy to
nurse, accepting so readily all ministrations. Never exacting and never
refusing, he was always gently grateful, giving a sort of impression
that he could have been far more thankful had he not known the object
of the kindnesses so unworthy. Next to Wingfold’s and his sister’s, the
face he always welcomed most was that of the gate-keeper--indeed I ought
hardly to say NEXT to theirs; for if the curate was to him as a brother,
Polwarth was like a father in Christ. He came every day, and every day,
almost till that of his departure, Leopold had something to ask him
about or something to tell him.
“I am getting so stupid, Mr. Polwarth!” he said once. “It troubles me
much. I don’t seem to care for anything now. I don’t want to hear the
New Testament: I would rather hear a child’s story--something that did
not want thinking about. If I am not coughing, I am content. I could lie
for hours and hours and never think more than what goes creeping through
my mind no faster than a canal in Holland. When I am coughing,--I don’t
think about anything then either--only long for the fit to be over and
let me back again into Sleepy Hollow. All my past life seems to be gone
from me. I don’t care about it. Even my crime looks like something done
ages ago. I know it is mine, and I would rather it were not mine, but
it is as if a great cloud had come and swept away the world in which it
took place. I am afraid sometimes that I am beginning not to care even
about that. I say to myself, I shall be sorry again by and by, but I
can’t think about it now. I feel as if I had handed it over to God to
lay down where I should find it again when I was able to think and be
sorry.”
This was a long utterance for him to make, but he had spoken slowly, and
with frequent pauses. Polwarth did not speak once, feeling that a dying
man must be allowed to ease his mind after his own fashion, and take as
much time to it as he pleased. Helen and Wingfold both would have told
him he must not tire himself, but that Polwarth never did. The dying
should not have their utterances checked, or the feeling of not having
finished forced upon them. They will always have plenty of the feeling
without that.
A fit of coughing compelled him to break off, and when it was over, he
lay panting and weary, but with his large eyes questioning the face of
Polwarth. Then the little man spoke.
“He must give us every sort of opportunity for trusting him,” he said.
“The one he now gives you, is this dulness that has come over you. Trust
him through it, submitting to it and yet trusting against it, and you
get the good of it. In your present state perhaps you cannot even try
to bring about by force of will any better state of feeling or higher
intellectual condition; but you can say to God something like this:
‘See, Lord, I am dull and stupid, and care for nothing: take thou care
of everything for me, heart and mind and all. I leave all to thee. Wilt
thou not at length draw me out of this my frozen wintery state? Let me
not shrink from fresh life and thought and duty, or be unready to come
out of the shell of my sickness when thou sendest for me. I wait thy
will. I wait even the light that I feel now as if I dared not encounter
for weariness of body and faintness of spirit.’”
“Ah!” cried Leopold, “there you have touched it! How can you know so
well what I feel?”
“Because I have often had to fight hard to keep death to his own
province, and not let him cross over into my spirit.”
“Alas! I am not fighting at all; I am only letting things go.”
“You are fighting more than you know, I suspect, for you are enduring,
and that patiently. Suppose Jesus were to knock at the door now, and it
was locked; suppose you knew it was he, and there was no one in the room
to open it for him; suppose you were as weak as you are now, and seemed
to care as little about him or anything else: what would you do?”
Leopold looked half amazed, as if wondering what his friend could be
driving at with such a question.
“What else could I do but get up and open it?” he said.
“Would you not be tempted to lie still and wait till some one came.”
“No.”
“Would you not say in your heart, ‘The Lord knows I am very weak, and I
should catch cold, and the exertion would make me cough dreadfully, and
he won’t mind if I lie still?’”
“That I wouldn’t! What should I care what came to me? What would it
matter so long as I got one look at him! Besides, if he didn’t want me
to get up, he wouldn’t knock.”
“But suppose you knew that the moment you turned the key you would drop
down, and when the Lord came in you would not see him.”
“I can’t think where you want to take me, Mr. Polwarth!” said the youth.
“Even if I knew I should drop dead the moment I got out on the floor,
what would it matter! I should get to him the sooner then, and tell him
why I didn’t open the door. Can you suppose for a moment I should let
any care for this miserable body of mine come between my eyes and the
face of my Lord?”
“You see then that you do care about him a little, though a minute ago
you didn’t think it! There are many feelings in us that are not able
to get up stairs the moment we call them. Be as dull and stupid as it
pleases God to let you be, and trouble neither yourself nor him about
that, only ask him to be with you all the same.”
The little man dropped on his knees by the bedside, and said,
“O Lord Jesus, be near when it seems to us, as it seemed to thee once,
that our Father has forsaken us, and gathered back to himself all the
gifts he once gave us. Even thou who wast mighty in death, didst need
the presence of thy Father to make thee able to endure: forget not
us the work of thy hands, yea, the labour of thy heart and spirit. O
remember that we are his offspring, neither accountable for our own
being, nor able to comfort or strengthen ourselves. If thou wert to
leave us alone, we should cry out upon thee as on the mother who threw
her babes to the wolves--and there are no wolves able to terrify thee.
Ah Lord! we know thou leavest us not, only in our weakness we would
comfort our hearts with the music of the words of faith. Thou canst not
do other than care for us, Lord Christ, for whether we be glad or sorry,
slow of heart or full of faith, all the same are we the children of thy
Father. He sent us here, and never asked us if we would; therefore thou
must be with us, and give us repentance and humility and love and faith,
that we may indeed be the children of thy Father who is in heaven.
Amen.”
While Polwarth was yet praying, the door had opened gently behind him,
and Helen, not knowing that he was there, had entered with Bascombe. He
neither heard their entrance, nor saw the face of disgust that George
made behind his back. What was in Bascombe’s deepest soul who shall
tell? Of that region he himself knew nothing. It was a silent, holy
place into which he had never yet entered--therefore lonely and deserted
as the top of Sinai after the cloud had departed. No--I will not say
that: who knows what is where man cannot or will not look? If George had
sought there, perhaps he might have found traces of a presence not yet
altogether vanished. In what he called and imagined his deepest soul,
however, all he was now conscious of was a perfect loathing of the
monstrous superstition so fitly embodied before him. The prayer of the
kneeling absurdity was to him an audacious mockery of the infrangible
laws of Nature: this hulk of misshapen pottery actually presuming to
believe that an invisible individual heard what he said because he
crooked his hinges to say it! It did not occur to George that the
infrangible laws of Nature she had herself from the very first so
agonizingly broken to the poor dwarf, she had been to him such a cruel
step-mother, that he was in evil case indeed if he could find no father
to give him fair play and a chance of the endurable. Was he so much to
blame if he felt the annihilation offered by such theorists as George,
not altogether a satisfactory counterpoise either to its existence or
its loss? If, even, he were to fancy in his trouble that the old fable
of an elder brother, something more humble than grand handsome George
Bascombe and more ready to help his little brothers and sisters, might
be true, seeing that an old story is not necessarily a false one, and
were to try after the hints it gave, surely in his condition such folly,
however absurd to a man of George Bascombe’s endowments, might of the
more gifted ephemeros be pardoned if not pitied. Nor will I assert that
he was altogether unaware of any admixture of the sad with the ludicrous
when he saw the amorphous agglomerate of human shreds and patches
kneeling by the bedside of the dying murderer, to pray some comfort into
his passing soul. But his “gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it,”
while through Helen ran a cold shudder of disgust at the familiarity and
irreverence of the little spiritual prig.
How many of the judgments we are told not to judge and yet do judge,
must make the angels of the judging and the judged turn and look at
each other and smile a sad smile, ere they set themselves to forget that
which so sorely needs to be forgotten.
Polwarth rose from his knees unaware of a hostile presence.
“Leopold,” he said, taking his hand, “I would gladly, if I might, walk
with you through the shadow. But the heart of all hearts will be with
you. Rest in your tent a little while, which is indeed the hollow of
the Father’s hand turned over you, with your strong brother watching
the door. Your imagination cannot go beyond the truth of him who is the
Father of lights, or of him who is the Elder Brother of men.”
Leopold answered only with his eyes. Polwarth turned to go, and saw the
on-lookers. They stood between him and the door, but parted and made
room for him to pass. Neither spoke. He made a bow first to one and
then to the other, looking up in the face of each, unabashed by smile or
scorn or blush of annoyance, but George took no notice, walking straight
to the bed the moment the way was clear. Helen’s conscience, however,
or heart, smote her, and, returning his bow, she opened the door for her
brother’s friend. He thanked her, and went his way.
“Poor dear fellow!” said George kindly, and stroked the thin hand laid
in his: “can I do anything for you?”
“Nothing but be good to Helen when I am gone, and tell her now and then
that I’m not dead, but living in the hope of seeing her again one day
before long. She might forget sometimes--not me, but that, you know.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll see to it,” answered George, in the evil tone of one
who faithfully promises a child an impossibility. Of course there was no
more harm in lying to a man who was just on the verge of being a man no
more, and becoming only an unpleasant mass of chemicals, which a whole
ant-heap of little laws would presently be carrying outside the gates of
the organic, than there had been in lying to him when he supposed him a
madman. Neither could anyone blame him for inconsistency; for had he not
always said in the goodness of his heart, that he would never disturb
the faith of old people drawing nigh their end, because such no more
possessed the needful elasticity of brain to accommodate themselves to
the subversion of previous modes of feeling and thought, unavoidable
to the adoption of his precious revelation. Precious he did believe it,
never having himself one of those visions of infinite hope, which,
were his theory once proved as true as he imagined it, must then indeed
vanish for ever.
“Do you suffer much?” asked George.
“Yes--a good deal.”
“Pain?”
“Not so much;--sometimes. The weakness is the worst. But it doesn’t
matter: God is with me.”
“What good does that do you?” asked George, forgetting himself, half
in contempt, half in a curiosity which he would have called, and which
perhaps was, scientific.
But Leopold took it in good faith, and answered,
“It sets it all right, and makes me able to be patient.”
George laid down the hand he held, and turned sadly to Helen, but said
nothing.
The next moment Wingfold entered. Helen kissed the dying hand, and left
the room with George.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE GARDEN.
Tenderly he led her into the garden, and down the walks now bare of
bordering flowers. To Helen it looked like a graveyard; the dry bushes
were the memorials of the buried flowers, and the cypress and box trees
rose like the larger monuments of shapely stone. The day was a cold
leaden one, that would have rained if it could, to get rid of the
deadness at its heart, but no tears came. To the summer-house they went,
under the cedar, and sat down. Neither spoke for some time.
“Poor Leopold!” said George at length, and took Helen’s hand.
She burst into tears, and again for some time neither spoke.
“George, I can’t bear it!” she said at length.
“It is very sad,” answered George. “But he had a happy life, I don’t
doubt, up to--to--”
“What does that matter now? It is all a horrible farce.--To begin so
fair and lovely, and end so stormy and cold and miserable!”
George did not like to say what he thought, namely, that it was
Leopold’s own doing. He did not see that therein lay the deepest depth
of the misery--the thing that of all things needed help: all else might
be borne; the less that COULD be borne the better.
“It IS horrible,” he said. “But what can be done? What’s done is done,
and nobody can help it.”
“There should be somebody to help it,” said Helen.
“Ah! Should be!” said George. “--Well, it’s a comfort it will soon be
over!”
“Is it?” returned Helen almost sharply. “--But he’s not your brother,
and you don’t know what it is to lose him! Oh, how desolate the world
will be without my darling!”
And again her tears found way.
“All that I can do to make up for the loss, dearest Helen,” said
George,--
“Oh George!” she cried, starting to her feet, “is there NO hope? I don’t
mean of his getting better--that we do know the likelihoods of--but is
there no hope of SOME TIME seeing him again? We know so little about all
of it! MIGHT there not be some way?”
But George was too honest in himself, and too true to his principles,
to pretend anything to Helen. Hers was an altogether different case from
Leopold’s. Here was a young woman full of health and life and hope,
with all her joys before her! Many suns must set before her sun would go
down, many pale moons look lovely in her eyes, ere came those that
would mock her with withered memories--a whole hortus siccus of
passion-flowers. Why should he lie to HER of a hope beyond the grave?
Let the pleasures of the world be the dearer to her for the knowledge
that they must so soon depart; let love be the sweeter for the mournful
thought that it is a thing of the summer, and that when the winter comes
it shall be no more! But perhaps George forgot one point. I will allow
that the insects of a day, dying in a moment of delightful fruition, are
blessed; but when the delicate Psyche, with her jewel-feathered wings,
is beat about by a wind full of rain until she lies draggled in the
dirt; when there are no more flowers, or if there be, the joy of her
hovering is over, and yet death comes but slowly; when the mourners are
going about the streets ere ever the silver cord is loosed; when the
past looks a mockery and the future a blank;--then perhaps, even to the
correlatives of the most triumphant natural selection, it may not merely
seem as if something were wrong somewhere, but even as if there ought
to be somebody to set wrong right. If Psyche should be so subdued to
circumstance as to accept without question her supposed fate, then
doubly woe for Psyche!
But if George could not lie, it was not necessary for him to speak the
truth: silence was enough. A moment of it was all Helen could endure.
She rose hastily, left the wintered summer-house, and walked back to the
sick-chamber. George followed a few paces behind, so far quenched that
he did not overtake her to walk by her side, feeling he had no aid to
offer her. Doubtless he could have told her of help at hand, but it was
help that must come, that could neither be given nor taken, would not
come the sooner for any prayer, and indeed would not begin to exist
until the worst should be over: the nearest George came to belief in a
saving power, was to console himself with the thought that TIME would do
everything for Helen.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE DEPARTURE.
As Leopold slowly departed, he seemed to his sister to draw along with
him all that was precious in her life. She felt herself grow dull
and indifferent. It was to no purpose that she upbraided herself with
heartlessness; seemingly heartless her bosom remained. It was not that
her mind was occupied with anything else than her brother, or drew
comfort from another source; her feelings appeared to be dying with
him who had drawn them forth more than any other. The battle was ending
without even the poor pomp and circumstance of torn banners and wailful
music.
Leopold said very little during the last few days. His fits, of coughing
were more frequent, and in the pauses he had neither strength nor desire
to speak. When Helen came to his bedside, he would put out his hand to
her, and she would sit down by him and hold it warm in hers. The hand
of his sister was the point of the planet from which, like his mount of
ascension, the spirit of the youth took its departure;--when he let
that go, he was gone. But he died asleep, as so many do; and fancied, I
presume, that he was waking into his old life, when he woke into his new
one.
Wingfold stood on the other side of the bed, with Polwarth by him, for
so had the departing wished it, and although he made no sign, I cannot
but think he reaped some content therefrom. While yet he lingered, one
of Helen’s listless, straying glances was arrested by the countenance of
the gate-keeper. It was so still and so rapt that she thought he must
be seeing within the veil, and regarding what things were awaiting
her brother on the reverse of the two-sided wonder. But it was not so.
Polwarth saw no more than she did: he was ONLY standing in the presence
of him who is not the God of the dead but of the living. Whatever lay in
that Will was the life of whatever came of that Will, that is, of every
creature, and no to that Will, to the face of the Father, he lifted,
in his prayerful thought, the heart and mind and body of the youth now
passing through the birth of death. “I know not,” he would have said,
had he been questioned concerning his spiritual attitude, “how my prayer
should for another work anything with the perfect Giver, but at least
I will not leave my friend behind when I go into the presence of his
Father and my Father. And I believe there is something in it I cannot
yet see.”
Wingfold’s anxiety was all for Helen. He could do no more for Leopold,
nor did he need more from man. As to many of the things that puzzled
them most, he was on his way to know more; he would soon be in the heart
of what seemed likely to remain a long secret to him. But there was
his sister, about to be left behind him without his hopes; for her
were dreary days at hand; and the curate prayed the God of comfort and
consolation to visit her.
Mrs. Ramshorn would now and then look in at the noiseless door of the
chamber of death, but she rightly felt her presence was not desired,
and though ready to help, did not enter. Neither did George--not from
heartlessness, but that he judged it better to leave the priests of
falsehood undisturbed in the exercise of their miserable office. What
did it matter how many comforting lies were told to a dying man? What
COULD it matter? There was small danger of their foolish prayers
and superstitious ceremonies evoking a deity from the well-ordered,
self-evolved sphericity of interacting law, where not a pin-hole of
failure afforded space out of which he might creep. No more could
they deprive the poor lad of the bliss of returning into the absolute
nothingness whence he had crept--to commit a horrible crime against
immortal society, and creep back again, with a heart full of love and
remorse and self-abhorrence, into the black abyss. Therefore, why should
he not let them tell their lies and utter their silly incantations?
Aloof and unharmed he stood, safe on the shore, all ready to reach the
rescuing hand to Helen, the moment she should turn her eyes to him, for
the help she knew he had to give her. Certainly, for her sake, he would
rather she were not left unprotected to such subtle and insinuating
influences; but with the power of his mind upon her good sense, he had
no fear of the result. Not that he expected her to submit at once to the
wholesome regimen and plain diet he must prescribe her: the soft hand of
Time must first draw together the edges of her heart’s wound.
But the deadness of Helen’s feelings, the heartlessness because of
which she cried out against herself, seemed, in a vague way, by herself
unacknowledged yet felt, if not caused by, yet associated with some
subtle radiation from the being of George Bascombe. That very morning
when he came into the breakfast-room so quietly that she had not heard
him, and, looking up, saw him unexpectedly, he seemed for a moment, she
could not tell why, the dull fountain of all the miserable feeling--not
of loss, but of no loss, which pressed her heart flat in her bosom. The
next moment she accused herself of the grossest injustice, attributing
it to the sickness of soul which the shadow of death had wrought in her;
for was not George the only true friend she had ever had? If she lost
him she must be lonely indeed!--The feeling lingered notwithstanding,
and when she thought it dispelled, began to gather again immediately.
At the same time she shrunk from Wingfold as hard and unsympathetic.
True he had been most kind, even tender, to her brother, but to him he
had taken a fancy, having found in him one whom he could work upon
and fashion to his own liking: poor Poldie had never been one of the
strongest of men. But to her, whom he could not model after his own
ideas, who required a reason for the thing anyone would have her
believe--to her he had shown the rough side of his nature, going farther
than any gentleman ought, even if he was a clergyman, in criticizing
her conduct. He might well take example of her cousin George! What a
different sort of artillery HE had brought to bear upon the outstanding
fortress of her convictions!
So would she say within herself, again and again, in different forms,
not knowing how little of conviction there was in the conclusions she
seemed to come to--how much of old habit and gratitude on the one
hand, and pride and resentment upon the other.-And there still was that
feeling! she could not drive it away. It was like trying to disperse a
fog with a fan.
The outside weather, although she was far past heeding that, was in
harmony with her soul’s weather. A dull dark-grey fog hung from the sky,
and without much obscuring the earth altogether hid the sun. The air
was very cold. There was neither joy nor hope anywhere. The bushes were
leafless and budless, the summer gone, the spring not worth hoping for,
because it also would go: spring after spring came--for nothing but to
go again! Things were so empty and wretched that pain and grief, almost
fear itself, would have been welcome. The world around her, yes, all
her life, all herself, was but the cold dead body of a summer-world. And
Leopold was going to be buried with the summer. His smiles had all gone
with the flowers. The weeds of his troubles were going also, for they
would die with him. But he would not know it and be glad, any more than
she, who was left caring for neither summer nor winter, joy nor sorrow,
love nor hate, the past nor the future.
Many such thoughts wandered hazily through her mind as she now sat
holding the hand of him who was fast sleeping away from her into death.
Her eyes were fixed on the window through which he had entered that
terrible night, but she saw nothing beyond it.
“He is gone,” said Polwarth in a voice that sounded unknown to the ears
of Helen, and as he spoke he kneeled.
She started up with a cry, and looked in her brother’s face. She had
never seen anyone die, and yet she saw that he was dead.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE SUNSET.
How the terrible time, terrible for its very dulness and insensibility,
passed until it brought the funeral, Helen could not have told. It
seemed to her, as she looked back upon it, a bare blank, yet was the
blank full of a waste weariness of heart. The days were all one, outside
and inside. Her heart was but a lonely narrow bay to the sea of cold
immovable fog that filled the world. No one tried to help, no one indeed
knew her trouble. Everyone took it for grief at the loss of her brother,
while to herself it was the oppression of a life that had not even the
interest of pain. The curate had of course called to inquire after her,
but had not been invited to enter. George had been everywhere with help,
but had no word to speak.
The day of the funeral came, in thin fog and dull cold. The few friends
gathered. The body was borne to the Abbey. The curate received it at the
gate in the name of the church--which takes our children in its arms,
and our bodies into its garden--save indeed where her gardener is some
foolish priest who knows not the heart of his mother, and will pick
and choose among her dead;--the lovely words of the last-first of the
apostles, were read; and earth was given back to earth, to mingle with
the rest of the stuff the great workman works withal. Cold was Helen’s
heart, cold her body, cold her very being. The earth, the air, the mist,
the very light was cold. The past was cold, the future yet colder. She
would have grudged Leopold his lonely rest in the grave, but that she
had not feeling enough even for that. Her life seemed withering away
from her, like an autumn flower in the frosts of winter; and she, as if
she had been but a flower, did not seem to care. What was life worth,
when it had not strength to desire even its own continuance? Heartless
she returned from the grave, careless of George’s mute attentions, not
even scornful of her aunt’s shallow wail over the uncertainty of life
and all things human,--so indifferent to the whole misery that she
walked straight up to the room, hers once more, from which the body had
just been carried, and which, for so many many weary weeks, had been the
centre of loving pain, sometimes agony. Once more she was at peace--but
what a peace!
She took off her cloak and bonnet, laid them on the bed, went to the
window, sat down, and gazed, hardly seeing, out on the cold garden with
its sodden earth, its leafless shrubs, and perennial trees of darkness
and mourning. The meadow lay beyond, and there she did see the red cow
busily feeding, and was half-angry with her. Beyond the meadow stood the
trees, with the park behind them. And yet further behind lay the hollow
with the awful house in its bosom, its dismal haunted lake and its
ruined garden. But nothing moved her. She could have walked over every
room in that house without a single quaver of the praecordia. Poldie
was dead, but was it not well? Even if he had not been in trouble, what
should his death matter? She would die soon herself and for ever: what
did that or anything else matter? Might she but keep this dulness of
spirit, and never more wake to weep foolish tears over an existence the
whole upstanding broad-based fact of which was not worth one drop in the
rivers of weeping that had been flowing ever since the joyless birth
of this unconceived, ill-fated, unfathered world! To the hour of death
belonged jubilation and not mourning; the hour of birth was the hour of
sorrow. Back to the darkness! was the cry of a life whose very being was
an injury, only there was no one to have done the injury.
Thus she sat until she was summoned to dinner--early for the sake of
the friends whose home lay at a distance. She ate and drank and took her
share in the talk as matter of course, believing all at the table would
judge her a heartless creature, and careless of what they might think
or say. But they judged her more kindly and more truly than she judged
herself. They saw through her eyes the deeps whose upward ducts were
choked with the frost of an unknown despair.
No sooner was she at liberty than again she sought her room, not
consciously from love to her brother who had died there, but because the
deadness of her heart chose a fitting loneliness: and again she seated
herself at the window.
The dreary day was drawing to a close, and the night, drearier it could
not be, was at hand. The gray had grown darker, and she sat like one
waiting for the night like a monster coming to claim its own and swallow
her up.
Something--was it an invasion of reviving light? caused her to lift her
eyes. Away, sideways from her window, in the west, the mist had cleared
a little--somewhere about the sun. Thinner and thinner it grew. No
sun came forth: he was already down; but a canopy of faint amber grew
visible, stretched above his tomb. It was the stuff of which sad smiles
are made, not a thing that belonged to gladness. But only he who has
lost his sorrow without regaining his joy, can tell how near sorrow
lieth to joy. Who that has known the dull paths of listless no-feeling,
would not have his sorrow back with all its attendant agonies?
The pale amber spread, dilute with light, and beneath it lay the gray of
the fog, and above it the dark blue of cloud--not of sky. The soul of it
was so still, so resigned, so sad, so forsaken, that she who had thought
her heart gone from her, suddenly felt its wells were filling, and soon
they overflowed. She wept. At what? A colour in the sky! Was there then
a God that knew sadness--and was that a banner of grief he hung forth
to comfort the sorrowful with sympathy? Or was it but a godless colour
which the heart varnished with its own grief? Or if the human heart came
from nothing and was sad, why might not the aspects of nature come from
nothing and be sad too--wrought in harmony with the unutterable woe of
humanity? Then either is man the constructive centre of the world, and
its meanings are but his own face looking back upon him from the mirror
of his own projected atmosphere, and comfort there is none; or he is not
the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and colours
the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man the
one conscious point and object of a vast derision--insentient nature
grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks and makes
mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all, being at once
that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but writhes in agony
under the mockery. Such as Bascombe reply that they find it not so. I
answer--For the best of reasons, that it is not so.
Helen’s doubts did not stay her weeping, as doubt generally does; for
the sky with its sweet sadness was before her, and deep in her heart
a lake of tears, which, now that it had begun to flow, would not be
stayed. She knew not why she wept, knew not that it was the sympathy
of that pale amber of sad resignation which brought her relief: but she
wept and wept, until her heart began to stir, and her tears came cooler
and freer.
“Oh Poldie! my own Poldie!” she cried at length, and fell upon her
knees--not-to worship the sky--not to pray to Poldie, or even for
Poldie--not indeed to pray at all, so far as she knew; yet I doubt if it
was merely and only from the impulse of the old childish habit of saying
prayers.
But in a moment she grew restless. There was no Poldie! She rose and
walked about the room. And he came back to her soul, her desolate
brother, clothed, alas! in the rags and tatters of all the unkind and
unjust thoughts she had ever had concerning him, and wearing on his face
the reflection of her worse deeds. She had stood between him and the
only poor remnant of peace, consolation, and hope that it was possible
he should have; and it was through the friends whom she had treated with
such distance and uncordiality that he did receive it. Then out rushed
from the chamber of her memory the vision of the small dark nervous
wild-looking Indian boy who gazed at her but for one questioning moment,
then shot into her arms and nestled in her bosom. How had she justified
that faith? She had received, and sheltered, and shielded him,
doubtless, and would have done so with her life, yet, when it came to
the test, she had loved herself better than him, and would have doomed
him to agony rather than herself to disgrace. Oh Poldie! Poldie! But
he could not hear! Never, for evermore, should she utter to him word of
sorrow or repentance! never beg his forgiveness, or let him know that
now she knew better, and had risen above such weakness and selfishness!
She stopped, and looked sadly from the window. The sky was cloudless
overhead, and the amber pall was fainter and clearer over the tomb of
the sun. She turned hastily to the bed where lay her cloak and bonnet,
put them on with trembling hands, and went out by that same window
into the garden. She could not help a shudder as she stood in the dark
passage unlocking the door in the sunk fence, but the next minute she
was crossing the meadow through the cold frosty twilight air, now clear
of its fog, and seeming somehow to comfort, uplift, and strengthen her.
The red cow was still feeding there. She stopped and talked to her a
little. She seemed one of Poldie’s friends, and Poldie had come back to
her heart if he might never more to her arms, and she was now on her
way to one of his best friends, whom, as more worthy, he had loved even
better than her, and whom she had not honoured as they deserved or as he
must have desired. To get near them, would be to get nearer to Poldie.
At least she would be with those whom he had loved, and who, she did not
doubt, still loved him, believing him still alive. She could not go to
the curate, but she could go to the Polwarths; no one would blame her
for that-except indeed George. But even George should not come between
her and what mere show of communion with Poldie was left her! She would
keep her freedom--would rather break with George than lose an atom
of her liberty! She would be no clay for his hands to mould after his
pleasure!
She opened the door in the fence and entered the park, seeming to
recover strength with every step she took towards Poldie’s friends.
It was almost dark when she stood at the lodge-door and knocked.
CHAPTER XXVI.
AN HONEST SPY.
No one answered Helen’s knock. She repeated it, and still no answer
came. Her heart might have failed her, but that she heard voices: what
if they were talking about Leopold? At length, after knocking four or
five times, she heard the step as of a child coming down a stair; but
it passed the door. Clearly no one had heard her. She knocked yet again,
and immediately it was opened by Rachel. The pleasured surprise that
shone up in her face when she saw who it was that stood without, was
lovely to see, and Helen, on whose miserable isolation it came like
a sunrise of humanity, took no counsel with pride, but, in simple
gratitude for the voiceless yet eloquent welcome, bent down and kissed
her. The little arms were flung about her neck, and the kiss returned
with such a gentle warmth and restrained sweetness as would have
satisfied the most fastidious in the matter of salute--to which class,
however, Helen did not belong, for she seldom kissed anyone. Then Rachel
took her by the hand, and led her into the kitchen, placed a chair for
her near the fire, and said,
“I AM sorry there is no fire in the parlour. The gentlemen are in my
uncle’s room. Oh, Miss Lingard, I do wish you could have heard how they
have been talking!”
“Have they been saying anything about my brother?” asked Helen.
“It’s all about him,” she replied.
“May I ask who the gentlemen are?” said Helen doubtfully.
“Mr. Wingfold and Mr. Drew. They are often here.”
“Is it--do you mean Mr. Drew, the draper?”
“Yes. He is one of Mr. Wingfold’s best pupils. He brought him to my
uncle, and he has come often ever since.”
“I never heard that--Mr. Wingfold--took pupils.--I am afraid I do not
quite understand you.
“I would have said DISCIPLES,” returned Rachel smiling; “but that has
grown to feel such a sacred word--as if it belonged only to the Master,
that I didn’t like to use it. It would say best what I mean though; for
there are people in Glaston that are actually mending their ways because
of Mr. Wingfold’s teaching, and Mr. Drew was the first of them. It is
long since such a thing was heard of in the Abbey. It never was in my
time.”
Helen sighed. She wished it had remained possible for her also to become
one of Mr. Wingfold’s pupils, but how could she now when she had learned
that what he had to teach was at best but a lovely phantasm, sprung of
the seething together of the conscience and imagination. George could
give account of the whole matter: religion invariably excited the
imagination and weakened the conscience;--witness the innumerable tales
concerning Jesus invented in the first of the Christian centuries, and
about this and that saint in those that followed! Helen’s experience
in Leopold’s case had certainly been different, but the other fact
remained. Alas, she could not be a pupil of Mr. Wingfold! She could no
longer deceive herself with such comfort. And yet!--COME UNTO ME, AND
_I_ WILL GIVE YOU REST.
“I do wish I could hear them,” she said.
“And why not?” returned Rachel. “There is not one of them would not be
glad to see you. I know that.”
“I am afraid I should hinder their talk. Would they speak just as freely
as if I were not there? Not that I know why they shouldn’t,” she added;
“only the presence of any stranger--”
“You are no stranger to Mr. Wingfold or my uncle,” said Rachel, “and I
daresay you know Mr. Drew?”
“To tell you the truth, Miss Polwarth, I have not behaved as I should
either to your uncle or Mr. Wingfold. I know it now that my brother is
gone. They were so good to him! I feel now as if I had been possessed
with an evil spirit. I could not bear them to be more to him than I
was. Oh, how I should like to hear what they are saying! I feel as if I
should get a glimpse of Leopold--almost, if I might. But I couldn’t face
them all together. I could not go into the room.”
Rachel was silent for a moment, thinking. Then she said:
“I’ll tell you what then: there’s no occasion. Between my uncle’s room
and mine there’s a little closet, where you shall sit and hear every
word. Nothing will divide you from them but a few thin old boards.”
“That would hardly be honourable though--would it?”
“I will answer for it. I shall tell my uncle afterwards. There may be
cases where the motive makes the right or the wrong. It’s not as if you
were listening to find out secrets. I shall be in the room, and that
will be a connecting link, you know: they never turn me out. Come now.
We don’t know what we may be losing.”
The desire to hear Leopold’s best friends talk about him was strong in
Helen, but her heart misgave her: was it not unbecoming? She would be in
terror of discovery all the time. In the middle of the stair, she drew
Rachel back and whispered,
“I dare not do it.”
“Come on,” said Rachel. “Hear what I shall say to them first. After that
you shall do as you please.”
Evidently, so quick was her response, her thoughts had been going in the
same direction as Helen’s.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she added, as Helen again followed her.
Arrived at the top, the one stood trembling, while the other went into
the room.
“Uncle,” said Rachel, “I have a friend in the house who is very anxious
to hear you and our friends speak your minds to each other, but for
reasons does not wish to appear: will you allow my friend to listen
without being seen?”
“Is it your wish, Rachel, or are you only conveying the request of
another?” asked her uncle.
“It is my wish,” answered Rachel. “I really desire it--if you do not
mind.”
She looked from one to another as she spoke. The curate and the draper
indicated a full acquiescence.
“Do you know quite what you are about, Rachel?” asked Polwarth.
“Perfectly, uncle,” she answered. “There is no reason why you should not
talk as freely as if you were talking only to me. I will put my friend
in the closet, and you need never think that anyone is in the house but
ourselves.”
“Then I have no more to say,” returned her uncle with a smile. “Your
FRIEND, whoever he or she may be, is heartily welcome.”
Rachel rejoined Helen, who had already drawn nearer to the door of the
closet, and now seated herself right willingly in its shelter, amidst
an atmosphere odorous of apples and herbs. Already the talk was going on
just as before. At first each of the talkers did now and then remember
there was a listener unseen but found, when the conversation came to a
close, that he had for a long time forgotten it.
CHAPTER XXVII.
WHAT HELEN HEARD,
Although satisfied that, after what Rachel had said to the men, there
could be no impropriety in her making use of the privilege granted her,
Helen felt oddly uncomfortable at first. But soon the fancy came, that
she was listening at the door of the other world to catch news of her
Leopold, and that made her forget herself and put her at peace. For some
time, however, the conversation was absolutely unintelligible to her.
She understood the words and phrases, and even some of the sentences,
but as she had no clue to their drift, the effort to understand was like
attempting to realize the span of a rainbow from a foot or two of it
appearing now and then in different parts and vanishing again at once.
It was chiefly Polwarth, often Wingfold, and now and then Drew that
spoke, Rachel contributing only an occasional word. At length broke
something of a dawn over the seeming chaos. The words from which the
light that first reached Helen flowed, were the draper’s.
“I can’t think, for all that,” he said, “why, if there be life beyond
the grave, and most sincerely I trust there is--I don’t see why
we should know so little about it. Confess now, Mr. Polwarth!--Mr.
Wingfold!” he said appealingly, “--does it not seem strange that, if
our dearest friends go on living somewhere else, they should, the moment
they cease to breathe, pass away from us utterly--so utterly that from
that moment neither hint nor trace nor sign of their existence ever
reaches us? Nature, the Bible, God himself says nothing about how they
exist or where they are, or why they are so silent--cruelly silent if
it be in their power to speak,--therefore, they cannot; and here we are
left not only with aching hearts but wavering faith, not knowing whither
to turn to escape the stare of the awful blank, that seems in the very
intensity of its silence to shout in our ears that we are but dust and
return to the dust!”
The gate-keeper and curate interchanged a pleased look of surprise at
the draper’s eloquence, but Polwarth instantly took up his answer.
“I grant you it would be strange indeed if there were no good reason for
it,” he said.
“Then do you say,” asked Wingfold, “that until we see, discover, or
devise some good reason for the darkness that overhangs it, we are at
liberty to remain in doubt as to whether there be any life within the
cloud?”
“I would say so,” answered Polwarth, “were it not that we have the story
of Jesus, which, if we accept it, is surely enough to satisfy us both as
to the thing itself, and as to the existence of a good reason, whether
we have found one or not, for the mystery that overshadows it.”
“Still I presume we are not forbidden to seek such a reason,” said the
curate.
The draper was glancing from the one to the other with evident anxiety.
“Certainly not,” returned the gate-keeper. “For what else is our
imagination given us but the discovery of good reasons that are, or the
invention of good reasons that may perhaps be?”
“Can you then imagine any good reason,” said Drew, “why we should be
kept in such absolute ignorance of everything that befalls the parted
spirit from the moment it quits its house with us?”
“I think I know one,” answered Polwarth. “I have sometimes fancied
it might be because no true idea of their condition could possibly be
grasped by those who remain in the tabernacle of the body; that to know
their state it is necessary that we also should be clothed in our new
bodies, which are to the old as a house to a tent. I doubt if we have
any words in which the new facts could be imparted to our knowledge, the
facts themselves being beyond the reach of any senses whereof we are now
in actual possession. I expect to find my new body provided with new, I
mean OTHER senses beyond what I now possess: many more may be required
to bring us into relation with all the facts in himself which God may
have shadowed forth in properties, as we say, of what we call matter.
The spaces all around us, even to those betwixt star and star, may be
the home of the multitudes of the heavenly host, yet seemingly empty
to all who have but our provision of senses. But I do not care to dwell
upon that kind of speculation. It belongs to a lower region, upon which
I grudge to expend interest while the far loftier one invites me, where,
if I gather not the special barley of which I am in search, I am sure to
come upon the finest of wheat.--Well, then, for my reason: There are a
thousand individual events in the course of every man’s life, by which
God takes a hold of him--a thousand breaches by which he would and does
enter, little as the man may know it; but there is one universal and
unchanging grasp he keeps upon the race, yet not as the race, for the
grasp is upon every solitary single individual that has a part in it:
that grasp is--death in its mystery. To whom can the man who is about
to die in absolute loneliness and go he cannot tell whither, flee for
refuge from the doubts and fears that assail him, but to the Father of
his being?”
“But,” said Drew, “I cannot see what harm would come of letting us know
a little--as much at least as might serve to assure us that there was
more of SOMETHING on the other side.”
“Just this,” returned Polwarth, “that, their fears allayed, their hopes
encouraged from any lower quarter, men would, as usual, turn away
from the fountain to the cistern of life, from the ever fresh original
creative Love to that drawn off and shut in. That there are thousands
who would forget God if they could but be assured of such a tolerable
state of things beyond the grave as even this wherein we now live, is
plainly to be anticipated from the fact that the doubts of so many in
respect of religion concentrate themselves now-a-days upon the question
whether there is any life beyond the grave; a question which, although
no doubt nearly associated with religion,--as what question worth asking
is not?--does not immediately belong to religion at all. Satisfy such
people, if you can, that they shall live, and what have they gained? A
little comfort perhaps--but a comfort not from the highest source, and
possibly gained too soon for their well-being. Does it bring them any
nearer to God than they were before? Is he filling one cranny more of
their hearts in consequence? Their assurance of immortality has not come
from a knowledge of him, and without him it is worse than worthless.
Little indeed has been gained, and that with the loss of much. The
word applies here which our Lord in his parable puts into the mouth of
Abraham: If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be
persuaded though one rose from the dead. He does not say they would not
believe in a future state though one rose from the dead--although most
likely they would soon persuade themselves that the apparition after all
was only an illusion--[Footnote: See Lynch’s admirable sermon on this
subject.] but that they would not be persuaded to repent, though one
rose from the dead; and without that, what great matter whether they
believed in a future state or not? It would only be the worse for them
if they did. No, Mr. Drew! I repeat, it is not a belief in immortality
that will deliver a man from the woes of humanity, but faith in the God
of life, the father of lights, the God of all consolation and comfort.
Believing in him, a man can leave his friends, and their and his
own immortality, with everything else--even his and their love and
perfection, with utter confidence in his hands. Until we have the life
in us, we shall never be at peace. The living God dwelling in the heart
he has made, and glorifying it by inmost speech with himself--that is
life, assurance, and safety. Nothing less is or can be such.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
WHAT HELEN HEARD MORE
“A word you dropped the other day,” said the curate, “set me thinking of
the note-worthy fact that belief in God and belief in immortality cease
together. But I do not see the logic of it. If we are here without God,
why may we not go on there without God? I marvel that I have heard of no
one taking up and advocating the view. What a grand discovery it would
be for some people--that not only was there no God to interfere with
them, and insist on their becoming something worth being, but that
they were immortal notwithstanding! that death was only the passage of
another birth into a condition of enlarged capacity for such bliss as
they enjoyed here, but more exalted in degree, perhaps in kind, and
altogether preferable.”
“I know one to whom the thought would not have been a new one,” said
Polwarth. “Have you not come upon a passage in my brother’s manuscript
involving the very idea?”
“Not yet. I read very slowly and pick up all the crumbs. I wish we had
had the book here. I should have so much liked to hear you read from it
again.”
The gate-keeper rose and went to his cabinet.
“The wish is easily gratified,” he said. “I made a copy of it,--partly
for security, partly that I might thoroughly enter into my brother’s
thoughts.”
“I wonder almost you lend the original then,” said Wingfold.
“I certainly could not lend the copy to any man I could not trust with
the original,” answered Polwarth. “But I never lent either before.”--He
was turning over the leaves as he spoke.--“The passage,” he went on,
“besides for its own worth, is precious to me as showing how, through
all his madness, his thoughts haunted the gates of wisdom.--Ah! here it
is!
“‘About this time I had another strange vision, whether in the body or
out of the body, I cannot tell. I thought, as oftener than once before,
that at length I was dying. And it seemed to me that I did die, and
awake to the consciousness of a blessed freedom from the coarser and
more ponderous outer dress I had hitherto worn, being now clad only
in what had been up to this time an inner garment, and was a far
more closely fitting one. The first delight of which I was aware was
coolness--a coolness that hurt me not--the coolness as of a dewy summer
eve, in which a soft friendly wind is blowing; and the coolness was that
of perfect well-being, of the health that cometh after fever, when
a sound sleep hath divided it away and built a rampart between; the
coolness of undoubted truth, and of love that has surmounted passion and
is tenfold love.’
“He goes on to give further and fuller account of his
sensations,--ventures even on the anticipated futility of an attempt to
convey a notion of one of his new senses. I leave all that for your own
reading, Mr. Wingfold.
“‘But where was I? That I could not tell. I am here was all I could say;
but then what more could I ever have said?--Gradually my sight came
to me, or the light of the country arose, I could not tell which, and
behold, I was in the midst of a paradise, gorgeous yet gracious, to
describe which I find no words in the halting tongues of earth, and I
know something of them all, most of them well. If I say a purple sea was
breaking in light on an emerald shore, the moment the words are written,
I see them coarse and crude as a boy’s first attempt at landscape; yet
are there no better wherewith to tell what first filled my eyes with
heavenly delight.
“‘The inhabitants were many, but nowhere were they crowded. There
was room in abundance, and wild places seemed to be held sacred for
solitude.’
“I am only picking up a sentence here and there, as I hasten to the
particular point,” said Polwarth, looking down the page.
“‘But the flowers! and the birds! and above all the beauty of the
people! And they dwelt in harmony. Yet on their foreheads lay as it
seemed a faint mist, or as it were the first of a cloud of coming
disquiet.
“‘And I prayed him, Tell me, sir, whither shall I go to find God and
say unto him, Lo, here I am! And he answered and said to me, Sir, I but
dimly know what thou meanest. Say further. And I stood for an hour, even
as one astonied. Then said I, All my long life on the world whence I
came, I did look to find God when death should take me. But lo, now--And
with that my heart smote me, for in my former life I had oftentimes
fallen into unbelief and denied God: was this now my punishment--that I
should never find him? And my heart grew cold in my body, and the blood
curdled therein. Then the man answered and said, It is true that in
generations past, for so I read in our ancient books, men did believe in
one above them and in them, who had wrought them to that they were, and
was working them to better still; but whether it be that we have now
gained that better, and there is nothing higher unto which we may look,
therefore no need of the high one, I know not, but truly we have long
ceased so to believe, and have learned that, as things are, so they have
been, and so they shall be. Then fell as it were a cold stone into the
core of my heart, and I questioned him no farther, for I bore death in
my heart, even as a woman carrieth her unborn child. No God! I cried,
and sped away into a solitude and shrieked aloud, No God! Nay, but ere I
believe it, I will search through all creation, and cry aloud as I go.
I will search until I find him, and if I find him not,--. With that
my soul would have fainted in me, had I not spread forth my wings and
rushed aloft to find him.
“‘For the more lovely anything I saw, the more gracious in colour or
form, or the more marvellous in the law of its working, ever a fresh
pang shot to my heart: if that which I had heard should prove true, then
was there no Love such as seemed to me to dwell therein, the soul of
its beauty, and all the excellence thereof was but a delusion of my
own heart, greedy after a phantom perfection. No God! no Love! no
loveliness, save a ghastly semblance thereof! and the more ghastly that
it was so like loveliness, and yet was not to be loved upon peril of
prostitution of spirit. Then in truth was heaven a fable, and hell an
all-embracing fact! for my very being knew in itself that if it would
dwell in peace, the very atmosphere in which it lived and moved and
breathed must be love, living love, a one divine presence, truth to
itself, and love to me, and to all them that needed love, down to the
poorest that can but need it, and knoweth it not when it cometh. I knew
that if love was not all in all, in fact as well as in imagination, my
life was but a dreary hollow made in the shape of a life, and therefore
for ever hungry and never to be satisfied. And again I spread wings--no
longer as it seemed of hope, but wings of despair, yet mighty, and flew.
And I learned thereafter that despair is but the hidden side of hope.’
“Here follow pages of his wanderings in quest of God. He tells how and
where he inquired and sought, searching into the near and minute as
earnestly as into the far and vast, watching at the very pores of being,
and sitting in the gates of the mighty halls of assembly--but all in
vain. No God was to be found.
“‘And it seemed to me,’ he says at last, ‘that, as I had been the
wanderer of earth, so was I now doomed to be the wanderer of heaven. On
earth I wandered to find death, and men called me the everlasting Jew;
in heaven I wandered to find God, and what name would they give me now?
“‘At last my heart sank within me wholly, and I folded my wings, and
through years I also sank and sank, and alighted at length upon the
place appointed for my habitation--that namely wherein I found myself
first after death. And alighting there, I fell down weary and slept.
“‘And when I awoke I turned upon my side in the despair of a life that
was neither in my own power nor in that of one who was the Father of
me, which life therefore was an evil thing and a tyrant unto me. And
lo! there by my side I beheld a lily of the field such as grew on the
wayside in the old times betwixt Jerusalem and Bethany. Never since my
death had I seen such, and my heart awoke within me, and I wept bitter
tears that nothing should be true, nothing be that which it had seemed
in the times of old. And as I wept I heard a sound as of the falling of
many tears, and I looked, and lo a shower as from a watering-pot falling
upon the lily! And I looked yet again, and I saw the watering-pot, and
the hand that held it; and he whose hand held the pot stood by me and
looked at me as he watered the lily. He was a man like the men of the
world where such lilies grow, and was poorly dressed, and seemed like
a gardener. And I looked up in his face, and lo--the eyes of the Lord
Jesus! and my heart swelled until it filled my whole body and my head,
and I gave a great cry, and for joy that turned into agony I could not
rise, neither could I speak, but I crept on my hands and my knees to his
feet, and there I fell down upon my face, and with my hands I lifted
one of his feet and did place it upon my head, and then I found voice to
cry, O master! and therewith the life departed from me. And when I came
to myself the master sat under the tree, and I lay by his side, and he
had lifted my head upon his knees. And behold, the world was jubilant
around me, for Love was Love and Lord of all. The sea roared, and the
fulness thereof was love; and the purple and the gold and the blue and
the green came straight from the hidden red heart of the Lord Jesus. And
I closed my eyes for very bliss; nor had I yet bethought me of the time
when first those eyes looked upon me, for I seemed to have known them
since first I began to be. But now when for very bliss I closed my eyes,
my sin came back to me, and I remembered. And I rose up, and kneeled
down before him, and said, O Lord, I am Ahasuerus the Jew, the man who
would not let thee rest thy cross upon the stone before my workshop, but
drave thee from it.--Say no more of that, answered my Lord, for truly
I have myself rested in thy heart, cross and all, until the thing thou
didest in thy ignorance is better than forgotten, for it is remembered
in love. Only see thou also make right excuse for my brethren who, like
thee then, know not now what they do. Come and I will bring thee to the
woman who died for thee in the burning fire. And I said, O Lord, leave
me not, for although I would now in my turn right gladly die for her,
yet would I not look upon that woman again if the love of her would make
me love thee one hair the less--thou knowest. And the Lord smiled upon
me and said, Fear not, Ahasuerus; my love infolds and is the nest of all
love. I fear not; fear thou not either. And I arose and followed him.
And every tree and flower, yea every stone and cloud, with the whole
earth and sea and air, were full of God, even the living God--so that
now I could have died of pure content. And I followed my Lord.’”
The gate-keeper was silent, and so were they all. At length Rachel rose
softly, wiping the tears from her eyes, and left the room. But she
found no one in the closet. Helen was already hastening across the park,
weeping as she went.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE CURATE’S RESOLVE.
The next day was Sunday.
Twelve months had not yet elapsed since the small events with which
my narrative opened. The change which had passed, not merely upon the
opinions, but in the heart and mind and very being of the curate, had
not then begun to appear even to himself, although its roots were not
only deep in him but deep beyond him, even in the source of him; and now
he was in a state of mind, a state of being, rather, of whose nature at
that time he had not, and could not have had, the faintest fore-feeling,
the most shadowy conception. It had been a season of great trouble,
but the gain had been infinitely greater; for now were the bonds of the
finite broken, he had burst the shell of the mortal, and was of those
over whom the second death hath no power. The agony of the second birth
was past, and he was a child again--only a child, he knew, but a child
of the kingdom; and the world, and all that God cared about in it, was
his, as no miser’s gold could ever belong to its hoarder, while the
created universe, yea and the uncreated also whence it sprang, lay open
to him in the boundless free-giving of the original Thought. “All things
are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s:” he understood the
words even as he who said them understood them, and as the wise of this
world never will understand them until first they become fools that they
may be wise.
At the same time a great sorrow threatened him from the no less
mysterious region of his relations to humanity; but if that region and
its most inexplicable cares were beyond the rule of the Life that dwelt
in him, then was that Life no true God, and the whole thing was false;
for he loved Helen with a love that was no invention or creation of
his own, and if not his, then whose? Certainly not of one who, when it
threatened to overwhelm him, was unable to uphold him under it! This
thing also belonged to the God of his being. A poor God must he be for
men or women who did not care about the awful things involved in the
relation between them! Therefore even in his worst anxieties about
Helen,--I do not mean in his worst seasons of despair at the thought of
never gaining her love--he had never yet indeed consciously regarded the
winning of her as a possibility--but at those times when he most plainly
saw her the submissive disciple of George Bascombe, and the two seemed
to his fancy to be straying away together “into a wide field, full of
dark mountains;” when he saw her, so capable of the noblest, submitting
her mind to the entrance of the poorest, meanest, shabbiest theories of
life, and taking for her guide one who could lead her to no conscious
well-being, or make provision for sustainment when the time of suffering
and anxiety should come, or the time of health and strength be over when
yet she must live on; when he saw her adopting a system of things whose
influence would shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush
her imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above
Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and
condition of an Aztec--even then was he able to reason with himself:
“She belongs to God, not to me; and God loves her better than ever I
could love her. If she should set out with her blind guide, it will be
but a first day’s journey she will go--through marshy places and dry
sands, across the far breadth of which, lo! the blue mountains that
shelter the high vales of sweetness and peace.” And with this he
not only tried to comfort himself, but succeeded--I do not say to
contentment, but to quiet. Contentment, which, whatever its immediate
shape, to be contentment at all, must be the will of God, lay beyond.
Alas that men cannot believe there is such a thing as “that good and
acceptable and perfect will of God!” To those that do believe it, it is
the rejoicing of a conscious deliverance.
And now this Sunday, Wingfold entered the pulpit prepared at last
to utter his resolve. Happily nothing had been done to introduce the
confusing element of another will. The bishop had heard nothing of the
matter, and if anything had reached the rector, he had not spoken. Not
one of the congregation, not even Mrs. Ramshorn, had hinted to him that
he ought to resign. It had been left altogether with himself. And now
he would tell them the decision to which the thought he had taken had
conducted him. I will give a portion of his sermon--enough to show us
how he showed the congregation the state of his mind in reference to the
grand question, and the position he took in relation to his hearers.
“It is time, my hearers,” he said, “because it is now possible, to
bring to a close that uncertainty with regard to the continuance of our
relation to each other, which I was, in the spring-time of the year,
compelled by mental circumstance to occasion. I then forced myself, for
very dread of the honesty of an all-knowing God, to break through every
convention of the church and the pulpit, and speak to you of my most
private affairs. I told you that I was sure of not one of those things
concerning which it is taken for granted that a clergyman must be
satisfied; but that I would not at once yield my office, lest in that
act I should seem to declare unbelief of many a thing which even then
I desired to find true. In leaving me undisturbed either by complaint,
expostulation, or proffered instruction, you, my hearers, have granted
me the leisure of which I stood in need. Meantime I have endeavoured
to show you the best I saw, while yet I dared not say I was sure of
anything. I have thus kept you, those at least who cared to follow my
path, acquainted with my mental history. And now I come to tell you the
practical result at which I have arrived.
“But when I say that I will not forsake my curacy, still less my right
and duty to teach whatever I seem to know, I must not therein convey
the impression that I have attained that conviction and assurance the
discovery of the absence of which was the cause of the whole uncertain
proceeding. All I now say is, that in the story of Jesus I have beheld
such grandeur--to me apparently altogether beyond the reach of human
invention, such a radiation of divine loveliness and truth, such hope
for man, soaring miles above every possible pitfall of Fate; and have
at the same time, from the endeavour to obey the word recorded as his,
experienced such a conscious enlargement of mental faculty, such a
deepening of moral strength, such an enhancement of ideal, such an
increase of faith, hope, and charity towards all men, that I now declare
with the consent of my whole man--I cast in my lot with the servants of
the Crucified; I am content even to share their delusion, if delusion
it be, for it is the truth of the God of men to me; I will stand or
fall with the story of my Lord; I will take my chance--I speak not in
irreverence but in honesty--my chance of failure or success in regard to
whatever may follow in this life or the life to come, if there be a
life to come--on the words and will of the Lord Jesus Christ, whom if,
impressed as I am with the truth of his nature, the absolute devotion of
his life, and the essential might of his being, I yet obey not, I shall
not only deserve to perish, but in that very refusal draw ruin upon my
head. Before God I say it--I would rather be crucified with that man, so
it might be as a disciple and not as a thief that creeps, intrudes, or
climbs into the fold, than I would reign with him over such a kingdom
of grandeur as would have satisfied the imagination and love-ambition of
his mother. On such grounds as these I hope I am justified in declaring
myself a disciple of the Son of Man, and in devoting my life and the
renewed energy and enlarged, yea infinite hope which he has given me, to
his brothers and sisters of my race, that if possible I may gain some to
be partakers of the blessedness of my hope. Henceforth I am, not IN HOLY
ORDERS, I reject the phrase, but UNDER holy orders, even the orders of
Christ Jesus, which is the law of liberty, the law whose obedience alone
can set a man free from in-burrowing slavery.
“And if any man yet say that, because of my lack of absolute assurance,
I have no right to the sacred post,--Let him, I answer, who has been
assailed by such doubts as mine, and from the citadel of his faith sees
no more one lingering shadow of a foe--let him cast at me the first
stone! Vain challenge! for such a one will never cast a stone at man or
woman. But let not him whose belief is but the absence of doubt, who
has never loved enough that which he thinks he believes to have felt a
single fear lest it should not be true--let not that man, I say, cast at
me pebble from the brook, or cloven rock from the mount of the law, for
either will fall hurtless at my feet. Friends, I have for the last time
spoken of myself in this place. Ye have borne with me in my trials,
and I thank you. Those who have not only borne but suffered, and do now
rejoice with me, I thank tenfold. I have done--
“Save for one word to the Christians of this congregation:
“The waves of infidelity are coming in with a strong wind and a flowing
tide. Who is to blame? God it cannot be, and for unbelievers, they are
as they were. It is the Christians who are to blame. I do not mean
those who are called Christians, but those who call and count themselves
Christians. I tell you, and I speak to each one of whom it is true, that
you hold and present such a withered, starved, miserable, death’s-head
idea of Christianity; that you are yourselves such poverty-stricken
believers, if believers you are at all; that the notion you present
to the world as your ideal, is so commonplace, so false to the grand,
gracious, mighty-hearted Jesus--that YOU are the cause why the truth
hangs its head in patience, and rides not forth on the white horse,
conquering and to conquer. You dull its lustre in the eyes of men; you
deform its fair proportions; you represent not that which it is, but
that which it is not, yet call yourselves by its name; you are not the
salt of the earth, but a salt that has lost its savour, for ye seek
all things else first, and to that seeking the kingdom of God and his
righteousness shall never be added. Until you repent and believe afresh,
believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by himself, and
not the muffled form of something vaguely human and certainly not all
divine, which the false interpretations of men have substituted for
him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the main reason why faith is so
scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes in like a flood. For the sake
of the progress of the truth, and that into nobler minds than yours, it
were better you joined the ranks of the enemy, and declared what I fear
with many of you is the fact, that you believe not at all. But whether
in some sense you believe or not, the fact remains, that, while you
are not of those Christians who obey the word of the master, DOING the
things he says to them, you are of those Christians, if you WILL be
called by the name, to whom he will say, I never knew you: go forth into
the outer darkness. Then at least will the church be rid of you, and the
honest doubter will have room to breathe the divine air of the presence
of Jesus.
“But oh what unspeakable bliss of heart and soul and mind and sense
remains for him who like St. Paul is crucified with Christ, who lives no
more from his own self, but is inspired and informed and possessed with
the same faith towards the Father in which Jesus lived and wrought the
will of the Father! If the words attributed to Jesus are indeed the
words of him whom Jesus declared himself, then truly is the fate of
mankind a glorious one,--and that, first and last, because men have
a God supremely grand, all-perfect in God-head; for that is, and that
alone can be, the absolute bliss of the created.”
CHAPTER XXX.
HELEN AWAKE.
That Sunday-dinner was a very quiet meal. An old friend of Mrs.
Ramshorn, a lady-ecclesiastic like herself, dined with them; what the
two may have said to each other in secret conclave, I cannot tell, but
not a word of remark upon Mr. Wingfold or his sermon was heard at table.
As she was leaving the room, Bascombe whispered Helen to put on
something and come to him in the garden. Helen glanced at the window
as if doubtful. It was cold, but the sun was shining; the weather had
nothing to do with it; she had but taken a moment to think. She pressed
her lips together--and consented. George saw she would rather not go,
but he set it down to a sisterly unwillingness to enjoy herself when her
brother could no longer behold the sun, and such mere sentiment must not
be encouraged.
When the cypresses and box-trees had come betwixt them and the house, he
offered his arm, but Helen preferred being free. She did not refuse
to go into the summer-house with him; but she took her place on the
opposite side of the little table. George however spied no hint of
approaching doom.
“I am sorry to have to alter my opinion of that curate,” he said as he
seated himself. “There was so much in him that I took to promise well.
But old habit, the necessities of existence, and the fear of society
have been too much for him--as they will always be for most men. He has
succumbed at last, and I am sorry! I did think he was going to turn out
an honest man!”
“And you have come to the certain conclusion that he is not an honest
man, George?”
“Assuredly.”
“Why?”
“Because he goes on to teach what he confesses he is not sure about.”
“He professes to be sure that it is better than anything he is sure
about.--You teach me there is no God: are you absolutely certain there
is not?”
“Yes; absolutely certain.”
“On what grounds?”
“On grounds I have set forth to you twenty times, Helen, dear,” answered
George a little impatiently. “I am not inclined to talk about them
now.--I can no more believe in a god than in a dragon.”
“And yet a dragon was believable to the poets that made our old ballads;
and now geology reveals that some-such creatures did at one time
actually exist.”
“Ah! you turn the tables on me there, Helen! I confess my parallel a
false one.”
“A truer one than you think, perhaps,” said Helen. “That a thing should
seem absurd to one man, or to a thousand men, will not make it absurd
in its own nature; and men as good and as clever as you, George, have
in all ages believed in a God. Only their notion of God may have been
different from yours. Perhaps their notion was a believable one, while
yours is not.”
“By Jove, Helen! you’ve got on with your logic. I feel quite flattered!
So far as I am aware you have had no tutor in that branch but myself!
You’ll soon be too much for your master, by Jove!”
Like the pied piper, Helen smiled a little smile. But she said
seriously,
“Well, George, all I have to suggest is--What if, after all your
inability to believe it, things should at last prove, even to
your--satisfaction, shall I say?--that there IS a God?”
“Don’t trouble yourself a bit about it, Helen,” returned George, whose
mind was full of something else, to introduce which he was anxiously,
and heedlessly, clearing the way: “I am prepared to take my chance, and
all I care about is whether you will take your chance with me. Helen, I
love you with my whole soul.”
“Oh! you have a soul, then, George? I thought you hadn’t!”
“It IS a foolish form of speech, no doubt,” returned Bascombe, a little
disconcerted, as was natural. “--But to be serious, Helen, I do love
you.”
“How long will you love me if I tell you I don’t love you?”
“Really, Helen, I don’t see how to answer such a question. I don’t
understand you at all to-day! Have I offended you? I am very sorry if I
have, but I am quite in the dark as to when or where or how.”
“Tell me then,” said Helen, heedless of his evident annoyance and
discomfort, “how long will you love me if I love you in return?”
“For ever and ever.”
“Another form of speech?”
“You know what I mean well enough. I shall love you as long as I live.”
“George, I never could love a man who believed I was going to die for
ever.”
“But, Helen,” pleaded Bascombe, “if it can’t be helped, you know!”
“But you are content it should be so. You believe it willingly. You
scoff at any hint of a possible immortality.”
“Well, but, Helen, what difference can it make between you and me?”
returned George, whom the danger of losing her had rendered for the
moment indifferent even to his most cherished theory. “If there should
be anything afterwards, of course I should go on loving you to the very
extreme of the possible.”
“While now you don’t love me enough to wish I may live and not die!
Leaving that out of view however, it makes all the difference to the
love I should have to expect of you. It may be only a whim--I can prove
nothing any more than you--but I have a--whim then--to be loved as an
immortal woman, the child of a living God, and not as a helpless bastard
of Nature!--I beg your pardon--I forget my manners.”
That a lady should utter such a word!--and that lady, Helen!--George was
shocked. Coming on the rest, it absolutely bewildered him. He sat
silent perforce. Helen saw it, and yielded to a moment’s annoyance with
herself, but presently resumed:
“I have given you the advantage, George, and wronged myself. But I don’t
care MUCH. I shall only take the better courage to speak my mind.--You
come asking me to love you, and my brother lying mouldering in the
earth--all there is of him, you tell me! If you believed he was alive
still, and I should find him again some day, there would be no reason
why you should not speak of love even now; for where does anyone need
love more than at the brink of the grave? But to come talking of love
to me, with the same voice that has but just been teaching me that the
grave is the end of all, and my brother gone down into it for ever--I
tell you, cousin--I must say it--it seems to me hardly decent. For me at
least--I will NOT be loved with the love that can calmly accept such a
fate. And I will never love any man, believing that, if I outlive him,
my love must thereafter be but a homeless torrent, falling ever into
a bottomless abyss. Why should I make of my heart a roaring furnace of
regrets and self-accusations? The memory of my brother is for me enough.
Let me keep what freedom is possible to me; let me rather live the life
of a cold-blooded animal, and die in the ice that gathers about me. But
before I sit down to await such an end, I shall know whether I am indeed
compelled to believe as you do that there is no God, that Death is my
lord and master, that he will take me as he has taken my brother and
yet I shall never see him more. No, cousin George, I need a God; and if
there be none how did I come to need one? Yes, I know you think you can
explain it all, but the way you account for it is just as miserable as
what you would put in its place. I am not complete in myself like you. I
am not able to live without a God. I will seek him until I find him, or
drop into the abyss where all question and answer ceases. Then in the
end I shall be no worse than you would have me at the beginning--no, it
will be nothing so bad, for then I shall not know my misery as you would
have me know it now. If we are creatures of nothing, in spite of all the
outcry of our souls against that fate, what mighty matter is it if, thus
utterly befooled of Nature, we should also a little fool ourselves, by
believing in a lovely hope that looks like a promise, and seems as if
it ought to be true? How can a devotion to the facts of her existence
be required of one whose nature has been proved to her a lie?--You speak
from the facts of your nature, George; I speak from the facts of mine.”
Helen had come awake at last! It would have suited George better had she
remained a half-quickened statue, responsive only to himself, her not
over-potent Pygmalion. He sat speechless--with his eyes fixed on her.
“You need no God,” she went on, “therefore you seek none. If you need
none, you are right to seek none, I dare say. But I need a God--oh,
I cannot tell how I need him, if he be to be found! and by the same
reasoning I will give my life to the search for him. To the last I will
go on seeking him, for if once I give in, and confess there is no God, I
shall go mad--mad, and perhaps kill somebody like poor Poldie. George,
I have said my say. I would not have come into the garden but to say it.
Good-bye.”
As she spoke she rose and held out her hand to him. But in the tumult
of more emotions than I can well name--amongst the rest indignation,
dismay, disappointment, pride, and chagrin, he lost himself while
searching in vain for words, paid no heed to her movement, and lifted no
hand to take that she offered.
With head erect she walked from the summer-house.
“The love of a lifetime!--a sweet invitation!” she said to herself, as
with the slow step of restrained wrath she went up the garden.
George sat for some minutes as she had left him. Then he broke the
silence in his own ears and said,
“Well, I’m damned!”
And so he was--for the time--and a very good thing too, for he required
it.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THOU DIDST NOT LEAVE.
The next day the curate found himself so ill at ease, from the reaction
after excitement of various kinds, that he determined to give himself a
holiday. His notion of a holiday was a very simple one: a day in a deep
wood, if such could be had, with a volume fit for alternate reading
and pocketing as he might feel inclined. Of late no volume had been his
companion in any wanderings but his New Testament.
There was a remnant of real old-fashioned forest on the Lythe, some
distance up: thither he went by the road, the shortest way, to return by
the winding course of the stream. It was a beautiful day of St. Martin’s
summer. In the forest, if the leaves were gone, there was the more
light, and sun and shadow played many a lovely game. But he saw them as
though he saw them not, for fear and hope struggled in his heart, and
for a long time prayer itself could not atone them. At length a calm
fell, and he set out to return home, down the bank of the river.
Many-hued and many-shaped had been the thoughts, not that came to him
from the forest, but that he had carried thither with him: through all
and each of them, ever and again had come dawning the face of Helen, as
he had seen it in church the day before, where she sat between her
aunt and her cousin, so unlike either. For, to their annoyance, she had
insisted on going to church, and to hers, they had refused to let her go
alone. And in her face the curate had seen something he had never seen
there until then,--a wistful look, as if now she would be glad to pick
up any suitable crumb to carry home with her. In that dawn of coming
childhood, though he dared not yet altogether believe it such, the
hard contemptuous expression of Bascombe’s countenance, and the severe
disapproval in Mrs. Ramshorn’s, were entirely lost upon him.
All the way down the river, the sweet change haunted him. When he got
into the park, and reached that hollow betwixt the steep ferny slopes
where he sat on the day with which my narrative opens, he seated himself
again on the same stone, and reviewed the past twelve months. This was
much such a day as that, only the hour was different: it was the setting
sun that now shone upon the ferns, and cast shadows from them big enough
for oaks. What a change had passed upon him! That day the New Testament
had been the book of the church--this day it was a fountain of living
waters to the man Thomas Wingfold. He had not opened his Horace for
six months. Great trouble he had had; both that and its results were
precious. Now a new trouble had come, but that also was a form of life:
he would rather love and suffer and love still, a thousand times rather,
than return to the poverty of not knowing Helen Lingard; yet a thousand
times rather would he forget Helen Lingard than lose from his heart one
word of the Master, whose love was the root and only pledge and security
of love, the only power that could glorify it--could cleanse it from the
mingled selfishness that wrought for its final decay and death.
The sun was down ere he left the park, and the twilight was rapidly
following the sun as he drew near to the Abbey on his way home.
Suddenly, more like an odour than a sound, he heard the organ, he
thought. Never yet had he heard it on a week-day: the organist was not
of those who haunt their instrument. Often of late had the curate gazed
on that organ as upon a rock filled with sweet waters, before which he
stood a Moses without his rod; sometimes the solemn instrument appeared
to him a dumb Jeremiah that sat there from Sunday to Sunday, all the
week long, with his head bowed upon his hands, and not a Jebusite
to listen to him: if only his fingers had been taught the craft, he
thought, how his soul would pour itself out through the song-tubes
of that tabernacle of sweetness and prayer, and on the blast of its
utterance ascend to the throne of the most high! Who could it be that
was now peopling the silence of the vast church with melodious sounds,
worshipping creatures of the elements? If the winds and the flames of
fire are his angels, how much more the grandly consorting tones of the
heavenly organ! He would go and see what power informed the vaporous
music.
He entered the church by one of the towers, in which a stair led
skyward, passing the neighbourhood of the organ, and having a door to
its loft. As he ascended, came a pause in the music;--and then, like the
breaking up of a summer cloud in the heavenliest of rain-showers, began
the prelude to the solo in the Messiah, THOU DIDST NOT LEAVE HIS SOUL
IN HELL. Up still the curate crept softly. All at once a rich full
contralto voice--surely he had heard it before--came floating out on the
torrent, every tone bearing a word of sorrowful triumph in its bosom.
He reached the door. Very gently he opened it, and peeped in. But the
back of the organ was towards him, and he could see nothing. He stepped
upon the tiles of the little apse. One stride cleared the end of the
organ, and he saw the face of the singer: it WAS Helen Lingard!
She started. The music folded its wings and dropped--like a lark
into its nest. But Helen recovered herself at once, rose from her
ministration at the music-altar, and approached the curate.
“Have I taken too great a liberty?” she said, in a gentle, steady voice.
“No, surely,” he answered. “I am sorry I startled you. I wish you would
wake such sounds oftener.”
“He didn’t leave my brother’s soul in hell, did he, Mr. Wingfold?” she
said abruptly, and her eyes shone through the dusk.
“If ever a soul was taken out of hell, it was Leopold’s,” returned the
curate. “And it lifts mine out of it too,” he added, “to hear you say
so.”
“I behaved very badly to you. I confess my fault. Will you forgive me?”
she said.
“I love you too much to be able to forgive you:” that was the word in
the curate’s heart, but a different found its way to his lips.
“My heart is open to you, Miss Lingard,” he said: “take what forgiveness
you think you need. For what I can tell, it may be my part to ask
forgiveness, not to grant it. If I have been harder to you than there
was need, I pray you to forgive me. Perhaps I did not enter enough into
your difficulties.”
“You never said one word more than was right, or harder than I deserved.
Alas! I can no more--in this world at least--ask Leopold to forgive me,
but I can ask you and Mr. Polwarth, who were as the angels of God to
him, to pardon me for him and for yourselves too. I was obstinate and
proud and selfish.--Oh, Mr. Wingfold, can you, do you really
believe that Leopold is somewhere? Is he alive this moment? Shall I
ever--ever--I don’t mind if it’s a thousand years first--but shall I
EVER see him again?”
“I do think so. I think the story must be true that tells us Jesus took
to himself again the body he left on the cross, and brought it with him
out of its grave.”
“Will you take me for a pupil--a disciple--and teach me to believe--or
hope, if you like that word better--as you do?” said Helen humbly.
How the heart of the curate beat--like the drum of a praising orchestra!
“Dear Miss Lingard,” he answered, very solemnly, “I can teach you
nothing; I can but show you where I found what has changed my life from
a bleak November to a sunny June--with its thunder-storms no doubt--but
still June beside November. Perhaps I could help you a little if you
were really set out to find Jesus, but you must yourself set out. It is
you who must find him. Words of mine, as the voice of one crying in the
wilderness, may let you know that one is near who thinks he sees him,
but it is you who must search, and you who must find. If you do
search, you will find, with or without help of mine.--But it is getting
dark.--You have the key of the north door, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“Then will you lock the door, and take the key to Mrs. Jenkins. I will
stay here a while, and then follow you home, if you will allow we, where
we can have a little talk together. Ah, what an anthem the silent organ
will play for me!”
Helen turned and went down into the church, and thence home.
The curate remained with the organ. It was silent, and so were his
lips, but his heart--the music was not latent there, for his praise and
thanksgiving ascended, without voice or instrument, essential harmony,
to the ear that hears thought, and the heart that vibrates to every
chord of feeling in the hearts it has created. Ah! what is it we send up
thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and
a grace? Alone in the dusky church, the curate’s ascended like a song of
the angels, for his heart was all a thanksgiving--not for any perfected
gift, but for many a lovely hope. He knelt down by the organ and
worshipped the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ--that God and no
other was the God of his expectation. When he rose from his knees, the
church was dark, but through the windows of the clerestory many stars
were shining.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg’s Thomas Wingfold, Curate, by George MacDonald