AN IMPORTANT LETTER.
It was, then, in the beginning of April that I received one morning an
epistle from an old college friend of mine, with whom I had renewed my
acquaintance of late, through the pleasure which he was kind enough to
say he had derived from reading a little book of mine upon the relation
of the mind of St. Paul to the gospel story. His name was Shepherd--a
good name for a clergyman. In his case both Christian name and
patronymic might remind him well of his duty. David Shepherd ought to be
a good clergyman.
As soon as I had read the letter, I went with it open in my hand to find
my wife.
“Here is Shepherd,” I said, “with a clerical sore-throat, and forced to
give up his duty for a whole summer. He writes to ask me whether, as
he understands I have a curate as good as myself--that is what the old
fellow says--it might not suit me to take my family to his place for
the summer. He assures me I should like it, and that it would do us all
good. His house, he says, is large enough to hold us, and he knows I
should not like to be without duty wherever I was. And so on Read the
letter for yourself, and turn it over in your mind. Weir will come back
so fresh and active that it will be no oppression to him to take the
whole of the duty here. I will run and ask Turner whether it would be
safe to move Connie, and whether the sea-air would be good for her.”
“One would think you were only twenty, husband--you make up your mind so
quickly, and are in such a hurry.”
The fact was, a vision of the sea had rushed in upon me. It was many
years since I had seen the sea, and the thought of looking on it once
more, in its most glorious show, the Atlantic itself, with nothing
between us and America, but the round of the ridgy water, had excited
me so that my wife’s reproof, if reproof it was, was quite necessary
to bring me to my usually quiet and sober senses. I laughed, begged old
grannie’s pardon, and set off to see Turner notwithstanding, leaving her
to read and ponder Shepherd’s letter.
“What do you think, Turner?” I said, and told him the case. He looked
rather grave.
“When would you think of going?” he asked.
“About the beginning of June.”
“Nearly two months,” he said, thoughtfully. “And Miss Connie was not the
worse for getting on the sofa yesterday?”
“The better, I do think.”
“Has she had any increase of pain since?”
“None, I quite believe; for I questioned her as to that.”
He thought again. He was a careful man, although young.
“It is a long journey.”
“She could make it by easy stages.”
“It would certainly do her good to breathe the sea-air and have such
a thorough change in every way--if only it could be managed without
fatigue and suffering. I think, if you can get her up every day between
this and that, we shall be justified in trying it at least. The sooner
you get her out of doors the better too; but the weather is scarcely fit
for that yet.”
“A good deal will depend on how she is inclined, I suppose.”
“Yes. But in her case you must not mind that too much. An invalid’s
instincts as to eating and drinking are more to be depended upon than
those of a healthy person; but it is not so, I think with regard to
anything involving effort. That she must sometimes be urged to. She must
not judge that by inclination. I have had, in my short practice, two
patients, who considered themselves _bedlars_, as you will find the
common people in the part you are going to, call them--bedridden, that
is. One of them I persuaded to make the attempt to rise, and although
her sense of inability was anything but feigned, and she will be a
sufferer to the end of her days, yet she goes about the house without
much inconvenience, and I suspect is not only physically but morally the
better for it. The other would not consent to try, and I believe lies
there still.”
“The will has more to do with most things than people generally
suppose,” I said. “Could you manage, now, do you think, supposing we
resolve to make the experiment, to accompany us the first stage or two?”
“It is very likely I could. Only you must not depend upon me. I cannot
tell beforehand. You yourself would teach me that I must not be a
respecter of persons, you know.”
I returned to my wife. She was in Connie’s room.
“Well, my dear,” I said, “what do you think of it?”
“Of what?” she asked.
“Why, of Shepherd’s letter, of course,” I answered.
“I’ve been ordering the dinner since, Harry.”
“The dinner!” I returned with some show of contempt, for I knew my wife
was only teasing me. “What’s the dinner to the Atlantic?”
“What do you mean by the Atlantic, papa?” said Connie, from whose
roguish eyes I could see that her mother had told her all about it, and
that _she_ was not disinclined to get up, if only she could.
“The Atlantic, my dear, is the name given to that portion of the waters
of the globe which divides Europe from America. I will fetch you the
Universal Gazetteer, if you would like to consult it on the subject.”
“O papa!” laughed Connie; “you know what I mean.”
“Yes; and you know what I mean too, you squirrel!”
“But do you really mean, papa,” she said “that you will take me to the
Atlantic?”
“If you will only oblige me by getting Well enough to go as soon as
possible.”
The poor child half rose on her elbow, but sank back again with a moan,
which I took for a cry of pain. I was beside her in a moment.
“My darling! You have hurt yourself!”
“O no, papa. I felt for the moment as if I could get up if I liked. But
I soon found that I hadn’t any back or legs. O! what a plague I am to
you!”
“On the contrary, you are the nicest plaything in the world, Connie. One
always knows where to find you.”
She half laughed and half cried, and the two halves made a very
bewitching whole.
“But,” I went on, “I mean to try whether my dolly won’t bear moving. One
thing is clear, I can’t go without it. Do you think you could be got on
the sofa to-day without hurting you?”
“I am sure I could, papa. I feel better today than I have felt yet.
Mamma, do send for Susan, and get me up before dinner.”
When I went in after a couple of hours or so, I found her lying on the
conch, propped up with pillows. She lay looking out of the window on the
lawn at the back of the house. A smile hovered about her bloodless lips,
and the blue of her eyes, though very gray, looked sunny. Her white face
showed the whiter because her dark brown hair was all about it. We had
had to cut her hair, but it had grown to her neck again.
“I have been trying to count the daisies on the lawn,” she said.
“What a sharp sight you must have, child!”
“I see them all as clear as if they were enamelled on that table before
me.”
I was not so anxious to get rid of the daisies as some people are.
Neither did I keep the grass quite so close shaved.
“But,” she went on, “I could not count them, for it gave me the fidgets
in my feet.”
“You don’t say so!” I exclaimed.
She looked at me with some surprise, but concluding that I was only
making a little of my mild fun at her expense, she laughed.
“Yes. Isn’t it a wonderful fact?” she said.
“It is a fact, my dear, that I feel ready to go on my knees and thank
God for. I may be wrong, but I take it as a sign that you are beginning
to recover a little. But we mustn’t make too much of it, lest I should
be mistaken,” I added, checking myself, for I feared exciting her too
much.
But she lay very still; only the tears rose slowly and lay shimmering in
her eyes. After about five minutes, during which we were both silent,--
“O papa!” she said, “to think of ever walking out with you again, and
feeling the wind on my face! I can hardly believe it possible.”
“It is so mild, I think you might have half that pleasure at once,” I
answered..
And I opened the window, let the spring air gently move her hair for one
moment, and then shut it again. Connie breathed deep, and said after a
little pause,--
“I had no idea how delightful it was. To think that I have been in the
way of breathing that every moment for so many years and never thought
about it!”
“It is not always just like that in this climate. But I ought not to
have made that remark when I wanted to make this other: that I suspect
we shall find some day that the loss of the human paradise consists
chiefly in the closing of the human eyes; that at least far more of it
than people think remains about us still, only we are so filled with
foolish desires and evil cares, that we cannot see or hear, cannot even
smell or taste the pleasant things round about us. We have need to
pray in regard to the right receiving of the things of the senses even,
‘Lord, open thou our hearts to understand thy word;’ for each of these
things is as certainly a word of God as Jesus is the Word of God. He
has made nothing in vain. All is for our teaching. Shall I tell you what
such a breath of fresh air makes me think of?”
“It comes to me,” said Connie, “like forgiveness when I was a little
girl and was naughty. I used to feel just like that.”
“It is the same kind of thing I feel,” I said--“as if life from the
Spirit of God were coming into my soul: I think of the wind that bloweth
where it listeth. Wind and spirit are the same word in the Greek; and
the Latin word _spirit_ comes even nearer to what we are saying, for
it is the wind as _breathed_. And now, Connie, I will tell you--and
you will see how I am growing able to talk to you like quite an old
friend--what put me in such a delight with Mr. Shepherd’s letter and so
exposed me to be teased by mamma and you. As I read it, there rose up
before me a vision of one sight of the sea which I had when I was a
young man, long before I saw your mamma. I had gone out for a walk along
some high downs. But I ought to tell you that I had been working rather
hard at Cambridge, and the life seemed to be all gone out of me. Though
my holidays had come, they did not feel quite like holidays--not as
holidays used to feel when I was a boy. Even when walking along those
downs with the scents of sixteen grasses or so in my brain, like a
melody with the odour of the earth for the accompaniment upon which it
floated, and with just enough of wind to stir them up and set them in
motion, I could not feel at all. I remembered something of what I had
used to feel in such places, but instead of believing in that, I doubted
now whether it had not been all a trick that I played myself--a fancied
pleasure only. I was walking along, then, with the sea behind me. It was
a warm, cloudy day--I had had no sunshine since I came out. All at once
I turned--I don’t know why. There lay the gray sea, but not as I had
seen it last, not all gray. It was dotted, spotted, and splashed all
over with drops, pools, and lakes of light, of all shades of depth, from
a light shimmer of tremulous gray, through a half light that turned the
prevailing lead colour into translucent green that seemed to grow out
of its depths--through this, I say, to brilliant light, deepening and
deepening till my very soul was stung by the triumph of the intensity
of its molten silver. There was no sun upon me. But there were breaks
in the clouds over the sea, through which, the air being filled with
vapour, I could see the long lines of the sun-rays descending on the
waters like rain--so like a rain of light that the water seemed to plash
up in light under their fall. I questioned the past no more; the present
seized upon me, and I knew that the past was true, and that nature was
more lovely, more awful in her loveliness than I could grasp. It was a
lonely place: I fell on my knees, and worshipped the God that made the
glory and my soul.”
While I spoke Connie’s tears had been flowing quietly.
“And mamma and I were making fun while you were seeing such things as
those!” she said pitifully.
“You didn’t hurt them one bit, my darling--neither mamma nor you. If I
had been the least cross about it, as I should have been when I was as
young as at the time of which I was thinking, that would have ruined the
vision entirely. But your merriment only made me enjoy it more. And, my
Connie, I hope you will see the Atlantic before long; and if one vision
should come as brilliant as that, we shall be fortunate indeed, if we
went all the way to the west to see that only.”
“O papa! I dare hardly think of it--it is too delightful. But do you
think we shall really go?”
“I do. Here comes your mamma--I am going to say to Shepherd, my dear,
that I will take his parish in hand, and if I cannot, after all, go
myself, will find some one, so that he need be in no anxiety from the
uncertainty which must hang over our movements even till the experiment
itself is made.”
“Very well, husband. I am quite satisfied.”
And as I watched Connie, I saw that hope and expectation did much to
prepare her.