CONSTANCE’S BIRTHDAY.
Was it from observation of nature in its association with human nature,
or from artistic feeling alone, that Shakspere so often represents
Nature’s mood as in harmony with the mood of the principal actors in
his drama? I know I have so often found Nature’s mood in harmony with my
own, even when she had nothing to do with forming mine, that in
looking back I have wondered at the fact. There may, however, be some
self-deception about it. At all events, on the morning of my Constance’s
eighteenth birthday, a lovely October day with a golden east, clouds of
golden foliage about the ways, and an air that seemed filled with the
ether of an _aurum potabile_, there came yet an occasional blast of
wind, which, without being absolutely cold, smelt of winter, and made
one draw one’s shoulders together with the sense of an unfriendly
presence. I do not think Constance felt it at all, however, as she stood
on the steps in her riding-habit, waiting till the horses made their
appearance. It had somehow grown into a custom with us that each of the
children, as his or her birthday came round, should be king or queen
for that day, and, subject to the veto of father and mother, should have
everything his or her own way. Let me say for them, however, that in the
matter of choosing the dinner, which of course was included in the royal
prerogative, I came to see that it was almost invariably the favourite
dishes of others of the family that were chosen, and not those
especially agreeable to the royal palate. Members of families where
children have not been taught from their earliest years that the great
privilege of possession is the right to bestow, may regard this as an
improbable assertion; but others will know that it might well enough
be true, even if I did not say that so it was. But there was always
the choice of some individual treat, which was determined solely by the
preference of the individual in authority. Constance had chosen “a long
ride with papa.”
I suppose a parent may sometimes be right when he speaks with admiration
of his own children. The probability of his being correct is to be
determined by the amount of capacity he has for admiring other people’s
children. However this may be in my own case, I venture to assert that
Constance did look very lovely that morning. She was fresh as the young
day: we were early people--breakfast and prayers were over, and it was
nine o’clock as she stood on the steps and I approached her from the
lawn.
“O, papa! isn’t it jolly?” she said merrily.
“Very jolly indeed, my dear,” I answered, delighted to hear the word
from the lips of my gentle daughter. She very seldom used a slang word,
and when she did, she used it like a lady. Shall I tell you what she was
like? Ah! you could not see her as I saw her that morning if I did. I
will, however, try to give you a general idea, just in order that you
and I should not be picturing to ourselves two very different persons
while I speak of her.
She was rather little, and so slight that she looked tall. I have often
observed that the impression of height is an affair of proportion,
and has nothing to do with feet and inches. She was rather fair in
complexion, with her mother’s blue eyes, and her mother’s long dark wavy
hair. She was generally playful, and took greater liberties with me than
any of the others; only with her liberties, as with her slang, she
knew instinctively when, where, and how much. For on the borders of her
playfulness there seemed ever to hang a fringe of thoughtfulness, as if
she felt that the present moment owed all its sparkle and brilliance
to the eternal sunlight. And the appearance was not in the least a
deceptive one. The eternal was not far from her--none the farther that
she enjoyed life like a bird, that her laugh was merry, that her heart
was careless, and that her voice rang through the house--a sweet soprano
voice--singing snatches of songs (now a street tune she had caught from
a London organ, now an air from Handel or Mozart), or that she would
sometimes tease her elder sister about her solemn and anxious looks; for
Wynnie, the eldest, had to suffer for her grandmother’s sins against her
daughter, and came into the world with a troubled little heart, that was
soon compelled to flee for refuge to the rock that was higher than she.
Ah! my Constance! But God was good to you and to us in you.
“Where shall we go, Connie?” I said, and the same moment the sound of
the horses’ hoofs reached us.
“Would it be too far to go to Addicehead?” she returned.
“It is a long ride,” I answered.
“Too much for the pony?”
“O dear, no--not at all. I was thinking of you, not of the pony.”
“I’m quite as able to ride as the pony is to carry me, papa. And I want
to get something for Wynnie. Do let us go.”
“Very well, my dear,” I said, and raised her to the saddle--if I may say
_raised_, for no bird ever hopped more lightly from one twig to another
than she sprung from the ground on her pony’s back.
In a moment I was beside her, and away we rode.
The shadows were still long, the dew still pearly on the spiders’ webs,
as we trotted out of our own grounds into a lane that led away towards
the high road. Our horses were fresh and the air was exciting; so we
turned from the hard road into the first suitable field, and had a
gallop to begin with. Constance was a good horse-woman, for she had been
used to the saddle longer than she could remember. She was now riding a
tall well-bred pony, with plenty of life--rather too much, I sometimes
thought, when I was out with Wynnie; but I never thought so when I
was with Constance. Another field or two sufficiently quieted both
animals--I did not want to have all our time taken up with their
frolics--and then we began to talk.
“You are getting quite a woman now, Connie, my dear,” I said.
“Quite an old grannie, papa,” she answered.
“Old enough to think about what’s coming next,” I said gravely.
“O, papa! And you are always telling us that we must not think about
the morrow, or even the next hour. But, then, that’s in the pulpit,” she
added, with a sly look up at me from under the drooping feather of her
pretty hat.
“You know very well what I mean, you puss,” I answered. “And I don’t say
one thing in the pulpit and another out of it.”
She was at my horse’s shoulder with a bound, as if Spry, her pony, had
been of one mind and one piece with her. She was afraid she had offended
me. She looked up into mine with as anxious a face as ever I saw upon
Wynnie.
“O, thank you, papa!” she said when I smiled. “I thought I had been
rude. I didn’t mean it, indeed I didn’t. But I do wish you would make
it a little plainer to me. I do think about things sometimes, though you
would hardly believe it.”
“What do you want made plainer, my child?” I asked.
“When we’re to think, and when we’re not to think,” she answered.
I remember all of this conversation because of what came so soon after.
“If the known duty of to-morrow depends on the work of to-day,” I
answered, “if it cannot be done right except you think about it and
lay your plans for it, then that thought is to-day’s business, not
to-morrow’s.”
“Dear papa, some of your explanations are more difficult than the things
themselves. May I be as impertinent as I like on my birthday?” she asked
suddenly, again looking up in my face.
We were walking now, and she had a hold of my horse’s mane, so as to
keep her pony close up.
“Yes, my dear, as impertinent as you like--not an atom more, mind.”
“Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn’t explain things so much. I
seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try
the text afterwards by myself, I can’t make anything of it, and I’ve
forgotten every word you said about it.”
“Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it.”
“I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the
Bible,” she returned.
“If they can,” I rejoined. “But last Sunday, for instance, I did not
expect anybody there to understand a certain bit of my sermon, except
your mamma and Thomas Weir.”
“How funny! What part of it was that?”
“O! I’m not going to tell you. You have no right to understand it. But
most likely you thought you understood it perfectly, and it appeared to
you, in consequence, very commonplace.”
“In consequence of what?”
“In consequence of your thinking you understood it.”
“O, papa dear! you’re getting worse and worse. It’s not often I ask
you anything--and on my birthday too! It is really too bad of you to
bewilder my poor little brains in this way.”
“I will try to make you see what I mean, my pet. No talk about an idea
that you never had in your head at all, can make you have that idea. If
you had never seen a horse, no description even, not to say no amount of
remark, would bring the figure of a horse before your mind. Much more is
this the case with truths that belong to the convictions and feelings of
the heart. Suppose a man had never in his life asked God for anything,
or thanked God for anything, would his opinion as to what David meant
in one of his worshipping psalms be worth much? The whole thing would be
beyond him. If you have never known what it is to have care of any kind
upon you, you cannot understand what our Lord means when he tells us to
take no thought for the morrow.”
“But indeed, papa, I am very full of care sometimes, though not perhaps
about to-morrow precisely. But that does not matter, does it?”
“Certainly not. Tell me what you are full of care about, my child, and
perhaps I can help you.”
“You often say, papa, that half the misery in this world comes from
idleness, and that you do not believe that in a world where God is at
work every day, Sundays not excepted, it could have been intended that
women any more than men should have nothing to do. Now what am I to do?
What have I been sent into the world for? I don’t see it; and I feel
very useless and wrong sometimes.”
“I do not think there is very much to complain of you in that respect,
Connie. You, and your sister as well, help me very much in my parish.
You take much off your mother’s hands too. And you do a good deal for
the poor. You teach your younger brothers and sister, and meantime you
are learning yourselves.”
“Yes, but that’s not work.”
“It is work. And it is the work that is given you to do at present. And
you would do it much better if you were to look at it in that light. Not
that I have anything to complain of.”
“But I don’t want to stop at home and lead an easy, comfortable life,
when there are so many to help everywhere in the world.”
“Is there anything better in doing something where God has not placed
you, than in doing it where he has placed you?”
“No, papa. But my sisters are quite enough for all you have for us to do
at home. Is nobody ever to go away to find the work meant for her? You
won’t think, dear papa, that I want to get away from home, will you?”
“No, my dear. I believe that you are really thinking about duty. And
now comes the moment for considering the passage to which you began by
referring:--What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give
yourself the least trouble about. Everything he gives you to do,
you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible
preparation for what he may want you to do next. If people would but do
what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what
came next. And I do not believe that those who follow this rule are ever
left floundering on the sea-deserted sands of inaction, unable to find
water enough to swim in.”
“Thank you, dear papa. That’s a little sermon all to myself, and I think
I shall understand it even when I think about it afterwards. Now let’s
have a trot.”
“There is one thing more I ought to speak about though, Connie. It is
not your moral nature alone you ought to cultivate. You ought to make
yourself as worth God’s making as you possibly can. Now I am a little
doubtful whether you keep up your studies at all.”
She shrugged her pretty shoulders playfully, looking up in my face
again.
“I don’t like dry things, papa.”
“Nobody does.”
“Nobody!” she exclaimed. “How do the grammars and history-books come to
be written then?”
In talking to me, somehow, the child always put on a more childish tone
than when she talked to anyone else. I am certain there was no affection
in it, though. Indeed, how could she be affected with her fault-finding
old father?
“No. Those books are exceedingly interesting to the people that make
them. Dry things are just things that you do not know enough about to
care for them. And all you learn at school is next to nothing to what
you have to learn.”
“What must I do then?” she asked with a sigh. “Must I go all over my
French Grammar again? O dear! I do hate it so!”
“If you will tell me something you like, Connie, instead of something
you don’t like, I may be able to give you advice. Is there nothing you
are fond of?” I continued, finding that she remained silent.
“I don’t know anything in particular--that is, I don’t know anything in
the way of school-work that I really liked. I don’t mean that I didn’t
try to do what I had to do, for I did. There was just one thing I
liked--the poetry we had to learn once a week. But I suppose gentlemen
count that silly--don’t they?”
“On the contrary, my dear, I would make that liking of yours the
foundation of all your work. Besides, I think poetry the grandest thing
God has given us--though perhaps you and I might not quite agree about
what poetry was poetry enough to be counted an especial gift of God.
Now, what poetry do you like best?”
“Mrs. Hemans’s, I think, papa.”
“Well, very well, to begin with. ‘There is,’ as Mr. Carlyle said to a
friend of mine--‘There is a thin vein of true poetry in Mrs. Hemans.’
But it is time you had done with thin things, however good they may be.
Most people never get beyond spoon-meat--in this world, at least, and
they expect nothing else in the world to come. I must take you in hand
myself, and see what I can do for you. It is wretched to see capable
enough creatures, all for want of a little guidance, bursting with
admiration of what owes its principal charm to novelty of form, gained
at the cost of expression and sense. Not that that applies to Mrs.
Hemans. She is simple enough, only diluted to a degree. But I hold that
whatever mental food you take should be just a little too strong for
you. That implies trouble, necessitates growth, and involves delight.”
“I sha’n’t mind how difficult it is if you help me, papa. But it is
anything but satisfactory to go groping on without knowing what you are
about.”
I ought to have mentioned that Constance had been at school for two
years, and had only been home a month that very day, in order to account
for my knowing so little about her tastes and habits of mind. We went on
talking a little more in the same way, and if I were writing for young
people only, I should be tempted to go on a little farther with the
account of what we said to each other; for it might help some of them to
see that the thing they like best should, circumstances and conscience
permitting, be made the centre from which they start to learn; that they
should go on enlarging their knowledge all round from that one point at
which God intended them to begin. But at length we fell into a silence,
a very happy one on my part; for I was more than delighted to find that
this one too of my children was following after the truth--wanting to
do what was right, namely, to obey the word of the Lord, whether openly
spoken to all, or to herself in the voice of her own conscience and the
light of that understanding which is the candle of the Lord. I had often
said to myself in past years, when I had found myself in the company of
young ladies who announced their opinions--probably of no deeper origin
than the prejudices of their nurses--as if these distinguished them from
all the world besides; who were profound upon passion and ignorant of
grace; who had not a notion whether a dress was beautiful, but only
whether it was of the newest cut--I had often said to myself: “What
shall I do if my daughters come to talk and think like that--if thinking
it can be called?” but being confident that instruction for which the
mind is not prepared only lies in a rotting heap, producing all kinds
of mental evils correspondent to the results of successive loads of
food which the system cannot assimilate, my hope had been to rouse wise
questions in the minds of my children, in place of overwhelming their
digestions with what could be of no instruction or edification without
the foregoing appetite. Now my Constance had begun to ask me questions,
and it made me very happy. We had thus come a long way nearer to each
other; for however near the affection of human animals may bring them,
there are abysses between soul and soul--the souls even of father and
daughter--over which they must pass to meet. And I do not believe that
any two human beings alive know yet what it is to love as love is in the
glorious will of the Father of lights.
I linger on with my talk, for I shrink from what I must relate.
We were going at a gentle trot, silent, along a woodland path--a brown,
soft, shady road, nearly five miles from home, our horses scattering
about the withered leaves that lay thick upon it. A good deal of
underwood and a few large trees had been lately cleared from the place.
There were many piles of fagots about, and a great log lying here and
there along the side of the path. One of these, when a tree, had been
struck by lightning, and had stood till the frosts and rains had bared
it of its bark. Now it lay white as a skeleton by the side of the path,
and was, I think, the cause of what followed. All at once my daughter’s
pony sprang to the other side of the road, shying sideways; unsettled
her so, I presume; then rearing and plunging, threw her from the saddle
across one of the logs of which I have spoken. I was by her side in a
moment. To my horror she lay motionless. Her eyes were closed, and when
I took her up in my arms she did not open them. I laid her on the moss,
and got some water and sprinkled her face. Then she revived a little;
but seemed in much pain, and all at once went off into another faint. I
was in terrible perplexity.
Presently a man who, having been cutting fagots at a little distance,
had seen the pony careering through the wood, came up and asked what
he could do to help me. I told him to take my horse, whose bridle I had
thrown over the latch of a gate, and ride to Oldcastle Hall, and ask
Mrs. Walton to come with the carriage as quickly as possible. “Tell
her,” I said, “that her daughter has had a fall from her pony, and is
rather shaken. Ride as hard as you can go.”
The man was off in a moment; and there I sat watching my poor child, for
what seemed to be a dreadfully long time before the carriage arrived.
She had come to herself quite, but complained of much pain in her back;
and, to my distress, I found that she could not move herself enough to
make the least change of her position. She evidently tried to keep up
as well as she could; but her face expressed great suffering: it was
dreadfully pale, and looked worn with a month’s illness. All my fear was
for her spine.
At length I caught sight of the carriage, coming through the wood as
fast as the road would allow, with the woodman on the box, directing the
coachman. It drew up, and my wife got out. She was as pale as Constance,
but quiet and firm, her features composed almost to determination. I had
never seen her look like that before. She asked no questions: there was
time enough for that afterwards. She had brought plenty of cushions
and pillows, and we did all we could to make an easy couch for the poor
girl; but she moaned dreadfully as we lifted her into the carriage. We
did our best to keep her from being shaken; but those few miles were the
longest journey I ever made in my life.
When we reached home at length, we found that Ethel, or, as we commonly
called her, using the other end of her name, Wynnie--for she was named
after her mother--had got a room on the ground-floor, usually given to
visitors, ready for her sister; and we were glad indeed not to have to
carry her up the stairs. Before my wife left, she had sent the groom
off to Addicehead for both physician and surgeon. A young man who had
settled at Marshmallows as general practitioner a year or two before,
was waiting for us when we arrived. He helped us to lay her upon a
mattress in the position in which she felt the least pain. But why
should I linger over the sorrowful detail? All agreed that the poor
child’s spine was seriously injured, and that probably years of
suffering were before her. Everything was done that could be done; but
she was not moved from that room for nine months, during which, though
her pain certainly grew less by degrees, her want of power to move
herself remained almost the same.
When I had left her at last a little composed, with her mother seated
by her bedside, I called my other two daughters--Wynnie, the eldest, and
Dorothy, the youngest, whom I found seated on the floor outside, one
on each side of the door, weeping--into my study, and said to them: “My
darlings, this is very sad; but you must remember that it is God’s will;
and as you would both try to bear it cheerfully if it had fallen to your
lot to bear, you must try to be cheerful even when it is your sister’s
part to endure.”
“O, papa! poor Connie!” cried Dora, and burst into fresh tears.
Wynnie said nothing, but knelt down by my knee, and laid her cheek upon
it.
“Shall I tell you what Constance said to me just before I left the
room?” I asked.
“Please do, papa.”
“She whispered, ‘You must try to bear it, all of you, as well as you
can. I don’t mind it very much, only for you.’ So, you see, if you want
to make her comfortable, you must not look gloomy and troubled. Sick
people like to see cheerful faces about them; and I am sure Connie
will not suffer nearly so much if she finds that she does not make the
household gloomy.”
This I had learned from being ill myself once or twice since my
marriage. My wife never came near me with a gloomy face, and I had found
that it was quite possible to be sympathetic with those of my flock
who were ill without putting on a long face when I went to see them.
Of course, I do not mean that I could, or that it was desirable that I
should, look cheerful when any were in great pain or mental distress.
But in ordinary conditions of illness a cheerful countenance is as a
message of _all’s well_, which may surely be carried into a sick chamber
by the man who believes that the heart of a loving Father is at the
centre of things, that he is light all about the darkness, and that
he will not only bring good out of evil at last, but will be with the
sufferer all the time, making endurance possible, and pain tolerable.
There are a thousand alleviations that people do not often think of,
coming from God himself. Would you not say, for instance, that time must
pass very slowly in pain? But have you never observed, or has no one
ever made the remark to you, how strangely fast, even in severe pain,
the time passes after all?
“We will do all we can, will we not,” I went on, “to make her as
comfortable as possible? You, Dora, must attend to your little brothers,
that your mother may not have too much to think about now that she will
have Connie to nurse.”
They could not say much, but they both kissed me, and went away leaving
me to understand clearly enough that they had quite understood me. I
then returned to the sick chamber, where I found that the poor child had
fallen asleep.
My wife and I watched by her bedside on alternate nights, until the pain
had so far subsided, and the fever was so far reduced, that we could
allow Wynnie to take a share in the office. We could not think of giving
her over to the care of any but one of ourselves during the night.
Her chief suffering came from its being necessary that she should
keep nearly one position on her back, because of her spine, while the
external bruise and the swelling of the muscles were in consequence
so painful, that it needed all that mechanical contrivance could do to
render the position endurable. But these outward conditions were greatly
ameliorated before many days were over.
This is a dreary beginning of my story, is it not? But sickness of all
kinds is such a common thing in the world, that it is well sometimes
to let our minds rest upon it, lest it should take us altogether at
unawares, either in ourselves or our friends, when it comes. If it were
not a good thing in the end, surely it would not be; and perhaps before
I have done my readers will not be sorry that my tale began so gloomily.
The sickness in Judaea eighteen hundred and thirty-five years ago, or
thereabouts, has no small part in the story of him who came to put all
things under our feet. Praise be to him for evermore!
It soon became evident to me that that room was like a new and more
sacred heart to the house. At first it radiated gloom to the remotest
corners; but soon rays of light began to appear mingling with the gloom.
I could see that bits of news were carried from it to the servants
in the kitchen, in the garden, in the stable, and over the way to the
home-farm. Even in the village, and everywhere over the parish, I was
received more kindly, and listened to more willingly, because of the
trouble I and my family were in; while in the house, although we had
never been anything else than a loving family, it was easy to discover
that we all drew more closely together in consequence of our common
anxiety. Previous to this, it had been no unusual thing to see Wynnie
and Dora impatient with each other; for Dora was none the less a wild,
somewhat lawless child, that she was a profoundly affectionate one. She
rather resembled her cousin Judy, in fact--whom she called Aunt Judy,
and with whom she was naturally a great favourite. Wynnie, on the other
hand, was sedate, and rather severe--more severe, I must in justice say,
with herself than with anyone else. I had sometimes wished, it is true,
that her mother, in regard to the younger children, were more like her;
but there I was wrong. For one of the great goods that come of having
two parents, is that the one balances and rectifies the motions of the
other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or can hold it,
in one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often, at best,
but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth;
and it is not a bad thing in a family, that the pendulums of father and
mother should differ in movement so far, that when the one is at one
extremity of the swing, the other should be at the other, so that
they meet only in the point of _indifference_, in the middle; that the
predominant tendency of the one should not be the predominant tendency
of the other. I was a very strict disciplinarian--too much so, perhaps,
sometimes: Ethelwyn, on the other hand, was too much inclined, I
thought, to excuse everything. I was law, she was grace. But grace often
yielded to law, and law sometimes yielded to grace. Yet she represented
the higher; for in the ultimate triumph of grace, in the glad
performance of the command from love of what is commanded, the law is
fulfilled: the law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. I must say
this for myself, however, that, although obedience was the one thing
I enforced, believing it the one thing upon which all family economy
primarily depends, yet my object always was to set my children free from
my law as soon as possible; in a word, to help them to become, as soon
as it might be, a law unto themselves. Then they would need no more of
mine. Then I would go entirely over to the mother’s higher side, and
become to them, as much as in me lay, no longer law and truth, but grace
and truth. But to return to my children--it was soon evident not only
that Wynnie had grown more indulgent to Dora’s vagaries, but that Dora
was more submissive to Wynnie, while the younger children began to
obey their eldest sister with a willing obedience, keeping down their
effervescence within doors, and letting it off only out of doors, or in
the out-houses.
When Constance began to recover a little, then the sacredness of that
chamber began to show itself more powerfully, radiating on all sides a
yet stronger influence of peace and goodwill. It was like a fountain of
gentle light, quieting and bringing more or less into tune all that came
within the circle of its sweetness. This brings me to speak again of my
lovely child. For surely a father may speak thus of a child of God. He
cannot regard his child as his even as a book he has written may be his.
A man’s child is his because God has said to him, “Take this child and
nurse it for me.” She is God’s making; God’s marvellous invention, to be
tended and cared for, and ministered unto as one of his precious things;
a young angel, let me say, who needs the air of this lower world to make
her wings grow. And while he regards her thus, he will see all other
children in the same light, and will not dare to set up his own against
others of God’s brood with the new-budding wings. The universal heart
of truth will thus rectify, while it intensifies, the individual feeling
towards one’s own; and the man who is most free from poor partisanship
in regard to his own family, will feel the most individual tenderness
for the lovely human creatures whom God has given into his own especial
care and responsibility. Show me the man who is tender, reverential,
gracious towards the children of other men, and I will show you the man
who will love and tend his own best, to whose heart his own will flee
for their first refuge after God, when they catch sight of the cloud in
the wind.