THUNDER.
We saw or heard nothing for a week or more of Mr. Carmel. It was
possible that he would never return. I was in low spirits. Laura Grey
had been shut up by a cold, and on the day of which I am now speaking
she had not yet been out. I therefore took my walk alone towards
Penruthyn Priory, and, as dejected people not unfrequently do, I was
well enough disposed to indulge and even to nurse my melancholy.
A thunder-storm had been for hours moving upwards from the south-east,
among the grand ranges of distant mountains that lie, tier beyond tier,
at the other side of the estuary, and now it rested on a wide and lurid
canopy of cloud upon the summits of the hills and headlands that
overlook the water.
It was evening, later than my usual return to tea. I knew that Laura
Grey minded half-an-hour here or there as little as I did, and a
thunder-storm seen and heard from the neighbourhood of Malory is one of
the grandest spectacles in its way on earth. Attracted by the mighty
hills on the other side, these awful elemental battles seldom visit our
comparatively level shore, and we see the lightning no nearer than about
half-way across the water. Vivid against blackening sky and purple
mountain, the lightning flies and shivers. From broad hill-side, through
rocky gorges, reflected and returned from precipice to precipice,
through the hollow windings of the mountains, the thunder rolls and
rattles, dies away, explodes again, and at length subsides in the
strangest and grandest of all sounds, spreading through all that
mountainous region for minutes after, like the roar and tremble of an
enormous seething cauldron.
Suppose these aerial sounds reverberating from cliff to cliff, from peak
to peak, and crag to crag, from one hill-side to another, like the
cannon in the battles of Milton's angels; suppose the light of the
setting sun, through a chink in the black curtain of cloud behind me,
touching with misty fire the graves and headstones in the pretty
churchyard, where, on the stone bench under the eastern window, I have
taken my seat, near the grave of my darling sister; and suppose an
uneasy tumult, not a breeze, in the air, sometimes still, and sometimes
in moaning gusts, tossing sullenly the boughs of the old trees that
darken the churchyard.
For the first time since her death I had now visited this spot without
tears. My thoughts of death had ceased to be pathetic, and were, at this
moment, simply terrible. "My heart was disquieted within me, and the
fear of death had fallen upon me." I sat with my hands clasped together,
and my eyes fixed on the thunderous horizon before me, and the grave of
my darling under my eyes, and she, in her coffin, but a few feet
beneath. The grave, God's prison, as old Rebecca Torkill used to say,
and then the Judgment! This new sense of horror and despair was, I dare
say, but an unconscious sympathy with the vengeful and melancholy aspect
of nature.
I heard a step near me, and turned. It was Mr. Carmel who approached. He
was looking more than usually pale, I thought, and ill. I was surprised,
and a little confused. I cannot recall our greeting. I said, after that
was over, something, I believe, about the thunder-storm.
"And yet," he answered, "you understand these awful phenomena--their
causes. You remember our little talk about electricity--here it is! We
know all that is but the restoration of an equilibrium. Think what it
will be when God restores the moral balance, and settles the equities of
eternity! There are moods, times, and situations in which we contemplate
justly our tremendous Creator. Fear him who, after he has killed the
body, has power to cast into hell. Yea, I say unto you, fear him. Here
all suffering is transitory. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
cometh in the morning. This life is the season of time and of mercy; but
once in hell, mercy is no more, and eternity opens, and endures, and has
no end."
Here he ceased for a time to speak, and looked across the estuary,
listening, as it seemed, to the roll and tremble of the thunder. After a
little while, he said:
"That you are to die is most certain; nothing more uncertain than the
time and manner; by a slow or a sudden death; in a state of grace or
sin. Therefore, we are warned to be ready at all hours. Better twenty
years too soon than one moment late; for to perish once is to be lost
for ever. Your death depends upon your life; such as your life is, such
will be your death. How can we dare to live in a state that we dare not
die in?"
I sat gazing at this young priest, who, sentence after sentence, was
striking the very key-note of the awful thought that seemed to peal and
glare in the storm. He stood with his head uncovered, his great earnest
eyes sometimes raised, sometimes fixed on me, and the uncertain gusts at
fitful intervals tossed his hair this way and that. The light of the
setting sun touched his thin hand, and his head, and glimmered on the
long grass; the graves lay around us; and the voice of God himself
seemed to speak in the air.
Mr. Carmel drew nearer, and in the same earnest vein talked on. There
was no particle of which is termed the controversial in what he had
said. He had not spoken a word that I could not subscribe. He had
quoted, also, from our version of the Bible; but he presented the
terrors of revelation with a prominence more tremendous than I was
accustomed to, and the tone of his discourse was dismaying.
I will not attempt to recollect and to give you in detail the
conversation that followed. He presented, with a savage homeliness of
illustration, with the same simplicity and increasing force, the same
awful view of Christianity. Beyond the naked strength of the facts, and
the terrible brevity with which he stated them in their different
aspects, I don't know that there was any special eloquence in his
discourse, but in the language of Scripture, his words made "both my
ears tingle."
He did not attempt to combat my Protestant tenets directly; that might
have alarmed me; he had too much tact for that. Anything he said with
that tendency was in the way simply of a discourse of the teaching and
practice of his own Church.
"In the little volume of legends you were so good as to say you would
like to look into," he said, "you will find the prayer of Saint Louis de
Gonzaga; you will also find an anonymous prayer, very pathetic and
beautiful. I have drawn a line in red ink down the margin at its side,
so it is easily found. These will show you the spirit in which the
faithful approach the Blessed Virgin. They may interest you. They will,
I am sure, interest your sympathies for those who have suffered, like
you, and have found peace and hope in these very prayers."
He then spoke very touchingly of my darling sister, and my tears at last
began to flow. It was the strangest half-hour I had ever passed.
Religion during that time had appeared in a gigantic and terrible
aspect. My grief for my sister was now tinged with terror. Do not we
from our Lutheran pulpits too lightly appeal to that potent
emotion--fear?
For awhile this tall thin priest in black, whose pale face and earnest
eyes seemed to gleam on me with an intense and almost painful
enthusiasm, looked like a spirit in the deepening twilight; the thunder
rattled and rolled on among the echoing mountains, the gleam of the
lightning grew colder and wilder as the darkness increased, and the
winds rushed mournfully, and tossed the churchyard grass, and bowed the
heads of the great trees about us; and as I walked home, with my head
full of awful thoughts, and my heart agitated, I felt as if I had been
talking with a messenger from that other world.