“I’ve nothing to lose,” Percivale had said. “You have a young wife,

Joe.”

“I’ve everything to win,” Joe had returned. “The only thing that makes

me feel a bit faint-hearted over it, is that I’m afraid it’s not my duty

that drives me to it, but the praise of men, leastways of a woman. What

would Aggy think of me if I was to let them drown out there and go to my

bed and sleep? I must go.”

“Very well, Joe,” returned Percivale, “I daresay you are right. You can

row, of course?”

“I can row hard, and do as I’m told,” said Joe.

“All right,” said Percivale; “come along.”

This I heard afterwards. We were now hurrying against the wind towards

the mouth of the canal, some twenty men hauling on the tow-rope. The

critical moment would be in the clearing of the gates, I thought, some

parts of which might remain swinging; but they encountered no difficulty

there, as I heard afterwards. For I remembered that this was not my

post, and turned again to follow the doctor.

“God bless you, my men!” I said, and left them.

They gave a great hurrah, and sped on to meet their fate. I found Turner

in the little public-house, whither they had carried the body. The woman

was quite dead.

“I fear it is an emigrant vessel,” he said.

“Why do you think so?” I asked, in some consternation.

“Come and look at the body,” he said.

It was that of a woman about twenty, tall, and finely formed. The face

was very handsome, but it did not need the evidence of the hands to

prove that she was one of our sisters who have to labour for their

bread.

“What should such a girl be doing on board ship but going out to America

or Australia--to her lover, perhaps,” said Turner. “You see she has

a locket on her neck; I hope nobody will dare to take it off. Some

of these people are not far derived from those who thought a wreck a

Godsend.”

A sound of many feet was at the door just as we turned to leave the

house. They were bringing another body--that of an elderly woman--dead,

quite dead. Turner had ceased examining her, and we were going out

together, when, through all the tumult of the wind and waves, a fierce

hiss, vindictive, wrathful, tore the air over our heads. Far up,

seawards, something like a fiery snake shot from the high ground on the

right side of the bay, over the vessel, and into the water beyond it.

“Thank God! that’s the coastguard,” I cried.

We rushed through the village, and up on the heights, where they had

planted their apparatus. A little crowd surrounded them. How dismal the

sea looked in the struggling moonlight! I felt as if I were wandering

in the mazes of an evil dream. But when I approached the cliff, and saw

down below the great mass, of the vessel’s hulk, with the waves breaking

every moment upon her side, I felt the reality awful indeed. Now and

then there would come a kind of lull in the wild sequence of rolling

waters, and then I fancied for a moment that I saw how she rocked on

the bottom. Her masts had all gone by the board, and a perfect chaos

of cordage floated and swung in the waves that broke over her. But her

bowsprit remained entire, and shot out into the foamy dark, crowded with

human beings. The first rocket had missed. They were preparing to fire

another. Roxton stood with his telescope in his hand, ready to watch the

result.

“This is a terrible job, sir,” he said when I approached him; “I doubt

if we shall save one of them.”

“There’s the life-boat!” I cried, as a dark spot appeared on the waters

approaching the vessel from the other side.

“The life-boat!” he returned with contempt. “You don’t mean to say

they’ve got _her_ out! She’ll only add to the mischief. We’ll have to

save her too.”

She was still some way from the vessel, and in comparatively smooth

water. But between her and the hull the sea raved in madness; the

billows rode over each other, in pursuit, as it seemed, of some

invisible prey. Another hiss, as of concentrated hatred, and the second

rocket was shooting its parabola through the dusky air. Roxton raised

his telescope to his eye the same moment.

“Over her starn!” he cried. “There’s a fellow getting down from the

cat-head to run aft.--Stop, stop!” he shouted involuntarily. “There’s an

awful wave on your quarter.”

His voice was swallowed in the roaring of the storm. I fancied I could

distinguish a dark something shoot from the bows towards the stern. But

the huge wave fell upon the wreck. The same moment Roxton exclaimed--so

coolly as to amaze me, forgetting how men must come to regard familiar

things without discomposure--

“He’s gone! I said so. The next’ll have better luck, I hope.”

That man came ashore alive, though.

All were forward of the foremast. The bowsprit, when I looked through

Roxton’s telescope, was shapeless as with a swarm of bees. Now and then

a single shriek rose upon the wild air. But now my attention was fixed

on the life-boat. She had got into the wildest of the broken water; at

one moment she was down in a huge cleft, the next balanced like a beam

on the knife-edge of a wave, tossed about hither and thither, as if the

waves delighted in mocking the rudder; but hitherto she had shipped no

water. I am here drawing upon the information I have since received;

but I did see how a huge wave, following close upon the back of that on

which she floated, rushed, towered up over her, toppled, and fell upon

the life-boat with tons of water: the moon was shining brightly enough

to show this with tolerable distinctness. The boat vanished. The next

moment, there she was, floating helplessly about, like a living thing

stunned by the blow of the falling wave. The struggle was over. As far

as I could see, every man was in his place; but the boat drifted away

before the storm shore-wards, and the men let her drift. Were they all

killed as they sat? I thought of my Wynnie, and turned to Roxton.

“That wave has done for them,” he said. “I told you it was no use. There

they go.”

“But what is the matter?” I asked. “The men are sitting every man in his

place.”

“I think so,” he answered. “Two were swept overboard, but they caught

the ropes and got in again. But don’t you see they have no oars?”

That wave had broken every one of them off at the rowlocks, and now they

were as helpless as a sponge.

I turned and ran. Before I reached the brow of the hill another rocket

was fired and fell wide shorewards, partly because the wind blew with

fresh fury at the very moment. I heard Roxton say--“She’s breaking up.

It’s no use. That last did for her;” but I hurried off for the other

side of the bay, to see what became of the life-boat. I heard a great

cry from the vessel as I reached the brow of the hill, and turned for a

parting glance. The dark mass had vanished, and the waves were rushing

at will over the space. When I got to the shore the crowd was less. Many

were running, like myself, towards the other side, anxious about the

life-boat. I hastened after them; for Percivale and Joe filled my heart.

They led the way to the little beach in front of the parsonage. It would

be well for the crew if they were driven ashore there, for it was the

only spot where they could escape being dashed on rocks.

There was a crowd before the garden-wall, a bustle, and great confusion

of speech. The people, men and women, boys and girls, were all gathered

about the crew of the life-boat,--which already lay, as if it knew of

nothing but repose, on the grass within.

“Percivale!” I cried, making my way through the crowd.

There was no answer.

“Joe Harper!” I cried again, searching with eager eyes amongst the crew,

to whom everybody was talking.

Still there was no answer; and from the disjointed phrases I heard, I

could gather nothing. All at once I saw Wynnie looking over the wall,

despair in her face, her wide eyes searching wildly through the crowd. I

could not look at her till I knew the worst. The captain was talking

to old Coombes. I went up to him. As soon as he saw me, he gave me his

attention.

“Where is Mr. Percivale?” I asked, with all the calmness I could assume.

He took me by the arm, and drew me out of the crowd, nearer to the

waves, and a little nearer to the mouth of the canal. The tide had

fallen considerably, else there would not have been standing-room,

narrow as it was, which the people now occupied. He pointed in the

direction of the Castle-rock.

“If you mean the stranger gentleman--”

“And Joe Harper, the blacksmith,” I interposed.

“They’re there, sir.”

“You don’t mean those two--just those two--are drowned?” I said.

“No, sir; I don’t say that; but God knows they have little chance.”

I could not help thinking that God might know they were not in the

smallest danger. But I only begged him to tell me where they were.

“Do you see that schooner there, just between you and the Castle-rock?”

“No,” I answered; “I can see nothing. Stay. I fancy I can. But I am

always ready to fancy I see a thing when I am told it is there. I can’t

say I see it.”

“I can, though. The gentleman you mean, and Joe Harper too, are, I

believe, on board of that schooner.”

“Is she aground?”

“O dear no, sir. She’s a light craft, and can swim there well enough.

If she’d been aground, she’d ha’ been ashore in pieces hours ago. But

whether she’ll ride it out, God only knows, as I said afore.”

“How ever did they get aboard of her? I never saw her from the heights

opposite.”

“You were all taken up by the ship ashore, you see, sir. And she don’t

make much show in this light. But there she is, and they’re aboard of

her. And this is how it was.”

He went on to give me his part of the story; but I will now give the

whole of it myself, as I have gathered and pieced it together.

Two men had been swept overboard, as Roxton said--one of them was

Percivale--but they had both got on board again, to drift, oarless, with

the rest--now in a windless valley--now aloft on a tempest-swept hill of

water--away towards a goal they knew not, neither had chosen, and which

yet they could by no means avoid.

A little out of the full force of the current, and not far from the

channel of the small stream, which, when the tide was out, flowed across

the sands nearly from the canal gates to the Castle-rock, lay a little

schooner, belonging to a neighbouring port, Boscastle, I think, which,

caught in the storm, had been driven into the bay when it was almost

dark, some considerable time before the great ship. The master, however,

knew the ground well. The current carried him a little out of the wind,

and would have thrown him upon the rocks next, but he managed to drop

anchor just in time, and the cable held; and there the little schooner

hung in the skirts of the storm, with the jagged teeth of the rocks

within an arrow flight. In the excitement of the great wreck, no one had

observed the danger of the little coasting bird. If the cable held till

the tide went down, and the anchor did not drag, she would be safe; if

not, she must be dashed to pieces.

In the schooner were two men and a boy: two men had been washed

overboard an hour or so before they reached the bay. When they had

dropped their anchor, they lay down exhausted on the deck. Indeed they

were so worn out that they had been unable to drop their sheet anchor,

and were holding on only by their best bower. Had they not been a good

deal out of the wind, this would have been useless. Even if it held she

was in danger of having her bottom stove in by bumping against the sands

as the tide went out. But that they had not to think of yet. The moment

they lay down they fell fast asleep in the middle of the storm. While

they slept it increased in violence.

Suddenly one of them awoke, and thought he saw a vision of angels. For

over his head faces looked down upon him from the air--that is, from the

top of a great wave. The same moment he heard a voice, two of the angels

dropped on the deck beside him, and the rest vanished. Those angels were

Percivale and Joe. And angels they were, for they came just in time,

as all angels do--never a moment too soon or a moment too late: the

schooner _was_ dragging her anchor. This was soon plain even to the less

experienced eyes of the said angels.

But it did not take them many minutes now to drop their strongest

anchor, and they were soon riding in perfect safety for some time to

come.

One of the two men was the son of old Coombes, the sexton, who was

engaged to marry the girl I have spoken of in the end of the fourth

chapter in the second volume.

Percivale’s account of the matter, as far as he was concerned, was, that

as they drifted helplessly along, he suddenly saw from the top of a huge

wave the little vessel below him. They were, in fact, almost upon the

rigging. The wave on which they rode swept the quarter-deck of the

schooner.

Percivale says the captain of the lifeboat called out “Aboard!” The

captain said he remembered nothing of the sort. If he did, he must

have meant it for the men on the schooner to get on board the lifeboat.

Percivale, however, who had a most chivalrous (ought I not to say

Christian?) notion of obedience, fancying the captain meant them to

board the schooner, sprang at her fore-shrouds. Thereupon the wave

sweeping them along the schooner’s side, Joe sprang at the main-shrouds,

and they dropped on the deck together.

But although my reader is at ease about their fate, we who were in the

affair were anything but easy at the time corresponding to this point of

the narrative. It was a terrible night we passed through.

When I returned, which was almost instantly, for I could do nothing by

staring out in the direction of the schooner, I found that the crowd was

nearly gone. One little group alone remained behind, the centre of which

was a woman. Wynnie had disappeared. The woman who remained behind was

Agnes Harper.

The moon shone out clear as I approached the group; indeed, the clouds

were breaking-up and drifting away off the heavens. The storm had raved

out its business, and was departing into the past.

“Agnes,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, and looked up as if waiting for a command.

There was no colour in her cheeks or in her lips--at least it seemed so

in the moonlight--only in her eyes. But she was perfectly calm. She

was leaning against the low wall, with her hands clasped, but hanging

quietly down before her.

“The storm is breaking-up, Agnes,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” she answered in the same still tone. Then, after just a

moment’s pause, she spoke out of her heart.

“Joe’s at his duty, sir?”

I have given the utterance a point of interrogation; whether she meant

that point I am not quite sure.

“Indubitably,” I returned. “I have such faith in Joe, that I should be

sure of that in any case. At all events, he’s not taking care of his own

life. And if one is to go wrong, I would ten thousand times rather err

on that side. But I am sure Joe has been doing right, and nothing else.”

“Then there’s nothing to be said, sir, is there?” she returned, with a

sigh that sounded as of relief.

I presume some of the surrounding condolers had been giving her Job’s

comfort by blaming her husband.

“Do you remember, Agnes, what the Lord said to his mother when she

reproached him with having left her and his father?”

“I can’t remember anything at this moment, sir,” was her touching

answer.

“Then I will tell you. He said, ‘Why did you look for me? Didn’t you

know that I must be about something my Father had given me to do?’ Now,

Joe was and is about his Father’s business, and you must not be anxious

about him. There could be no better reason for not being anxious.”

Agnes was a very quiet woman. When without a word she took my hand and

kissed it, I felt what a depth there was in the feeling she could not

utter. I did not withdraw my hand, for I knew that would be to rebuke

her love for Joe.

“Will you come in and wait?” I said indefinitely.

“No, thank you, sir. I must go to my mother. God will look after Joe,

won’t he, sir?”

“As sure as there is a God, Agnes,” I said; and she went away without

another word.

I put my hand on the top of the wall and jumped over. I started back

with terror, for I had almost alighted on the body of a woman lying

there. The first insane suggestion was that it had been cast ashore; but

the next moment I knew that it was my own Wynnie.

She had not even fainted. She was lying with her handkerchief stuffed

into her mouth to keep her from screaming. When I uttered her name

she rose, and, without looking at me, walked away towards the house. I

followed. She went straight to her own room and shut the door. I went to

find her mother. She was with Connie, who was now awake, lying pale and

frightened. I told Ethelwyn that Percivale and Joe were on board the

little schooner, which was holding on by her anchor, that Wynnie was in

terror about Percivale, that I had found her lying on the wet grass, and

that she must get her into a warm bath and to bed. We went together to

her room.

She was standing in the middle of the floor, with her hands pressed

against her temples.

“Wynnie,” I said, “our friends are not drowned. I think you will see

them quite safe in the morning. Pray to God for them.”

She did not hear a word.

“Leave her with me,” said Ethelwyn, proceeding to undress her; “and tell

nurse to bring up the large bath. There is plenty of hot water in the

boiler. I gave orders to that effect, not knowing what might happen.”

Wynnie shuddered as her mother said this; but I waited no longer, for

when Ethelwyn spoke everyone felt her authority. I obeyed her, and then

went to Connie’s room.

“Do you mind being left alone a little while?” I asked her.

“No, papa; only--are they all drowned?” she said with a shudder.

“I hope not, my dear; but be sure of the mercy of God, whatever you

fear. You must rest in him, my love; for he is life, and will conquer

death both in the soul and in the body.”

“I was not thinking of myself, papa.”

“I know that, my dear. But God is thinking of you and every creature

that he has made. And for our sakes you must be quiet in heart, that you

may get better, and be able to help us.”

“I will try, papa,” she said; and, turning slowly on her side, she lay

quite still.

Dora and the boys were all fast asleep, for it was very late. I cannot,

however, say what hour it was.

Telling nurse to be on the watch because Connie was alone, I went again

to the beach. I called first, however, to inquire after Agnes. I found

her quite composed, sitting with her parents by the fire, none of them

doing anything, scarcely speaking, only listening intently to the sounds

of the storm now beginning to die away.

I next went to the place where I had left Turner. Five bodies lay there,

and he was busy with a sixth. The surgeon of the place was with him, and

they quite expected to recover this man.

I then went down to the sands. An officer of the revenue was taking

charge of all that came ashore--chests, and bales, and everything. For

a week the sea went on casting out the fragments of that which she had

destroyed. I have heard that, for years after, the shifting of the sands

would now and then discover things buried that night by the waves.

All the next day the bodies kept coming ashore, some peaceful as in

sleep, others broken and mutilated. Many were cast upon other parts

of the coast. Some four or five only, all men, were recovered. It was

strange to me how I got used to it. The first horror over, the cry that

yet another body had come awoke only a gentle pity--no more dismay or

shuddering. But, finding I could be of no use, I did not wait longer

than just till the morning began to dawn with a pale ghastly light over

the seething raging sea; for the sea raged on, although the wind had

gone down. There were many strong men about, with two surgeons and all

the coastguard, who were well accustomed to similar though not such

extensive destruction. The houses along the shore were at the disposal

of any who wanted aid; the Parsonage was at some distance; and I confess

that when I thought of the state of my daughters, as well as remembered

former influences upon my wife, I was very glad to think there was no

necessity for carrying thither any of those whom the waves cast on the

shore.

When I reached home, and found Wynnie quieter and Connie again asleep, I

walked out along our own downs till I came whence I could see the little

schooner still safe at anchor. From her position I concluded--correctly

as I found afterwards--that they had let out her cable far enough to

allow her to reach the bed of the little stream, where the tide would

leave her more gently. She was clearly out of all danger now; and if

Percivale and Joe had got safe on board of her, we might confidently

expect to see them before many hours were passed. I went home with the

good news.

For a few moments I doubted whether I should tell Wynnie, for I could

not know with any certainty that Percivale was in the schooner. But

presently I recalled former conclusions to the effect that we have no

right to modify God’s facts for fear of what may be to come. A little

hope founded on a present appearance, even if that hope should never be

realised, may be the very means of enabling a soul to bear the weight of

a sorrow past the point at which it would otherwise break down. I would

therefore tell Wynnie, and let her share my expectation of deliverance.

I think she had been half-asleep, for when I entered her room she

started up in a sitting posture, looking wild, and putting her hands to

her head.

“I have brought you good news, Wynnie,” I said. “I have been out on the

downs, and there is light enough now to see that the little schooner is

quite safe.”

“What schooner?” she asked listlessly, and lay down again, her eyes

still staring, awfully unappeased.

“Why the schooner they say Percivale got on board.”

“He isn’t drowned then!” she cried with a choking voice, and put her

hands to her face and burst into tears and sobs.

“Wynnie,” I said, “look what your faithlessness brings upon you.

Everybody but you has known all night that Percivale and Joe Harper are

probably quite safe. They may be ashore in a couple of hours.”

“But you don’t know it. He may be drowned yet.”

“Of course there is room for doubt, but none for despair. See what a

poor helpless creature hopelessness makes you.”

“But how can I help it, papa?” she asked piteously. “I am made so.”

But as she spoke the dawn was clear upon the height of her forehead.

“You are not made yet, as I am always telling you; and God has ordained

that you shall have a hand in your own making. You have to consent, to

desire that what you know for a fault shall be set right by his loving

will and spirit.”

“I don’t know God, papa.”

“Ah, my dear, that is where it all lies. You do not know him, or you

would never be without hope.”

“But what am I to do to know him!” she asked, rising on her elbow.

The saving power of hope was already working in her. She was once more

turning her face towards the Life.

“Read as you have never read before about Christ Jesus, my love. Read

with the express object of finding out what God is like, that you may

know him and may trust him. And now give yourself to him, and he will

give you sleep.”

“What are we to do,” I said to my wife, “if Percivale continue silent?

For even if he be in love with her, I doubt if he will speak.”

“We must leave all that, Harry,” she answered.

She was turning on myself the counsel I had been giving Wynnie. It is

strange how easily we can tell our brother what he ought to do, and yet,

when the case comes to be our own, do precisely as we had rebuked him

for doing. I lay down and fell fast asleep.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FUNERAL.

It was a lovely morning when I woke once more. The sun was flashing back

from the sea, which was still tossing, but no longer furiously, only as

if it wanted to turn itself every way to flash the sunlight about. The

madness of the night was over and gone; the light was abroad, and the

world was rejoicing. When I reached the drawing-room, which afforded

the best outlook over the shore, there was the schooner lying dry on the

sands, her two cables and anchors stretching out yards behind her;

but half way between the two sides of the bay rose a mass of something

shapeless, drifted over with sand. It was all that remained together of

the great ship that had the day before swept over the waters like a live

thing with wings--of all the works of man’s hands the nearest to the

shape and sign of life. The wind had ceased altogether, only now and

then a little breeze arose which murmured “I am very sorry,” and lay

down again. And I knew that in the houses on the shore dead men and

women were lying.

I went down to the dining-room. The three children were busy at their

breakfast, but neither wife, daughter, nor visitor had yet appeared. I

made a hurried meal, and was just rising to go and inquire further into

the events of the night, when the door opened, and in walked Percivale,

looking very solemn, but in perfect health and well-being. I grasped his

hand warmly.

“Thank God,” I said, “that you are returned to us, Percivale.”

“I doubt if that is much to give thanks for,” he said.

“We are the judges of that,” I rejoined. “Tell me all about it.”

While he was narrating the events I have already communicated, Wynnie

entered. She started, turned pale and then very red, and for a moment

hesitated in the doorway.

“Here is another to rejoice at your safety, Percivale,” I said.

Thereupon he stepped forward to meet her, and she gave him her hand with

an emotion so evident that I felt a little distressed--why, I could not

easily have told, for she looked most charming in the act,--more lovely

than I had ever seen her. Her beauty was unconsciously praising God, and

her heart would soon praise him too. But Percivale was a modest man, and

I think attributed her emotion to the fact that he had been in danger in

the way of duty,--a fact sufficient to move the heart of any good woman.

She sat down and began to busy herself with the teapot. Her hand

trembled. I requested Percivale to begin his story once more; and he

evidently enjoyed recounting to her the adventures of the night.

I asked him to sit down and have a second breakfast while I went into

the village, whereto he seemed nothing loth.

As I crossed the floor of the old mill to see how Joe was, the head of

the sexton appeared emerging from it. He looked full of weighty solemn

business. Bidding me good-morning, he turned to the corner where his

tools lay, and proceeded to shoulder spade and pickaxe.

“Ah, Coombes! you’ll want them,” I said.

“A good many o’ my people be come all at once, you see, sir,” he

returned. “I shall have enough ado to make ‘em all comfortable like.”

“But you must get help, you know; you can never make them all

comfortable yourself alone.”

“We’ll see what I can do,” he returned. “I ben’t a bit willin’ to let no

one do my work for me, I do assure you, sir.”

“How many are there wanting your services?” I asked.

“There be fifteen of them now, and there be more, I don’t doubt, on the

way.”

“But you won’t think of making separate graves for them all,” I said.

“They died together: let them lie together.”

The old man set down his tools, and looked me in the face with

indignation. The face was so honest and old, that, without feeling I had

deserved it, I yet felt the rebuke.

“How would you like, sir,” he said, at length, “to be put in the same

bed with a lot of people you didn’t know nothing about?”

I knew the old man’s way, and that any argument which denied the premiss

of his peculiar fancy was worse than thrown away upon him. I therefore

ventured no farther than to say that I had heard death was a leveller.

“That be very true; and, mayhap, they mightn’t think of it after they’d

been down awhile--six weeks, mayhap, or so. But anyhow, it can’t be

comfortable for ‘em, poor things. One on ‘em be a baby: I daresay he’d

rather lie with his mother. The doctor he say one o’ the women be a

mother. I don’t know,” he went on reflectively, “whether she be the

baby’s own mother, but I daresay neither o’ them ‘ll mind it if I take

it for granted, and lay ‘em down together. So that’s one bed less.”

One thing was clear, that the old man could not dig fourteen graves

within the needful time. But I would not interfere with his office in

the church, having no reason to doubt that he would perform its duties

to perfection. He shouldered his tools again and walked out. I descended

the stair, thinking to see Joe; but there was no one there but the old

woman.

“Where are Joe and Agnes?” I asked.

“You see, sir, Joe had promised a little job of work to be ready to-day,

and so he couldn’t stop. He did say Agnes needn’t go with him; but she

thought she couldn’t part with him so soon, you see, sir.”

“She had received him from the dead--raised to life again,” I said; “it

was most natural. But what a fine fellow Joe is; nothing will make him

neglect his work!”

“I tried to get him to stop, sir, saying he had done quite enough last

night for all next day; but he told me it was his business to get the

tire put on Farmer Wheatstone’s cart-wheel to-day just as much as it was

his business to go in the life-boat yesterday. So he would go, and Aggy

wouldn’t stay behind.”

“Fine fellow, Joe!” I said, and took my leave.

As I drew near the village, I heard the sound of hammering and sawing,

and apparently everything at once in the way of joinery; they were

making the coffins in the joiners’ shops, of which there were two in the

place.

I do not like coffins. They seem to me relics of barbarism. If I had my

way, I would have the old thing decently wound in a fair linen cloth,

and so laid in the bosom of the earth, whence it was taken. I would have

it vanish, not merely from the world of vision, but from the world

of form, as soon as may be. The embrace of the fine life-hoarding,

life-giving mould, seems to me comforting, in the vague, foolish fancy

that will sometimes emerge from the froth of reverie--I mean, of

subdued consciousness remaining in the outworn frame. But the coffin is

altogether and vilely repellent. Of this, however, enough, I hate even

the shadow of sentiment, though some of my readers, who may not yet have

learned to distinguish between sentiment and feeling, may wonder how I

dare to utter such a barbarism.

I went to the house of the county magistrate hard by, for I thought

something might have to be done in which I had a share. I found that

he had sent a notice of the loss of the vessel to the Liverpool papers,

requesting those who might wish to identify or claim any of the bodies

to appear within four days at Kilkhaven.

This threw the last upon Saturday, and before the end of the week it was

clear that they must not remain above ground over Sunday. I therefore

arranged that they should be buried late on the Saturday night.

On the Friday morning, a young woman and an old man, unknown to each

other, arrived by the coach from Barnstaple. They had come to see the

last of their friends in this world; to look, if they might, at the

shadow left behind by the departing soul. For as the shadow of any

object remains a moment upon the magic curtain of the eye after the

object itself has gone, so the shadow of the soul, namely, the body,

lingers a moment upon the earth after the object itself has gone to

the “high countries.” It was well to see with what a sober sorrow the

dignified little old man bore his grief. It was as if he felt that the

loss of his son was only for a moment. But the young woman had taken on

the hue of the corpse she came to seek. Her eyes were sunken as if with

the weight of the light she cared not for, and her cheeks had already

pined away as if to be ready for the grave. A being thus emptied of its

glory seized and possessed my thoughts. She never even told us whom she

came seeking, and after one involuntary question, which simply received

no answer, I was very careful not even to approach another. I do not

think the form she sought was there; and she may have gone home with

the lingering hope to cast the gray aurora of a doubtful dawn over her

coming days, that, after all, that one had escaped.

On the Friday afternoon, with the approbation of the magistrate, I had

all the bodies removed to the church. Some in their coffins, others

on stretchers, they were laid in front of the communion-rail. In the

evening these two went to see them. I took care to be present. The old

man soon found his son. I was at his elbow as he walked between the rows

of the dead. He turned to me and said quietly--

“That’s him, sir. He was a good lad. God rest his soul. He’s with his

mother; and if I’m sorry, she’s glad.”

With that he smiled, or tried to smile. I could only lay my hand on his

arm, to let him know that I understood him, and was with him. He walked

out of the church, sat down, upon a stone, and stared at the mould of a

new-made grave in front of him. What was passing behind those eyes God

only knew--certainly the man himself did not know. Our lightest thoughts

are of more awful significance than the most serious of us can imagine.

For the young woman, I thought she left the church with a little light

in her eyes; but she had said nothing. Alas! that the body was not there

could no more justify her than Milton in letting her

“frail thoughts dally with false surmise.”

With him, too, she might well add--

“Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away.”

But God had them in his teaching, and all I could do was to ask them

to be my guests till the funeral and the following Sunday were over.

To this they kindly consented, and I took them to my wife, who received

them like herself, and had in a few minutes made them at home with her,

to which no doubt their sorrow tended, for that brings out the relations

of humanity and destroys its distinctions.

The next morning a Scotchman of a very decided type, originally from

Aberdeen, but resident in Liverpool, appeared, seeking the form of

his daughter. I had arranged that whoever came should be brought to me

first. I went with him to the church. He was a tall, gaunt, bony man,

with long arms and huge hands, a rugged granite-like face, and a slow

ponderous utterance, which I had some difficulty in understanding. He

treated the object of his visit with a certain hardness, and at the same

time lightness, which also I had some difficulty in understanding.

“You want to see the--” I said, and hesitated.

“Ow ay--the boadies,” he answered. “She winna be there, I daursay, but I

wad jist like to see; for I wadna like her to be beeried gin sae be ‘at

she was there, wi’oot biddin’ her good-bye like.”

When we reached the church, I opened the door and entered. An awe fell

upon me fresh and new. The beautiful church had become a tomb: solemn,

grand, ancient, it rose as a memorial of the dead who lay in peace

before her altar-rail, as if they had fled thither for sanctuary from a

sea of troubles. And I thought with myself, Will the time ever come when

the churches shall stand as the tombs of holy things that have passed

away, when Christ shall have rendered up the kingdom to his Father, and

no man shall need to teach his neighbour or his brother, saying, “Know

the Lord”? The thought passed through my mind and vanished, as I led my

companion up to the dead. He glanced at one and another, and passed on.

He had looked at ten or twelve ere he stopped, gazing on the face of the

beautiful form which had first come ashore. He stooped and stroked the

white cheeks, taking the head in his great rough hands, and smoothed the

brown hair tenderly, saying, as if he had quite forgotten that she was

dead--

“Eh, Maggie! hoo cam _ye_ here, lass?”

Then, as if for the first time the reality had grown comprehensible, he

put his hands before his face, and burst into tears. His huge frame was

shaken with sobs for one long minute, while I stood looking on with awe

and reverence. He ceased suddenly, pulled a blue cotton handkerchief

with yellow spots on it--I see it now--from his pocket, rubbed his face

with it as if drying it with a towel, put it back, turned, and said,

without looking at me, “I’ll awa’ hame.”

“Wouldn’t you like a piece of her hair?” I asked.

“Gin ye please,” he answered gently, as if his daughter’s form had been

mine now, and her hair were mine to give.

By the vestry door sat Mrs. Coombes, watching the dead, with her sweet

solemn smile, and her constant ministration of knitting.

“Have you got a pair of scissors there, Mrs. Coombes?” I asked.

“Yes, to be sure, sir,” she answered, rising, and lifting a huge pair by

the string suspending them from her waist.

“Cut off a nice piece of this beautiful hair,” I said.

She lifted the lovely head, chose, and cut off a long piece, and handed

it respectfully to the father.

He took it without a word, sat down on the step before the

communion-rail, and began to smooth out the wonderful sleave of dusky

gold. It was, indeed, beautiful hair. As he drew it out, I thought it

must be a yard long. He passed his big fingers through and through it,

but tenderly, as if it had been still growing on the live lovely head,

stopping every moment to pick out the bits of sea-weed and shells, and

shake out the sand that had been wrought into its mass. He sat thus for

nearly half-an-hour, and we stood looking on with something closely akin

to awe. At length he folded it up, drew from his pocket an old black

leather book, laid it carefully in the innermost pocket, and rose. I led

the way from the church, and he followed me.

Outside the church, he laid his hand on my arm, and said, groping with

his other hand in his trousers-pocket--

“She’ll hae putten ye to some expense--for the coffin an’ sic like.”

“We’ll talk about that afterwards,” I answered. “Come home with me now,

and have some refreshment.”

“Na, I thank ye. I hae putten ye to eneuch o’ tribble already. I’ll jist

awa’ hame.”

“We are going to lay them down this evening. You won’t go before the

funeral. Indeed, I think you can’t get away till Monday morning. My wife

and I will be glad of your company till then.”

“I’m no company for gentle-fowk, sir.”

“Come and show me in which of these graves you would like to have her

laid,” I said.

He yielded and followed me.

Coombes had not dug many spadefuls before he saw what had been plain

enough--that ten such men as he could not dig the graves in time. But

there was plenty of help to be had from the village and the neighbouring

farms. Most of them were now ready, but a good many men were still at

work. The brown hillocks lay all about the church-yard--the mole-heaps

of burrowing Death.

The stranger looked around him. His face grew critical. He stepped a

little hither and thither. At length he turned to me and said--

“I wadna like to be greedy; but gin ye wad lat her lie next the kirk

there--i’ that neuk, I wad tak’ it kindly. And syne gin ever it cam’

aboot that I cam’ here again, I wad ken whaur she was. Could ye get

a sma’ bit heidstane putten up? I wad leave the siller wi’ ye to pay

for’t.”

“To be sure I can. What will you have put on the stone?”

“Ow jist--let me see--Maggie Jamieson--nae Marget, but jist Maggie. She

was aye Maggie at home. Maggie Jamieson, frae her father. It’s the last

thing I can gie her. Maybe ye micht put a verse o’ Scripter aneath’t, ye

ken.”

“What verse would you like?”

He thought for a little.

“Isna there a text that says, ‘The deid shall hear his voice’?”

“Yes: ‘The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God.’”

“Ay. That’s it. Weel, jist put that on.--They canna do better than hear

his voice,” he added, with a strange mixture of Scotch ratiocination.

I led the way home, and he accompanied me without further objection or

apology. After dinner, I proposed that we should go upon the downs, for

the day was warm and bright. We sat on the grass. I felt that I could

not talk to them as from myself. I knew nothing of the possible gulfs

of sorrow in their hearts. To me their forms seemed each like a hill

in whose unseen bosom lay a cavern of dripping waters, perhaps with a

subterranean torrent of anguish raving through its hollows and tumbling

down hidden precipices, whose voice God only heard, and God only could

still. This daughter _might_, though from her face I did not think it,

have gone away against her father’s will. That son _might_ have been a

ne’er-do-well at home--how could I tell? The woman _might_ be looking

for the lover that had forsaken her--I could not divine. I would speak

no words of my own. The Son of God had spoken words of comfort to

his mourning friends, when he was the present God and they were the

forefront of humanity; I would read some of the words he spoke. From

them the human nature in each would draw what comfort it could. I took

my New Testament from my pocket, and said, without any preamble,

“When our Lord was going to die, he knew that his friends loved

him enough to be very wretched about it. He knew that they would be

overwhelmed for a time with trouble. He knew, too, that they could not

believe the glad end of it all, to which end he looked, across the awful

death that awaited him--a death to which that of our friends in the

wreck was ease itself. I will just read to you what he said.”

I read from the fourteenth to the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s

Gospel. I knew there were worlds of meaning in the words into which I

could hardly hope any of them would enter. But I knew likewise that the

best things are just those from which the humble will draw the truth

they are capable of seeing. Therefore I read as for myself, and left

it to them to hear for themselves. Nor did I add any word of comment,

fearful of darkening counsel by words without knowledge. For the Bible

is awfully set against what is not wise.

When I had finished, I closed the book, rose from the grass, and walked

towards the brow of the shore. They rose likewise and followed me. I

talked of slight things; the tone was all that communicated between us.

But little of any sort was said. The sea lay still before us, knowing

nothing of the sorrow it had caused.

We wandered a little way along the cliff. The burial-service was at

seven o’clock.

“I have an invalid to visit out in this direction,” I said; “would you

mind walking with me? I shall not stay more than five minutes, and we

shall get back just in time for tea.”

They assented kindly. I walked first with one, then with another; heard

a little of the story of each; was able to say a few words of sympathy,

and point, as it were, a few times towards the hills whence cometh our

aid. I may just mention here, that since our return to Marshmallows I

have had two of them, the young woman and the Scotchman, to visit us

there.

The bell began to toll, and we went to church. My companions placed

themselves near the dead. I went into the vestry till the appointed

hour. I thought as I put on my surplice how, in all religions but the

Christian, the dead body was a pollution to the temple. Here the church

received it, as a holy thing, for a last embrace ere it went to the

earth.

As the dead were already in the church, the usual form could not be

carried out. I therefore stood by the communion-table, and there began

to read, “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that

believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever

liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

I advanced, as I read, till I came outside the rails and stood before

the dead. There I read the Psalm, “Lord, thou hast been our refuge,” and

the glorious lesson, “Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the

first-fruits of them that slept.” Then the men of the neighbourhood

came forward, and in long solemn procession bore the bodies out of the

church, each to its grave. At the church-door I stood and read, “Man

that is born of a woman;” then went from one to another of the graves,

and read over each, as the earth fell on the coffin-lid, “Forasmuch as

it hath pleased Almighty God, of his great mercy.” Then again, I went

back to the church-door and read, “I heard a voice from heaven;” and so

to the end of the service.

Leaving the men to fill up the graves, I hastened to lay aside my

canonicals, that I might join my guests; but my wife and daughter had

already prevailed on them to leave the churchyard.

A word now concerning my own family. Turner insisted on Connie’s

remaining in bed for two or three days. She looked worse in face--pale

and worn; but it was clear, from the way she moved in bed, that the

fresh power called forth by the shock had not vanished with the moment.

Wynnie was quieter almost than ever; but there was a constant _secret_

light, if I may use the paradox, in her eyes. Percivale was at the

house every day, always ready to make himself useful. My wife bore up

wonderfully. As yet the much greater catastrophe had come far short

of the impression made by the less. When quieter hours should come,

however, I could not help fearing that the place would be dreadfully

painful to all but the younger ones, who, of course, had the usual

child-gift of forgetting. The servants--even Walter--looked thin and

anxious.

That Saturday night I found myself, as I had once or twice found myself

before, entirely unprepared to preach. I did not feel anxious, because

I did not feel that I was to blame: I had been so much occupied. I had

again and again turned my thoughts thitherward, but nothing recommended

itself to me so that I could say “I must take that;” nothing said

plainly, “This is what you have to speak of.”

As often as I had sought to find fitting matter for my sermon, my mind

had turned to death and the grave; but I shrunk from every suggestion,

or rather nothing had come to me that interested myself enough to

justify me in giving it to my people. And I always took it as my sole

justification, in speaking of anything to the flock of Christ, that I

cared heartily in my own soul for that thing. Without this consciousness

I was dumb. And I do think, highly as I value prophecy, that a clergyman

ought to be at liberty upon occasion to say, “My friends, I cannot

preach to-day.” What a riddance it would be for the Church, I do not say

if every priest were to speak sense, but only if every priest were to

abstain from speaking of that in which, at the moment, he feels little

or no interest!

I went to bed, which is often the very best thing a man can do; for

sleep will bring him from God that which no effort of his own will can

compass. I have read somewhere--I will verify it by present search--that

Luther’s translation, of the verse in the psalm, “So he giveth to his

beloved sleep,” is, “He giveth his beloved sleeping,” or while asleep.

Yes, so it is, literally, in English, “It is in vain that ye rise early,

and then sit long, and eat your bread with care, for to his friends he

gives it sleeping.” This was my experience in the present instance; for

the thought of which I was first conscious when I awoke was, “Why should

I talk about death? Every man’s heart is now full of death. We have

enough of that--even the sum that God has sent us on the wings of the

tempest. What I have to do, as the minister of the new covenant, is to

speak of life.” It flashed in on my mind: “Death is over and gone. The

resurrection comes next. I will speak of the raising of Lazarus.”

The same moment I knew that I was ready to speak. Shall I or shall I not

give my reader the substance of what I said? I wish I knew how many of

them would like it, and how many would not. I do not want to bore them

with sermons, especially seeing I have always said that no sermons ought

to be printed; for in print they are but what the old alchymists would

have called a _caput mortuum_, or death’s head, namely, a lifeless lump

of residuum at the bottom of the crucible; for they have no longer the

living human utterance which gives all the power on the minds of the

hearers. But I have not, either in this or in my preceding narrative,

attempted to give a sermon as I preached it. I have only sought to

present the substance of it in a form fitter for being read, somewhat

cleared of the unavoidable, let me say necessary--yes, I will

say _valuable_--repetitions and enforcements by which the various

considerations are pressed upon the minds of the hearers. These are

entirely wearisome in print--useless too, for the reader may ponder over

every phrase till he finds out the purport of it--if indeed there be

such readers nowadays.

I rose, went down to the bath in the rocks, had a joyous physical

ablution, and a swim up and down the narrow cleft, from which I emerged

as if myself newly born or raised anew, and then wandered about on the

downs full of hope and thankfulness, seeking all I could to plant deep

in my mind the long-rooted truths of resurrection, that they might be

not only ready to blossom in the warmth of the spring-tides to come, but

able to send out some leaves and promissory buds even in the wintry time

of the soul, when the fogs of pain steam up from the frozen clay soil of

the body, and make the monarch-will totter dizzily upon his throne, to

comfort the eyes of the bewildered king, reminding him that the King of

kings hath conquered Death and the Grave. There is no perfect faith

that cannot laugh at winters and graveyards, and all the whole array

of defiant appearances. The fresh breeze of the morning visited me. “O

God,” I said in my heart, “would that when the dark day comes, in which

I can feel nothing, I may be able to front it with the memory of this

day’s strength, and so help myself to trust in the Father! I would call

to mind the days of old, with David the king.”

When I returned to the house, I found that one of the sailors, who had

been cast ashore with his leg broken, wished to see me. I obeyed, and

found him very pale and worn.

“I think I am going, sir,” he said; “and I wanted to see you before I

die.”

“Trust in Christ, and do not be afraid,” I returned.

“I prayed to him to save me when I was hanging to the rigging, and if I

wasn’t afraid then, I’m not going to be afraid now, dying quietly in my

bed. But just look here, sir.”

He took from under his pillow something wrapped up in paper, unfolded

the envelope, and showed a lump of something--I could not at first tell

what. He put it in my hand, and then I saw that it was part of a bible,

with nearly the upper half of it worn or cut away, and the rest partly

in a state of pulp.

“That’s the bible my mother gave me when I left home first,” he said. “I

don’t know how I came to put it in my pocket, but I think the rope that

cut through that when I was lashed to the shrouds would a’most have cut

through my ribs if it hadn’t been for it.”

“Very likely,” I returned. “The body of the Bible has saved your bodily

life: may the spirit of it save your spiritual life.”

“I think I know what you mean, sir,” he panted out. “My mother was a

good woman, and I know she prayed to God for me.”

“Would you like us to pray for you in church to-day?”

“If you please, sir; me and Bob Fox. He’s nearly as bad as I am.”

“We won’t forget you,” I said. “I will come in after church and see how

you are.”

I knelt and offered the prayers for the sick, and then took my leave. I

did not think the poor fellow was going to die.

I may as well mention here, that he has been in my service ever since.

We took him with us to Marshmallows, where he works in the garden and

stables, and is very useful. We have to look after him though, for his

health continues delicate.

CHAPTER X.

THE SERMON.

When I stood up to preach, I gave them no text; but, with the eleventh

chapter of the Gospel of St. John open before me, to keep me correct, I

proceeded to tell the story in the words God gave me; for who can dare

to say that he makes his own commonest speech?

“When Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and therefore our elder brother,

was going about on the earth, eating and drinking with his brothers

and sisters, there was one family he loved especially--a family of two

sisters and a brother; for, although he loves everybody as much as they

can be loved, there are some who can be loved more than others. Only

God is always trying to make us such that we can be loved more and more.

There are several stories--O, such lovely stories!--about that family

and Jesus; and we have to do with one of them now.

“They lived near the capital of the country, Jerusalem, in a village

they called Bethany; and it must have been a great relief to our Lord,

when he was worn out with the obstinacy and pride of the great men of

the city, to go out to the quiet little town and into the refuge of

Lazarus’s house, where everyone was more glad at the sound of his feet

than at any news that could come to them.

“They had at this time behaved so ill to him in Jerusalem--taking up

stones to stone him even, though they dared not quite do it, mad with

anger as they were--and all because he told them the truth--that he had

gone away to the other side of the great river that divided the country,

and taught the people in that quiet place. While he was there his friend

Lazarus was taken ill; and the two sisters, Martha and Mary, sent a

messenger to him, to say to him, ‘Lord, your friend is very ill.’ Only

they said it more beautifully than that: ‘Lord, behold, he whom thou

lovest is sick.’ You know, when anyone is ill, we always want the person

whom he loves most to come to him. This is very wonderful. In the worst

things that can come to us the first thought is of love. People, like

the Scribes and Pharisees, might say, ‘What good can that do him?’ And

we may not in the least suppose that the person we want knows any secret

that can cure his pain; yet love is the first thing we think of. And

here we are more right than we know; for, at the long last, love will

cure everything: which truth, indeed, this story will set forth to us.

No doubt the heart of Lazarus, ill as he was, longed after his friend;

and, very likely, even the sight of Jesus might have given him such

strength that the life in him could have driven out the death which had

already got one foot across the threshold. But the sisters expected

more than this: they believed that Jesus, whom they knew to have driven

disease and death out of so many hearts, had only to come and touch

him--nay, only to speak a word, to look at him, and their brother was

saved. Do you think they presumed in thus expecting? The fact was, they

did not believe enough; they had not yet learned to believe that he

could cure him all the same whether he came to them or not, because he

was always with them. We cannot understand this; but our understanding

is never a measure of what is true.

“Whether Jesus knew exactly all that was going to take place I cannot

tell. Some people may feel certain upon points that I dare not feel

certain upon. One thing I am sure of: that he did not always know

everything beforehand, for he said so himself. It is infinitely more

valuable to us, because more beautiful and godlike in him, that he

should trust his Father than that he should foresee everything. At all

events he knew that his Father did not want him to go to his friends

yet. So he sent them a message to the effect that there was a particular

reason for this sickness--that the end of it was not the death of

Lazarus, but the glory of God. This, I think, he told them by the same

messenger they sent to him; and then, instead of going to them, he

remained where he was.

“But O, my friends, what shall I say about this wonderful message? Think

of being sick for the glory of God! of being shipwrecked for the glory

of God! of being drowned for the glory of God! How can the sickness, the

fear, the broken-heartedness of his creatures be for the glory of God?

What kind of a God can that be? Why just a God so perfectly, absolutely

good, that the things that look least like it are only the means of

clearing our eyes to let us see how good he is. For he is so good that

he is not satisfied with _being_ good. He loves his children, so that

except he can make them good like himself, make them blessed by seeing

how good he is, and desiring the same goodness in themselves, he is not

satisfied. He is not like a fine proud benefactor, who is content with

doing that which will satisfy his sense of his own glory, but like a

mother who puts her arm round her child, and whose heart is sore

till she can make her child see the love which is her glory. The

glorification of the Son of God is the glorification of the human

race; for the glory of God is the glory of man, and that glory is love.

Welcome sickness, welcome sorrow, welcome death, revealing that glory!

“The next two verses sound very strangely together, and yet they almost

seem typical of all the perplexities of God’s dealings. The old painters

and poets represented Faith as a beautiful woman, holding in her hand

a cup of wine and water, with a serpent coiled up within. Highhearted

Faith! she scruples not to drink of the life-giving wine and water; she

is not repelled by the upcoiled serpent. The serpent she takes but for

the type of the eternal wisdom that looks repellent because it is not

understood. The wine is good, the water is good; and if the hand of the

supreme Fate put that cup in her hand, the serpent itself must be good

too,--harmless, at least, to hurt the truth of the water and the wine.

But let us read the verses.

“‘Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When he had heard

therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place

where he was.’

“Strange! his friend was sick: he abode two days where he was! But

remember what we have already heard. The glory of God was infinitely

more for the final cure of a dying Lazarus, who, give him all the life

he could have, would yet, without that glory, be in death, than the mere

presence of the Son of God. I say _mere_ presence, for, compared with

the glory of God, the very presence of his Son, so dissociated, is

nothing. He abode where he was that the glory of God, the final cure of

humanity, the love that triumphs over death, might shine out and redeem

the hearts of men, so that death could not touch them.

“After the two days, the hour had arrived. He said to his disciples,

‘Let us go back to Judæa.’ They expostulated, because of the danger,

saying, ‘Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou

thither again?’ The answer which he gave them I am not sure whether I

can thoroughly understand; but I think, in fact I know, it must bear

on the same region of life--the will of God. I think what he means by

walking in the day is simply doing the will of God. That was the sole,

the all-embracing light in which Jesus ever walked. I think he means

that now he saw plainly what the Father wanted him to do. If he did not

see that the Father wanted him to go back to Judæa, and yet went, that

would be to go stumblingly, to walk in the darkness. There are twelve

hours in the day--one time to act--a time of light and the clear call of

duty; there is a night when a man, not seeing where or hearing how, must

be content to rest. Something not inharmonious with this, I think, he

must have intended; but I do not see the whole thought clearly enough

to be sure that I am right. I do think, further, that it points at a

clearer condition of human vision and conviction than I am good enough

to understand; though I hope one day to rise into this upper stratum of

light.

“Whether his scholars had heard anything of Lazarus yet, I do not know.

It looks a little as if Jesus had not told them the message he had had

from the sisters. But he told them now that he was asleep, and that he

was going to wake him. You would think they might have understood

this. The idea of going so many miles to wake a man might have surely

suggested death. But the disciples were sorely perplexed with many

of his words. Sometimes they looked far away for the meaning when the

meaning lay in their very hearts; sometimes they looked into their hands

for it when it was lost in the grandeur of the ages. But he meant them

to see into all that he said by and by, although they could not see into

it now. When they understood him better, then they would understand what

he said better. And to understand him better they must be more like

him; and to make them more like him he must go away and give them his

spirit--awful mystery which no man but himself can understand.

“Now he had to tell them plainly that Lazarus was dead. They had not

thought of death as a sleep. I suppose this was altogether a new and

Christian idea. Do not suppose that it applied more to Lazarus than to

other dead people. He was none the less dead that Jesus meant to take a

weary two days’ journey to his sepulchre and wake him. If death is not a

sleep, Jesus did not speak the truth when he said Lazarus slept. You may

say it was a figure; but a figure that is not like the thing it figures

is simply a lie.

“They set out to go back to Judæa. Here we have a glimpse of the faith

of Thomas, the doubter. For a doubter is not without faith. The very

fact that he doubts, shows that he has some faith. When I find anyone

hard upon doubters, I always doubt the _quality_ of his faith. It is of

little use to have a great cable, if the hemp is so poor that it breaks

like the painter of a boat. I have known people whose power of believing

chiefly consisted in their incapacity for seeing difficulties. Of what

fine sort a faith must be that is founded in stupidity, or far worse, in

indifference to the truth and the mere desire to get out of hell! That

is not a grand belief in the Son of God, the radiation of the Father.

Thomas’s want of faith was shown in the grumbling, self-pitying way in

which he said, ‘Let us also go that we may die with him.’ His Master had

said that he was going to wake him. Thomas said, ‘that we may die with

him.’ You may say, ‘He did not understand him.’ True, it may be, but his

unbelief was the cause of his not understanding him. I suppose Thomas

meant this as a reproach to Jesus for putting them all in danger by

going back to Judæa; if not, it was only a poor piece of sentimentality.

So much for Thomas’s unbelief. But he had good and true faith

notwithstanding; for _he went with his Master_.

“By the time they reached the neighbourhood of Bethany, Lazarus had been

dead four days. Someone ran to the house and told the sisters that Jesus

was coming. Martha, as soon as she heard it, rose and went to meet him.

It might be interesting at another time to compare the difference of the

behaviour of the two sisters upon this occasion with the difference of

their behaviour upon another occasion, likewise recorded; but with the

man dead in his sepulchre, and the hope dead in these two hearts, we

have no inclination to enter upon fine distinctions of character. Death

and grief bring out the great family likenesses in the living as well as

in the dead.

“When Martha came to Jesus, she showed her true though imperfect faith

by almost attributing her brother’s death to Jesus’ absence. But even

in the moment, looking in the face of the Master, a fresh hope, a new

budding of faith, began in her soul. She thought--‘What if, after all,

he were to bring him to life again!’ O, trusting heart, how thou leavest

the dull-plodding intellect behind thee! While the conceited intellect

is reasoning upon the impossibility of the thing, the expectant faith

beholds it accomplished. Jesus, responding instantly to her faith,

granting her half-born prayer, says, ‘Thy brother shall rise again;’ not

meaning the general truth recognised, or at least assented to by all

but the Sadducees, concerning the final resurrection of the dead, but

meaning, ‘Be it unto thee as thou wilt. I will raise him again.’ For

there is no steering for a fine effect in the words of Jesus. But these

words are too good for Martha to take them as he meant them. Her faith

is not quite equal to the belief that he actually will do it. The thing

she could hope for afar off she could hardly believe when it came to her

very door. ‘O, yes,’ she said, her mood falling again to the level of

the commonplace, ‘of course, at the last day.’ Then the Lord turns away

her thoughts from the dogmas of her faith to himself, the Life, saying,

‘I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he

were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me,

shall never die. Believest thou this?’ Martha, without understanding

what he said more than in a very poor part, answered in words which

preserved her honesty entire, and yet included all he asked, and a

thousandfold more than she could yet believe: ‘Yea, Lord; I believe that

thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.’

“I dare not pretend to have more than a grand glimmering of the truth

of Jesus’ words ‘shall never die;’ but I am pretty sure that when Martha

came to die, she found that there was indeed no such thing as she had

meant when she used the ghastly word _death_, and said with her first

new breath, ‘Verily, Lord, I am not dead.’

“But look how this declaration of her confidence in the Christ operated

upon herself. She instantly thought of her sister; the hope that the

Lord would do something swelled within her, and, leaving Jesus, she

went to find Mary. Whoever has had a true word with the elder brother,

straightway will look around him to find his brother, his sister. The

family feeling blossoms: he wants his friend to share the glory withal.

Martha wants Mary to go to Jesus too.

“Mary heard her, forgot her visitors, rose, and went. They thought she

went to the grave: she went to meet its conqueror. But when she came to

him, the woman who had chosen the good part praised of Jesus, had but

the same words to embody her hope and her grief that her careful and

troubled sister had uttered a few minutes before. How often during those

four days had not the self-same words passed between them! ‘Ah, if he

had been here, our brother had not died!’ She said so to himself now,

and wept, and her friends who had followed her wept likewise. A moment

more, and the Master groaned; yet a moment, and he too wept. ‘Sorrow is

catching;’ but this was not the mere infection of sorrow. It went deeper

than mere sympathy; for he groaned in his spirit and was troubled. What

made him weep? It was when he saw them weeping that he wept. But why

should he weep, when he knew how soon their weeping would be turned into

rejoicing? It was not for their weeping, so soon to be over, that he

wept, but for the human heart everywhere swollen with tears, yea, with

griefs that can find no such relief as tears; for these, and for all his

brothers and sisters tormented with pain for lack of faith in his Father

in heaven, Jesus wept. He saw the blessed well-being of Lazarus on the

one side, and on the other the streaming eyes from whose sight he had

vanished. The veil between was so thin! yet the sight of those eyes

could not pierce it: their hearts must go on weeping--without cause, for

his Father was so good. I think it was the helplessness he felt in the

impossibility of at once sweeping away the phantasm death from their

imagination that drew the tears from the eyes of Jesus. Certainly it was

not for Lazarus; it could hardly be for these his friends--save as they

represented the humanity which he would help, but could not help even as

he was about to help them.

“The Jews saw herein proof that he loved Lazarus; but they little

thought it was for them and their people, and for the Gentiles whom they

despised, that his tears were now flowing--that the love which pressed

the fountains of his weeping was love for every human heart, from Adam

on through the ages.

“Some of them went a little farther, nearly as far as the sisters,

saying, ‘Could he not have kept the man from dying?’ But it was such

a poor thing, after all, that they thought he might have done. They

regarded merely this unexpected illness, this early death; for I daresay

Lazarus was not much older than Jesus. They did not think that, after

all, Lazarus must die some time; that the beloved could be saved, at

best, only for a little while. Jesus seems to have heard the remark, for

he again groaned in himself.

“Meantime they were drawing near the place where he was buried. It was

a hollow in the face of a rock, with a stone laid against it. I suppose

the bodies were laid on something like shelves inside the rock, as they

are in many sepulchres. They were not put into coffins, but wound round

and round with linen.

“When they came before the door of death, Jesus said to them, ‘Take away

the stone.’ The nature of Martha’s reply--the realism of it, as they

would say now-a-days--would seem to indicate that her dawning faith had

sunk again below the horizon, that in the presence of the insignia of

death, her faith yielded, even as the faith of Peter failed him when he

saw around him the grandeur of the high-priest, and his Master bound and

helpless. Jesus answered--O, what an answer!--To meet the corruption

and the stink which filled her poor human fancy, ‘the glory of God’ came

from his lips: human fear; horror speaking from the lips of a woman in

the very jaws of the devouring death; and the ‘said I not unto thee?’

from the mouth of him who was so soon to pass worn and bloodless through

such a door! ‘He stinketh,’ said Martha. ‘The glory of God,’ said Jesus.

‘Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest

see the glory of God?’

“Before the open throat of the sepulchre Jesus began to speak to his

Father aloud. He had prayed to him in his heart before, most likely

while he groaned in his spirit. Now he thanked him that he had comforted

him, and given him Lazarus as a first-fruit from the dead. But he will

be true to the listening people as well as to his ever-hearing Father;

therefore he tells why he said the word of thanks aloud--a thing not

usual with him, for his Father was always hearing, him. Having spoken it

for the people, he would say that it was for the people.

“The end of it all was that they might believe that God had sent him--a

far grander gift than having the dearest brought back from the grave;

for he is the life of men.

“‘Lazarus, come forth!”

“And Lazarus came forth, creeping helplessly with inch-long steps of his

linen-bound limbs. ‘Ha, ha! brother, sister!’ cries the human heart. The

Lord of Life hath taken the prey from the spoiler; he hath emptied the

grave. Here comes the dead man, welcome as never was child from the

womb--new-born, and in him all the human race new-born from the grave!

‘Loose him and let him go,’ and the work is done. The sorrow is over,

and the joy is come. Home, home, Martha, Mary, with your Lazarus! He too

will go with you, the Lord of the Living. Home and get the feast ready,

Martha! Prepare the food for him who comes hungry from the grave,

for him who has called him thence. Home, Mary, to help Martha! What a

household will yours be! What wondrous speech will pass between the dead

come to life and the living come to die!

“But what pang is this that makes Lazarus draw hurried breath, and turns

Martha’s cheek so pale? Ah, at the little window of the heart the pale

eyes of the defeated Horror look in. What! is he there still! Ah, yes,

he will come for Martha, come for Mary, come yet again for Lazarus--yea,

come for the Lord of Life himself, and carry all away. But look at the

Lord: he knows all about it, and he smiles. Does Martha think of the

words he spoke, ‘He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die’?

Perhaps she does, and, like the moon before the sun, her face returns

the smile of her Lord.

“This, my friends, is a fancy in form, but it embodies a dear truth.

What is it to you and me that he raised Lazarus? We are not called upon

to believe that he will raise from the tomb that joy of our hearts which

lies buried there beyond our sight. Stop! Are we not? We are called upon

to believe this; else the whole story were for us a poor mockery. What

is it to us that the Lord raised Lazarus?--Is it nothing to know that

our Brother is Lord over the grave? Will the harvest be behind the

first-fruits? If he tells us he cannot, for good reasons, raise up our

vanished love to-day, or to-morrow, or for all the years of our life to

come, shall we not mingle the smile of faithful thanks with the sorrow

of present loss, and walk diligently waiting? That he called forth

Lazarus showed that he was in his keeping, that he is Lord of the

living, and that all live to him, that he has a hold of them, and can

draw them forth when he will. If this is not true, then the raising

of Lazarus is false; I do not mean merely false in fact, but false in

meaning. If we believe in him, then in his name, both for ourselves and

for our friends, we must deny death and believe in life. Lord Christ,

fill our hearts with thy Life!”

CHAPTER XI.

CHANGED PLANS.

In a day or two Connie was permitted to rise and take to her couch once

more. It seemed strange that she should look so much worse, and yet be

so much stronger. The growth of her power of motion was wonderful.

As they carried her, she begged to be allowed to put her feet to the

ground. Turner yielded, though without quite ceasing to support her. He

was satisfied, however, that she could have stood upright for a moment

at least. He would not, of course, risk it, and made haste to lay her

down.

The time of his departure was coming near, and he seemed more anxious

the nearer it came; for Connie continued worn-looking and pale; and her

smile, though ever ready to greet me when I entered, had lost much

of its light. I noticed, too, that she had the curtain of her window

constantly so arranged as to shut out the sea. I said something to her

about it once. Her reply was:

“Papa, I can’t bear it. I know it is very silly; but I think I can make

you understand how it is: I was so fond of the sea when I came down;

it seemed to lie close to my window, with a friendly smile ready for me

every morning when I looked out. I daresay it is all from want of faith,

but I can’t help it: it looks so far away now, like a friend that had

failed me, that I would rather not see it.”

I saw that the struggling life within her was grievously oppressed, that

the things which surrounded her were no longer helpful. Her life had

been driven as to its innermost cave; and now, when it had been enticed

to venture forth and look abroad, a sudden pall had descended upon

nature. I could not help thinking that the good of our visit to

Kilkhaven had come, and that evil, from which I hoped we might yet

escape, was following. I left her, and sought Turner.

“It strikes me, Turner,” I said, “that the sooner we get out of this the

better for Connie.”

“I am quite of your opinion. I think the very prospect of leaving the

place would do something to restore her. If she is so uncomfortable now,

think what it will be in the many winter nights at hand.”

“Do you think it would be safe to move her?”

“Far safer than to let her remain. At the worst, she is now far better

than when she came. Try her. Hint at the possibility of going home, and

see how she will take it.”

“Well, I sha’n’t like to be left alone; but if she goes they must all

go, except, perhaps, I might keep Wynnie. But I don’t know how her

mother would get on without her.”

“I don’t see why you should stay behind. Mr. Weir would be as glad

to come as you would be to go; and it can make no difference to Mr.

Shepherd.”

It seemed a very sensible suggestion. I thought a moment. Certainly it

was a desirable thing for both my sister and her husband. They had no

such reasons as we had for disliking the place; and it would enable her

to avoid the severity of yet another winter. I said as much to Turner,

and went back to Connie’s room.

The light of a lovely sunset was lying outside her window. She was

sitting so that she could not see it. I would find out her feeling in

the matter without any preamble.

“Would you like to go back to Marshmallows, Connie?” I asked.

Her countenance flashed into light.

“O, dear papa, do let us go,” she said; “that would be delightful.”

“Well, I think we can manage it, if you will only get a little stronger

for the journey. The weather is not so good to travel in as when we came

down.”

“No; but I am ever so much better, you know, than I was then.”

The poor girl was already stronger from the mere prospect of going home

again. She moved restlessly on her couch, half mechanically put her hand

to the curtain, pulled it aside, looked out, faced the sun and the sea,

and did not draw back. My mind was made up. I left her, and went to find

Ethelwyn. She heartily approved of the proposal for Connie’s sake, and

said that it would be scarcely less agreeable to herself. I could see a

certain troubled look above her eyes, however.

“You are thinking of Wynnie,” I said.

“Yes. It is hard to make one sad for the sake of the rest.”

“True. But it is one of the world’s recognised necessities.”

“No doubt.”

“Besides, you don’t suppose Percivale can stay here the whole winter.

They must part some time.”

“Of course. Only they did not expect it so soon.”

But here my wife was mistaken.

I went to my study to write to Weir. I had hardly finished my letter

when Walter came to say that Mr. Percivale wished to see me. I told him

to show him in.

“I am just writing home to say that I want my curate to change places

with me here, which I know he will be glad enough to do. I see Connie

had better go home.”

“You will all go, then, I presume?” returned Percivale.

“Yes, yes; of course.”

“Then I need not so much regret that I can stay no longer. I came to

tell you that I must leave to-morrow.”

“Ah! Going to London?”

“Yes. I don’t know how to thank you for all your kindness. You have made

my summer something like a summer; very different, indeed, from what it

would otherwise have been.”

“We have had our share of advantage, and that a large one. We are all

glad to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Percivale.”

He made no answer.

“We shall be passing through London within a week or ten days in all

probability. Perhaps you will allow us the pleasure of looking at some

of your pictures then?”

His face flushed. What did the flush mean? It was not one of mere

pleasure. There was confusion and perplexity in it. But he answered at

once:

“I will show you them with pleasure. I fear, however, you will not care

for them.”

Would this fear account for his embarrassment? I hardly thought it

would; but I could not for a moment imagine, with his fine form and

countenance before me, that he had any serious reason for shrinking from

a visit.

He began to search for a card.

“O, I have your address. I shall be sure to pay you a visit. But you

will dine with us to-day, of course?” I said.

“I shall have much pleasure,” he answered; and took his leave.

I finished my letter to Weir, and went out for a walk.

I remember particularly the thoughts that moved in me and made that

walk memorable. Indeed, I think I remember all outside events chiefly

by virtue of the inward conditions with which they were associated. Mere

outside things I am very ready to forget. Moods of my own mind do not

so readily pass away; and with the memory of some of them every outward

circumstance returns; for a man’s life is where the kingdom of heaven

is--within him. There are people who, if you ask the story of their

lives, have nothing to tell you but the course of the outward events

that have constituted, as it were, the clothes of their history. But I

know, at the same time, that some of the most important crises in my

own history (by which word _history_ I mean my growth towards the right

conditions of existence) have been beyond the grasp and interpretation

of my intellect. They have passed, as it were, without my consciousness

being awake enough to lay hold of their phenomena. The wind had been

blowing; I had heard the sound of it, but knew not whence it came

nor whither it went; only, when it was gone, I found myself more

responsible, more eager than before.

I remember this walk from the thoughts I had about the great change

hanging over us all. I had now arrived at the prime of middle life; and

that change which so many would escape if they could, but which will let

no man pass, had begun to show itself a real fact upon the horizon

of the future. Death looks so far away to the young, that while they

acknowledge it unavoidable, the path stretches on in such vanishing

perspective before them, that they see no necessity for thinking about

the end of it yet; and far would I be from saying they ought to think

of it. Life is the true object of a man’s care: there is no occasion to

make himself think about death. But when the vision of the inevitable

draws nigh, when it appears plainly on the horizon, though but as a

cloud the size of a man’s hand, then it is equally foolish to meet it

by refusing to meet it, to answer the questions that will arise by

declining to think about them. Indeed, it is a question of life then,

and not of death. We want to keep fast hold of our life, and, in the

strength of that, to look the threatening death in the face. But to my

walk that morning.

I wandered on the downs till I came to the place where a solitary rock

stands on the top of a cliff looking seaward, in the suggested shape

of a monk praying. On the base on which he knelt I seated myself, and

looked out over the Atlantic. How faded the ocean appeared! It seemed as

if all the sunny dyes of the summer had been diluted and washed with the

fogs of the coming winter, when I thought of the splendour it wore when

first from these downs I gazed on the outspread infinitude of space and

colour.

“What,” I said to myself at length, “has she done since then? Where is

her work visible? She has riven, and battered, and destroyed, and her

destruction too has passed away. So worketh Time and its powers! The

exultation of my youth is gone; my head is gray; my wife is growing old;

our children are pushing us from our stools; we are yielding to the new

generation; the glory for us hath departed; our life lies weary before

us like that sea; and the night cometh when we can no longer work.”

Something like this was passing vaguely through my mind. I sat in a

mournful stupor, with a half-consciousness that my mood was false, and

that I ought to rouse myself and shake it off. There is such a thing

as a state of moral dreaming, which closely resembles the intellectual

dreaming in sleep. I went on in this false dreamful mood, pitying myself

like a child tender over his hurt and nursing his own cowardice, till,

all at once, “a little pipling wind” blew on my cheek. The morning was

very still: what roused that little wind I cannot tell; but what that

little wind roused I will try to tell. With that breath on my cheek,

something within me began to stir. It grew, and grew, until the memory

of a certain glorious sunset of red and green and gold and blue, which

I had beheld from these same heights, dawned within me. I knew that the

glory of my youth had not departed, that the very power of recalling

with delight that which I had once felt in seeing, was proof enough of

that; I knew that I could believe in God all the night long, even if the

night were long. And the next moment I thought how I had been reviling

in my fancy God’s servant, the sea. To how many vessels had she not

opened a bounteous highway through the waters, with labour, and food,

and help, and ministration, glad breezes and swelling sails, healthful

struggle, cleansing fear and sorrow, yea, and friendly death! Because

she had been commissioned to carry this one or that one, this hundred or

that thousand of his own creatures from one world to another, was I to

revile the servant of a grand and gracious Master? It was blameless in

Connie to feel the late trouble so deeply that she could not be glad:

she had not had the experience of life, yea, of God, that I had had;

she must be helped from without. But for me, it was shameful that I, who

knew the heart of my Master, to whom at least he had so often shown

his truth, should ever be doleful and oppressed. Yet even me he had now

helped from within. The glory of existence as the child of the Infinite

had again dawned upon me. The first hour of the evening of my life had

indeed arrived; the shadows had begun to grow long--so long that I had

begun to mark their length; this last little portion of my history had

vanished, leaving its few gray ashes behind in the crucible of my life;

and the final evening must come, when all my life would lie behind me,

and all the memory of it return, with its mornings of gold and red,

with its evenings of purple and green; with its dashes of storm, and its

foggy glooms; with its white-winged aspirations, its dull-red passions,

its creeping envies in brown and black and earthy yellow. But from all

the accusations of my conscience, I would turn me to the Lord, for he

was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins. Then

I thought what a grand gift it would be to give his people the power

hereafter to fight the consequences of their sins. Anyhow, I would trust

the Father, who loved me with a perfect love, to lead the soul he had

made, had compelled to be, through the gates of the death-birth, into

the light of life beyond. I would cast on him the care, humbly challenge

him with the responsibility he had himself undertaken, praying only for

perfect confidence in him, absolute submission to his will.

I rose from my seat beside the praying monk, and walked on. The thought

of seeing my own people again filled me with gladness. I would leave

those I had here learned to love with regret; but I trusted I had taught

them something, and they had taught me much; therefore there could be

no end to our relation to each other--it could not be broken, for it was

_in the Lord_, which alone can give security to any tie. I should not,

therefore, sorrow as if I were to see their faces no more.

I now took my farewell of that sea and those cliffs. I should see them

often ere we went, but I should not feel so near them again. Even

this parting said that I must “sit loose to the world”--an old Puritan

phrase, I suppose; that I could gather up only its uses, treasure its

best things, and must let all the rest go; that those things I

called mine--earth, sky, and sea, home, books, the treasured gifts of

friends--had all to leave me, belong to others, and help to educate

them. I should not need them. I should have my people, my souls, my

beloved faces tenfold more, and could well afford to part with these.

Why should I mind this chain passing to my eldest boy, when it was only

his mother’s hair, and I should have his mother still?

So my thoughts went on thinking themselves, until at length I yielded

passively to their flow.

I found Wynnie looking very grave when I went into the drawing-room.

Her mother was there, too, and Mr. Percivale. It seemed rather a moody

party. They wakened up a little, however, after I entered, and before

dinner was over we were all chatting together merrily.

“How is Connie?” I asked Ethelwyn.

“Wonderfully better already,” she answered.

“I think everybody seems better,” I said. “The very idea of home seems

reviving to us all.”

Wynnie darted a quick glance at me, caught my eyes, which was more than

she had intended, and blushed; sought refuge in a bewildered glance at

Percivale, caught his eye in turn, and blushed yet deeper. He plunged

instantly into conversation, not without a certain involuntary sparkle

in his eye.

“Did you go to see Mrs. Stokes this morning?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “She does not want much visiting now; she is going

about her work, apparently in good health. Her husband says she is not

like the same woman; and I hope he means that in more senses than one,

though I do not choose to ask him any questions about his wife.”

I did my best to keep up the conversation, but every now and then after

this it fell like a wind that would not blow. I withdrew to my study.

Percivale and Wynnie went out for a walk. The next morning he left by

the coach--early. Turner went with him.

Wynnie did not seem very much dejected. I thought that perhaps the

prospect of meeting him again in London kept her up.

CHAPTER XII.

THE STUDIO.

I will not linger over our preparations or our leave-takings. The most

ponderous of the former were those of the two boys, who, as they had

wanted to bring down a chest as big as a corn-bin, full of lumber,

now wanted to take home two or three boxes filled with pebbles, great

oystershells, and sea-weed.

Weir, as I had expected, was quite pleased to make the exchange. An

early day had been fixed for his arrival; for I thought it might be of

service to him to be introduced to the field of his labours. Before he

came, I had gone about among the people, explaining to them some of my

reasons for leaving them sooner than I had intended, and telling them a

little about my successor, that he might not appear among them quite as

a stranger. He was much gratified with their reception of him, and had

no fear of not finding himself quite at home with them. I promised, if

I could comfortably manage it, to pay them a short visit the following

summer, and as the weather was now getting quite cold, hastened our

preparations for departure.

I could have wished that Turner had been with us on the journey, but

he had been absent from his cure to the full extent that his conscience

would permit, and I had not urged him. He would be there to receive us,

and we had got so used to the management of Connie, that we did not feel

much anxiety about the travelling. We resolved, if she seemed strong

enough as we went along, to go right through to London, making a few

days there the only break in the transit.

It was a bright, cold morning when we started. But Connie could now

bear the air so well, that we set out with the carriage open, nor had

we occasion to close it. The first part of our railway journey was very

pleasant. But when we drew near London, we entered a thick fog, and

before we arrived, a small dense November rain was falling. Connie

looked a little dispirited, partly from weariness, but no doubt from the

change in the weather.

“Not very cheerful, this, Connie, my dear,” I said.

“No, papa,” she answered; “but we are going home, you know.”

_Going home._ It set me thinking--as I had often been set thinking

before, always with fresh discovery and a new colour on the dawning sky

of hope. I lay back in the carriage and thought how the November fog

this evening in London, was the valley of the shadow of death we had to

go through on the way _home._ A. shadow like this would fall upon me;

the world would grow dark and life grow weary; but I should know it was

the last of the way home.

Then I began to question myself wherein the idea of this home consisted.

I knew that my soul had ever yet felt the discomfort of strangeness,

more or less, in the midst of its greatest blessedness. I knew that as

the thought of water to the thirsty _soul_, for it is the soul far more

than the body that thirsts even for the material water, such is the

thought of home to the wanderer in a strange country. As the weary soul

pines for sleep, and every heart for the cure of its own bitterness, so

my heart and soul had often pined for their home. Did I know, I asked

myself, where or what that home was? It could consist in no change of

place or of circumstance; no mere absence of care; no accumulation of

repose; no blessed communion even with those whom my soul loved; in the

midst of it all I should be longing for a homelier home--one into which

I might enter with a sense of infinitely more absolute peace, than a

conscious child could know in the arms, upon the bosom of his mother.

In the closest contact of human soul with human soul, when all the

atmosphere of thought was rosy with love, again and yet again on the far

horizon would the dun, lurid flame of unrest shoot for a moment through

the enchanted air, and Psyche would know that not yet had she reached

her home. As I thought this I lifted my eyes, and saw those of my wife

and Connie fixed on mine, as if they were reproaching me for saying in

my soul that I could not be quite at home with them. Then I said in my

heart, “Come home with me, beloved--there is but one home for us all.

When we find--in proportion as each of us finds--that home, shall we be

gardens of delight to each other--little chambers of rest--galleries of

pictures--wells of water.”

Again, what was this home? God himself. His thoughts, his will, his

love, his judgment, are man’s home. To think his thoughts, to choose his

will, to love his loves, to judge his judgments, and thus to know that

he is in us, with us, is to be at home. And to pass through the valley

of the shadow of death is the way home, but only thus, that as all

changes have hitherto led us nearer to this home, the knowledge of

God, so this greatest of all outward changes--for it is but an outward

change--will surely usher us into a region where there will be fresh

possibilities of drawing nigh in heart, soul, and mind to the Father

of us. It is the father, the mother, that make for the child his home.

Indeed, I doubt if the home-idea is complete to the parents of a family

themselves, when they remember that their fathers and mothers have

vanished.

At this point something rose in me seeking utterance.

“Won’t it be delightful, wife,” I began, “to see our fathers and mothers

such a long way back in heaven?”

But Ethelwyn’s face gave so little response, that I felt at once how

dreadful a thing it was not to have had a good father or mother. I do

not know what would have become of me but for a good father. I wonder

how anybody ever can be good that has not had a good father. How

dreadful not to be a good father or good mother! Every father who is

not good, every mother who is not good, just makes it as impossible to

believe in God as it can be made. But he is our one good Father,

and does not leave us, even should our fathers and mothers have thus

forsaken us, and left him without a witness.

Here the evil odour of brick-burning invaded my nostrils, and I knew

that London was about us. A few moments after, we reached the station,

where a carriage was waiting to take us to our hotel.

Dreary was the change from the stillness and sunshine of Kilkhaven to

the fog and noise of London; but Connie slept better that night than she

had slept for a good many nights before.

After breakfast the next morning, I said to Wynnie,

“I am going to see Mr. Percivale’s studio, my dear: have you any

objection to going with me?”

“No, papa,” she answered, blushing. “I have never seen an artist’s

studio in my life.”

“Come along, then. Get your bonnet at once. It rains, but we shall take

a cab, and it won’t matter.”

She ran off, and was ready in a few minutes. We gave the driver

directions, and set off. It was a long drive. At length he stopped

at the door of a very common-looking house, in a very dreary-looking

street, in which no man could possibly identify his own door except by

the number. I knocked. A woman who looked at once dirty and cross, the

former probably the cause of the latter, opened the door, gave a bare

assent to my question whether Mr. Percivale was at home, withdrew to her

den with the words “second-floor,” and left us to find our own way up

the two flights of stairs. This, however, involved no great difficulty.

We knocked at the door of the front room. A well-known voice cried,

“Come in,” and we entered.

Percivale, in a short velvet coat, with his palette on his thumb,

advanced to meet us cordially. His face wore a slight flush, which

I attributed solely to pleasure, and nothing to any awkwardness in

receiving us in such a poor place as he occupied. I cast my eyes round

the room. Any romantic notions Wynnie might have indulged concerning the

marvels of a studio, must have paled considerably at the first glance

around Percivale’s room--plainly the abode if not of poverty, then of

self-denial, although I suspected both. A common room, with no carpet

save a square in front of the fireplace; no curtains except a piece

of something like drugget nailed flat across all the lower half of

the window to make the light fall from upwards; two or three horsehair

chairs, nearly worn out; a table in a corner, littered with books and

papers; a horrible lay-figure, at the present moment dressed apparently

for a scarecrow; a large easel, on which stood a half-finished

oil-painting--these constituted almost the whole furniture of the room.

With his pocket-handkerchief Percivale dusted one chair for Wynnie and

another for me. Then standing before us, he said:

“This is a very shabby place to receive you in, Miss Walton, but it is

all I have got.”

“A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he

possesses,” I ventured to say.

“Thank you,” said Percivale. “I hope not. It is well for me it should

not.”

“It is well for the richest man in England that it should not,” I

returned. “If it were not so, the man who could eat most would be the

most blessed.”

“There are people, even of my acquaintance, however, who seem to think

it does.”

“No doubt; but happily their thinking so will not make it so even for

themselves.”

“Have you been very busy since you left us, Mr. Percivale?” asked

Wynnie.

“Tolerably,” he answered. “But I have not much to show for it. That on

the easel is all. I hardly like to let you look at it, though.”

“Why?” asked Wynnie.

“First, because the subject is painful. Next, because it is so

unfinished that none but a painter could do it justice.”

“But why should you paint subjects you would not like people to look

at?”

“I very much want people to look at them.”

“Why not us, then?” said Wynnie.

“Because you do not need to be pained.”

“Are you sure it is good for you to pain anybody?” I said.

“Good is done by pain--is it not?” he asked.

“Undoubtedly. But whether _we_ are wise enough to know when and where

and how much, is the question.”

“Of course I do not make the pain my object.”

“If it comes only as a necessary accompaniment, that may alter the

matter greatly,” I said. “But still I am not sure that anything in which

the pain predominates can be useful in the best way.”

“Perhaps not,” he returned.--“Will you look at the daub?”

“With much pleasure,” I replied, and we rose and stood before the easel.

Percivale made no remark, but left us to find out what the picture

meant. Nor had I long to look before I understood it--in a measure at

least.

It represented a garret-room in a wretchedly ruinous condition. The

plaster had come away in several places, and through between the laths

in one spot hung the tail of a great rat. In a dark corner lay a man

dying. A woman sat by his side, with her eyes fixed, not on his face,

though she held his hand in hers, but on the open door, where in the

gloom you could just see the struggles of two undertaker’s men to get

the coffin past the turn of the landing towards the door. Through the

window there was one peep of the blue sky, whence a ray of sunlight

fell on the one scarlet blossom of a geranium in a broken pot on the

window-sill outside.

“I do not wonder you did not like to show it,” I said. “How can you bear

to paint such a dreadful picture?”

“It is a true one. It only represents a fact.”

“All facts have not a right to be represented.”

“Surely you would not get rid of painful things by huddling them out of

sight?”

“No; nor yet by gloating upon them.”

“You will believe me that it gives me anything but pleasure to

paint such pictures--as far as the subject goes,” he said with some

discomposure.

“Of course. I know you well enough by this time to know that. But no

one could hang it on his wall who would not either gloat on suffering or

grow callous to it. Whence, then, would come the good I cannot doubt you

propose to yourself as your object in painting the picture? If it had

come into my possession, I would--”

“Put it in the fire,” suggested Percivale with a strange smile.

“No. Still less would I sell it. I would hang it up with a curtain

before it, and only look at it now and then, when I thought my heart was

in danger of growing hardened to the sufferings of my fellow-men, and

forgetting that they need the Saviour.”

“I could not wish it a better fate. That would answer my end.”

“Would it, now? Is it not rather those who care little or nothing about

such matters that you would like to influence? Would you be content with

one solitary person like me? And, remember, I wouldn’t buy it. I would

rather not have it. I could hardly bear to know it was in my house. I

am certain you cannot do people good by showing them _only_ the painful.

Make it as painful as you will, but put some hope into it--something

to show that action is worth taking in the affair. From mere suffering

people will turn away, and you cannot blame them. Every show of it,

without hinting at some door of escape, only urges them to forget it

all. Why should they be pained if it can do no good?”

“For the sake of sympathy, I should say,” answered Percivale.

“They would rejoin, ‘It is only a picture. Come along.’ No; give people

hope, if you would have them act at all, in anything.”

“I was almost hoping you would read the picture rather differently. You

see there is a bit of blue sky up there, and a bit of sunshiny scarlet

in the window.”

He looked at me curiously as he spoke.

“I can read it so for myself, and have metamorphosed its meaning so. But

you only put in the sky and the scarlet to heighten the perplexity, and

make the other look more terrible.”

“Now I know that as an artist I have succeeded, however I may have

failed otherwise. I did so mean it; but knowing you would dislike the

picture, I almost hoped in my cowardice, as I said, that you would read

your own meaning into it.”

Wynnie had not said a word. As I turned away from the picture, I saw

that she was looking quite distressed, but whether by the picture or

the freedom with which I had remarked upon it, I do not know. My eyes

falling on a little sketch in sepia, I began to examine it, in the hope

of finding something more pleasant to say. I perceived in a moment,

however, that it was nearly the same thought, only treated in a gentler

and more poetic mode. A girl lay dying on her bed. A youth held her

hand. A torrent of summer sunshine fell through the window, and made a

lake of glory upon the floor. I turned away.

“You like that better, don’t you, papa?” said Wynnie tremulously.

“It is beautiful, certainly,” I answered. “And if it were only one, I

should enjoy it--as a mood. But coming after the other, it seems but the

same thing more weakly embodied.”

I confess I was a little vexed; for I had got much interested in

Percivale, for his own sake as well as for my daughter’s, and I had

expected better things from him. But I saw that I had gone too far.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Percivale,” I said.

“I fear I have been too free in my remarks. I know, likewise, that I am

a clergyman, and not a painter, and therefore incapable of giving the

praise which I have little doubt your art at least deserves.”

“I trust that honesty cannot offend me, however much and justly it may

pain me.”

“But now I have said my worst, I should much like to see what else you

have at hand to show me.”

“Unfortunately I have too much at hand. Let me see.”

He strode to the other end of the room, where several pictures were

leaning against the wall, with their faces turned towards it. From these

he chose one, but, before showing it, fitted it into an empty frame that

stood beside. He then brought it forward and set it on the easel. I will

describe it, and then my reader will understand the admiration which

broke from me after I had regarded it for a time.

A dark hill rose against the evening sky, which shone through a few

thin pines on its top. Along a road on the hill-side four squires bore

a dying knight--a man past the middle age. One behind carried his helm,

and another led his horse, whose fine head only appeared in the picture.

The head and countenance of the knight were very noble, telling of many

a battle, and ever for the right. The last had doubtless been gained,

for one might read victory as well as peace in the dying look. The party

had just reached the edge of a steep descent, from which you saw the

valley beneath, with the last of the harvest just being reaped, while

the shocks stood all about in the fields, under the place of the sunset.

The sun had been down for some little time. There was no gold left in

the sky, only a little dull saffron, but plenty of that lovely liquid

green of the autumn sky, divided with a few streaks of pale rose. The

depth of the sky overhead, which you could not see for the arrangement

of the picture, was mirrored lovelily in a piece of water that lay in

the centre of the valley.

“My dear fellow,” I cried, “why did you not show me this first, and save

me from saying so many unkind things? Here is a picture to my own heart;

it is glorious. Look here, Wynnie,” I went on; “you see it is evening;

the sun’s work is done, and he has set in glory, leaving his good name

behind him in a lovely harmony of colour. The old knight’s work is done

too; his day has set in the storm of battle, and he is lying lapt in the

coming peace. They are bearing him home to his couch and his grave.

Look at their faces in the dusky light. They are all mourning for

and honouring the life that is ebbing away. But he is gathered to his

fathers like a shock of corn fully ripe; and so the harvest stands

golden in the valley beneath. The picture would not be complete,

however, if it did not tell us of the deep heaven overhead, the symbol

of that heaven whither he who has done his work is bound. What a lovely

idea to represent it by means of the water, the heaven embodying itself

in the earth, as it were, that we may see it! And observe how that dusky

hill-side, and those tall slender mournful-looking pines, with that

sorrowful sky between, lead the eye and point the heart upward towards

that heaven. It is indeed a grand picture, full of feeling--a picture

and a parable.”

[Footnote: This is a description, from memory only, of a picture painted

by Arthur Hughes.]

I looked at the girl. Her eyes were full of tears, either called forth

by the picture itself or by the pleasure of finding Percivale’s work

appreciated by me, who had spoken so hardly of the others.

“I cannot tell you how glad I am that you like it,” she said.

“Like it!” I returned; “I am simply delighted with it, more than I can

express--so much delighted that if I could have this alongside of it,

I should not mind hanging that other--that hopeless garret--on the most

public wall I have.”

“Then,” said Wynnie bravely, though in a tremulous voice, “you

confess--don’t you, papa?--that you were _too_ hard on Mr. Percivale at

first?”

“Not too hard on his picture, my dear; and that was all he had yet given

me to judge by. No man should paint a picture like that. You are not

bound to disseminate hopelessness; for where there is no hope there can

be no sense of duty.”

“But surely, papa, Mr. Percivale has _some_ sense of duty,” said Wynnie

in an almost angry tone.

“Assuredly my love. Therefore I argue that he has some hope, and

therefore, again, that he has no right to publish such a picture.”

At the word _publish_ Percivale smiled. But Wynnie went on with her

defence:

“But you see, papa, that Mr. Percivale does not paint such pictures

only. Look at the other.”

“Yes, my dear. But pictures are not like poems, lying side by side in

the same book, so that the one can counteract the other. The one of

these might go to the stormy Hebrides, and the other to the Vale of

Avalon; but even then I should be strongly inclined to criticise the

poem, whatever position it stood in, that had _nothing_--positively

nothing--of the aurora in it.”

Here let me interrupt the course of our conversation to illustrate it by

a remark on a poem which has appeared within the last twelvemonth from

the pen of the greatest living poet, and one who, if I may dare to

judge, will continue the greatest for many, many years to come. It is

only a little song, “I stood on a tower in the wet.” I have found few

men who, whether from the influence of those prints which are always on

the outlook for something to ridicule, or from some other cause, did not

laugh at the poem. I thought and think it a lovely poem, although I am

not quite sure of the transposition of words in the last two lines. But

I do not _approve_ of the poem, just because there is no hope in it.

It lacks that touch or hint of _red_ which is as essential, I think, to

every poem as to every picture--the life-blood--the one pure colour. In

his hopeful moods, let a man put on his singing robes, and chant aloud

the words of gladness--or of grief, I care not which--to his fellows;

in his hours of hopelessness, let him utter his thoughts only to his

inarticulate violin, or in the evanescent sounds of any his other

stringed instrument; let him commune with his own heart on his bed, and

be still; let him speak to God face to face if he may--only he cannot

do that and continue hopeless; but let him not sing aloud in such a mood

into the hearts of his fellows, for he cannot do them much good thereby.

If it were a fact that there is no hope, it would not be a _truth_. No

doubt, if it were a fact, it ought to be known; but who will dare be

confident that there is no hope? Therefore, I say, let the hopeless

moods, at least, if not the hopeless men, be silent.

“He could refuse to let the one go without the other,” said Wynnie.

“Now you are talking like a child, Wynnie, as indeed all partisans do

at the best. He might sell them together, but the owner would part

them.--If you will allow me, I will come and see both the pictures again

to-morrow.”

Percivale assured me of welcome, and we parted, I declining to look at

any more pictures that day, but not till we had arranged that he should

dine with us in the evening.

CHAPTER XIII.

HOME AGAIN.

I will not detain my readers with the record of the few days we spent in

London. In writing the account of it, as in the experience of the time

itself, I feel that I am near home, and grow the more anxious to reach

it. Ah! I am growing a little anxious after another home, too; for the

house of my tabernacle is falling to ruins about me. What a word _home_

is! To think that God has made the world so that you have only to be

born in a certain place, and live long enough in it to get at the

secret of it, and henceforth that place is to you a _home_ with all the

wonderful meaning in the word. Thus the whole earth is a home to the

race; for every spot of it shares in the feeling: some one of the family

loves it as _his_ home. How rich the earth seems when we so regard

it--crowded with the loves of home! Yet I am now getting ready to _go

home_--to leave this world of homes and go home. When I reach that home,

shall I even then seek yet to go home? Even then, I believe, I shall

seek a yet warmer, deeper, truer home in the deeper knowledge of God--in

the truer love of my fellow-man. Eternity will be, my heart and my faith

tell me, a travelling homeward, but in jubilation and confidence and the

vision of the beloved.

When we had laid Connie once more in her own room, at least the room

which since her illness had come to be called hers, I went up to my

study. The familiar faces of my books welcomed me. I threw myself in my

reading-chair, and gazed around me with pleasure. I felt it so homely

here. All my old friends--whom somehow I hoped to see some day--present

there in the spirit ready to talk with me any moment when I was in the

mood, making no claim upon my attention when I was not! I felt as if I

should like, when the hour should come, to die in that chair, and pass

into the society of the witnesses in the presence of the tokens they had

left behind them.

I heard shouts on the stair, and in rushed the two boys.

“Papa, papa!” they were crying together.

“What is the matter?”

“We’ve found the big chest just where we left it.”

“Well, did you expect it would have taken itself off?”

“But there’s everything in it just as we left it.”

“Were you afraid, then, that the moment you left it it would turn itself

upside down, and empty itself of all its contents on the floor?”

They laughed, but apparently with no very keen appreciation of the

attempt at a joke.

“Well, papa, I did not think anything about it; but--but--but--there

everything is as we left it.”

With this triumphant answer they turned and hurried, a little abashed,

out of the room; but not many moments elapsed before the sounds that

arose from them were sufficiently reassuring as to the state of their

spirits. When they were gone, I forgot my books in the attempt to

penetrate and understand the condition of my boys’ thoughts; and I soon

came to see that they were right and I was wrong. It was the movement

of that undeveloped something in us which makes it possible for us in

everything to give thanks. It was the wonder of the discovery of the

existence of law. There was nothing that they could understand, _à

priori_, to necessitate the remaining of the things where they had left

them. No doubt there was a reason in the nature of God, why all things

should hold together, whence springs the law of gravitation, as we call

it; but as far as the boys could understand of this, all things might as

well have been arranged for flying asunder, so that no one could expect

to find anything where he had left it. I began to see yet further into

the truth that in everything we must give thanks, and whatever is not of

faith is sin. Even the laws of nature reveal the character of God,

not merely as regards their ends, but as regards their kind, being of

necessity fashioned after ideal facts of his own being and will.

I rose and went down to see if everybody was getting settled, and how

the place looked. I found Ethel already going about the house as if

she had never left it, and as if we all had just returned from a long

absence and she had to show us home-hospitality. Wynnie had vanished;

but I found her by and by in the favourite haunt of her mother before

her marriage--beside the little pond called the Bishop’s Basin, of which

I do not think I have ever told my readers the legend. But why should I

mention it, for I cannot tell it now? The frost lay thick in the hollow

when I went down there to find her; the branches, lately clothed

with leaves, stood bare and icy around her. Ethelwyn and I had almost

forgotten that there was anything out of the common in connection with

the house. The horror of this mysterious spot had laid hold upon Wynnie.

I resolved that that night I would, in her mother’s presence, tell

her all the legend of the place, and the whole story of how I won her

mother. I did so; and I think it made her trust us more. But now I left

her there, and went to Connie. She lay in her bed; for her mother had

got her thither at once, a perfect picture of blessed comfort. There was

no occasion to be uneasy about her. I was so pleased to be at home

again with such good hopes, that I could not rest, but went wandering

everywhere--into places even which I had not entered for ten years at

least, and found fresh interest in everything; for this was home, and

here I was.

Now I fancy my readers, looking forward to the end, and seeing what

a small amount of print is left, blaming me; some, that I have roused

curiosity without satisfying it; others, that I have kept them so long

over a dull book and a lame conclusion. But out of a life one cannot

always cut complete portions, and serve them up in nice shapes. I am

well aware that I have not told them the _fate_, as some of them would

call it, of either of my daughters. This I cannot develop now, even as

far as it is known to me; but, if it is any satisfaction to them to

know this much--and it will be all that some of them mean by _fate_, I

fear--I may as well tell them now that Wynnie has been Mrs. Percivale

for many years, with a history well worth recounting; and that Connie

has had a quiet, happy life for nearly as long, as Mrs. Turner. She has

never got strong, but has very tolerable health. Her husband watches her

with the utmost care and devotion. My Ethelwyn is still with me. Harry

is gone home. Charlie is a barrister of the Middle Temple. And Dora--I

must not forget Dora--well, I will say nothing about her _fate_, for

good reasons--it is not quite determined yet. Meantime she puts up with

the society of her old father and mother, and is something else than

unhappy, I fully believe.

“And Connie’s baby?” asks some one out of ten thousand readers. I have

no time to tell you about her now; but as you know her so little, it

cannot be such a trial to remain, for a time at least, unenlightened

with regard to her _fate._

The only other part of my history which could contain anything like

incident enough to make it interesting in print, is a period I spent in

London some few years after the time of which I have now been writing.

But I am getting too old to regard the commencement of another history

with composure. The labour of thinking into sequences, even the bodily

labour of writing, grows more and more severe. I fancy I can think

correctly still; but the effort necessary to express myself with

corresponding correctness becomes, in prospect, at least, sometimes

almost appalling. I must therefore take leave of my patient reader--for

surely every one who has followed me through all that I have here

written, well deserves the epithet--as if the probability that I shall

write no more were a certainty, bidding him farewell with one word:

_“Friend, hope thou in God,”_ and for a parting gift offering him a

new, and, I think, a true rendering of the first verse of the eleventh

chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews:

“Now faith is the essence of hopes, the trying of things unseen.”

Good-bye.

THE END.

End of Project Gutenberg’s The Seaboard Parish, Complete, by George MacDonald