sort to Aggy. She never could ha’ kep it from me, sir.”
“Why doesn’t he then?”
“That’s the pint again, sir. All as knows him says it’s because he be in
such bad health, and he thinks he oughtn’t to go marrying with one foot
in the grave. He never said so to me; but I think very likely that be
it.”
“For that matter, Mrs. Coombes, we’ve all got one foot in the grave, I
think.”
“That be very true, sir.”
“And what does your daughter think?”
“I believe she thinks the same. And so they go on talking to each other,
quiet-like, like old married folks, not like lovers at all, sir. But I
can’t help fancying it have something to do with my Aggy’s pale face.”
“And something to do with Joe’s pale face too, Mrs. Coombes,” I said.
“Thank you. You’ve told me more than I expected. It explains everything.
I must have it out with Joe now.”
“O deary me! sir, don’t go and tell him I said anything, as if I wanted
him to marry my daughter.”
“Don’t you be afraid. I’ll take good care of that. And don’t fancy I’m
fond of meddling with other people’s affairs. But this is a case in
which I ought to do something. Joe’s a fine fellow.”
“That he be, sir. I couldn’t wish a better for a son-in-law.”
I put on my hat.
“You won’t get me into no trouble with Joe, will ye, sir!”
“Indeed I will not, Mrs. Coombes. I should be doing a great deal more
harm than good if I said a word to make him doubt you.”
I went straight to the church. There were the two men working away in
the shadowy tower, and there was Agnes standing beside, knitting like
her mother, so quiet, so solemn even, that it did indeed look as if she
were a long-married wife, hovering about her husband at his work. Harry
was saying something to her as I went in, but when they saw me they were
silent, and Agnes gently withdrew.
“Do you think you will get through to-night?” I asked.
“Sure of it, sir,” answered Harry.
“You shouldn’t be sure of anything, Harry. We are told in the New
Testament that we ought to say _If the Lord will_,” said Joe.
“Now, Joe, you’re too hard upon Harry,” I said. “You don’t think that
the Bible means to pull a man up every step like that, till he’s afraid
to speak a word. It was about a long journey and a year’s residence that
the Apostle James was speaking.”
“No doubt, sir. But the principle’s the same. Harry can no more be sure
of finishing his work before it be dark, than those people could be of
going their long journey.”
“That is perfectly true. But you are taking the letter for the spirit,
and that, I suspect, in more ways than one. The religion does not lie in
not being sure about anything, but in a loving desire that the will of
God in the matter, whatever it be, may be done. And if Harry has not
learned yet to care about the will of God, what is the good of coming
down upon him that way, as if that would teach him in the least. When
he loves God, then, and not till then, will he care about his will. Nor
does the religion lie in saying, _if the Lord will_, every time anything
is to be done. It is a most dangerous thing to use sacred words often.
It makes them so common to our ear that at length, when used most
solemnly, they have not half the effect they ought to have, and that is
a serious loss. What the Apostle means is, that we should always be in
the mood of looking up to God and having regard to his will, not
always writing D.V. for instance, as so many do--most irreverently, I
think--using a Latin contraction for the beautiful words, just as if
they were a charm, or as if God would take offence if they did not make
the salvo of acknowledgment. It seems to me quite heathenish. Our hearts
ought ever to be in the spirit of those words; our lips ought to utter
them rarely. Besides, there are some things a man might be pretty sure
the Lord wills.”
“It sounds fine, sir; but I’m not sure that I understand what you mean
to say. It sounds to me like a darkening of wisdom.”
I saw that I had irritated him, and so had in some measure lost ground.
But Harry struck in--
“How _can_ you say that now, Joe? _I_ know what the parson means well
enough, and everybody knows I ain’t got half the brains you’ve got.”
“The reason is, Harry, that he’s got something in his head that stands
in the way.”
“And there’s nothing in my head _to_ stand in the way!” returned Harry,
laughing.
This made me laugh too, and even Joe could not help a sympathetic grin.
By this time it was getting dark.
“I’m afraid, Harry, after all, you won’t get through to-night.”
“I begin to think so too, sir. And there’s Joe saying, ‘I told you so,’
over and over to himself, though he won’t say it out like a man.”
Joe answered only with another grin.
“I tell you what it is, Harry,” I said--“you must come again on Monday.
And on your way home, just look in and tell Joe’s mother that I have
kept him over to-morrow. The change will do him good.”
“No, sir, that can’t he. I haven’t got a clean shirt.”
“You can have a shirt of mine,” I said. “But I’m afraid you’ll want your
Sunday clothes.”
“I’ll bring them for you, Joe--before you’re up,” interposed Harry. “And
then you can go to church with Aggy Coombes, you know.”
Here was just what I wanted.
“Hold your tongue, Harry,” said Joe angrily. “You’re talking of what you
don’t know anything about.”
“Well, Joe, I ben’t a fool, if I ben’t so religious as you be. You ben’t
a bad fellow, though you be a Methodist, and I ben’t a fool, though I be
Harry Cobb.”
“What do you mean, Harry? Do hold your tongue.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I mean first, and then I’ll hold my tongue.
I mean this--that nobody with two eyes, or one eye, for that matter, in
his head, could help seeing the eyes you and Aggy make at each other,
and why you don’t port your helm and board her--I won’t say it’s more
than I know, but I du say it to be more than I think be fair to the
young woman.”
“Hold your tongue, Harry.”
“I said I would when I’d answered you as to what I meaned. So no more
at present; but I’ll be over with your clothes afore you’re up in the
morning.”
As Harry spoke he was busy gathering his tools.
“They won’t be in the way, will they, sir?” he said, as he heaped them
together in the furthest corner of the tower.
“Not in the least,” I returned. “If I had my way, all the tools used in
building the church should be carved on the posts and pillars of it, to
indicate the sacredness of labour, and the worship of God that lies,
not in building the church merely, but in every honest trade honestly
pursued for the good of mankind and the need of the workman. For a
necessity of God is laid upon every workman as well as on St. Paul. Only
St. Paul saw it, and every workman doesn’t, Harry.”
“Thank you, sir. I like that way of it. I almost think I could be a
little bit religious after your way of it, sir.”
“Almost, Harry!” growled Joe--not unkindly.
“Now, you hold your tongue, Joe,” I said. “Leave Harry to me. You may
take him, if you like, after I’ve done with him.”
Laughing merrily, but making no other reply than a hearty good-night,
Harry strode away out of the church, and Joe and I went home together.
When he had had his tea, I asked him to go out with me for a walk.
The sun was shining aslant upon the downs from over the sea. We rose out
of the shadowy hollow to the sunlit brow. I was a little in advance of
Joe. Happening to turn, I saw the light full on his head and face, while
the rest of his body had not yet emerged from the shadow.
“Stop, Joe,” I said. “I want to see you so for a moment.”
He stood--a little surprised.
“You look just like a man rising from the dead, Joe,” I said.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he returned.
“I will describe yourself to you. Your head and face are full of
sunlight, the rest of your body is still buried in the shadow. Look; I
will stand where you are now; and you come here. You will soon see what
I mean.”
We changed places. Joe stared for a moment. Then his face brightened.
“I see what you mean, sir,” he said. “I fancy you don’t mean the
resurrection of the body, but the resurrection of righteousness.”
“I do, Joe. Did it ever strike you that the whole history of the
Christian life is a series of such resurrections? Every time a man
bethinks himself that he is not walking in the light, that he has been
forgetting himself, and must repent, that he has been asleep and must
awake, that he has been letting his garments trail, and must gird up the
loins of his mind--every time this takes place, there is a resurrection
in the world. Yes, Joe; and every time that a man finds that his heart
is troubled, that he is not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must
follow--a resurrection out of the night of troubled thoughts into the
gladness of the truth. For the truth is, and ever was, and ever must be,
gladness, however much the souls on which it shines may be obscured by
the clouds of sorrow, troubled by the thunders of fear, or shot through
with the lightnings of pain. Now, Joe, will you let me tell you what you
are like--I do not know your thoughts; I am only judging from your words
and looks?”
“You may if you like, sir,” answered Joe, a little sulkily. But I was
not to be repelled.
I stood up in the sunlight, so that my eyes caught only about half the
sun’s disc. Then I bent my face towards the earth.
“What part of me is the light shining on now, Joe?”
“Just the top of your head,” answered he.
“There, then,” I returned, “that is just what you are like--a man with
the light on his head, but not on his face. And why not on your face?
Because you hold your head down.”
“Isn’t it possible, sir, that a man might lose the light on his face, as
you put it, by doing his duty?”
“That is a difficult question,” I replied. “I must think before I answer
it.”
“I mean,” added Joe--“mightn’t his duty be a painful one?”
“Yes. But I think that would rather etherealise than destroy the light.
Behind the sorrow would spring a yet greater light from the very duty
itself. I have expressed myself badly, but you will see what I mean.--To
be frank with you, Joe, I do not see that light in your face. Therefore
I think something must be wrong with you. Remember a good man is not
necessarily in the right. St. Peter was a good man, yet our Lord called
him Satan--and meant it of course, for he never said what he did not
mean.”
“How can I be wrong when all my trouble comes from doing my
duty--nothing else, as far as I know?”
“Then,” I replied, a sudden light breaking in on my mind, “I doubt
whether what you suppose to be your duty can be your duty. If it were,
I do not think it would make you so miserable. At least--I may be wrong,
but I venture to think so.”
“What is a man to go by, then? If he thinks a thing is his duty, is he
not to do it?”
“Most assuredly--until he knows better. But it is of the greatest
consequence whether the supposed duty be the will of God or the
invention of one’s own fancy or mistaken judgment. A real duty is always
something right in itself. The duty a man makes his for the time, by
supposing it to be a duty, may be something quite wrong in itself. The
duty of a Hindoo widow is to burn herself on the body of her husband.
But that duty lasts no longer than till she sees that, not being the
will of God, it is not her duty. A real duty, on the other hand, is a
necessity of the human nature, without seeing and doing which a man can
never attain to the truth and blessedness of his own being. It was the
duty of the early hermits to encourage the growth of vermin upon their
bodies, for they supposed that was pleasing to God; but they could not
fare so well as if they had seen the truth that the will of God was
cleanliness. And there may be far more serious things done by Christian
people against the will of God, in the fancy of doing their duty, than
such a trifle as swarming with worms. In a word, thinking a thing is
your duty makes it your duty only till you know better. And the prime
duty of every man is to seek and find, that he may do, the will of God.”
“But do you think, sir, that a man is likely to be doing what he ought
not, if he is doing what he don’t like?”
“Not so likely, I allow. But there may be ambition in it. A man must
not want to be better than the right. That is the delusion of the
anchorite--a delusion in which the man forgets the rights of others for
the sake of his own sanctity.”
“It might be for the sake of another person, and not for the person’s
own sake at all.”
“It might be; but except it were the will of God for that other person,
it would be doing him or her a real injury.”
We were coming gradually towards what I wanted to make the point in
question. I wished him to tell me all about it himself, however, for
I knew that while advice given on request is generally disregarded, to
offer advice unasked is worthy only of a fool.
“But how are you to know the will of God in every case?” asked Joe.
“By looking at the general laws of life, and obeying them--except there
be anything special in a particular case to bring it under a higher
law.”
“Ah! but that be just what there is here.”
“Well, my dear fellow, that may be; but the special conduct may not be
right for the special case for all that. The speciality of the case may
not be even sufficient to take it from under the ordinary rule. But it
is of no use talking generals. Let us come to particulars. If you can
trust me, tell me all about it, and we may be able to let some light in.
I am sure there is darkness somewhere.”
“I will turn it over in my mind, sir; and if I can bring myself to talk
about it, I will. I would rather tell you than anyone else.”
I said no more. We watched a glorious sunset--there never was a grander
place for sunsets--and went home.
CHAPTER XII.
A SMALL ADVENTURE.
The next morning Harry came with the clothes. But Joe did not go to
church. Neither did Agnes make her appearance that morning. They were
both present at the evening service, however.
When we came out of church, it was cloudy and dark, and the wind was
blowing cold from the sea. The sky was covered with one cloud, but the
waves tossing themselves against the rocks, flashed whiteness out of the
general gloom. As the tide rose the wind increased. It was a night of
surly temper--hard and gloomy. Not a star cracked the blue above--there
was no blue; and the wind was _gurly_; I once heard that word in
Scotland, and never forgot it.
After one of our usual gatherings in Connie’s room, which were much
shorter here because of the evening service in summer, I withdrew till
supper should be ready.
Now I have always had, as I think I have incidentally stated before, a
certain peculiar pleasure in the surly aspects of nature. When I was a
young man this took form in opposition and defiance; since I had begun
to grow old the form had changed into a sense of safety. I welcomed such
aspects, partly at least, because they roused my faith to look through
and beyond the small region of human conditions in which alone the storm
can be and blow, and thus induced a feeling like that of the child who
lies in his warm crib and listens to the howling of one of these same
storms outside the strong-built house which yet trembles at its fiercer
onsets: the house is not in danger; or, if it be, that is his father’s
business, not his. Hence it came that, after supper, I put on my
great-coat and travelling-cap, and went out into the ill-tempered
night--speaking of it in its human symbolism.
I meant to have a stroll down to the breakwater, of which I have yet
said little, but which was a favourite resort, both of myself and my
children. At the further end of it, always covered at high water, was
an outlying cluster of low rocks, in the heart of which the lord of
the manor, a noble-hearted Christian gentleman of the old school, had
constructed a bath of graduated depth--an open-air swimming-pool--the
only really safe place for men who were swimmers to bathe in. Thither I
was in the habit of taking my two little men every morning, and bathing
with them, that I might develop the fish that was in them; for, as
George Herbert says:
“Man is everything,
And more: he is a tree, yet bears no fruit;
A beast, yet is, or should be, more;”
and he might have gone on to say that he is, or should be, a fish as
well.
It will seem strange to any reader who can recall the position of my
Connie’s room, that the nearest way to the breakwater should be through
that room; but so it was. I mention the fact because I want my readers
to understand a certain peculiarity of the room. By the side of
the window which looked out upon the breakwater was a narrow door,
apparently of a closet or cupboard, which communicated, however, with a
narrow, curving, wood-built passage, leading into a little wooden hut,
the walls of which were by no means impervious to the wind, for they
were formed of outside-planks, with the bark still upon them. From this
hut one or two little windows looked seaward, and a door led out on the
bit of sward in which lay the flower-bed under Connie’s window. From
this spot again a door in the low wall and thick hedge led out on the
downs, where a path wound along the cliffs that formed the side of the
bay, till, descending under the storm-tower, it brought you to the root
of the breakwater.
This mole stretched its long strong low back to a rock a good way out,
breaking the force of the waves, and rendering the channel of a small
river, that here flowed into the sea across the sands from the mouth of
the canal, a refuge from the Atlantic. But it was a roadway often hard
to reach. In fair weather even, the wind falling as the vessel rounded
the point of the breakwater into the calm of the projecting headlands,
the under-current would sometimes dash her helpless on the rocks. During
all this heavenly summer there had been no thought or fear of any such
disaster. The present night was a hint of what weather would yet come.
When I went into Connie’s room, I found her lying in bed a very picture
of peace. But my entrance destroyed the picture.
“Papa,” she said, “why have you got your coat on? Surely you are not
going out to-night. The wind is blowing dreadfully.”
“Not very dreadfully, Connie. It blew much worse the night we found your
baby.”
“But it is very dark.”
“I allow that; but there is a glimmer from the sea. I am only going on
the breakwater for a few minutes. You know I like a stormy night quite
as much as a fine one.”
“I shall be miserable till you come home, papa.”
“Nonsense, Connie. You don’t think your father hasn’t sense to take
care of himself! Or rather, Connie, for I grant that is poor ground of
comfort, you don’t think I can go anywhere without my Father to take
care of me?”
“But there is no occasion--is there, papa?”
“Do you think I should be better pleased with my boys if they shrunk
from everything involving the least possibility of danger because there
was no occasion for it? That is just the way to make cowards. And I
am certain God would not like his children to indulge in such moods of
self-preservation as that. He might well be ashamed of them. The fearful
are far more likely to meet with accidents than the courageous. But
really, Connie, I am almost ashamed of talking so. It is all your fault.
There is positively no ground for apprehension, and I hope you won’t
spoil my walk by the thought that my foolish little girl is frightened.”
“I will be good--indeed I will, papa,” she said, holding up her mouth to
kiss me.
I left her room, and went through the wooden passage into the bark hut.
The wind roared about it, shook it, and pawed it, and sung and whistled
in the chinks of the planks. I went out and shut the door. That moment
the wind seized upon me, and I had to fight with it. When I got on the
path leading along the edge of the downs, I felt something lighter than
any feather fly in my face. When I put up my hand, I found my cheek wet.
Again and again I was thus assailed, but when I got to the breakwater
I found what it was. They were flakes of foam, bubbles worked up into
little masses of adhering thousands, which the wind blew off the waters
and across the downs, carrying some of them miles inland. When I reached
the breakwater, and looked along its ridge through the darkness of the
night, I was bewildered to see a whiteness lying here and there in
a great patch upon its top. They were but accumulations of these
foam-flakes, like soap-suds, lying so thick that I expected to have to
wade through them, only they vanished at the touch of my feet. Till then
I had almost believed it was snow I saw. On the edge of the waves, in
quieter spots, they lay like yeast, foaming and working. Now and then a
little rush of water from a higher wave swept over the top of the broad
breakwater, as with head bowed sideways against the wind, I struggled
along towards the rock at its end; but I said to myself, “The tide is
falling fast, and salt water hurts nobody,” and struggled on over the
huge rough stones of the mighty heap, outside which the waves were white
with wrath, inside which they had fallen asleep, only heaving with the
memory of their late unrest. I reached the tall rock at length, climbed
the rude stair leading up to the flagstaff, and looked abroad, if
looking it could be called, into the thick dark. But the wind blew so
strong on the top that I was glad to descend. Between me and the basin
where yesterday morning I had bathed in still water and sunshine with my
boys, rolled the deathly waves. I wandered on the rough narrow space yet
uncovered, stumbling over the stones and the rocky points between which
they lay, stood here and there half-meditating, and at length, finding
a sheltered nook in a mass of rock, sat with the wind howling and
the waves bursting around me. There I fell into a sort of brown
study--almost a half-sleep.
But I had not sat long before I came broad awake, for I heard voices,
low and earnest. One I recognised as Joe’s voice. The other was a
woman’s. I could not tell what they said for some time, and therefore
felt no immediate necessity for disclosing my proximity, but sat
debating with myself whether I should speak to them or not. At length,
in a lull of the wind, I heard the woman say--I could fancy with a
sigh--
“I’m sure you’ll du what is right, Joe. Don’t ‘e think o’ me, Joe.”
“It’s just of you that I du think, Aggy. You know it ben’t for my sake.
Surely you know that?”
There was no answer for a moment. I was still doubting what I had best
do--go away quietly or let them know I was there--when she spoke again.
There was a momentary lull now in the noises of both wind and water, and
I heard what she said well enough.
“It ben’t for me to contradict you, Joe. But I don’t think you be going
to die. You be no worse than last year. Be you now, Joe?”
It flashed across me how once before, a stormy night and darkness had
brought me close to a soul in agony. Then I was in agony myself; now
the world was all fair and hopeful around me--the portals of the world
beyond ever opening wider as I approached them, and letting out more of
their glory to gladden the path to their threshold. But here were two
souls straying in a mist which faith might roll away, and leave them
walking in the light. The moment was come. I must speak.
“Joe!” I called out.
“Who’s there?” he cried; and I heard him start to his feet.
“Only Mr. Walton. Where are you?”
“We can’t be very far off,” he answered, not in a tone of any pleasure
at finding me so nigh.
I rose, and peering about through the darkness, found that they were a
little higher up on the same rock by which I was sheltered.
“You mustn’t think,” I said, “that I have been eavesdropping. I had no
idea anyone was near me till I heard your voices, and I did not hear a
word till just the last sentence or two.”
“I saw someone go up the Castle-rock,” said Joe; “but I thought he was
gone away again. It will be a lesson to me.”
“I’m no tell-tale, Joe,” I returned, as I scrambled up the rock. “You
will have no cause to regret that I happened to overhear a little. I am
sure, Joe, you will never say anything you need be ashamed of. But what
I heard was sufficient to let me into the secret of your trouble. Will
you let me talk to Joe, Agnes? I’ve been young myself, and, to tell the
truth, I don’t think I’m old yet.”
“I am sure, sir,” she answered, “you won’t be hard on Joe and me. I
don’t suppose there be anything wrong in liking each other, though we
can’t be--married.”
She spoke in a low tone, and her voice trembled very much; yet there was
a certain womanly composure in her utterance. “I’m sure it’s very bold
of me to talk so,” she added, “but Joe will tell you all about it.”
I was close beside them now, and fancied I saw through the dusk the
motion of her hand stealing into his.
“Well, Joe, this is just what I wanted,” I said. “A woman can be braver
than a big smith sometimes. Agnes has done her part. Now you do yours,
and tell me all about it.”
No response followed my adjuration. I must help him.
“I think I know how the matter lies, Joe. You think you are not going to
live long, and that therefore you ought not to marry. Am I right?”
“Not far off it, sir,” he answered.
“Now, Joe,” I said, “can’t we talk as friends about this matter? I have
no right to intrude into your affairs--none in the least--except what
friendship gives me. If you say I am not to talk about it, I shall be
silent. To force advice upon you would be as impertinent as useless.”
“It’s all the same, I’m afraid, sir. My mind has been made up for a long
time. What right have I to bring other people into trouble? But I take
it kind of you, sir, though I mayn’t look over-pleased. Agnes wants to
hear your way of it. I’m agreeable.”
This was not very encouraging. Still I thought it sufficient ground for
proceeding.
“I suppose you will allow that the root of all Christian behaviour is
the will of God?”
“Surely, sir.”
“Is it not the will of God, then, that when a man and woman love each
other, they should marry?”
“Certainly, sir--where there be no reasons against it.”
“Of course. And you judge you see reason for not doing so, else you
would?”
“I do see that a man should not bring a woman into trouble for the sake
of being comfortable himself for the rest of a few weary days.”
Agnes was sobbing gently behind her handkerchief. I knew how gladly she
would be Joe’s wife, if only to nurse him through his last illness.
“Not except it would make her comfortable too, I grant you, Joe. But
listen to me. In the first place, you don’t know, and you are not
required to know, when you are going to die. In fact, you have nothing
to do with it. Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation
of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation
for the night is to work while the day lasts, diligently. The best
preparation for death is life. Besides, I have known delicate people
who have outlived all their strong relations, and been left alone in the
earth--because they had possibly taken too much care of themselves.
But marriage is God’s will, and death is God’s will, and you have no
business to set the one over against, as antagonistic to, the other.
For anything you know, the gladness and the peace of marriage may be
the very means intended for your restoration to health and strength. I
suspect your desire to marry, fighting against the fancy that you ought
not to marry, has a good deal to do with the state of health in which
you now find yourself. A man would get over many things if he were
happy, that he cannot get over when he is miserable.”
“But it’s for Aggy. You forget that.”
“I do not forget it. What right have you to seek for her another kind
of welfare than you would have yourself? Are you to treat her as if
she were worldly when you are not--to provide for her a comfort which
yourself you would despise? Why should you not marry because you have to
die soon?--if you _are_ thus doomed, which to me is by no means clear.
Why not have what happiness you may for the rest of your sojourn? If you
find at the end of twenty years that here you are after all, you will be
rather sorry you did not do as I say.”
“And if I find myself dying at the end of six months’?”
“You will thank God for those six months. The whole thing, my dear
fellow, is a want of faith in God. I do not doubt you think you are
doing right, but, I repeat, the whole thing comes from want of faith in
God. You will take things into your own hands, and order them after a
preventive and self-protective fashion, lest God should have ordained
the worst for you, which worst, after all, would be best met by doing
his will without inquiry into the future; and which worst is no evil.
Death is no more an evil than marriage is.”
“But you don’t see it as I do,” persisted the blacksmith.
“Of course I don’t. I think you see it as it is not.”
He remained silent for a little. A shower of spray fell upon us. He
started.
“What a wave!” he cried. “That spray came over the top of the rock. We
shall have to run for it.”
I fancied that he only wanted to avoid further conversation.
“There’s no hurry,” I said. “It was high water an hour and a half ago.”
“You don’t know this coast, sir,” returned he, “or you wouldn’t talk
like that.”
As he spoke he rose, and going from under the shelter of the rock,
looked along.
“For God’s sake, Aggy!” he cried in terror, “come at once. Every other
wave be rushing across the breakwater as if it was on the level.”
So saying, he hurried back, caught her by the hand, and began to draw
her along.
“Hadn’t we better stay where we are?” I suggested.
“If you can stand the night in the cold. But Aggy here is delicate; and
I don’t care about being out all night. It’s not the tide, sir; it’s
a ground swell--from a storm somewhere out at sea. That never asks no
questions about tide or no tide.”
“Come along, then,” I said. “But just wait one minute more. It is better
to be ready for the worst.”
For I remembered that the day before I had seen a crowbar lying among
the stones, and I thought it might be useful. In a moment or two I
had found it, and returning, gave it to Joe. Then I took the girl’s
disengaged hand. She thanked me in a voice perfectly calm and firm. Joe
took the bar in haste, and drew Agnes towards the breakwater.
Any real thought of danger had not yet crossed my mind. But when I
looked along the outstretched back of the mole, and saw a dim sheet of
white sweep across it, I felt that there was ground for his anxiety, and
prepared myself for a struggle.
“Do you know what to do with the crowbar, Joe?” I said, grasping my own
stout oak-stick more firmly.
“Perfectly,” answered Joe. “To stick between the stones and hold on. We
must watch our time between the waves.”
“You take the command, then, Joe,” I returned. “You see better than I
do, and you know the ways of that raging wild beast there better than I
do. I will obey orders--one of which, no doubt, will be, not for wind or
sea to lose hold of Agnes--eh, Joe?”
Joe gave a grim enough laugh in reply, and we started, he carrying his
crowbar in his right hand towards the advancing sea, and I my oak-stick
in my left towards the still water within.
“Quick march!” said Joe, and away we went out on the breakwater.
Now the back of the breakwater was very rugged, for it was formed of
huge stones, with wide gaps between, where the waters had washed out the
cement, and worn their edges. But what impeded our progress secured our
safety.
“Halt!” cried Joe, when we were yet but a few yards beyond the shelter
of the rocks. “There’s a topper coming.”
We halted at the word of command, as a huge wave, with combing crest,
rushed against the far out-sloping base of the mole, and flung its heavy
top right over the middle of the mass, a score or two of yards in front
of us.
“Now for it!” cried Joe. “Run!”
We did run. In my mind there was just sense enough of danger to add to
the pleasure of the excitement. I did not know how much danger there
was. Over the rough worn stones we sped stumbling.
“Halt!” cried the smith once more, and we did halt; but this time, as it
turned out, in the middle front of the coming danger.
“God be with us!” I exclaimed, when the huge billow showed itself
through the night, rushing towards the mole. The smith stuck his crowbar
between two great stones. To this he held on with one hand, and threw
the other arm round Agnes’s waist. I, too, had got my oak firmly fixed,
held on with one hand, and threw the other arm round Agnes. It took but
a moment.
“Now then!” cried Joe. “Here she comes! Hold on, sir. Hold on, Aggy!”
But when I saw the height of the water, as it rushed on us up the
sloping side of the mound, I cried out in my turn, “Down, Joe! Down on
your face, and let it over us easy! Down Agnes!”
They obeyed. We threw ourselves across the breakwater, with our heads to
the coming foe, and I grasped my stick close to the stones with all the
power of a hand that was then strong. Over us burst the mighty wave,
floating us up from the stones where we lay. But we held on, the wave
passed, and we sprung gasping to our feet.
“Now, now!” cried Joe and I together, and, heavy as we were, with the
water pouring from us, we flew across the remainder of the heap, and
arrived, panting and safe, at the other end, ere one wave more had swept
the surface. The moment we were in safety we turned and looked back
over the danger we had traversed. It was to see a huge billow sweep the
breakwater from end to end. We looked at each other for a moment without
speaking.
“I believe, sir,” said Joe at length, with slow and solemn speech, “if
you hadn’t taken the command at that moment we should all have been
lost.”
“It seems likely enough, when I look back on it. For one thing, I was
not sure that my stick would stand, so I thought I had better grasp it
low down.”
“We were awfully near death,” said Joe.
“Nearer than you thought, Joe; and yet we escaped it. Things don’t
go all as we fancy, you see. Faith is as essential to manhood as
foresight--believe me, Joe. It is very absurd to trust God for the
future, and not trust him for the present. The man who is not anxious is
the man most likely to do the right thing. He is cool and collected and
ready. Our Lord therefore told his disciples that when they should
be brought before kings and rulers, they were to take no thought what
answer they should make, for it would be given them when the time came.”
We were climbing the steep path up to the downs. Neither of my
companions spoke.
“You have escaped one death together,” I said at length: “dare another.”
Still neither of them returned an answer. When we came near the
parsonage, I said, “Now, Joe, you must go in and get to bed at once. I
will take Agnes home. You can trust me not to say anything against you?”
Joe laughed rather hoarsely, and replied: “As you please, sir. Good
night, Aggie. Mind you get to bed as fast as you can.”
When I returned from giving Agnes over to her parents, I made haste
to change my clothes, and put on my warm dressing-gown. I may as well
mention at once, that not one of us was the worse for our ducking. I
then went up to Connie’s room.
“Here I am, you see, Connie, quite safe.”
“I’ve been lying listening to every blast of wind since you went out,
papa. But all I could do was to trust in God.”
“Do you call that _all_, Connie? Believe me, there is more power in that
than any human being knows the tenth part of yet. It is indeed _all_.”
I said no more then. I told my wife about it that night, but we were
well into another month before I told Connie.
When I left her, I went to Joe’s room to see how he was, and found him
having some gruel. I sat down on the edge of his bed, and said,
“Well, Joe, this is better than under water. I hope you won’t be the
worse for it.”
“I don’t much care what comes of me, sir. It will be all over soon.”
“But you ought to care what comes of you, Joe. I will tell you why.
You are an instrument out of which ought to come praise to God, and,
therefore, you ought to care for the instrument.”
“That way, yes, sir, I ought.”
“And you have no business to be like some children who say, ‘Mamma won’t
give me so and so,’ instead of asking her to give it them.”
“I see what you mean, sir. But really you put me out before the young
woman. I couldn’t say before her what I meant. Suppose, you know, sir,
there was to come a family. It might be, you know.”
“Of course. What else would you have?”
“But if I was to die, where would she be then?”
“In God’s hands; just as she is now.”
“But I ought to take care that she is not left with a burden like that
to provide for.”
“O, Joe! how little you know a woman’s heart! It would just be the
greatest comfort she could have for losing you--that’s all. Many a woman
has married a man she did not care enough for, just that she might have
a child of her own to let out her heart upon. I don’t say that is right,
you know. Such love cannot be perfect. A woman ought to love her child
because it is her husband’s more than because it is her own, and because
it is God’s more than either’s. I saw in the papers the other day, that
a woman was brought before the Recorder of London for stealing a baby,
when the judge himself said that there was no imaginable motive for her
action but a motherly passion to possess the child. It is the need of
a child that makes so many women take to poor miserable, broken-nosed
lap-dogs; for they are self-indulgent, and cannot face the troubles and
dangers of adopting a child. They would if they might get one of a good
family, or from a respectable home; but they dare not take an orphan
out of the dirt, lest it should spoil their silken chairs. But that
has nothing to do with our argument. What I mean is this, that if Agnes
really loves you, as no one can look in her face and doubt, she will be
far happier if you leave her a child--yes, she will be happier if you
only leave her your name for hers--than if you died without calling her
your wife.”
I took Joe’s basin from him, and he lay down. He turned his face to the
wall. I waited a moment, but finding him silent, bade him good-night,
and left the room.
A month after, I married them.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE HARVEST.
It was some time before we got the bells to work to our mind, but at
last we succeeded. The worst of it was to get the cranks, which at first
required strong pressure on the keys, to work easily enough. But neither
Joe nor his cousin spared any pains to perfect the attempt, and, as I
say, at length we succeeded. I took Wynnie down to the instrument and
made her try whether she could not do something, and she succeeded in
making the old tower discourse loudly and eloquently.
By this time the thanksgiving for the harvest was at hand: on the
morning of that first of all would I summon the folk to their prayers
with the sound of the full peal. And I wrote a little hymn of praise to
the God of the harvest, modelling it to one of the oldest tunes in that
part of the country, and I had it printed on slips of paper and laid
plentifully on the benches. What with the calling of the bells, like
voices in the highway, and the solemn meditation of the organ within to
bear aloft the thoughts of those who heard, and came to the prayer and
thanksgiving in common, and the message which God had given me to utter
to them, I hoped that we should indeed keep holiday.
Wynnie summoned the parish with the hundredth psalm pealed from aloft,
dropping from the airy regions of the tower on village and hamlet and
cottage, calling aloud--for who could dissociate the words from the
music, though the words are in the Scotch psalms?--written none the
less by an Englishman, however English wits may amuse themselves with
laughing at their quaintness--calling aloud,
“All people that on earth do dwell
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell--
Come ye before him and rejoice.”
Then we sang the psalm before the communion service, making bold in the
name of the Lord to serve him with _mirth_ as in the old version, and
not with the _fear_ with which some editor, weak in faith, has presumed
to alter the line. Then before the sermon we sang the hymn I had
prepared--a proceeding justifiable by many an example in the history
of the church while she was not only able to number singers amongst her
clergy, but those singers were capable of influencing the whole heart
and judgment of the nation with their songs. Ethelwyn played the organ.
The song I had prepared was this:
“We praise the Life of All;
From buried seeds so small
Who makes the ordered ranks of autumn stand;
Who stores the corn
In rick and barn
To feed the winter of the land.
We praise the Life of Light!
Who from the brooding night
Draws out the morning holy, calm, and grand;
Veils up the moon,
Sends out the sun,
To glad the face of all the land.
We praise the Life of Work,
Who from sleep’s lonely dark
Leads forth his children to arise and stand,
Then go their way,
The live-long day,
To trust and labour in the land.
We praise the Life of Good,
Who breaks sin’s lazy mood,
Toilsomely ploughing up the fruitless sand.
The furrowed waste
They leave, and haste
Home, home, to till their Father’s land.
We praise the Life of Life,
Who in this soil of strife
Casts us at birth, like seed from sower’s hand;
To die and so
Like corn to grow
A golden harvest in his land.”
After we had sung this hymn, the meaning of which is far better than the
versification, I preached from the words of St. Paul, “If by any means
I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Not as though I had
already attained, either were already perfect.” And this is something
like what I said to them:
“The world, my friends, is full of resurrections, and it is not always
of the same resurrection that St. Paul speaks. Every night that folds us
up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early and
have seen the first of the dawn, will know it--the day rises out of the
night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life. That
you may feel that the sunrise is a resurrection--the word resurrection
just means a rising again--I will read you a little description of it
from a sermon by a great writer and great preacher called Jeremy Taylor.
Listen. ‘But as when the sun approaching towards the gates of the
morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven and sends away the
spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to
matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the
eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like those which decked
the brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil, because himself
had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the
sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and
then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping
great and little showers, and sets quickly; so is a man’s reason and his
life.’ Is not this a resurrection of the day out of the night? Or hear
how Milton makes his Adam and Eve praise God in the morning,--
‘Ye mists and exhalations that now rise
From hill or streaming lake, dusky or gray,
Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold,
In honour to the world’s great Author rise,
Whether to deck with clouds the uncoloured sky,
Or wet the thirsty earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.’
But it is yet more of a resurrection to you. Think of your own condition
through the night and in the morning. You die, as it were, every night.
The death of darkness comes down over the earth; but a deeper death, the
death of sleep, descends on you. A power overshadows you; your eyelids
close, you cannot keep them open if you would; your limbs lie moveless;
the day is gone; your whole life is gone; you have forgotten everything;
an evil man might come and do with your goods as he pleased; you
are helpless. But the God of the Resurrection is awake all the time,
watching his sleeping men and women, even as a mother who watches her
sleeping baby, only with larger eyes and more full of love than hers;
and so, you know not how, all at once you know that you are what you
are; that there is a world that wants you outside of you, and a God that
wants you inside of you; you rise from the death of sleep, not by your
own power, for you knew nothing about it; God put his hand over your
eyes, and you were dead; he lifted his hand and breathed light on you
and you rose from the dead, thanked the God who raised you up, and went
forth to do your work. From darkness to light; from blindness to
seeing; from knowing nothing to looking abroad on the mighty world; from
helpless submission to willing obedience,--is not this a resurrection
indeed? That St. Paul saw it to be such may be shown from his using
the two things with the same meaning when he says, ‘Awake, thou that
sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.’
No doubt he meant a great deal more. No man who understands what he is
speaking about can well mean only one thing at a time.
“But to return to the resurrections we see around us in nature. Look at
the death that falls upon the world in winter. And look how it revives
when the sun draws near enough in the spring to wile the life in it once
more out of its grave. See how the pale, meek snowdrops come up with
their bowed heads, as if full of the memory of the fierce winds they
encountered last spring, and yet ready in the strength of their weakness
to encounter them again. Up comes the crocus, bringing its gold safe
from the dark of its colourless grave into the light of its parent gold.
Primroses, and anemones, and blue-bells, and a thousand other children
of the spring, hear the resurrection-trumpet of the wind from the west
and south, obey, and leave their graves behind to breathe the air of the
sweet heavens. Up and up they come till the year is glorious with the
rose and the lily, till the trees are not only clothed upon with new
garments of loveliest green, but the fruit-tree bringeth forth its
fruit, and the little children of men are made glad with apples, and
cherries, and hazel-nuts. The earth laughs out in green and gold. The
sky shares in the grand resurrection. The garments of its mourning,
wherewith it made men sad, its clouds of snow and hail and stormy
vapours, are swept away, have sunk indeed to the earth, and are now
humbly feeding the roots of the flowers whose dead stalks they beat upon
all the winter long. Instead, the sky has put on the garments of praise.
Her blue, coloured after the sapphire-floor on which stands the throne
of him who is the Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and glorified
with the pure white of sailing clouds, and at morning and evening
prayer, puts on colours in which the human heart drowns itself with
delight--green and gold and purple and rose. Even the icebergs floating
about in the lonely summer seas of the north are flashing all the
glories of the rainbow. But, indeed, is not this whole world itself a
monument of the Resurrection? The earth was without form and void. The
wind of God moved on the face of the waters, and up arose this fair
world. Darkness was on the face of the deep: God said, ‘Let there be
light,’ and there was light.
“In the animal world as well, you behold the goings of the Resurrection.
Plainest of all, look at the story of the butterfly--so plain that the
pagan Greeks called it and the soul by one name--Psyche. Psyche meant
with them a butterfly or the soul, either. Look how the creeping thing,
ugly to our eyes, so that we can hardly handle it without a shudder,
finding itself growing sick with age, straightway falls a spinning and
weaving at its own shroud, coffin, and grave, all in one--to prepare, in
fact, for its resurrection; for it is for the sake of the resurrection
that death exists. Patiently it spins its strength, but not its life,
away, folds itself up decently, that its body may rest in quiet till the
new body is formed within it; and at length when the appointed hour has
arrived, out of the body of this crawling thing breaks forth the winged
splendour of the butterfly--not the same body--a new one built out of
the ruins of the old--even as St. Paul tells us that it is not the same
body _we_ have in the resurrection, but a nobler body like ourselves,
with all the imperfect and evil thing taken away. No more creeping for
the butterfly; wings of splendour now. Neither yet has it lost the feet
wherewith to alight on all that is lovely and sweet. Think of it--up
from the toilsome journey over the low ground, exposed to the foot of
every passer-by, destroying the lovely leaves upon which it fed, and the
fruit which they should shelter, up to the path at will through the air,
and a gathering of food which hurts not the source of it, a food which
is but as a tribute from the loveliness of the flowers to the yet higher
loveliness of the flower-angel: is not this a resurrection? Its children
too shall pass through the same process, to wing the air of a summer
noon, and rejoice in the ethereal and the pure.
“To return yet again from the human thoughts suggested by the symbol of
the butterfly”--
Here let me pause for a moment--and there was a corresponding pause,
though but momentary, in the sermon as I spoke it--to mention a curious,
and to me at the moment an interesting fact. At this point of my
address, I caught sight of a white butterfly, a belated one, flitting
about the church. Absorbed for a moment, my eye wandered after it.
It was near the bench where my own people sat, and, for one flash of
thought, I longed that the butterfly would alight on my Wynnie, for I
was more anxious about her resurrection at the time than about anything
else. But the butterfly would not. And then I told myself that God
would, and that the butterfly was only the symbol of a grand truth, and
of no private interpretation, to make which of it was both selfishness
and superstition. But all this passed in a flash, and I resumed my
discourse.
--“I come now naturally to speak of what we commonly call the
Resurrection. Some say: ‘How can the same dust be raised again, when it
may be scattered to the winds of heaven?’ It is a question I hardly care
to answer. The mere difficulty can in reason stand for nothing with God;
but the apparent worthlessness of the supposition renders the question
uninteresting to me. What is of import is, that I should stand clothed
upon, with a body which is _my_ body because it serves my ends,
justifies my consciousness of identity by being, in all that was good
in it, like that which I had before, while now it is tenfold capable of
expressing the thoughts and feelings that move within me. How can I care
whether the atoms that form a certain inch of bone should be the same as
those which formed that bone when I died? All my life-time I never felt
or thought of the existence of such a bone! On the other hand, I object
to having the same worn muscles, the same shrivelled skin with which I
may happen to die. Why give me the same body as that? Why not rather my
youthful body, which was strong, and facile, and capable? The matter in
the muscle of my arm at death would not serve to make half the muscle I
had when young. But I thank God that St. Paul says it will _not_ be the
same body. That body dies--up springs another body. I suspect myself
that those are right who say that this body being the seed, the moment
it dies in the soil of this world, that moment is the resurrection of
the new body. The life in it rises out of it in a new body. This is not
after it is put in the mere earth; for it is dead then, and the germ of
life gone out of it. If a seed rots, no new body comes of it. The seed
dies into a new life, and so does man. Dying and rotting are two very
different things.--But I am not sure by any means. As I say, the whole
question is rather uninteresting to me. What do I care about my old
clothes after I have done with them? What is it to me to know what
becomes of an old coat or an old pulpit gown? I have no such clinging
to the flesh. It seems to me that people believe their bodies to be
themselves, and are therefore very anxious about them--and no wonder
then. Enough for me that I shall have eyes to see my friends, a face
that they shall know me by, and a mouth to praise God withal. I leave
the matter with one remark, that I am well content to rise as Jesus
rose, however that was. For me the will of God is so good that I would
rather have his will done than my own choice given me.
“But I now come to the last, because infinitely the most important part
of my subject--the resurrection for the sake of which all the other
resurrections exist--the resurrection unto Life. This is the one
of which St. Paul speaks in my text. This is the one I am most
anxious--indeed, the only one I am anxious to set forth, and impress
upon you.
“Think, then, of all the deaths you know; the death of the night, when
the sun is gone, when friend says not a word to friend, but both lie
drowned and parted in the sea of sleep; the death of the year, when
winter lies heavy on the graves of the children of summer, when the
leafless trees moan in the blasts from the ocean, when the beasts even
look dull and oppressed, when the children go about shivering with cold,
when the poor and improvident are miserable with suffering or think of
such a death of disease as befalls us at times, when the man who says,
‘Would God it were morning!’ changes but his word, and not his tune,
when the morning comes, crying, ‘Would God it were evening!’ when what
life is left is known to us only by suffering, and hope is amongst the
things that were once and are no more--think of all these, think of them
all together, and you will have but the dimmest, faintest picture of the
death from which the resurrection of which I have now to speak, is the
rising. I shrink from the attempt, knowing how weak words are to set
forth _the_ death, set forth _the_ resurrection. Were I to sit down to
yonder organ, and crash out the most horrible dissonances that ever took
shape in sound, I should give you but a weak figure of this death; were
I capable of drawing from many a row of pipes an exhalation of dulcet
symphonies and voices sweet, such as Milton himself could have
invaded our ears withal, I could give you but a faint figure of this
resurrection. Nevertheless, I must try what I can do in my own way.
“If into the face of the dead body, lying on the bed, waiting for its
burial, the soul of the man should begin to dawn again, drawing near
from afar to look out once more at those eyes, to smile once again
through those lips, the change on that face would be indeed great and
wondrous, but nothing for marvel or greatness to that which passes on
the countenance, the very outward bodily face of the man who wakes from
his sleep, arises from the dead and receives light from Christ. Too
often indeed, the reposeful look on the face of the dead body would be
troubled, would vanish away at the revisiting of the restless ghost; but
when a man’s own right true mind, which God made in him, is restored
to him again, and he wakes from the death of sin, then comes the repose
without the death. It may take long for the new spirit to complete
the visible change, but it begins at once, and will be perfected. The
bloated look of self-indulgence passes away like the leprosy of Naaman,
the cheek grows pure, the lips return to the smile of hope instead of
the grin of greed, and the eyes that made innocence shrink and shudder
with their yellow leer grow childlike and sweet and faithful. The
mammon-eyes, hitherto fixed on the earth, are lifted to meet their kind;
the lips that mumbled over figures and sums of gold learn to say words
of grace and tenderness. The truculent, repellent, self-satisfied
face begins to look thoughtful and doubtful, as if searching for some
treasure of whose whereabouts it had no certain sign. The face anxious,
wrinkled, peering, troubled, on whose lines you read the dread of
hunger, poverty, and nakedness, thaws into a smile; the eyes reflect in
courage the light of the Father’s care, the back grows erect under its
burden with the assurance that the hairs of its head are all numbered.
But the face can with all its changes set but dimly forth the rising
from the dead which passes within. The heart, which cared but for
itself, becomes aware of surrounding thousands like itself, in the love
and care of which it feels a dawning blessedness undreamt of before.
From selfishness to love--is not this a rising from the dead? The man
whose ambition declares that his way in the world would be to subject
everything to his desires, to bring every human care, affection, power,
and aspiration to his feet--such a world it would be, and such a king
it would have, if individual ambition might work its will! if a
man’s opinion of himself could be made out in the world, degrading,
compelling, oppressing, doing everything for his own glory!--and such a
glory!--but a pang of light strikes this man to the heart; an arrow of
truth, feathered with suffering and loss and dismay, finds out--the open
joint in his armour, I was going to say--no, finds out the joint in the
coffin where his heart lies festering in a death so dead that itself
calls it life. He trembles, he awakes, he rises from the dead. No more
he seeks the slavery of all: where can he find whom to serve? how can he
become if but a threshold in the temple of Christ, where all serve all,
and no man thinks first of himself? He to whom the mass of his fellows,
as he massed them, was common and unclean, bows before every human
sign of the presence of the making God. The sun, which was to him but
a candle with which to search after his own ends, wealth, power, place,
praise--the world, which was but the cavern where he thus searched--are
now full of the mystery of loveliness, full of the truth of which sun
and wind and land and sea are symbols and signs. From a withered old age
of unbelief, the dim eyes of which refuse the glory of things a passage
to the heart, he is raised up a child full of admiration, wonder, and
gladness. Everything is glorious to him; he can believe, and therefore
he sees. It is from the grave into the sunshine, from the night into
the morning, from death into life. To come out of the ugly into the
beautiful; out of the mean and selfish into the noble and loving; out
of the paltry into the great; out of the false into the true; out of the
filthy into the clean; out of the commonplace into the glorious; out of
the corruption of disease into the fine vigour and gracious movements
of health; in a word, out of evil into good--is not this a resurrection
indeed--_the_ resurrection of all, the resurrection of Life? God grant
that with St. Paul we may attain to this resurrection of the dead.
“This rising from the dead is often a long and a painful process. Even
after he had preached the gospel to the Gentiles, and suffered much for
the sake of his Master, Paul sees the resurrection of the dead
towering grandly before him, not yet climbed, not yet attained unto--a
mountainous splendour and marvel, still shining aloft in the air of
existence, still, thank God, to be attained, but ever growing in height
and beauty as, forgetting those things that are behind, he presses
towards the mark, if by any means he may attain to the resurrection of
the dead. Every blessed moment in which a man bethinks himself that
he has been forgetting his high calling, and sends up to the Father a
prayer for aid; every time a man resolves that what he has been doing he
will do no more; every time that the love of God, or the feeling of
the truth, rouses a man to look first up at the light, then down at the
skirts of his own garments--that moment a divine resurrection is wrought
in the earth. Yea, every time that a man passes from resentment to
forgiveness, from cruelty to compassion, from hardness to tenderness,
from indifference to carefulness, from selfishness to honesty, from
honesty to generosity, from generosity to love,--a resurrection, the
bursting of a fresh bud of life out of the grave of evil, gladdens
the eye of the Father watching his children. Awake, then, thou that
sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give thee light. As
the harvest rises from the wintry earth, so rise thou up from the trials
of this world a full ear in the harvest of Him who sowed thee in the
soil that thou mightest rise above it. As the summer rises from the
winter, so rise thou from the cares of eating and drinking and clothing
into the fearless sunshine of confidence in the Father. As the morning
rises out of the night, so rise thou from the darkness of ignorance
to do the will of God in the daylight; and as a man feels that he is
himself when he wakes from the troubled and grotesque visions of the
night into the glory of the sunrise, even so wilt thou feel that then
first thou knowest what thy life, the gladness of thy being, is. As from
painful tossing in disease, rise into the health of well-being. As from
the awful embrace of thy own dead body, burst forth in thy spiritual
body. Arise thou, responsive to the indwelling will of the Father, even
as thy body will respond to thy indwelling soul.
‘White wings are crossing;
Glad waves are tossing;
The earth flames out in crimson and green:
Spring is appearing,
Summer is nearing--
Where hast thou been?
Down in some cavern,
Death’s sleepy tavern,
Housing, carousing with spectres of night?
The trumpet is pealing
Sunshine and healing--
Spring to the light.’”
With this quotation from a friend’s poem, I closed my sermon, oppressed
with a sense of failure; for ever the marvel of simple awaking, the mere
type of the resurrection eluded all my efforts to fix it in words. I
had to comfort myself with the thought that God is so strong that he can
work even with our failures.
END OF VOL. II.
THE SEABOARD PARISH
BY GEORGE MAC DONALD, LL.D.
VOLUME III.
CONTENTS OF VOL. III.
I. A WALK WITH MY WIFE
II. OUR LAST SHORE-DINNER
III. A PASTORAL VISIT.
IV. THE ART OF NATURE
V. THE SORE SPOT
VI. THE GATHERING STORM.
VII. THE GATHERED STORM.
VIII. THE SHIPWRECK IX. THE FUNERAL
X. THE SERMON.
XI. CHANGED PLANS.
XII. THE STUDIO.
XIII. HOME AGAIN.
CHAPTER I.
A WALK WITH MY WIFE.
The autumn was creeping up on the earth, with winter holding by its
skirts behind; but before I loose my hold of the garments of summer,
I must write a chapter about a walk and a talk I had one night with my
wife. It had rained a good deal during the day, but as the sun went down
the air began to clear, and when the moon shone out, near the full, she
walked the heavens, not “like one that hath been led astray,” but as
“queen and huntress, chaste and fair.”
“What a lovely night it is!” said Ethelwyn, who had come into my
study--where I always sat with unblinded windows, that the night and her
creatures might look in upon me--and had stood gazing out for a moment.
“Shall we go for a little turn?” I said.
“I should like it very much,” she answered. “I will go and put on my
bonnet at once.”
In a minute or two she looked in again, all ready. I rose, laid aside
my Plato, and went with her. We turned our steps along the edge of the
down, and descended upon the breakwater, where we seated ourselves upon
the same spot where in the darkness I had heard the voices of Joe and
Agnes. What a different night it was from that! The sea lay as quiet as
if it could not move for the moonlight that lay upon it. The glory over
it was so mighty in its peacefulness, that the wild element beneath was
afraid to toss itself even with the motions of its natural unrest. The
moon was like the face of a saint before which the stormy people has
grown dumb. The rocks stood up solid and dark in the universal aether,
and the pulse of the ocean throbbed against them with a lapping gush,
soft as the voice of a passionate child soothed into shame of its
vanished petulance. But the sky was the glory. Although no breath moved
below, there was a gentle wind abroad in the upper regions. The air was
full of masses of cloud, the vanishing fragments of the one great vapour
which had been pouring down in rain the most of the day. These masses
were all setting with one steady motion eastward into the abysses of
space; now obscuring the fair moon, now solemnly sweeping away from
before her. As they departed, out shone her marvellous radiance, as
calm as ever. It was plain that she knew nothing of what we called her
covering, her obscuration, the dimming of her glory. She had been busy
all the time weaving her lovely opaline damask on the other side of the
mass in which we said she was swallowed up.
“Have you ever noticed, wifie,” I said, “how the eyes of our
minds--almost our bodily eyes--are opened sometimes to the cubicalness
of nature, as it were?”
“I don’t know, Harry, for I don’t understand your question,” she
answered.
“Well, it was a stupid way of expressing what I meant. No human being
could have understood it from that. I will make you understand in a
moment, though. Sometimes--perhaps generally--we see the sky as a flat
dome, spangled with star-points, and painted blue. _Now_ I see it as an
awful depth of blue air, depth within depth; and the clouds before me
are not passing away to the left, but sinking away from the front of me
into the marvellous unknown regions, which, let philosophers say what
they will about time and space,--and I daresay they are right,--are yet
very awful to me. Thank God, my dear,” I said, catching hold of her arm,
as the terror of mere space grew upon me, “for himself. He is deeper
than space, deeper than time; he is the heart of all the cube of
history.”
“I understand you now, husband,” said my wife.
“I knew you would,” I answered.
“But,” she said again, “is it not something the same with the things
inside us? I can’t put it in words as you do. Do you understand me now?”
“I am not sure that I do. You must try again.”
“You understand me well enough, only you like to make me blunder where
you can talk,” said my wife, putting her hand in mine. “But I will try.
Sometimes, after thinking about something for a long time, you come to
a conclusion about it, and you think you have settled it plain and clear
to yourself, for ever and a day. You hang it upon your wall, like a
picture, and are satisfied for a fortnight. But some day, when you
happen to cast a look at it, you find that instead of hanging flat on
the wall, your picture has gone through it--opens out into some region
you don’t know where--shows you far-receding distances of air and
sea--in short, where you thought one question was settled for ever, a
hundred are opened up for the present hour.”
“Bravo, wife!” I cried in true delight. “I do indeed understand you
now. You have said it better than I could ever have done. That’s the
plague of you women! You have been taught for centuries and centuries
that there is little or nothing to be expected of you, and so you won’t
try. Therefore we men know no more than you do whether it is in you or
not. And when you do try, instead of trying to think, you want to be in
Parliament all at once.”
“Do you apply that remark to me, sir?” demanded Ethelwyn.
“You must submit to bear the sins of your kind upon occasion,” I
answered.
“I am content to do that, so long as yours will help mine,” she replied.
“Then I may go on?” I said, with interrogation.
“Till sunrise if you like. We were talking of the cubicalness--I believe
you called it--of nature.”
“And you capped it with the cubicalness of thought. And quite right
too. There are people, as a dear friend of mine used to say, who are
so accustomed to regard everything in the _flat_, as dogma cut and--not
_always_ dried my moral olfactories aver--that if you prove to them the
very thing they believe, but after another mode than that they have been
accustomed to, they are offended, and count you a heretic. There is no
help for it. Even St. Paul’s chief opposition came from the Judaizing
Christians of his time, who did not believe that God _could_ love the
Gentiles, and therefore regarded him as a teacher of falsehood. We must
not be fierce with them. Who knows what wickedness of their ancestors
goes to account for their stupidity? For that there are stupid people,
and that they are, in very consequence of their stupidity, conceited,
who can deny? The worst of it is, that no man who is conceited can be
convinced of the fact.”
“Don’t say that, Harry. That is to deny conversion.”
“You are right, Ethelwyn. The moment a man is convinced of his folly,
he ceases to be a fool. The moment a man is convinced of his conceit,
he ceases to be conceited. But there _must_ be a final judgment, and the
true man will welcome it, even if he is to appear a convicted fool. A
man’s business is to see first that he is not acting the part of a fool,
and next, to help any honest people who care about the matter to take
heed likewise that they be not offering to pull the mote out of their
brother’s eye. But there are even societies established and supported
by good people for the express purpose of pulling out motes.--‘The
Mote-Pulling Society!’--That ought to take with a certain part of the
public.”
“Come, come, Harry. You are absurd. Such people don’t come near you.”
“They can’t touch me. No. But they come near good people whom I know,
brandishing the long pins with which they pull the motes out, and
threatening them with judgment before their time. They are but pins, to
be sure--not daggers.”
“But you have wandered, Harry, into the narrowest underground, musty
ways, and have forgotten all about ‘the cubicalness of nature.’”
“You are right, my love, as you generally are,” I answered, laughing.
“Look at that great antlered elk, or moose--fit quarry for Diana of the
silver bow. Look how it glides solemnly away into the unpastured depths
of the aerial deserts. Look again at that reclining giant, half raised
upon his arm, with his face turned towards the wilderness. What eyes
they must be under those huge brows! On what message to the nations is
he borne as by the slow sweep of ages, on towards his mysterious goal?”
“Stop, stop, Harry,” said my wife. “It makes me unhappy to hear grand
words clothing only cloudy fancies. Such words ought to be used about
the truth, and the truth only.”
“If I could carry it no further, my dear, then it would indeed be a
degrading of words. But there never was a vagary that uplifted the soul,
or made the grand words flow from the gates of speech, that had not its
counterpart in truth itself. Man can imagine nothing, even in the clouds
of the air, that God has not done, or is not doing. Even as that cloudy
giant yields, and is ‘shepherded by the slow unwilling wind,’ so is each
of us borne onward to an unseen destiny--a glorious one if we will but
yield to the Spirit of God that bloweth where it listeth--with a grand
listing--coming whence we know not, and going whither we know not. The
very clouds of the air are hung up as dim pictures of the thoughts and
history of man.”
“I do not mind how long you talk like that, husband, even if you take
the clouds for your text. But it did make me miserable to think that
what you were saying had no more basis than the fantastic forms which
the clouds assume. I see I was wrong, though.”
“The clouds themselves, in such a solemn stately march as this, used to
make me sad for the very same reason. I used to think, What is it all
for? They are but vapours blown by the wind. They come nowhence, and
they go nowhither. But now I see them and all things as ever moving
symbols of the motions of man’s spirit and destiny.”
A pause followed, during which we sat and watched the marvellous depth
of the heavens, deep as I do not think I ever saw them before or since,
covered with a stately procession of ever-appearing and ever-vanishing
forms--great sculpturesque blocks of a shattered storm--the icebergs
of the upper sea. These were not far off against a blue background, but
floating near us in the heart of a blue-black space, gloriously lighted
by a golden rather than silvery moon. At length my wife spoke.
“I hope Mr. Percivale is out to-night,” she said. “How he must be
enjoying it if he is!”
“I wonder the young man is not returning to his professional labours,” I
said. “Few artists can afford such long holidays as he is taking.”
“He is laying in stock, though, I suppose,” answered my wife.
“I doubt that, my dear. He said not, on one occasion, you may remember.”
“Yes, I remember. But still he must paint better the more familiar he
gets with the things God cares to fashion.”
“Doubtless. But I am afraid the work of God he is chiefly studying at
present is our Wynnie.”
“Well, is she not a worthy object of his study?” returned Ethelwyn,
looking up in my face with an arch expression.
“Doubtless again, Ethel; but I hope she is not studying him quite so
much in her turn. I have seen her eyes following him about.”
My wife made no answer for a moment. Then she said,
“Don’t you like him, Harry?”
“Yes. I like him very much.”
“Then why should you not like Wynnie to like him?”
“I should like to be surer of his principles, for one thing.”
“I should like to be surer of Wynnie’s.”
I was silent. Ethelwyn resumed.
“Don’t you think they might do each other good?”
Still I could not reply.
“They both love the truth, I am sure; only they don’t perhaps know what
it is yet. I think if they were to fall in love with each other, it
would very likely make them both more desirous of finding it still.”
“Perhaps,” I said at last. “But you are talking about awfully serious
things, Ethelwyn.”
“Yes, as serious as life,” she answered.
“You make me very anxious,” I said. “The young man has not, I fear, any
means of gaining a livelihood for more than himself.”
“Why should he before he wanted it? I like to see a man who can be
content with an art and a living by it.”
“I hope I have not been to blame in allowing them to see so much of each
other,” I said, hardly heeding my wife’s words.
“It came about quite naturally,” she rejoined. “If you had opposed
their meeting, you would have been interfering just as if you had been
Providence. And you would have only made them think more about each
other.”
“He hasn’t said anything--has he?” I asked in positive alarm.
“O dear no. It may be all my fancy. I am only looking a little ahead.
I confess I should like him for a son-in-law. I approve of him,” she
added, with a sweet laugh.
“Well,” I said, “I suppose sons-in-law are possible, however
disagreeable, results of having daughters.”
I tried to laugh, but hardly succeeded.
“Harry,” said my wife, “I don’t like you in such a mood. It is not like
you at all. It is unworthy of you.”
“How can I help being anxious when you speak of such dreadful things as
the possibility of having to give away my daughter, my precious wonder
that came to me through you, out of the infinite--the tender little
darling!”
“‘Out of the heart of God,’ you used to say, Henry. Yes, and with a
destiny he had ordained. It is strange to me how you forget your best
and noblest teaching sometimes. You are always telling us to trust in
God. Surely it is a poor creed that will only allow us to trust in
God for ourselves--a very selfish creed. There must be something wrong
there. I should say that the man who can only trust God for himself is
not half a Christian. Either he is so selfish that that satisfies him,
or he has such a poor notion of God that he cannot trust him with what
most concerns him. The former is not your case, Harry: is the latter,
then?--You see I must take my turn at the preaching sometimes. Mayn’t I,
dearest?”
She took my hand in both of hers. The truth arose in my heart. I never
loved my wife more than at that moment. And now I could not speak for
other reasons. I saw that I had been faithless to my God, and the moment
I could command my speech, I hastened to confess it.
“You are right, my dear,” I said, “quite right. I have been wicked, for
I have been denying my God. I have been putting my providence in the
place of his--trying, like an anxious fool, to count the hairs on
Wynnie’s head, instead of being content that the grand loving Father
should count them. My love, let us pray for Wynnie; for what is prayer
but giving her to God and his holy, blessed will?”
We sat hand in hand. Neither spoke aloud for some minutes, but we
spoke in our hearts to God, talking to him about Wynnie. Then we rose
together, and walked homeward, still in silence. But my heart and hand
clung to my wife as to the angel whom God had sent to deliver me out of
the prison of my faithlessness. And as we went, lo! the sky was
glorious again. It had faded from my sight, had grown flat as a dogma,
uninteresting as “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;” the
moon had been but a round thing with the sun shining upon it, and the
stars were only minding their own business. But now the solemn march
towards an unseen, unimagined goal had again begun. Wynnie’s life was
hid with Christ in God. Away strode the cloudy pageant with its banners
blowing in the wind, which blew where it grandly listed, marching as to
a solemn triumphal music that drew them from afar towards the gates of
pearl by which the morning walks out of the New Jerusalem to gladden the
nations of the earth. Solitary stars, with all their sparkles drawn in,
shone, quiet as human eyes, in the deep solemn clefts of dark blue air.
They looked restrained and still, as if they knew all about it--all
about the secret of this midnight march. For the moon--she saw the sun,
and therefore made the earth glad.
“You have been a moon to me this night, my wife,” I said. “You were
looking full at the truth, while I was dark. I saw its light in your
face, and believed, and turned my soul to the sun. And now I am both
ashamed and glad. God keep me from sinning so again.”
“My dear husband, it was only a mood--a passing mood,” said Ethelwyn,
seeking to comfort me.
“It was a mood, and thank God it is now past; but it was a wicked one.
It was a mood in which the Lord might have called me a devil, as he did
St. Peter. Such moods have to be grappled with and fought the moment
they appear. They must not have their way for a single thought even.”
“But we can’t help it always, can we, husband?”
“We can’t help it out and out, because our wills are not yet free with
the freedom God is giving us as fast as we will let him. When we are
able to will thoroughly, then we shall do what we will. At least, I
think we shall. But there is a mystery in it God only understands.
All we know is, that we can struggle and pray. But a mood is an awful
oppression sometimes when you least believe in it and most wish to get
rid of it. It is like a headache in the soul.”
“What do the people do that don’t believe in God?” said Ethelwyn.
The same moment Wynnie, who had seen us pass the window, opened the door
of the bark-house for us, and we passed into Connie’s chamber and found
her lying in the moonlight, gazing at the same heavens as her father and
mother had been revelling in.
CHAPTER II.
OUR LAST SHORE-DINNER.
The next day was very lovely. I think it is the last of the kind of
which I shall have occasion to write in my narrative of the Seaboard
Parish. I wonder if my readers are tired of so much about the common
things of Nature. I reason about it something in this way: We are so
easily affected by the smallest things that are of the unpleasant kind,
that we ought to train ourselves to the influence of those that are of
an opposite nature. The unpleasant ones are like the thorns which make
themselves felt as we scramble--for we often do scramble in a very
undignified manner--through the thickets of life; and, feeling the
thorns, we grumble, and are blind to all but the thorns. The flowers,
and the lovely leaves, and the red berries, and the clusters of
filberts, and the birds’-nests do not force themselves upon our
attention as the thorns do, and the thorns make us forget to look for
them. But a scratch would be forgotten--and that in mental hurts is
often equivalent to a cure, for a forgotten scratch on the mind or heart
will never fester--if we but allowed our being a moment’s repose upon
any of the quiet, waiting, unobtrusive beauties that lie around the
half-trodden way, offering their gentle healing. And when I think how,
not unfrequently, otherwise noble characters are anything but admirable
when under the influence of trifling irritations, the very paltriness of
which seems what the mind, which would at once rouse itself to a noble
endurance of any mighty evil, is unable to endure, I would gladly
help so with sweet antidotes to defeat the fly in the ointment of the
apothecary that the whole pot shall send forth a pure savour. We ought
for this to cultivate the friendships of little things. Beauty is one
of the surest antidotes to vexation. Often when life looked dreary about
me, from some real or fancied injustice or indignity, has a thought of
truth been flashed into my mind from a flower, a shape of frost, or even
a lingering shadow--not to mention such glories as angel-winged clouds,
rainbows, stars, and sunrises. Therefore I hope that in my loving delay
over such aspects of Nature as impressed themselves upon me in this most
memorable part of my history I shall not prove wearisome to my reader,
for therein I should utterly contravene my hope and intent in the
recording of them.
This day there was to be an unusually low tide, and we had reckoned on
enlarging our acquaintance with the bed of the ocean--of knowing a few
yards more of the millions of miles lapt in the mystery of waters. It
was to be low water about two o’clock, and we resolved to dine upon
the sands. But all the morning the children were out playing on the
threshold of old Neptune’s palace; for in his quieter mood he will, like
a fierce mastiff, let children do with him what they will. I gave myself
a whole holiday--sometimes the most precious part of my life both for
myself and those for whom I labour--and wandered about on the shore, now
passing the children, and assailed with a volley of cries and entreaties
to look at this one’s castle and that one’s ditch, now leaving them
behind, with what in its ungraduated flatness might well enough
personate an endless desert of sand between, over the expanse of which I
could imagine them disappearing on a far horizon, whence however a faint
occasional cry of excitement and pleasure would reach my ears. The sea
was so calm, and the shore so gently sloping, that you could hardly tell
where the sand ceased and the sea began--the water sloped to such a thin
pellicle, thinner than any knife-edge, upon the shining brown sand, and
you saw the sand underneath the water to such a distance out. Yet this
depth, which would not drown a red spider, was the ocean. In my mind I
followed that bed of shining sand, bared of its hiding waters, out and
out, till I was lost in an awful wilderness of chasms, precipices, and
mountain-peaks, in whose caverns the sea-serpent may dwell, with his
breath of pestilence; the kraken, with “his skaly rind,” may there be
sleeping
“His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep,”
while
“faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides,”
as he lies
“Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep.”
There may lie all the horrors that Schiller’s diver encountered--the
frightful Molch, and that worst of all, to which he gives no name,
which came creeping with a hundred knots at once; but here are only the
gracious rainbow-woven shells, an evanescent jelly or two, and the queer
baby-crabs that crawl out from the holes of the bordering rocks. What
awful gradations of gentleness lead from such as these down to those
cabins where wallow the inventions of Nature’s infancy, when, like
a child of untutored imagination, she drew on the slate of her fancy
creations in which flitting shadows of beauty serve only to heighten the
shuddering, gruesome horror. The sweet sun and air, the hand of man, and
the growth of the ages, have all but swept such from the upper plains
of the earth. What hunter’s bow has twanged, what adventurer’s rifle has
cracked in those leagues of mountain-waste, vaster than all the upper
world can show, where the beasts of the ocean “graze the sea-weed, their
pasture”! Diana of the silver bow herself, when she descends into
the interlunar caves of hell, sends no such monsters fleeing from
her spells. Yet if such there be, such horrors too must lie in the
undiscovered caves of man’s nature, of which all this outer world is but
a typical analysis. By equally slow gradations may the inner eye descend
from the truth of a Cordelia to the falsehood of an Iago. As these
golden sands slope from the sunlight into the wallowing abyss of
darkness, even so from the love of the child to his holy mother slopes
the inclined plane of humanity to the hell of the sensualist. “But with
one difference in the moral world,” I said aloud, as I paced up and down
on the shimmering margin, “that everywhere in the scale the eye of the
all-seeing Father can detect the first quiver of the eyelid that would
raise itself heavenward, responsive to his waking spirit.” I lifted my
eyes in the relief of the thought, and saw how the sun of the autumn
hung above the waters oppressed with a mist of his own glory; far away
to the left a man who had been clambering on a low rock, inaccessible
save in such a tide, gathering mussels, threw himself into the sea and
swam ashore; above his head the storm-tower stood in the stormless air;
the sea glittered and shone, and the long-winged birds knew not which
to choose, the balmy air or the cool deep, now flitting like arrow-heads
through the one, now alighting eagerly upon the other, to forsake it
anew for the thinner element. I thanked God for his glory.
“O, papa, it’s so jolly--so jolly!” shouted the children as I passed
them again.
“What is it that’s so jolly, Charlie?” I asked.
“My castle,” screeched Harry in reply; “only it’s tumbled down. The
water _would_ keep coming in underneath.”
“I tried to stop it with a newspaper,” cried Charlie, “but it wouldn’t.
So we were forced to let it be, and down it went into the ditch.”
“We blew it up rather than surrender,” said Dora. “We did; only Harry
always forgets, and says it was the water did it.”
I drew near the rock that held the bath. I had never approached it from
this side before. It was high above my head, and a stream of water was
flowing from it. I scrambled up, undressed, and plunged into its dark
hollow, where I felt like one of the sea-beasts of which I had been
dreaming, down in the caves of the unvisited ocean. But the sun was over
my head, and the air with an edge of the winter was about me. I dressed
quickly, descended on the other side of the rock, and wandered again on
the sands to seaward of the breakwater, which lay above, looking dry
and weary, and worn with years of contest with the waves, which had at
length withdrawn defeated to their own country, and left it as if to
victory and a useless age of peace. How different was the scene when a
raving mountain of water filled all the hollow where I now wandered,
and rushed over the top of that mole now so high above me; and I had
to cling to its stones to keep me from being carried off like a bit
of floating sea-weed! This was the loveliest and strangest part of the
shore. Several long low ridges of rock, of whose existence I scarcely
knew, worn to a level with the sand, hollowed and channelled with the
terrible run of the tide across them, and looking like the old and
outworn cheek-teeth of some awful beast of prey, stretched out seawards.
Here and there amongst them rose a well-known rock, but now so changed
in look by being lifted all the height between the base on the waters,
and the second base in the sand, that I wondered at each, walking round
and viewing it on all sides. It seemed almost a fresh growth out of the
garden of the shore, with uncouth hollows around its fungous root, and
a forsaken air about its brows as it stood in the dry sand and looked
seaward. But what made the chief delight of the spot, closed in by
rocks from the open sands, was the multitude of fairy rivers that
flowed across it to the sea. The gladness these streams gave me I cannot
communicate. The tide had filled thousands of hollows in the breakwater,
hundreds of cracked basins in the rocks, huge sponges of sand; from all
of which--from cranny and crack, and oozing sponge--the water flowed in
restricted haste back, back to the sea, tumbling in tiny cataracts
down the faces of the rocks, bubbling from their roots as from wells,
gathering in tanks of sand, and overflowing in broad shallow streams,
curving and sweeping in their sandy channels, just like, the great
rivers of a continent;--here spreading into smooth silent lakes and
reaches, here babbling along in ripples and waves innumerable--flowing,
flowing, to lose their small beings in the same ocean that met on the
other side the waters of the Mississippi, the Orinoco, the Amazon. All
their channels were of golden sand, and the golden sunlight was above
and through and in them all: gold and gold met, with the waters between.
And what gave an added life to their motion was, that all the ripples
made shadows on the clear yellow below them. The eye could not see
the rippling on the surface; but the sun saw it, and drew it in
multitudinous shadowy motion upon the sand, with the play of a thousand
fancies of gold burnished and dead, of sunlight and yellow, trembling,
melting, curving, blending, vanishing ever, ever renewed. It was as if
all the water-marks upon a web of golden silk had been set in wildest
yet most graceful curvilinear motion by the breath of a hundred playful
zephyrs. My eye could not be filled with seeing. I stood in speechless
delight for a while, gazing at the “endless ending” which was “the
humour of the game,” and thinking how in all God’s works the laws of
beauty are wrought out in evanishment, in birth and death. There, there
is no hoarding, but an ever-fresh creating, an eternal flow of life
from the heart of the All-beautiful. Hence even the heart of man cannot
hoard. His brain or his hand may gather into its box and hoard; but the
moment the thing has passed into the box, the heart has lost it and is
hungry again. If man would _have,_ it is the giver he must have; the
eternal, the original, the ever-outpouring is alone within his reach;
the everlasting _creation_ is his heritage. Therefore all that he makes
must be free to come and go through the heart of his child; he can enjoy
it only as it passes, can enjoy only its life, its soul, its vision,
its meaning, not itself. To hoard rubies and sapphires is as useless and
hopeless for the heart, as if I were to attempt to hoard this marvel of
sand and water and sunlight in the same iron chest with the musty deeds
of my wife’s inheritance.
“Father,” I murmured half aloud, “thou alone art, and I am because thou
art. Thy will shall be mine.”
I know that I must have spoken aloud, because I remember the start of
consciousness and discomposure occasioned by the voice of Percivale
greeting me.
“I beg your pardon,” he added; “I did not mean to startle you, Mr.
Walton. I thought you were only looking at Nature’s childplay--not
thinking.”
“I know few things _more_ fit to set one thinking than what you have
very well called Nature’s childplay,” I returned. “Is Nature very
heartless now, do you think, to go on with this kind of thing at our
feet, when away up yonder lies the awful London, with so many sores
festering in her heart?”
“You must answer your own question, Mr. Walton. You know I cannot. I
confess I feel the difficulty deeply. I will go further, and confess
that the discrepancy makes me doubt many things I would gladly believe.
I know _you_ are able to distinguish between a glad unbelief and a
sorrowful doubt.”
“Else were I unworthy of the humblest place in the kingdom--unworthy to
be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,” I answered, and recoiled from
the sound of my own words; for they seemed to imply that I believed
myself worthy of the position I occupied. I hastened to correct them:
“But do not mistake my thoughts,” I said; “I do not dream of worthiness
in the way of honour--only of fitness for the work to be done. For that
I think God has fitted me in some measure. The doorkeeper’s office may
be given him, not because he has done some great deed worthy of the
honour, but because he can sweep the porch and scour the threshold, and
will, in the main, try to keep them clean. That is all the worthiness I
dare to claim, even to hope that I possess.”
“No one who knows you can mistake your words, except wilfully,” returned
Percivale courteously.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now I will just ask you, in reference to the
contrast between human life and nature, how you will go back to your
work in London, after seeing all this child’s and other play of Nature?
Suppose you had had nothing here but rain and high winds and sea-fogs,
would you have been better fitted for doing something to comfort those
who know nothing of such influences than you will be now? One of the
most important qualifications of a sick-nurse is a ready smile. A
long-faced nurse in a sickroom is a visible embodiment and presence of
the disease against which the eager life of the patient is fighting in
agony. Such ought to be banished, with their black dresses and their
mourning-shop looks, from every sick-chamber, and permitted to minister
only to the dead, who do not mind looks. With what a power of life
and hope does a woman--young or old I do not care--with a face of the
morning, a dress like the spring, a bunch of wild flowers in her hand,
with the dew upon them, and perhaps in her eyes too (I don’t object
to that--that is sympathy, not the worship of darkness),--with what a
message from nature and life does she, looking death in the face with a
smile, dawn upon the vision of the invalid! She brings a little health,
a little strength to fight, a little hope to endure, actually lapt in
the folds of her gracious garments; for the soul itself can do more than
any medicine, if it be fed with the truth of life.”
“But are you not--I beg your pardon for interposing on your eloquence
with dull objection,” said Percivale--“are you not begging all the
question? _Is_ life such an affair of sunshine and gladness?”
“If life is not, then I confess all this show of nature is worse than
vanity--it is a vile mockery. Life is gladness; it is the death in
it that makes the misery. We call life-in-death life, and hence the
mistake. If gladness were not at the root, whence its opposite sorrow,
against which we arise, from which we recoil, with which we fight? We
recognise it as death--the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow
but for a recognition of primordial bliss. This in us that fights must
be life. It is of the nature of light, not of darkness; darkness is
nothing until the light comes. This very childplay, as you call it, of
Nature, is her assertion of the secret that life is the deepest, that
life shall conquer death. Those who believe this must bear the good
news to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death. Our Lord has
conquered death--yea, the moral death that he called the world; and now,
having sown the seed of light, the harvest is springing in human hearts,
is springing in this dance of radiance, and will grow and grow until the
hearts of the children of the kingdom shall frolic in the sunlight
of the Father’s presence. Nature has God at her heart; she is but the
garment of the Invisible. God wears his singing robes in a day like
this, and says to his children, ‘Be not afraid: your brothers and
sisters up there in London are in my hands; go and help them. I am with
you. Bear to them the message of joy. Tell them to be of good cheer:
I have overcome the world. Tell them to endure hunger, and not sin; to
endure passion, and not yield; to admire, and not desire. Sorrow and
pain are serving my ends; for by them will I slay sin; and save my
children.’”
“I wish I could believe as you do, Mr. Walton.”
“I wish you could. But God will teach you, if you are willing to be
taught.”
“I desire the truth, Mr. Walton.”
“God bless you! God is blessing you,” I said.
“Amen,” returned Percivale devoutly; and we strolled away together in
silence towards the cliffs.
The recession of the tide allowed us to get far enough away from the
face of the rocks to see the general effect. With the lisping of the
inch-deep wavelets at our heels we stood and regarded the worn yet
defiant, the wasted and jagged yet reposeful face of the guardians of
the shore.
“Who could imagine, in weather like this, and with this baby of a tide
lying behind us, low at our feet, and shallow as the water a schoolboy
pours upon his slate to wash it withal, that those grand cliffs before
us bear on their front the scars and dints of centuries, of chiliads of
stubborn resistance, of passionate contest with this same creature that
is at this moment unable to rock the cradle of an infant? Look behind
you, at your feet, Mr. Percivale; look before you at the chasms, rents,
caves, and hollows of those rocks.”
“I wish you were a painter, Mr. Walton,” he said.
“I wish I were,” I returned. “At least I know I should rejoice in it, if
it had been given me to be one. But why do you say so now?”
“Because you have always some individual predominating idea, which
would give interpretation to Nature while it gave harmony, reality, and
individuality to your representation of her.”
“I know what you mean,” I answered; “but I have no gift whatever in that
direction. I have no idea of drawing, or of producing the effects
of light and shade; though I think I have a little notion of
colour--perhaps about as much as the little London boy, who stopped a
friend of mine once to ask the way to the field where the buttercups
grew, had of nature.”
“I wish I could ask your opinion of some of my pictures.”
“That I should never presume to give. I could only tell you what they
made me feel, or perhaps only think. Some day I may have the pleasure of
looking at them.”
“May I offer you my address?” he said, and took a card from his
pocket-book. “It is a poor place, but if you should happen to think of
me when you are next in London, I shall be honoured by your paying me a
visit.”
“I shall be most happy,” I returned, taking his card.--“Did it ever
occur to you, in reference to the subject we were upon a few minutes
ago, how little you can do without shadow in making a picture?”
“Little indeed,” answered Percivale. “In fact, it would be no picture at
all.”
“I doubt if the world would fare better without its shadows.”
“But it would be a poor satisfaction, with regard to the nature of God,
to be told that he allowed evil for artistic purposes.”
“It would indeed, if you regard the world as a picture. But if you think
of his art as expended, not upon the making of a history or a drama, but
upon the making of an individual, a being, a character, then I think
a great part of the difficulty concerning the existence of evil which
oppresses you will vanish. So long as a creature has not sinned, sin
is possible to him. Does it seem inconsistent with the character of God
that in order that sin should become impossible he should allow sin
to come? that, in order that his creatures should choose the good and
refuse the evil, in order that they might become such, with their
whole nature infinitely enlarged, as to turn from sin with a perfect
repugnance of the will, he should allow them to fall? that, in order
that, from being sweet childish children, they should become noble,
child-like men and women, he should let them try to walk alone?
Why should he not allow the possible in order that it should become
impossible? for possible it would ever have been, even in the midst of
all the blessedness, until it had been, and had been thus destroyed.
Thus sin is slain, uprooted. And the war must ever exist, it seems to
me, where there is creation still going on. How could I be content to
guard my children so that they should never have temptation, knowing
that in all probability they would fail if at any moment it should cross
their path? Would the deepest communion of father and child ever be
possible between us? Evil would ever seem to be in the child, so long
as it was possible it should be there developed. And if this can be said
for the existence of moral evil, the existence of all other evil becomes
a comparative trifle; nay, a positive good, for by this the other is
combated.”
“I think I understand you,” returned Percivale. “I will think over what
you have said. These are very difficult questions.”
“Very. I don’t think argument is of much use about them, except as it
may help to quiet a man’s uneasiness a little, and so give his mind
peace to think about duty. For about the doing of duty there can be no
question, once it is seen. And the doing of duty is the shortest--in
very fact, the only way into the light.”
As we spoke, we had turned from the cliffs, and wandered back across the
salt streams to the sands beyond. From the direction of the house came
a little procession of servants, with Walter at their head, bearing the
preparations for our dinner--over the gates of the lock, down the sides
of the embankment of the canal, and across the sands, in the direction
of the children, who were still playing merrily.
“Will you join our early dinner, which is to be out of doors, as you
see, somewhere hereabout on the sands?” I said.
“I shall be delighted,” he answered, “if you will let me be of some use
first. I presume you mean to bring your invalid out.”
“Yes; and you shall help me to carry her, if you will.”
“That is what I hoped,” said Percivale; and we went together towards the
parsonage.
As we approached, I saw Wynnie sitting at the drawing-room window; but
when we entered the room, she was gone. My wife was there, however.
“Where is Wynnie?” I asked.
“She saw you coming,” she answered, “and went to get Connie ready; for I
guessed Mr. Percivale had come to help you to carry her out.”
But I could not help doubting there might be more than that in Wynnie’s
disappearance. “What if she should have fallen in love with him,” I
thought, “and he should never say a word on the subject? That would be
dreadful for us all.”
They had been repeatedly but not very much together of late, and I was
compelled to allow to myself that if they did fall in love with each
other it would be very natural on both sides, for there was evidently
a great mental resemblance between them, so that they could not help
sympathising with each other’s peculiarities. And anyone could see what
a fine couple they would make.
Wynnie was much taller than Connie--almost the height of her mother.
She had a very fair skin, and brown hair, a broad forehead, a wise,
thoughtful, often troubled face, a mouth that seldom smiled, but on
which a smile seemed always asleep, and round soft cheeks that dimpled
like water when she did smile. I have described Percivale before. Why
should not two such walk together along the path to the gates of the
light? And yet I could not help some anxiety. I did not know anything
of his history. I had no testimony concerning him from anyone that knew
him. His past life was a blank to me; his means of livelihood probably
insufficient--certainly, I judged, precarious; and his position in
society--but there I checked myself: I had had enough of that kind of
thing already. I would not willingly offend in that worldliness again.
The God of the whole earth could not choose that I should look at
such works of his hands after that fashion. And I was his servant--not
Mammon’s or Belial’s.
All this passed through my mind in about three turns of the
winnowing-fan of thought. Mr. Percivale had begun talking to my wife,
who took no pains to conceal that his presence was pleasant to her, and
I went upstairs, almost unconsciously, to Connie’s room.
When I opened the door, forgetting to announce my approach as I ought to
have done, I saw Wynnie leaning over Connie, and Connie’s arm round her
waist. Wynnie started back, and Connie gave a little cry, for the jerk
thus occasioned had hurt her. Wynnie had turned her head away, but
turned it again at Connie’s cry, and I saw a tear on her face.
“My darlings, I beg your pardon,” I said. “It was very stupid of me not
to knock at the door.”
Connie looked up at me with large resting eyes, and said--
“It’s nothing, papa, Wynnie is in one of her gloomy moods, and didn’t
want you to see her crying. She gave me a little pull, that was all.
It didn’t hurt me much, only I’m such a goose! I’m in terror before the
pain comes. Look at me,” she added, seeing, doubtless, some perturbation
on my countenance, “I’m all right now.” And she smiled in my face
perfectly.
I turned to Wynnie, put my arm about her, kissed her cheek, and left the
room. I looked round at the door, and saw that Connie was following me
with her eyes, but Wynnie’s were hidden in her handkerchief.
I went back to the drawing-room, and in a few minutes Walter came to
announce that dinner was about to be served. The same moment Wynnie came
to say that Connie was ready. She did not lift her eyes, or approach to
give Percivale any greeting, but went again as soon as she had given her
message. I saw that he looked first concerned and then thoughtful.
“Come, Mr. Percivale,” I said; and he followed me up to Connie’s room.
Wynnie was not there; but Connie lay, looking lovely, all ready for
going. We lifted her, and carried her by the window out on the down, for
the easiest way, though the longest, was by the path to the breakwater,
along its broad back and down from the end of it upon the sands. Before
we reached the breakwater, I found that Wynnie was following behind us.
We stopped in the middle of it, and set Connie down, as if I wanted
to take breath. But I had thought of something to say to her, which I
wanted Wynnie to hear without its being addressed to her.
“Do you see, Connie,” I said, “how far off the water is?”
“Yes, papa; it is a long way off. I wish I could get up and run down to
it.”
“You can hardly believe that all between, all those rocks, and all that
sand, will be covered before sunset.”
“I know it will be. But it doesn’t _look_ likely, does it, papa!”
“Not the least likely, my dear. Do you remember that stormy night when I
came through your room to go out for a walk in the dark?”
“Remember it, papa? I cannot forget it. Every time I hear the wind
blowing when I wake in the night I fancy you are out in it, and have to
wake myself up’ quite to get rid of the thought.”
“Well, Connie, look down into the great hollow there, with rocks and
sand at the bottom of it, stretching far away.”
“Yes, papa.”
“Now look over the side of your litter. You see those holes all about
between the stones?”
“Yes, papa.”
“Well, one of those little holes saved my life that night, when the
great gulf there was full of huge mounds of roaring water, which rushed
across this breakwater with force enough to sweep a whole cavalry
regiment off its back.”
“Papa!” exclaimed Connie, turning pale.
Then first I told her all the story. And Wynnie listened behind.
“Then I _was_ right in being frightened, papa!” cried Connie, bursting
into tears; for since her accident she could not well command her
feelings.
“You were right in trusting in God, Connie.”
“But you might have been drowned, papa!” she sobbed.
“Nobody has a right to say that anything might have been other than what
has been. Before a thing has happened we can say might or might not; but
that has to do only with our ignorance. Of course I am not speaking
of things wherein we ought to exercise will and choice. That is _our_
department. But this does not look like that now, does it? Think what
a change--from the dark night and the roaring water to this fulness of
sunlight and the bare sands, with the water lisping on their edge away
there in the distance. Now, I want you to think that in life troubles
will come which look as if they would never pass away; the night and the
storm look as if they would last for ever; but the calm and the morning
cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort
of Nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose,
for God is Peace.”
“But if you will excuse me, Mr. Walton,” said Percivale, “you can hardly
expect experience to be of use to any but those who have had it. It
seems to me that its influences cannot be imparted.”
“That depends on the amount of faith in those to whom its results are
offered. Of course, as experience, it can have no weight with another;
for it is no longer experience. One remove, and it ceases. But faith in
the person who has experienced can draw over or derive--to use an old
Italian word--some of its benefits to him who has the faith. Experience
may thus, in a sense, be accumulated, and we may go on to fresh
experience of our own. At least I can hope that the experience of a
father may take the form of hope in the minds of his daughters.
Hope never hurt anyone, never yet interfered with duty; nay, always
strengthens to the performance of duty, gives courage, and clears the
judgment. St. Paul says we are saved by hope. Hope is the most rational
thing in the universe. Even the ancient poets, who believed it was
delusive, yet regarded it as an antidote given by the mercy of the gods
against some, at least, of the ills of life.”
“But they counted it delusive. A wise man cannot consent to be deluded.”
“Assuredly not. The sorest truth rather than a false hope! But what is a
false hope? Only one that ought not to be fulfilled. The old poets could
give themselves little room for hope, and less for its fulfilment; for
what were the gods in whom they believed--I cannot say in whom they
trusted? Gods who did the best their own poverty of being was capable of
doing for men when they gave them the _illusion_ of hope. But I see
they are waiting for us below. One thing I repeat--the waves that
foamed across the spot where we now stand are gone away, have sunk and
vanished.”
“But they will come again, papa,” faltered Wynnie.
“And God will come with them, my love,” I said, as we lifted the litter.
In a few minutes more we were all seated on the sand around a
table-cloth spread upon it. I shall never forgot the peace and the
light outside and in, as far as I was concerned at least, and I hope
the others too, that afternoon. The tide had turned, and the waves were
creeping up over the level, soundless almost as thought; but it would
be time to go home long before they had reached us. The sun was in the
western half of the sky, and now and then a breath of wind came from the
sea, with a slight saw-edge in it, but not enough to hurt. Connie could
stand much more in that way now. And when I saw how she could move
herself on her couch, and thought how much she had improved since first
she was laid upon it, hope for her kept fluttering joyously in my heart.
I could not help fancying even that I saw her move her legs a little;
but I could not be in the least sure; and she, if she did move them,
was clearly unconscious of it. Charles and Harry were every now and then
starting up from their dinner and running off with a shout, to return
with apparently increased appetite for the rest of it; and neither their
mother nor I cared to interfere with the indecorum. Dora alone took
it upon her to rebuke them. Wynnie was very silent, but looked more
cheerful. Connie seemed full of quiet bliss. My wife’s face was a
picture of heavenly repose. The old nurse was walking about with the
baby, occasionally with one hand helping the other servants to wait upon
us. They, too, seemed to have a share in the gladness of the hour, and,
like Ariel, did their spiriting gently.
“This is the will of God,” I said, after the things were removed, and we
had sat for a few moments in silence.
“What is the will of God, husband?” asked Ethelwyn.
“Why, this, my love,” I answered; “this living air, and wind, and sea,
and light, and land all about us; this consenting, consorting harmony of
Nature, that mirrors a like peace in our souls. The perfection of such
visions, the gathering of them all in one was, is, I should say, in the
face of Christ Jesus. You will say that face was troubled sometimes.
Yes, but with a trouble that broke not the music, but deepened the
harmony. When he wept at the grave of Lazarus, you do not think it was
for Lazarus himself, or for his own loss of him, that he wept? That
could not be, seeing he had the power to call him back when he would.
The grief was for the poor troubled hearts left behind, to whom it was
so dreadful because they had not faith enough in his Father, the God
of life and love, who was looking after it all, full of tenderness and
grace, with whom Lazarus was present and blessed. It was the aching,
loving heart of humanity for which he wept, that needed God so awfully,
and could not yet trust in him. Their brother was only hidden in the
skirts of their Father’s garment, but they could not believe that: they
said he was dead--lost--away--all gone, as the children say. And it was
so sad to think of a whole world full of the grief of death, that he
could not bear it without the human tears to help his heart, as they
help ours. It was for our dark sorrows that he wept. But the peace could
be no less plain on the face that saw God. Did you ever think of that
wonderful saying: ‘Again a little while, and ye shall see me, because I
go to the Father’? The heart of man would have joined the ‘because I go
to the Father’ with the former result--the not seeing of him. The heart
of man is not able, without more and more light, to understand that all
vision is in the light of the Father. Because Jesus went to the Father,
therefore the disciples saw him tenfold more. His body no longer in
their eyes, his very being, his very self was in their hearts--not in
their affections only--in their spirits, their heavenly consciousness.”
As I said this, a certain hymn, for which I had and have an especial
affection, came into my mind, and, without prologue or introduction, I
repeated it:
“If I Him but have,
If he be but mine,
If my heart, hence to the grave,
Ne’er forgets his love divine--
Know I nought of sadness,
Feel I nought but worship, love, and gladness.
If I Him but have,
Glad with all I part;
Follow on my pilgrim staff
My Lord only, with true heart;
Leave them, nothing saying,
On broad, bright, and crowded highways straying.
If I Him but have,
Glad I fall asleep;
Aye the flood that his heart gave
Strength within my heart shall keep,
And with soft compelling
Make it tender, through and through it swelling.
If I Him but have,
Mine the world I hail!
Glad as cherub smiling grave,
Holding back the virgin’s veil.
Sunk and lost in seeing,
Earthly fears have died from all my being.
Where I have but Him
Is my Fatherland;
And all gifts and graces come
Heritage into my hand:
Brothers long deplored
I in his disciples find restored.”
“What a lovely hymn, papa!” exclaimed Connie. She could always speak
more easily than either her mother or sister. “Who wrote it?”
“Friedrich von Hardenberg, known, where he is known, as Novalis.”
“But he must have written it in German. Did you translate it?”
“Yes. You will find, I think, that I have kept form, thought, and
feeling, however I may have failed in making an English poem of it.”
“O, you dear papa, it is lovely! Is it long since you did it?”
“Years before you were born, Connie.”
“To think of you having lived so long, and being one of us!” she
returned. “Was he a Roman Catholic, papa?”
“No, he was a Moravian. At least, his parents were. I don’t think he
belonged to any section of the church in particular.”
“But oughtn’t he, papa?”
“Certainly not, my dear, except he saw good reason for it. But what is
the use of asking such questions, after a hymn like that?”