Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,
Donnez vos mains magiciennes;
Pour me guider par les chemins
Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,
Vos mains d’Infante dans les miennes.
From _Les Unes et les Autres_.
There is nothing to be gained by dwelling upon sadness; the details of
Paul’s suffering may be left to the imagination. It was characteristic
of him that he sought instinctively, and without cant, for the Reality
that lay behind his pain; and Reality—though seas of grief may first be
plunged through to find it—is always Joy. For love is joy, and joy is
strength, and both are aspects of the great central Reality of the life
of the soul. The child was so woven into the strands of his inmost being
that her going seemed, as it were, to draw out with her these very
strands—drew them out away from himself towards—towards what? He hardly
knew how to name it. The word ‘God’ rarely passed his lips: towards
‘Reality,’ then; towards the deep things he had sought all his life.
Part of himself, however, the child had taken away with her. He passed
more and more away from the things of the world, though these had never
yet held him with any security in their mesh. Nixie had gone ahead, that
was all. Before long, as years measure time at least, he would follow
her. She might even come back, ‘like the trees in the spring,’ to tell
him of the way.
His great longing, unexpressed, had always been to know something of the
Beyond—to see into the heart of things; not by the uninspired methods of
an unsavoury spiritualism, or the artificial forcing-house of an
audacious Magic; but by some inner, as yet undetermined, way in his own
heart. For he had always clung to the secret belief that there must be
some interior way of finding ‘Reality,’ some process, simple, piercing,
profound, that would have authority for himself, if not for all the
world. In the heart of all true mystics some such Faith is ingrained.
They are born with it. It is ineradicable—lived, but rarely spoken.
And the root of this belief it was that Nixie had unknowingly watered
and fed. Her going seemed suddenly to have coaxed it almost into flower.
His need of the great, satisfying Companion that knows no shadow of
turning was incalculably quickened thereby. Love and Nature were the
veils that screened the Beyond so thinly that he could almost see
through them; and to both these mysteries the child had led him better
than she knew.
The energy of his mystical yearnings suddenly increased a hundredfold.
Whether these remain within to poison, or go out to bless, depends, of
course, upon the nature of the heart that feels them. Paul, fortunately
for himself, had found ways of expression; he was always provided now
with the safety of an outlet. And, for the immediate moment, the path
was clear enough, and very simple. He was to comfort the mother that
mourned her; himself that mourned her; the puzzled little brother and
sister, and even the army of more or less disconsolate four-footed
friends that missed her presence vaguely, and haunted the door of her
room with the strange instinct that there must still be caresses for
them within, and that for the moment she was merely hiding.
It was Smoke, the furry black fellow, however, always her favourite and
his own, participant in all their old Aventures, who brought him a
strange comfort by secret ways that no man understands. For Smoke asked
no questions. He knew; and though he missed her in all their games, and
meals, and undertakings of every kind, in house or garden, he showed no
obvious symptoms of grief as a dog might have shown. And sometimes he
was positively uncanny: he behaved almost as though he still saw her.
The others, however,——! With most of them out of sight was out of mind.
The kittens, now growing up, purred and played as of old in the
schoolroom, and the Chow puppies, China and Japan, more like yellow
puddings than ever, tore about the house, tumbling and thudding, as
though they had never known their little two-legged elfin playmate. The
household dropped back into the old routine; Margaret, sadder, less
alive than before, pressed down by her new grief into the semblance of a
vision; and the children, hushed and pale, but gradually yielding to the
stress of bursting life which at that age has no long acquaintance with
grief.
It was winter, and the woods and gardens were so altered that the usual
corners of play and mischief were unrecognisable. ‘Out-ov-doors’ was
dead, the sunshine unreal, the darkness hovering close even on the
clearest day. The haunts that Paul and Nixie knew were too much changed,
mercifully for him, who often sought them none the less, to remind him
keenly. The little silver birch tree that danced in summer before the
skirts of the fir wood was bare and shivering in the winds. Behind it,
however, unchanged and shaggy, still stood the dark sheltering pine,
steady among the blasts.
And Paul, meanwhile, beyond the smaller sphere of his immediate duties
in the grey house under the hill, took up with all the enthusiasm he
could spare from sorrow the work among the lost waifs. As has been seen,
he found the complete organisation ready to hand. And, to his great
satisfaction, he found, as he became familiar with the detail, that it
was work suited to the best that was in him. He was the right man in the
right place.
Moreover, it was Dick’s scheme, and to lose himself in it was to get
into touch again delightfully with the great friendship of his youth.
Nixie, too, who had meant when she grew up to provide a Wood for Lost
Children, seemed ever pushing him forward from behind. Thus his zeal
never lessened, and he lost himself in others to some purpose.
The test of time, of course, proved this. At the moment, however, it can
only be known by the trick of ‘looking at the last chapter’—which is
unlawful, as well as logically impossible. And, before he got so far, he
had first learned another profound truth: that only he who carries in
his heart a great sorrow, borne alone, can know the mystery of interior
Vision, inspiring and truly marvellous, which comes from a blessing so
singularly disguised as pain.