"I never saw that door open before," she said, "and none of us knew

where it led. We took it for granted it was into the next house, but the

old lady was so cross,--"

Here she checked herself; for if Mr. Christopher had just come from that

house, he might be a friend of the old lady's!

"It goes into no lady's house, so far as I understand," said

Christopher. "The stair leads to a garret--I should fancy over our heads

here--much higher up, though."

"Would you show me how you came in?" said Hester.

"With pleasure," he answered, and taking one of the candles, led the

way.

"I would not let the young woman leave her husband to show me out," he

went on. "When I found myself a prisoner, I thought I would try this

door before periling the sleep of a patient in the small-pox. You seem

to have it all round you here!"

Through the door so long mysterious Hester stepped on a narrow, steep

stair. Christopher turned downward, and trod softly. At the bottom he

passed through a door admitting them to a small cellar, a mere recess.

Thence they issued into that so lately occupied by the Frankses.

Christopher went to the door Hester had locked, and said,

"This is where I came in. I suppose one of your people must have locked

it."

"I locked it myself," replied Hester, and told him in brief the story of

the evening.

"I see!" said Christopher; "we must have passed through just after you

had taken them away."

"And now the question remains," said Hester, "--who can it be in our

house without our knowledge? The stair is plainly in our house."

"Beyond a doubt," said Christopher. "But how strange it is you should

know your own house so imperfectly! I fancy the young couple, having got

into some difficulty, found entrance the same way the Frankses did; only

they went farther and fared better!--to the top of the house, I mean.

They've managed to make themselves pretty comfortable too! There is

something peculiar about them--I can hardly say what in a word."

"Could I not go up with you to-morrow and see them!" said Hester.

"That would hardly do, I fear. I could be of no farther use to them were

they to suppose I had betrayed them. You have a perfect right to know

what is going on in your house, but I would rather not appear in the

discovery. One thing is plain, you must either go to them, or unlock the

cellar-door. You will be taken with the young woman. She is a capable

creature--an excellent nurse. Shall I go out this way?"

"Will you come to-morrow?" said Hester. "I am alone, and cannot ask

anybody to help me because of the small-pox; and I shall want help for

the funeral. You do not think me troublesome?"

"Not in the least. It is all in the way of my business. I will manage

for you."

"Come then; I will show you the way out. This is no. 18, Addison square.

You need not come in the cellar-way next time."

"If I were you," said Christopher, stopping at the foot of the kitchen

stair, "I would leave the key in that cellar-door. The poor young woman

would be terrified to find they were prisoners."

She turned immediately and went back, he following, and replaced the

key.

"Now let us fasten up the door I came in by," said Christopher. "I have

got a screw in my pocket, and I never go without my tool-knife."

This was soon done, and he went.

What a strange night it had been for Hester--more like some unbelievable

romance! For the time she had forgotten her own troubles! Ah, if she had

been of one mind with lord Gartley, those poor creatures would be now

moaning in darkness by the dead body of their child, or out with it in

their arms in the streets, or parted asunder in the casual wards of some

workhouse! Certainly God could have sent them other help than hers, but

where would _she_ be then--a fellow-worker with his lordship, and

not with God--one who did it not to _him_! Woe for the wife whose

husband has no regard to her deepest desires, her highest

aspirations!--who loves her so that he would be the god of her idolatry,

not the friend and helper of her heart, soul, and mind! Many of Hester's

own thoughts were revealed to her that night by the side of the dead

Moxy. It became clear to her that she had been led astray, in part by

the desire to rescue one to whom God had not sent her, in part by the

pleasure of being loved and worshipped, and in part by worldly ambition.

Surer sign would God have sent her had he intended she should give

herself to Gartley! Would God have her give herself to one who would

render it impossible for her to make life more abundant to others?

Marriage might be the absorbing duty of some women, but was it

necessarily hers? Certainly not with such a man? Might not the duties of

some callings be incompatible with marriage? Did not the providence of

the world ordain that not a few should go unmarried? The children of the

married would be but ill cared for were there only the married to care

for them! It was one thing to die for a man--another to enslave God's

child to the will of one who did not know him! Was a husband to take the

place of Christ, and order her life for her? Was man enough for woman?

Did she not need God? It came to that! Was he or God to be her master?

It grew clearer and clearer as she watched by the dead. There was, there

could be no relation of life over which the Lord of life was not

supreme! That this or that good woman could do this or that faithless or

mean thing, was nothing to her! What might be unavoidable to one less

instructed, would be sin in her! The other might heed the sufferings and

confusions that resulted; but for her must remain a fearful looking for

of judgment and fiery indignation!

When the morning came and she heard Sarah stirring, she sent her to take

her place, and went to get a little rest.

CHAPTER XLV.

MORE YET.

But she could not sleep. She rose, went back to the room where the dead

Moxy lay, and sent Sarah to get breakfast ready. Then came upon her an

urgent desire to know the people who had come, like swallows, to tenant,

without leave asked, the space overhead. She undid the screw, opened the

door, and stole gently up the stair, steep, narrow and straight, which

ran the height of the two rooms between two walls. A long way up she

came to another door, and peeping through a chink in it, saw that it

admitted to the small orchestra high in the end-wall of the great room.

Probably then the stair and the room below had been an arrangement for

the musicians.

Going higher yet, till she all but reached the roof, the stair brought

her to a door. She knocked. No sound of approaching foot followed, but

after some little delay it was opened by a young woman, with her finger

on her lip, and something of a scared look in her eye. She had expected

to see the doctor, and started and trembled at sight of Hester. There

was little light where she stood, but Hester could not help feeling as

if she had not merely seen her somewhere before. She came out on the

landing and shut the door behind her.

"He is very ill," she said; "and he hears a strange voice even in his

sleep. A strange voice is dreadful to him."

Her voice was not strange, and the moment she spoke it seemed to light

up her face: Hester, with a pang she could scarcely have accounted for,

recognized Amy Amber.

"Amy!" she said.

"Oh, Miss Raymount!" cried Amy joyfully, "is it indeed you? Are you come

at last? I thought I was never to see you any more!"

"You bewilder me," said Hester. "How do you come to be here? I don't

understand."

"_He_ brought me here."

"_Who_ brought you here?"

"Why, miss!" exclaimed Amy, as if hearing the most unexpected of

questions, "who should it be?"

"I have not the slightest idea," returned Hester.

But the same instant a feeling strangely mingled of alarm, discomfort,

indignation, and relief crossed her mind.

Through her whiteness Amy turned whiter still, and she turned a little

away, like a person offended.

"There is but one, miss!" she said coldly. "Who should it be but him?"

"Speak his name," said Hester almost sternly. "This is no time for

hide-and-seek. Tell me whom you mean."

"Are you angry with me?" faltered Amy. "Oh, Miss Raymount, I don't think

I deserve it!"

"Speak out, child! Why should I be angry with you?"

"Do you know what it is?--Oh, I hardly know what I am saying! He is

dying! he is dying!"

She sank on the floor, and covered her face with her hands. Hester stood

a moment and looked at her weeping, her heart filled with sad dismay,

mingled with a kind of wan hope. Then softly and quickly she opened the

door of the room and went in.

Amy started to her feet, but too late to prevent her, and followed

trembling, afraid to speak, but relieved to find that Hester moved so

noiselessly.

It was a great room, but the roof came down to the floor nearly all

round. It was lighted only with a skylight. In the farthest corner was a

screen. Hester crept gently towards it, and Amy after her, not

attempting to stop her. She came to the screen and peeped behind it.

There lay a young man in a troubled sleep, his face swollen and red and

blotched with the small-pox; but through the disfigurement she

recognized her brother. Her eyes filled with tears; she turned away, and

stole out again as softly as she came in. Amy had been looking up at her

anxiously; when she saw the tenderness of her look, she gathered courage

and followed her. Outside, Hester stopped, and Amy again closed the

door.

"You _will_ forgive him, won't you, miss?" she said pitifully,

"What do you want me to forgive him for, Amy?" asked Hester, suppressing

her tears.

"I don't know, miss. You seemed angry with him. I don't know what to

make of it. Sometimes I feel certain it must have been his illness

coming on that made him weak in his head and talk foolishness; and

sometimes I wonder whether he has really been doing anything wrong."

"He must have been doing something wrong, else how should _you_ be

here, Amy?" said Hester with hasty judgment.

"He never told me, miss: or of course I would have done what I could to

prevent it," answered Amy, bewildered. "We were so happy, miss, till

then! and we've never had a moment's peace since! That's why we came

here--to be where nobody would find us. I wonder how he came to know the

place!"

"Do _you_ not know where you are then, Amy?"

"No, miss; not in the least. I only know where to buy the things we

need. He has not been out once since we came."

"You are in our house, Amy. What will my father say!--How long have

you--have you been--"

Something in her heart or her throat prevented Hester from finishing the

sentence.

"How long have I been married to him, miss? You surely know that as well

as I do, miss!"

"My poor Amy! Did he make you believe we knew about it?"

Amy gave a cry, but after her old way instantly crammed her handkerchief

into her mouth, and uttered no further smallest sound.

"Alas!" said Hester, "I fear he has been more wicked than we know! But,

Amy, he has done something besides very wrong."

Amy covered her face with her apron, through which Hester could see her

soundless sobs.

"I have been doing what I could to find him," continued Hester, "and

here he was close to me all the time! But it adds greatly to my misery

to find you with him, Amy!"

"Indeed, miss, I may have been silly; but how was I to suspect he was

not telling me the truth? I loved him too much for that! I told him I

would not marry him without he had his father's leave. And he pretended

he had got it, and read me such a beautiful letter from his mother! Oh,

miss, it breaks my heart to think of it!"

A new fear came upon Hester: had he deceived the poor girl with a

pretended marriage? Was he bad through and through? What her father

would say to a marriage, was hard to think; what he would say to a

deception, she knew! That he would like such a marriage, she could ill

imagine; but might not the sense of escape from an alternative reconcile

him to it?

Such thoughts passed swiftly through her mind as she stood half turned

from Amy, looking down the deep stair that sank like a precipice before

her. She heard nothing, but Amy started and turned to the door. She was

following her, when Amy said, in a voice almost of terror,

"Please, miss, do not let him see you till I have told him you are

here."

"Certainly not," answered Hester, and drew back,--"if you think the

sight of me would hurt him!"

"Thank you, miss; I am sure it would," whispered Amy. "He is frightened

of you."

"Frightened of me!" said Hester to herself, repeating Amy's phrase, when

she had gone in, leaving her at the head of the stair. "I should have

thought he only disliked me! I wonder if he would have loved me a

little, if he had not been afraid of me! Perhaps I could have made him

if I had tried. It is easier then to wake fear than love!"

It may be very well for a nature like Corney's to fear a father: fear

does come in for some good where love is wanting: but I doubt if fear of

a sister can be of any good.

"If he couldn't love me," thought Hester, "it would have been better he

hadn't been afraid of me. Now comes the time when it renders me unable

to help him!"

When first it began to dawn upon Hester that there was in her a certain

hardness of character distinct in its nature from that unbending

devotion to the right which is imperative--belonging in truth to the

region of her weakness--that self which fears for itself, and is of

death, not of life. But she was one of those who, when they discover a

thing in them that is wrong, take refuge in the immediate endeavour to

set it right--with the conviction that God is on their side to help

them: for wherein, if not therein, is he God our Saviour?

She went down to the house, to get everything she could think of to make

the place more comfortable: it would be long before the patient could be

moved. In particular she sought out a warm fur cloak for Amy. Poor Amy!

she was but the shadow of her former self, but a shadow very pretty and

pleasant to look on. Hester's heart was sore to think of such a bright,

good honest creature married to a man like her brother. But she was sure

however credulous she might have been, she had done nothing to be

ashamed of. Where there was blame it must all be Corney's!

It was with feelings still strangely mingled of hope and dismay, that,

having carried everything she could at the time up the stair, she gave

herself to the comfort of her other guests.

Left alone in London, Corney had gone idly ranging about the house when

another man would have been reading, or doing something with his hands.

Curious in correspondent proportion to his secrecy, for the qualities go

together, the moment he happened to cast his eyes on the door in the

wainscot of the low room, no one being in the house to interfere with

him, he proceeded to open it. He little thought then what his discovery

would be to him, for at that time he had done nothing to make him fear

his fellow-men. But he kept the secret after his kind.

Contriving often to meet Amy, he had grown rapidly more and more fond of

her--became indeed as much in love with her as was possible to him; and

though the love of such a man can never be of a lofty kind, it may yet

be the best thing in him, and the most redemptive power upon him.

Without a notion of denying himself anything he desired and could

possibly have, he determined she should be his, but from fear as well as

tortuosity, avoided the direct way of gaining her: the straight line

would not, he judged, be the shortest: his father would never, or only

after unendurable delay, consent to his marriage with a girl like Amy!

How things might have gone had he not found her even unable to receive a

thought that would have been dishonorable to him, and had he not come to

pride himself on her simplicity and purity, I cannot say; but he

contrived to persuade her to a private marriage--contrived also to

prevent her from communicating with her sister.

His desire to please her, his passion for showing off, and the

preparations his design seemed to render necessary, soon brought him

into straits for money. He could not ask his father, who would have

insisted on knowing how it was that he found his salary insufficient,

seeing he was at no expense for maintenance, having only to buy his

clothes. He went on and on, hiding his eyes from the approach of the

"armed man," till he was in his grasp, and positively in want of a

shilling. Then he borrowed, and went on borrowing small sums from those

about him, till he was ashamed to borrow more. The next thing was to

_borrow_ a trifle of what was passing through his hands. He was

merely borrowing, and of his own uncle! It was a shame his uncle should

have so much and leave him in such straits!--be rolling in wealth and

pay him such a contemptible salary! It was the height of injustice! Of

course he would replace it long before any one knew! Thus by degrees the

poor weak creature, deluding himself with excuses, slipped into the

consciousness of being a rogue. There are some, I suspect, who fall into

vice from being so satisfied with themselves that they scorn to think it

possible they should ever do wrong.

He went on taking and taking until at last he was obliged to confess to

himself that there was no possibility of making restoration before the

time when his _borrowing_ must be embezzlement. Then in a kind of

cold despair he laid hold upon a large sum and left the bank an

unconvicted felon. What story he told Amy, to whom he was by this time

married, I do not know; but once convinced of the necessity for

concealment, she was as careful as himself. He brought her to their

refuge by the back way. She went and came only through the cellar, and

knew no other entrance. When they found that, through Amy's leaving the

door unfastened when she went to buy, there being no way of securing it

from the outside, others had taken refuge in the cellar, they dared not,

for fear of attracting attention to themselves, warn them off the

premises.

CHAPTER XLVI.

AMY AND CORNEY.

The Frankses remained at rest until the funeral was over, and then

Hester would have father and sons go out to follow their calling, while

the mother and she did what could be done for the ailing baby, who could

not linger long behind Moxy.

Hester had a little money of her own--not much, but enough to restore to

decency, with the help of the wife's fingers, the wardrobe of the

family. For the present she would not let them leave the house; she must

have them in better condition first, and with a little money in their

pockets of their own earning. And the very first day, though they went

out with heavy hearts, and could hardly have played with much spirit,

they brought home more money than any day for weeks before. And Franks

as he walked home weary, took some comfort that his Moxy was not with

him to trouble his mother with his white face and drawn look.

The same day lord Gartley called, but was informed by Sarah, who opened

the door but a chink, that the small-pox was in the house, and that she

could admit no one but the doctor. To his exclamation she made answer

that her young mistress was perfectly well, but could and would see

nobody--was in attendance upon the sick. So his lordship was compelled

to go without seeing her, not without a haunting doubt that he was being

played upon, and she did not want to see him.

As had happened more than once before, soon after he was gone the major

made his appearance. To him Sarah gave the same answer, adding by her

mistress's directions, that in the meantime there was no occasion to

prosecute inquiry about Mr. Cornelius, for it was all--as Sarah put

it--explained, and her mistress would write to him.

But what was Hester to tell her father and mother? Until she knew with

certainty the fact of her marriage, she shrank from mentioning Amy; and

at present it was impossible to find out anything from Cornelius. She

merely wrote, therefore, that she had found him, but very ill; that she

would take the best care of him she could, and as soon as he was able to

be moved, bring him home to be nursed by his mother.

The great room was for the mean time given over to the Frankses. The

wife kept everything tidy, and they managed things their own way. Hester

made inquiry now and then, to be sure they were having everything they

wanted, but left them to provide for themselves.

She did her best to help Amy without letting her brother suspect her

presence, and by degrees she got the room more comfortable for them.

Corney had indeed taken a good many things from the house to make

habitable the waste expanse, but had been careful not to take anything

Sarah would miss.

He was covered with the terrible eruption, and if he survived, which

again and again seemed doubtful, would probably be much changed, for Amy

could not keep his hands from his face: in trifles the lack of

self-restraint is manifested, and its consequences are sometimes

grievous.

Hitherto Hester had not let her parents quite know how ill he was--for

what may seem a far-fetched reason--not to save them from anxiety, but

to save her mother from hearing his father say, the best thing he could

do would be to die. Nor was she mistaken: many a time had her father

said so to himself. It was simply impossible, he said, that he should

ever again speak to him or in any way treat him as a son. He had by his

vile conduct ceased to be a son, and he was nowise bound to do anything

more for him; though, from mere compassion, he would keep him from

starving till he got some employment to which no character was

necessary.

He began at last to recover, but it was long before he could be treated

otherwise than as a child--so feeble was he, and so unreasonable. The

first time he saw and knew Hester, he closed his eyes and turned away

his head as if he would have no more of that apparition. She retired;

but, watching, presently saw him, in his own sly way, looking through

half closed lids to know whether she was gone. When he saw Amy where

Hester had stood, his face beamed up. "Amy," he said, "come here;" and

when she went, he took her hand and laid it on his cheek, little knowing

what a disfigured cheek it was.

"Thank God!" said Hester to herself: she had never seen him look so

sweet or loving or lovable, despite his disfigurement.

She took care not to show herself again till he should be a little

accustomed to the idea of her presence.

The more she saw of Amy the better she liked her. She treated her

patient with so much good sense, showed such a readiness to subordinate

her ignorance to the wisdom of others, and such a careful obedience to

the directions of the doctor, that she rose every day in Hester's

opinion, as well as found a yet deeper place in her heart.

His lordship wrote, making an apology for anything he had said, from

anxiety about one whom he loved to distraction, in which he might have

presumed on the closeness of their relation to each other. He would

gladly talk the whole matter over with her as soon as she gave him

leave. For his part he had not a moment's doubt that her good sense,

relieved from the immediate pressure of her feelings, which were in

themselves but too divine for the needs of this world, would convince

her of the reasonableness of all he had sought to urge upon her. As soon

as she was able, and judged it safe to admit a visitor, his aunt would

be happy to call upon her.

For the present, as he knew she would not admit him, he would content

himself with frequent and most anxious inquiries after her, reserving

argument and expostulation for a happier, and, he hoped, not very

distant time.

Hester smiled a curious smile at the prospect of a call from Miss

Vavasor: was she actually going to plead her nephew's cause?

As her brother grew better, and things became easier, the thought of

lord Gartley came oftener, with something of the old feeling for the man

himself, but mingled with sadness and a strange pity. She would never

have been able to do anything for him! It had been in her spiritual

presumption to think she could save him by the preciousness of her

self-gift to him and the strength of her power over him!

If God cannot save a man by all his good gifts, not even by the gift of

a woman offered to his higher nature, but by that refused, the woman's

giving of herself a slave to his lower nature can only make him the more

unredeemable; while the withholding of herself may do something--may at

least, as the years go on, wake in him some sense of what a fool he had

been. The man who would go to the dogs for lack of the woman he fancies,

will go to the dogs when he has her--may possibly drag her to the dogs

with him.

Hester began to see something of this. She recalled how she had never

once gained from him a satisfactory reply to anything she said worth

saying; she had in her foolishness supplied from her own imagination the

defective echoes of his response! Love had made her apt and able to do

this; but now that she had yielded entrance to doubt, she saw many

things otherwise than before. She loved the man enough to die for him:

she would not have one moment hesitated about that; but it was quite

another thing to marry him! It was her brother now she had to save! His

dear, good little wife was doing all she could for him, but it would

take sister and mother and all to save him! She could not do so much for

him as Amy now, but by and by there would be his father to meditate

with: to that she would give her energy!

But his poor mother! would she recognize him--so terribly scarred and

changed? He might in time, being young, grow more like himself, but now

he was not pleasant to look upon. Some men are as vain as any women, and

Corney was one of those some. While pretending to despise the kindest

word concerning his good looks, he had taken the greatest pleasure in

them; and the first time he saw himself in a mirror, the look of dismay,

of despairing horror that came over his face was as pitiful as it was

ludicrous. He had been accustomed to regard himself as one superior on

most grounds, on that of good looks in particular, to any one he

knew--and now! He could not but admit that he was nothing less than

unpleasant to behold--must be so even to those who loved him! It was a

pain that in itself could do little to cast out the evil spirit that

possessed him, but it was something that that evil spirit, while it

remained in him, should be deprived of one source of its nourishment. It

was a good thing that from any cause the transgressor should find his

ways hard. He dashed the glass from him, and burst into tears which he

did not even try to conceal.

It was notable that from that time he was more dejected, and less

peevish; and this latter might not be only from returning health, for he

had always been more or less peevish at home, where he never thought of

cultivating the same conception or idea of himself as before the eyes of

the world. Much of supposed goodness is merely a looking of the thing

men would like to be considered--originating doubtless sometimes in an

admiration of, perhaps in a vague wish to be that thing, but

unaccompanied of desire or strength enough to rouse the smallest

endeavour after being it. Still Hester found it difficult to bear with

his remaining peevishness and bad temper, knowing what he had made of

himself, and that he knew she must know it; but at such hard moments she

had the good sense to leave him to the soothing ministrations of his

wife. Amy never set herself against him: first of all she would show him

that she understood what was troubling him: then would say something

sympathetic, or petting, or coaxing, and always had her way with him.

She had the great advantage that not yet had he once quarrelled with

her.

That gave a ground of hope for her influence with him that his sister

had long lost. God had made Amy so that she had less trouble from

selfishness than all but a few people. Hester, more than Amy, felt her

own rights, and was ready to be indignant. She would have far more

trouble than Amy in getting rid of the self-asserting self in her, which

closes the door against heaven's divinest gifts. In Hester it was no

doubt associated with a loftier nature, and the harder victory would

have its greater reward, but until finally conquered it must continue to

obstruct her walk in the true way. So Hester learned from the sweetness

of Amy, as Amy from the unbending principle of Hester.

She at last made up her mind that she would take Cornelius home without

giving her father the opportunity of saying he should not come. She

would presume that he must go home after such an illness: the result she

would wait! The meeting could in no case be a happy one, but if he were

not altogether repulsed, if the mean devil in him was not thoroughly

roused by the harshness of his father, she would think much had been

gained!

With gentle watchfulness she regarded Amy, and was more and more

satisfied that, whatever might be wrong, she had had a share in it not

as one who did, but as one who endured wrong. The sweetness and devotion

with which she seemed to live only for her husband was to Hester, who

found it impossible to take such a position even in imagination towards

Gartley, in her tenderer moments almost a rebuke. But she could not

believe that had Amy known before she married him what kind of person

Cornelius was, she would have given herself to him. She did not think

how nearly the man she had once accepted stood on the same level of

manhood. But Amy was the wife of Cornelius, and that made an eternal

difference. Her duty was as plain as Hester's--and the same--to do the

best for him!

When he was able to be moved, Hester brought them into the house, and

placed them in a comfortable room. She then moved the Frankses into the

room they had left, making it over to them, subject to her father's

pleasure, for a time at least. With their own entrance through the

cellar, they were to live there after their own fashion, and follow

their own calling, only they were to let Hester know if they found

themselves in any difficulty. And now for the first time in her life she

wished she had some means of her own, that she might act with freedom.

She had seen hope of freedom in marriage, but now she wished it in

independence.

CHAPTER XLVII.

MISS VAVASOR.

About three weeks after lord Gartley's call, during which he had left a

good many cards in Addison square, Hester received the following letter

from Miss Vavasor: "My dear Miss Raymount, I am very anxious to see you,

but fear it is hardly safe to go to you yet. You with your heavenly

spirit do not regard such things, but I am not so much in love with the

future as to risk my poor present for it. Neither would I willingly be

the bearer of infection into my own circle: I am not so selfish as to be

careless about that. But communicate with you somehow I must, and that

for your own sake as well as Gartley's who is pining away for lack of

the sunlight of your eyes. I throw myself entirely on your judgment. If

you tell me you consider yourself out of quarantine, I will come to you

at once; if you do not, will you propose something, for meet we must."

Hester pondered well before returning an answer. She could hardly say,

she replied, that there was no danger, for her brother, who had been

ill, was yet in the house, too weak for the journey to Yrndale. She

would rather suggest, therefore, that they should meet in some quiet

corner of one of the parks. She need hardly add she would take every

precaution against carrying infection.

The proposal proved acceptable to Miss Vavasor. She wrote suggesting

time and place. Hester agreed, and they met.

Hester appeared on foot, having had to dismiss her cab at the gate; Miss

Vavasor, who had remained seated in her carriage; got down as soon as

she saw her, and having sent it away, advanced to meet her with a smile:

she was perfect in skin-hospitality.

"How long is it now," she began, "since you saw Gartley?"

"Three weeks or a month," replied Hester.

"I am afraid, sadly afraid, you cannot be much of a lover, not to have

seen him for so long and look so fresh!" smiled Miss Vavasor, with

gently implied reproach, and followed the words with a sigh, as if

_she_ had memories of a different complexion.

"When one has one's work to do,--" said Hester.

"Ah, yes!" returned Miss Vavasor, not waiting for the sentence, "I

understand you have some peculiar ideas about work. That kind of thing

is spreading very much in our circle too. I know many ladies who visit

the poor. They complain there are so few unobjectionable tracts to give

them. The custom came in with these Woman's-rights. I fear they will

upset everything before long. But I hope the world will last my time. No

one can tell where such things will end."

"No," replied Hester. "Nothing has ever stopped yet."

"Is that as much as to say that nothing ever will stop?"

"I think it is something like it," said Hester.

"We know nothing about the ends of things--only the beginnings."

There had been an air of gentle raillery in Miss Vavasor's tone, and

Hester used the same, for she had no hope of coming to an understanding

with her about anything.

"Then the sooner we do the better! I don't see else how things are to go

on at all!" said Miss Vavasor, revealing the drop of Irish blood in her.

"When the master comes he will stop a good deal," thought Hester, but

she did not say it. She could not allude to such things without at least

a possibility of response.

"You and Gartley had a small misunderstanding, he tells me, the last

time you met," continued Miss Vavasor, after a short pause.

"I think not," answered Hester; "at least I fancy I understood him very

well."

"My dear Miss Raymount, you must not be offended with me. I am an old

woman, and have had to compose differences that had got in the way of

their happiness between goodness knows how many couples. I am not

boasting when I say I have had considerable experience in that sort of

thing."

"I do not doubt it," said Hester. "What I do doubt is, that you have had

any experience of the sort necessary to set things right between lord

Gartley and myself. The fact is, for I will be perfectly open with you,

that I saw then--for the first time plainly, that to marry him would be

to lose my liberty."

"Not more, my dear, than every woman does who marries at all. I presume

you will allow marriage and its duties to be the natural calling of a

woman?"

"Certainly."

"Then she ought not to complain of the loss of her liberty."

"Not of so much as is naturally involved in _marriage_, I allow."

"Then why draw back from your engagement to Gartley?"

"Because he requires me to turn away at once, and before any necessity

shows itself, from the exercise of a higher calling yet."

"I am not aware of any higher calling."

"I am. God has given me gifts to use for my fellows, and use them I must

till he, not man, stops me. That is my calling."

"But you know that of necessity a woman must give up many things when

she accepts the position of a wife, and possibly the duties of a

mother."

"The natural claims upon a wife or mother I would heartily acknowledge."

"Then of course to the duties of a wife belong the claims Society has

upon her as a wife."

"So far as I yet know what is meant in your circle by such claims, I

count them the merest usurpations: I will never subject myself to

such--never put myself in a position where I should be expected to obey

a code of laws not merely opposed to the work for which I was made, but

to all the laws of the relations to each other of human beings as human

beings."

"I do not quite understand you," said Miss Vavasor.

"Well, for instance," returned Hester, willing to give the question a

general bearing, "a mother in your class, according at least to much

that I have heard, considers the duties she owes to society, duties that

consist in what looks to me the merest dissipation and killing of time,

as paramount even to those of a mother. Because of those 'traditions of

men,' or fancies of fashionable women rather, she justifies herself in

leaving her children in the nursery to the care of other women--the

vulgarest sometimes."

"Not knowingly," said Miss Vavasor. "We are all liable to mistakes."

"But certainly," insisted Hester, "without taking the pains necessary to

know for themselves the characters of those to whom they trust the

children God has given to their charge; whereas to abandon them to the

care of angels themselves would be to go against the laws of nature and

the calling of God."

Miss Vavasor began to think it scarcely desirable to bring a woman of

such levelling opinions into their quiet circle: she would be preaching

next that women were wicked who did not nurse their own brats! But she

would be faithful to Gartley!

"To set up as reformers would be to have the whole hive about our ears,"

she said.

"That may be," replied Hester, "but it does not apply to me. I keep the

beam out of my own eye which I have no hope of pulling out of my

neighhour's. I do not belong to your set."

"But you are about to belong to it, I hope."

"I hope not."

"You are engaged to marry my nephew."

"Not irrevocably, I trust."

"You should have thought of all that before you gave your consent.

Gartley thought you understood. Certainly our circle is not one for

saints."

"Honest women would be good enough for me. But I thought I had done and

said more than was necessary to make Gartley understand my ideas of what

was required of me in life, and I thought he sympathized with me so far

at least that he would be what help to me he could. Now I find instead

of this, that he never believed I meant what I said, but all the time

intended to put a stop to the aspiration of my life the moment he had it

in his power to do so."

"Ah, my dear young lady, you do not know what love is!" said Miss

Vavasor, and sighed again as if _she_ knew what love was. And in

truth she had been in love at least once in her youth, but had yielded

without word of remonstrance when her parents objected to her marrying

three hundred a year, and a curacy of _fifty_. She saw it was

reasonable: what fellowship can light have with darkness, or love with

starvation? "A woman really in love," she went on, "is ready to give up

everything, yes, my dear, _everything_ for the man she loves. She

who is not equal to that, does not know what love is."

"Suppose he should prove unworthy of her?"

"That would be nothing, positively nothing. If she had once learned to

love him she would see no fault in him."

"_Whatever_ faults he might have?"

"Whatever faults: love has no second thoughts."

"Suppose he were to show himself regardless of her best welfare--caring

for her only as an adjunct to his display?"

"If she loved him, I only say _if she loved him_, she would be

proud to follow in his triumph. His glory is hers."

"Whether it be real or not?"

"If he counts it so. A woman who loves gives herself to her husband to

be moulded by him."

"I fear that is the way men think of us," said Hester, sadly; "and no

doubt there are women whose behaviour would justify them in it. With all

my heart I say a woman ought to be ready to die for the man she loves;

that is a matter of course; she cannot really love him if she would not;

but that she should fall in with all his thoughts, feelings, and

judgments whatever, even such as in others she would most heartily

despise; that she should act as if her husband and not God made her, and

his whims, instead of the lovely will of him who created man and woman,

were to be to her the bonds of her being--that surely no woman could

grant who had not first lost her reason."

"You won't lose yours for love at least," concluded Miss Vavasor, who

could not help admiring her ability, though she despised the direction

it took. "I see," she said to herself, "she is one of the strong-minded

who think themselves superior to any man. Gartley will be well rid of

her--that is my conviction! I think I have done nearly all he could

require of me."

"I tell you honestly," continued Hester, "I love lord Gartley so well

that I would gladly yield my life to do him any worthy good."--"It is

easy to talk," said Miss Vavasor to herself.--"Not that that is saying

much," Hester went on, "for I would do that to redeem any human creature

from the misery of living without God. I would even marry lord

Gartley--I think I would, after what has passed--if only I knew that he

would not try to prevent me from being the woman I ought to be and have

to be;--perhaps I would--I am not clear about it just at this moment:

never, if I were married to him, would I be so governed by him that he

should do that! But who would knowingly marry for strife and debate? Who

would deliberately add to the difficulties of being what she ought to

be, what she desired, and was determined, with God's help, to be! I for

one will not take an enemy into the house of my life. I will not make it

a hypocrisy to say, 'Lead us not into temptation.' I grant you a wife

must love her husband grandly'--passionately, if you like the word; but

there is one to be loved immeasurably more grandly, yea

_passionately_, if the word means anything true and good in

love--he whose love creates love. Can you for a moment imagine, when the

question came between my Lord and my husband, I would hesitate?"

"'Tis a pity you were not born in the middle ages," said Miss Vavasor,

smiling, but with a touch of gentle scorn in the superiority of her

tone; "you would certainly have been canonized!"

"But now I am sadly out of date--am I not?" returned Hester, trying to

smile also.

"I could no more consent to live in God's world without minding what he

told me, than I would marry a man merely because he admired me."

"Heavens," exclaimed Miss Vavasor to what she called herself, "what an

extravagant young woman! She won't do for us! You'll have to let her

fly, my dear boy!"

What she said to Hester was,

"Don't you think, my dear, all that sounds a little--just a little

extravagant? You know as well as I do--you have just confessed it--that

the kind of thing is out of date--does not belong to the world of

to-day. And when a thing is once of the past, it cannot be called back,

do what you will. Nothing will ever bring in that kind of thing again.

It is all very well to go to church and that sort of thing; I should be

the last to encourage the atheism that is getting so frightfully common,

but really it seems to me such extravagant notions about religion as you

have been brought up in must have not a little to do with the present

sad state of affairs--must in fact go far to make atheists. Civilization

will never endure to be priest-ridden."

"It is my turn now," said Hester, "to say that I scarcely understand

you. Do you take God for a priest? Do you object to atheism, and yet

regard obedience to God as an invention of the priests? Was Jesus Christ

a priest? or did he say what was not true when he said that whoever

loved any one else more than him was not worthy of him? Or do you

confess it true, yet say it is of no consequence? If you do not care

about what he wants of you, I simply tell you that I care about nothing

else; and if ever I should change, I hope he will soon teach me

better--whatever sorrow may be necessary for me to that end. I desire

not to care a straw about anything he does not care about."

"It is very plain, at least," said Miss Vavasor, "that you do not love

my nephew as he deserves to be loved--or as any woman ought to love the

man to whom she has given her consent to be his wife! You have very

different ideas from such as were taught in my girlhood concerning the

duties of wives! A woman, I used to be told, was to fashion herself upon

her husband, fit her life to his life, her thoughts to his thoughts, her

tastes to his tastes."

Absurd indeed would have seemed, to any one really knowing the two, the

idea of a woman like Hester fitting herself into the mould of such a man

as lord Gartley!--for what must be done with the quantity of her that

would be left over after his lordship's mould was filled! The notion of

squeezing a large, divine being, like Hester, into the shape of such a

poor, small, mean, worldly, time-serving fellow, would have been so

convincingly ludicrous as to show at once the theory on which it was

founded for the absurdity it was. Instead of walking on together in

simple equality, in mutual honour and devotion, each helping the other

to be better still, to have the woman, large and noble, come cowering

after her pigmy lord, as if he were the god of her life, instead of a

Satan doing his best to damn her to his own meanness!--it is a contrast

that needs no argument! Not the less if the woman be married to such a

man, will it be her highest glory, by the patience of Christ, by the

sacrifice of self, yea of everything save the will of God, to win the

man, if he may by any means be won, from the misery of his self-seeking

to a noble shame of what he now delights in.

"You are right," said Hester; "I do not love lord Gartley sufficiently

for that! Thank you, Miss Vavasor, you have helped me to the thorough

conviction that there could never have been any real union between us.

Can a woman love with truest wifely love a man who has no care that she

should attain to the perfect growth of her nature? _He_ would have

been quite content I should remain for ever the poor creature I

am--would never by word, or wish, or prayer, have sought to raise me

above myself! The man I shall love as I could love must be a greater man

than lord Gartley! He is not fit to make any woman love him so. If she

were so much less than he as to have to look up to him, she would be too

small to have any devotion in her. No! I will be a woman and not a

countess!--I wish you good morning, Miss Vavasor."

"If I am not to help him," she said to herself, "what is there in reason

why I should marry him? His love, no doubt, is the best thing he has to

give, but a poor thing is his best, and save as an advantage for serving

him, not worth the having." What her love to him would have been three

months after marrying him, I am glad to have no occasion to imagine.

She held out her hand. Miss Vavasor drew herself up, and looked a cold

annihilation into her eyes. The warm blood rose from Hester's heart to

her brain. Quietly she returned her gaze, nor blenched a moment. She

felt as if she were looking a far off idea in the face--as if she were

telling her what a poor miserable creature of money and manners,

ambitions and expediencies she thought her. Miss Vavasor, unused to

having such a full strong virgin look fixed fearless, without defiance,

but with utter disapproval, upon her, quailed--only a little, but as she

had never in her life quailed before. She forced her gaze, and Hester

felt that to withdraw her eyes would give her a false sense of victory.

She therefore continued her look, but had no need to force it, for she

knew she was the stronger. It seemed minutes where only seconds passed.

She smiled at last and said,

"I am glad you are not going to be my aunt, Miss Vavasor."

"Thank goodness, no!" cried Miss Vavasor, with a slightly hysterical

laugh.

Notwithstanding her educated self-command, she felt cowed before the

majesty of Hester, for woman was face to face with woman, and the truth

was stronger than the lie. Had she then yielded to the motions within

her, she would, and it would have been but the second time in her life,

have broken into undignified objurgation. She had to go back to her

nephew and confess that she had utterly failed where she had expected,

if not an easy victory, yet the more a triumphant one! She had to tell

him that his lady was the most peculiar, most unreasonable young woman

she had ever had to deal with; and that she was not only unsuited to

him, but quite unworthy of him! He would conclude she had managed the

matter ill, and said things she ought not to have said! It was very hard

that she, who desired only to set things right, looking for no advantage

to herself--she who was recognized as a power in her own circle, should

have been so ignominiously foiled in the noble endeavour, having

sacrificed herself, to sacrifice also another upon the altar of her

beloved earldom! She could not reconcile herself to the thought. It did

not occur to her that there was a power here concerned altogether

different from any she had before encountered--namely a soul possessed

by truth and clad in the armour of righteousness. Of conscience that

dealt with the qualities of things, nor cared what had been decreed

concerning them by a class claiming for itself the apex of the world,

she had scarce even a shadowy idea; for never in her life had she

herself acted from any insight into primary quality. When therefore she

had to do with a girl who did not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the

law to which she bowed as supreme, she was out of her element--had got,

as it seemed to her, into water too shoal to swim in; whereas, in fact,

she had got into water too deep to wade in, and did not know how to

swim.

She turned and walked away, attempting a show of dignity, but showing

only that Brummagem thing, haughtiness--an adornment the possessor alone

does not recognize as a counterfeit. Then Hester turned too, and walked

in the opposite direction, feeling that one supposed portion of her

history was but an episode, and at an end.

She did not know that, both coming and going, she was attended at a near

distance by a tall, portly gentleman of ruddy complexion and military

bearing. He had beheld her interview--by no means overheard her

conversation--with Miss Vavasor, and had seen with delight the

unmistakable symptoms of serious difference which at last appeared, and

culminated in their parting. He did not venture to approach her, but

when she got into a cab, took a Hansom and followed her to the entrance

of the square, where he got down, his heart beating with exultant hope

that "the rascal ass of a nobleman" had been dismissed.

All the time since he came to London with Hester, he had, as far as

possible to him, kept guard over her, and had known a good deal more of

her goings and comings than she was aware of--this with an unselfishness

of devotion that took from him the least suspicion of its being a thing

unwarrantable. He was like the dog which, not allowed to accompany his

master, follows him at a distance, ready to interfere at any moment when

such interference may be desirable. She had let him know that she had

found her brother, that he was very ill, and that she was helping to

nurse him; but she had not yet summoned him. In severe obedience to

orders, therefore, he did not even now call. Next day, however, he found

a summons waiting him at his club, and made haste to obey it.

She had thought it better to prepare him for what she was about to ask

of him, therefore mentioned in her note that in a day or two she was

going to Yrndale with her brother and his wife.

"Whew!" exclaimed the major when he read it, "wife! this complicates

matters! I was sure he had not gone to the dogs--no dog but a cur would

receive him--without help!--Marriage and embezzlement! Poor devil! if he

were not such a confounded ape I should pity him! But the small-pox and

a wife may perhaps do something for him!"

When he reached the house, Hester received him warmly, and at once made

her request that he would go down with them. It would be such a relief

to her if he would, she said. He expressed entire readiness, but thought

she had better not say he was coming, as in the circumstances he could

hardly be welcome. They soon made their arrangements, and he left her

yet more confirmed in a respect such as he had never till now felt. And

this was the major's share in the good that flowed from Hester's

sufferings: the one most deficient thing in him was reverence, and in

this he was now having a strong lesson.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

MR. CHRISTOPHER.

On the Sunday evening, the last before she was to leave for Yrndale,

Hester had gone to see a poor woman in a house she had not been in

before, and was walking up the dismal stair, dark and dirty, when she

heard a moaning from a room the door of which was a little open. She

peeped in, and saw on a low bed a poor woman, old, yellow, and wrinkled,

apparently at the point of death. Her throat was bare, and she saw the

muscles of it knotted in the struggle for life.--Is not death the

victorious struggle for life?--She was not alone; a man knelt by her

bedside, his arm under the pillow to hold her head higher, and his other

hand clasping hers.

"The darkness! the darkness!" moaned the woman.

"You feel lonely?" said the voice of the man, low, and broken with

sympathy.

"All, all alone," sighed the woman.

"I can do nothing for you. I can only love you."

"Yes, yes," said the woman hopelessly.

"You are slipping away from me, but my master is stronger than me, and

can help you yet. He is not far from you though you can't see him. He

loves you too, and only wants you to ask him to help you. He can cure

death as easy as any other disease."

No reply came for a moment. Then, moulded of all-but dying breath, came

the cry,

"O Christ, save me!"

Then Hester was seized with a sudden impulse: she thought afterwards the

feeling of it might be like what men and women of old had when the

Spirit of God came upon them: it seemed she had not intended song when

the sounds issuing from her mouth entered her ears. The words she

uttered were those and no more, over and over again, which the poor

dying woman had just spoken: "O Christ, save me!" But the song-sounds in

which they were lapt and with which they came winged from her lips,

seemed the veriest outpouring of her whole soul. They seemed to rise

from some eternal deep within her, yet not to be of her making. She was

as in the immediate presence of Christ, pleading with him for the

consolation and strength which his poor dying creature so sorely needed.

The holy possession lasted but a minute or so, and left her dumb. She

turned away, and passed up the stair.

"The angels! the angels! I'm going now!" said the woman feebly.

"The angel was praying to Christ for you," said Christopher. "--Oh

living brother, save our dying sister!"

"O Christ, save me!" she murmured again, and they were her last words.

Christopher laid the body gently back on the pillow. A sigh of relief

passed from his lips, and he went from the room to give notice of the

death. The dead or who would might bury the dead; he must go to the

living!

Inflated sentiment all this looks to the man of this world. But when the

inevitable Death has him by the throat; when he lies like that poor

woman, lonely in the shadow, though his room be crowded with friends,

whatever his theories about future or no future, it may be an awful hour

in which less than a Christ will hardly comfort him.

Hester's heart was full when she found the woman she went to see, and

she was able to speak as she had never spoken before. She never troubled

her poor with any of the theories of salvation, which, right or wrong,

are _not_ the things to be presented for men's reception--now any

more than in the days of the first teachers who knew nothing of them:

they serve but to obscure the vision of the live brother in whom men

must believe to be lifted out of their evil and brought into the air of

truth and the room for growing deliverance. Hester spoke of Christ, the

friend of men, who came to save every one by giving him back to God, as

one gives back to a mother the stray child who has run from her to

escape obeying her.

The woman at least listened; and then she sang to her. But she could not

sing as she had sung a little while before. One cannot have or give the

best always--not at least until the soul shall be always in its highest

and best moods--a condition which may perhaps be on the way to us,

though I am doubtful whether the created will ever stand continuously on

the apex of conscious existence. I think part of the joy will be to

contemplate the conditions in which we are at our best: I delight to

think of twilights in heaven--the brooding on the best. Perhaps we may

be full of God always and yet not always full of the ecstasy of good, or

always able to make it pass in sweet splendours from heart to heart.

Hester was walking homewards when, passing through a court on her way,

she heard the voice of a man, which again she recognized as that of Mr.

Christopher. Glancing about her she discovered that it came from a room

half under ground. She went to the door. There was a little crowd of

dirty children making a noise round it, and she could not well hear what

was going on, but what she did hear was enough to let her know it was

the voice of one pleading with his fellows not to be miserable and die,

but to live and rejoice. Now for all the true liberality of Hester's

heart and brain both, she had never entered any place of worship that

did not belong to the established church, thinking all the rest only and

altogether sectarian, and she would not be a sectary. She had not yet

learned that therein she just was a sectary--from Christ the head. But

here was something meant only for the poor, she thought, and seeing they

would not go to church, a layman like Mr. Christopher might surely give

them of the good things he had! So she went in: she would sit near the

door, and come out again presently!

It was a low room, and though not many were present, the air was

stifling. The doctor stood at the farther end. Some of his congregation

were decently dressed, some but sparingly washed; many wore the same

clothes they wore through the week, though probably most of these had a

better gown or suit, if that could be called _having_ which was

represented by a pawn-ticket. Hester could hardly say she saw among them

much sign of listening. Most of the faces were just as vacant as those

to be seen in the most fashionable churches, but there were one or two

which seemed to show their owners in some kind of sympathetic relation

with the speaker, and that was a far larger proportion than was found in

Sodom that was destroyed, or in Nineveh that was spared. That the

speaker was in earnest there could be no manner of question. His eyes

were glowing, his face was gleaming with a light of its own; his hands

were often clenched hard and his motions broken by very earnestness: it

was the bearing of one that pleaded with men, saying, "Why will ye die?"

The whole rough appearance of the man was elevated into dignity.

Simplicity and self-forgetfulness were manifest in carriage and

utterance. He was not self-possessed--but he was God-possessed. He kept

saying the simplest things to them. One thing she heard him tell them

was, that they were like orphan children, hungry in the street, raking

the gutter for what they could get, while behind them stood a grand,

beautiful house to which they never so much as lifted up their eyes--and

there their father lived! There he sat in a beautiful room, waiting,

waiting, waiting for any one of them all who would but turn round, run

in, and up the stairs to him.

"But you will say," something as thus he went on,--"Why does he not

send out a message to them, to tell them he is waiting there for them?

How can they know without being told?--you say. But that is just what he

does do. He is constantly sending out messengers to them to tell them to

come in. But they mostly laugh and make faces at them. _They_ won't

be at the trouble to go up those stairs! 'It's not likely,' they say, 'a

man like that would trouble his head about such as us, even if we were

his children!' That makes me wonder how such people treat their own

children! But some do listen and hear and go in; and some of them come

out again, and say they find it all true. Very few believe them a bit,

or mind in the least what they say. They are not miserable enough yet to

go back to the father that loves them, and would be as good to them as

the bird that covers her young ones all over with her wings, or the

mother you see wrapping her shawl round her child in her arms.

"Some of you are thinking with yourselves now, '_We_ wouldn't do

like that! _We_ should be only too glad to get somebody that would

make us comfortable without any trouble on our parts!' Ah, there's the

rub! These children that won't go in, they're just like you: they won't

take any trouble about it. Why now here I am, sent to you with the very

message! and you fancy I am only talking, as you do so often, without

meaning anything! I am one of those who have been into the house, and

have found my father--oh, so grand! and so good to me! And I am come out

again to tell you it is so, and that if you will go in, you will have

the same kindness I have had. All the servants of the house even will

rejoice over you with music and dancing--so glad that you are come home.

Is it possible you will not take the trouble to go! There are certain

things required of you when you go: perhaps you are too lazy or too

dirty in your habits, to like doing them! I have known some refuse to

scrape their shoes, or rub them on the door-mat when they went in, and

then complain loudly that they were refused admittance. A fine house

would such make to their father, were they allowed to run in and out as

they pleased! such a house, in fact, as would very soon drive their

father himself out of it! for they would make it unfit for any decent

person to live in. A few months and they would have the grand beautiful

house as wretched and mean and dirty as the houses they live in now.

Such persons are those that keep grumbling that they are not rich. They

want to loaf about, and drink, and be a nuisance to everybody, like some

of the rich ones. They think it hard they should not be able to do just

as they please with everything that takes their fancy, when they would

do nothing but break and spoil it, and make it no good to anybody. Their

father, who can do whatever he sees fit, is not one to let such

disagreeable children work what mischief they like! He is a better

father than that would come to! A father who lets them be dirty and rude

just as they like, is one of the worst enemies of his children. And the

day is coming when, if he can't get them to mind him any other way, he

will put them where they will be ten times more miserable than ever they

were at the worst time of their lives, and make them mind. Out of the

same door whence came the messengers to ask them in, he will send dogs

and bears and lions and tigers and wild cats out upon them.

"You will, I daresay, some of you, say, 'Ah, we know what you mean; but

you see that's not the sort of thing we care for, so you needn't go on

about it.' I know it is not the sort of thing you care for, else you

might have been in a very different condition by this time. And I know

the kind of thing you do care for--low, dirty things: you are like a

child, if such there could be, that preferred mud and the gutter to all

the beautiful toys in the shop at the corner of Middle Row. But though

these things are not the things you want, they are the things you need;

and the time is coming when you will say, 'Ah me! what a fool I was not

to look at the precious things, and see how precious they were, and put

out my hand for them when they were offered me!'"

It was something in this simple way, but more earnestly yet, and

occasionally with an energy that rose to eloquence, that the man freed

his soul of the things he had to give. After about twenty minutes, he

ceased, saying, "We will now sing a hymn." Then he read a short hymn,

repeating each verse before they sang it, for there was no other

hymn-book than his own. It was the simplest hymn, Hester thought, she

had ever heard. He began the singing himself to a well-known tune, but

when he heard the voice of Hester take it up, he left the leading to

her, and betaking himself to the bass, did his part there. When they

heard her voice the people all turned to look, and some began to

whisper, but presently resumed the hymn. When it was ended, he prayed

for two or three minutes, not more, and sent them away. Hester being

near the door went out with the first of them, and walked home full of

pleasure in the thought of such preaching: if only her friends could

hear such! The great difficulty was to wake in them any vaguest

recognition of a Nature from whom they came. She had been driven to

conclude that the faculty for things _epouranian_ was awake in them

not an atom more than in the South-African Bushman, in whom most

travellers have failed to discover even the notion of a power above him.

But to wake the faculty in them what could be so powerful as the story

and the message of Jesus?--and Mr. Christopher had not spoken of him!

She did not know that every Sunday he taught them there, and that this

sermon, if such it could be called, was but one wave in the flow of a

river. The true teacher brings from his treasure things old and things

new; at one time tells, at another explains; and ever and anon lets his

own well of water flow to everlasting life.

But as she thought, Hester, like the true soul she was, turned from ways

and means to the questioning of herself: what of the faculty was awake

in her? Had she been obedient only to that she had been taught, or

obedient to the very God? This questioning again she left for better

labour: she turned her whole soul towards God in prayer unutterable. Of

one thing she could be sure--that she had but the faintest knowledge of

him whom to know is life eternal.

She was near the turning that led to the square when she heard a quick

footstep behind her, and was presently overtaken by Mr. Christopher.

"I was so glad to see you come in!" he said. "I was able to speak the

better, for I was sure then of some sympathy in the spiritual air. It is

not easy to go on when you feel all the time a doubt whether to one

present your words are more than mere words; or, if they have some

meaning to any, whether that meaning be not something very different

from your meaning."

"I do not see," said Hester, "how any one could misunderstand, or indeed

help understanding what I heard you say."

"Ah!" he returned, "the one incomprehensible thing is ignorance! To

understand why another does not understand seems to me beyond the power

of humanity. As God only can understand evil, while we only can be evil,

so God only can understand ignorance, while we only can be ignorant. I

have been trying now for a good many months to teach those people, and I

am not sure that a single thought has passed from my mind into one of

theirs. I sometimes think I am but beating the air. But I must tell you

how your singing comforted the poor woman at whose door you stopped this

afternoon! I saw it in her face. She thought it was the angels. And it

was one angel, for did not God send you? I trust your fellow-servants

were waiting for her: she died a minute or two after."

They walked some distance before either spoke again.

"I was surprised," said Hester at length, "to find you taking the

clergyman's part as well as the doctor's."

"By no means," returned Christopher; "I took no clergyman's part. I took

but the part of a human being, bound to share with his fellow. What

could make you think so? Did I preach like one?"

"Not very," she answered.

"I am glad of that," he returned, "for such a likeness would by no means

favour my usefulness with such as those. If you see any reason why a

layman, as was our Lord, should not speak to his fellows, I fear it is

one I should be unable to comprehend. I do whatever seems to me a

desirable action, so long as I see no reason for not doing it. As to the

customs of society, my experience of them has resulted in mere and

simple contempt--in so far at least as they would hamper my freedom. I

have another master; and they who obey higher rules need not regard

lower judgment. If Shakspere liked my acting, should I care if Marlowe

did not?"

"But if anybody and everybody be at liberty to preach, how are we to

have any assurance what kind of doctrine will be preached?"

"We must go without it.--But it is too late to object, for here are a

few of us laymen preaching, and no one to hinder us. There are many

uneducated preachers who move the classes the clergy cannot touch. Their

preaching has a far more evident effect, I know, than mine."

"Why do you not then preach like them?"

"I would not if I could, and could not if I would: I do not believe one

half of the things they say."

"How can they do more good if what they say is not true?"

"I did not say they did more good--about that I cannot tell; that may

need centuries to determine. I said they moved their people more. And

the fundamental element of what they say is most true, only the forms

they express it in contain much that is false."

"Will you then defend a man in speaking things that are not true?"

"If he believes them, what is he to do but speak them? Let him speak

them in God's name. I cannot speak them because I do not believe them.

If I did believe them they would take from me the heart to preach."

"Can it be," said Hester, "that falsehood is more powerful than

truth--and for truth too?"

"By no means. A falsehood has in itself no power but for evil. It is the

spiritual truth clothed in the partially false form that is powerful.

Clearer truth will follow in the wake of it, and cast the false forms

out: they serve but to make a place of seeming understanding in ignorant

minds, wherein the truths themselves may lie and work with their own

might. But if what I teach be nearer the truth, let it be harder to get

in, it will in the end work more truth. In the meantime I say God-speed

to every man who honestly teaches what he honestly believes. Paul was

grand when he said he would rejoice that Christ was preached, from

whatever motive he might be preached. If you say those people, though

contentious, may have preached good doctrine, I answer--Possibly; for

they could not have preached much of what is called doctrine now-a-days.

If they preached theories of their own, they were teachers of lies, for

they were not true men, and the theories of an untrue man cannot be

true. But they told something about Christ, and of that Paul was glad."

Some may wonder that Hester, having got so far as she had, should need

to be told such things; but she had never had occasion to think about

them before, though the truth wrought out in her life had rendered her

capable of seeing them the moment they were put before her.

"You interest me much," she said. "--Would you mind telling me how you,

whose profession has to do with the bodies of men, have come to do more

for their souls?"

"I know nothing about less or more," answered Christopher. "--You would

find it, I fear, a long story if I were to attempt telling it in full. I

studied medicine from guile, not therefore the less carefully, that I

might have a good ostensible reason for going about among the poor. I

count myself bound to do all I can for their bodies; and pity itself

would, I think, when I came to go among them, have driven me to the

study, had I been ignorant. No one who has not been among them knows

their sufferings--borne by some of them without complaint--for the sad

reason that it is of no use. To be to such if only one to whom they can

speak, is in some sort to mediate between them and a possible world of

relief. But it was not primarily from the desire to alleviate their

sufferings that I learned what I could of medicine, but in the hope to

start them on the way towards victory over all evil. I saw that the man

who brought them physical help had a chance with them such as no

clergyman had--an advantage quite as needful with them as with the

heathen--to whom we are not so _immediately_ debtors. It would have

been a sad thing for the world if the Lord of it had not sought first

the lost sheep of the house of Israel. One awful consequence of our

making haste to pull out the mote out of our heathen brother's eye,

while yet the beam is in our own, is that wherever our missionaries go,

they are followed by a foul wave of our vices.

"With all my guile I have not done much. But now after nearly two

thousand years, such is the amount of faith I find in myself towards my

Lord and his Father, that sometimes I ask myself whether in very truth I

believe that that man did live and die as the story says: if it has

taken all this time for such a poor result, I say to myself, perhaps I

may have done something, for it must be too small to be seen; so I will

try on, helping God as the children help the father.--You know that

grand picture, on the ceiling of the pope's chapel, of the making of

Adam?"

"Michael Angelo's?--Yes."

"You must have noticed then how the Father is accompanied by a crowd of

young ones--come to help him to make Adam, I always think. The poet has

there, consciously or not, hit upon a great truth: it is the majesty of

God's great-heartedness, and the majesty of man's destiny, that every

man must be a fellow-worker with God, nor can ever in less attain his

end, and the conscious satisfaction of being. I want to help God with my

poor brothers."

"How well I understand you!" said Hester. "But would you mind telling me

what made you think of the thing first? I began because I saw how

miserable so many people were, and longed to do something to make life a

better thing for them."

"That was not quite the way with me," replied Christopher. "I see I must

tell you something of my external, in order to explain my internal

history."

"No, no, pray!" returned Hester, fearing she had presumed. "I did not

mean to be inquisitive. I ought not to have asked such a question; for

these things have to do with the most sacred regions of our nature."

"I was only going to cast the less in with the greater--the outer fact

to explain the inner truth," said Christopher. "I should like to tell

you about it.--And first,--you may suppose I could not have followed my

wishes had I not had some money!"

"A good thing you had, then!"

"I don't know exactly," replied the doctor in a dubious tone. "You shall

judge for yourself from my story.--I had money then--a good deal

too--left me by my grandfather. My father died when I was a child. I am

glad to say."

"Glad to say!" repeated Hester bewildered.

"Yes: if he had lived, how do I know he might not have done just like my

grandfather. But my mother lived, thank God.--Not that my grandfather

was what is counted a bad man; on the contrary he stood high in the

world's opinion--was considered indeed the prince of----well, I will

not say what, for my business is not to expose him. The world had

nothing against him.

"When he died and left me his money--I was then at school, preparing for

Oxford--it was necessary that I should look into the affairs of the

business, for it was my mother's wish that I should follow the same. In

the course of my investigation, I came across things not a few in the

books, all fair and square in the judgment of the trade itself, which

made me doubtful, and which at last, unblinded by custom, I was

confident were unfair, that is dishonest. Thereupon I began to argue

with myself: 'What is here?' I said. 'Am I to use the wages of iniquity

as if they were a clean God-gift? If there has been wrong done there

must be atonement, reparation. I cannot look on this money as mine, for

part of it at least, I cannot say how much, ought not to be mine.' The

truth flashed upon me; I saw that my business in life must be to send

the money out again into the channels of right. I could claim a

workman's wages for doing that. The history of the business went so far

back that it was impossible to make return of more than a small

proportion of the sums rightly due; therefore something else, and that a

large something, must be done as well.

"To be honest, however, in explaining how I came to choose the life I am

now leading, I must here confess the fact that about this time I had a

disappointment of a certain kind which set me thinking, for it gave me

such a shock that for some months I could not imagine anything to make

life worth living. Some day, if you like, I will give you a detailed

account of how I came to the truth of the question--came to see what

alone does make the value of life. A flash came first, then a darkness,

then a long dawn; by and in which it grew clearer and ever clearer, that

there could be no real good, in the very nature of things and of good,

but oneness with the will of God; that man's good lay in becoming what

the inventor of him meant in the inventing of him--to speak after the

fashion of man's making. Going on thinking about it all, and reading my

New Testament, I came to see that, if the story of Christ was true, the

God that made me was just inconceivably lovely, and that the perfection,

the very flower of existence, must be to live the heir of all things, at

home with the Father. Next, mingled inextricably with my resolve about

the money, came the perception that my fellow-beings, my brothers and

sisters of the same father, must be, next to the father himself, the

very atmosphere of life; and that perfect misery must be to care only

for one's self. With that there woke in me such a love and pity for my

people, my own race, my human beings, my brothers and sisters, whoever

could hear the word of the father of men, that I felt the only thing

worth giving the energy of a life to, was the work that Christ gave

himself to--the delivery of men out of their lonely and mean devotion to

themselves, into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, whose joy and

rejoicing is the rest of the family. Then I saw that here the claim upon

my honesty, and the highest calling of man met. I saw that were I as

free to do with my grandfather's money as it was possible for man to be,

I could in no other way use it altogether worthily than in aiding to

give outcome, shape and operation to the sonship and brotherhood in me.

I have not yet found how best to use it all; and I will do nothing in

haste, which is the very opposite of divine, and sure to lead astray;

but I keep thinking in order to find out, and it will one day be

revealed to me. God who has laid the burden on me will enable me to bear

it until he shows me how to unpack and disperse it.

"First, I spent a portion in further study, and especially the study of

medicine. I could not work miracles; I had not the faith necessary to

that, if such is now to be had; but God might be pleased I should heal a

little by the doctor's art. So doing I should do yet better, and learn

how, to spend the money upon humanity itself, repaying to the race what

had been wrongfully taken from its individuals to whom it was impossible

to restore it; and should while so doing at the same time fill up what

was left behind for me of the labours of the Master.

"That is my story. I am now trying to do as I have seen, working

steadily, without haste, with much discouragement, and now and then with

a great gladness and auroral hope. I have this very day got a new idea

that may have in it a true germ!"

"Will you not tell me what it is?" said Hester.

"I don't like talking about things before at least they are begun,"

answered Christopher. "And I have not much hope from money. If it were

not that I have it and cannot help it, and am bound to spend it, I would

not trouble myself about any scheme to which it was necessary. I

sometimes feel as if it was a devil, restrained a little by being

spell-bound in mental discs. I know the feeling is wrong and faithless;

for money is God's as certainly as the earth in which the crops grow,

though he does not care so much about it."

"I know what I would do if I had money!" said Hester.

"You have given me the right to ask what--the right to ask--not the

right to have an answer."

"I would have a house of refuge to which any one might run for covert or

rest or warmth or food or medicine or whatever he needed. It should have

no society or subscriptions or committee, but should be my own as my

hands and my voice are mine--to use as God enabled me. I would have it

like the porch--not of Bethesda, but of heaven itself. It should come

into use by the growth of my friendships. It should be a refuge for the

needy, from the artisan out of work to the child with a cut finger, or

cold bitten feet. I would take in the weary-brained prophet, the worn

curate, or the shadowy needle-woman. I would not take in drunkards or

ruined speculators--not at least before they were very miserable indeed.

The suffering of such is the only desirable consequence of their doing,

and to save from it would be to take from them their last chance."

"It is a lovely idea," said Christopher. "One of my hopes is to build a

small hospital for children in some lovely place, near some sad ugly

one. But perhaps I cannot do it till I am old, for when I do, I must

live among them and have them and their nurses within a moment's reach."

"Is it not delightful to know that you can start anything when you

please?"

"Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where

everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth

calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of

any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to

it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the

less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead

matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have

its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and

subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to

root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social

regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures

are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea.

God's beginnings are imperceptible, whether in the region of soul or of

matter. Besides, I believe in no good done save in person--by personal

operative presence of soul, body and spirit. God is the one only person,

and it is our personality alone, so far as we have any, that can work

with God's perfect personality. God can use us as tools, but to be a

tool of, is not to be a fellow-worker with. How the devil would have

laughed at the idea of a society for saving the world! But when he saw

_one_ take it in hand, one who was in no haste even to do that,

one who would only do the will of God with all his heart and soul, and

cared for nothing else, then indeed he might tremble for his kingdom! It

is the individual Christians forming the church by their obedient

individuality, that have done all the good done since men for the love

of Christ began to gather together. It is individual ardour alone that

can combine into larger flame. There is no true power but that which has

individual roots. Neither custom nor habit nor law nor foundation is a

root. The real roots are individual conscience that hates evil,

individual faith that loves and obeys God, individual heart with its

kiss of charity."

"I think I understand you; I am sure I do in part, at least," said

Hester.

They had, almost unconsciously, walked, twice round the square, and had

now the third time reached the house. He went in with her and saw his

patient, then took his leave to go home to his Greek Testament--for the

remainder of the evening if he might. Except when some particular case

required attention, he never went on-trying to teach with his soul

weary. He would carry material aid or social comfort, but would not

teach. His soul must be shining--with faith or hope or love or

repentance or compassion, when he unveiled it. "No man," he would say,

"will be lost because I do not this or that; but if I do the unfitting

thing, I may block his way for him, and retard his redemption." He would

not presume beyond what was given him--as if God were letting things go

wrong, and he must come in to prevent them! He would not set blunted or

ill tempered tools to the finest work of the universe!

CHAPTER XLIX.

AN ARRANGEMENT.

Hester had not yet gone to see Miss Dasomma because of the small-pox.

Second causes are God's as much as first, and Christ made use of them as

his father's way. It were a sad world indeed if God's presence were only

interference, that is, miracle. The roundabout common ways of things are

just as much his as the straight, miraculous ones--I incline to think

more his, in the sense that they are plainly the ways he prefers. In all

things that are, he is--present even in the evil we bring into the

world, to foil it and bring good out of it. We are always disbelieving

in him because things do not go as we intend and desire them to go. We

forget that God has larger ends, even for us, than we can see, so his

plans do not fit ours. If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he

does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he

would not be God our Saviour, but the ministering genius of our

destruction.

But now Hester thought she might visit her friend. She had much to say

to her and ask of her. First she told her of herself and lord Gartley.

Miss Dasomma threw her arms about her, and broke into a flood of

congratulation. Hester looked a little surprised, and was indeed a

little annoyed at the vehemence of her pleasure. Miss Dasomma hastened

to excuse herself.

"My dear," she said, "the more I saw of that man, the more I thought and

the more I heard about him, his ways, and his surroundings, the more I

marvelled you should ever have taken him for other than the most wordly,

shallow, stunted creature. It was the very impossibility of your

understanding the mode of being of such a man that made it possible for

him to gain on you. Believe me, if you had married him, you would have

been sick of him--forgive the vulgar phrase--yes, and hopeless of him,

in six weeks."

"There was more and better in him than you imagine," returned Hester,

hurt that her friend should think so badly of the man she loved, but by

no means sure that she was wrong.

"That may be," answered her friend; "but I am certain also that if you

had married him, you would have done him no good."

Then Hester went on with her tale of trouble. Her brother Cornelius had

been behaving very badly, she said, and had married a young woman

without letting them know. Her father and mother were unaware of the

fact as yet, and she dreaded having to communicate it to them. He had

been very ill with the small-pox, and she must take him home; but what

to do with his wife until she had broken the matter to them, she did not

know. She knew her father would be very angry, and until he should have

got over it a little she dared not have her home: in a word she was at

her wits' end.

"One question, excuse me if I ask," said Miss Dasomma: "_are_ they

married?"

"I am not sure; but I am sure she believes they are."

Then she told her what she knew of Amy. Miss Dasomma fell a thinking.

"Could I see her?" she said at length.

"Surely; any time," replied Hester, "now that Corney is so much better."

Miss Dasomma called, and was so charmed with Amy that she proposed to

Hester she should stay with her.

This was just what Hester wished but had not dared to propose.

Now came the painful necessity not only of breaking to the young wife

that she must be parted from her husband for a while, but--which was

much worse--of therein revealing that he had deceived her.

Had Cornelius not been ill and helpless, and characterless, he would

probably have refused to go home; but he did not venture a word of

opposition to Hester's determination. He knew she had not told Amy

anything, but saw that, if he refused, she might judge it necessary to

tell her all. And notwithstanding his idiotic pretence of superiority,

he had a kind of thorough confidence in Hester. In his sickness

something of the old childish feeling about her as a refuge from evil

had returned upon him, and he was now nearly ready to do and allow

whatever she pleased, trusting to her to get him out of the scrape he

was in: she could do more than any one else, he was sure!

"But now tell me, on your word of honour," she said to him that same

night, happening to find herself alone with him, "are you really and

truly married to Amy?"

She was delighted to see him blaze up in anger.

"Hester, you insult us both!" he said.

"No, Cornelius," returned Hester, "I have a right to distrust you--but I

distrust only you. Whatever may be amiss in the affair, I am certain you

alone are to blame--not Amy."

Thereupon Cornelius swore a solemn oath that Amy was as much his lawful

wife as he knew how to make her.

"Then what is to be done with her when you go home? You cannot expect

she will be welcomed. I have not dared tell them of your marriage--only

of your illness. The other must be by word of mouth."

"I don't know what's to be done with her. How should _I_ know!"

answered Cornelius with a return of his old manner. "I thought you would

manage it all for me! This cursed illness--"

"Cornelius," said Hester, "this illness is the greatest kindness God

could show you."

"Well, we won't argue about that!--Sis, you must get me out of the

scrape!"

Hester's heart swelled with delight at the sound of the old loving

nursery-word. She turned to him and kissed him.

"I will do what I honestly can, Cornelius," she said.

"All right!" replied Corney. "What do you mean to do?"

"Not to take Amy down with us. She must wait till I have told."

"Then my wife is to be received only on sufferance!" he cried.

"You can hardly expect to be otherwise received yourself. You have put

your wife at no end of disadvantage by making her your wife without the

knowledge of your family. For yourself, when a man has taken money not

his own; when he has torn the hearts of father and mother with anguish

such as neither ever knew before--ah, Corney! if you had seen them as I

saw them, you would not now wonder that I tremble at the thought of your

meeting. If you have any love for poor Amy, you will not dream of

exposing her to the first outbreak of a shocked judgment. I cannot be

sure what my mother might think, but my father would take her for your

evil genius! It is possible he may refuse to see yourself!"

"Then I'm not going. Better stay here and starve!"

"If so, I must at once tell Amy what you have done. I will not have the

parents on whom you have brought disgrace and misery supposed guilty of

cruelty. Amy must know all about it some day, but it ought to come from

yourself--not from me. You will never be fit for honest company till for

very misery you have told your wife."

Hester thought she must not let him fancy things were going back into

the old grooves--that his crime would become a thing of no consequence,

and pass out of existence, ignored and forgotten. Evil cannot be

destroyed without repentance.

He was silent as one who had nothing to answer.

"So now," said Hester, "will you, or must I, tell Amy that she cannot go

home?"

He thought for a moment.

"I will," he said.

Hester left him and sent Amy to him. In a few minutes she returned. She

had wept, but was now, though looking very sad, quite self-possessed.

"Please, miss," she said--but Hester interrupted her.

"You must not call me _miss_, Amy," she said. "You must call me

_Hester_. Am I not your sister?"

A gleam of joy shot from the girl's eyes, like the sun through red

clouds.

"Then you have forgiven me!" she cried, and burst into tears.

"No, Amy, not that! I should have had to know something to forgive

first. You may have been foolish; everybody can't always be wise, though

everybody must try to do right. But now we must have time to set things

straighter, without doing more mischief, and you mustn't mind staying a

little while with Miss Dasomma."

"Does she know all about it, miss---Hester?" asked Amy; and as she

called her new sister by her name, the blood rushed over her face.

"She knows enough not to think unfairly of you, Amy."

"And you won't be hard upon him when he hasn't me to comfort him--will

you, Hester?"

"I will think of my new sister who loves him," replied Hester. "But you

must not think I do not love him too. And oh, Amy! you must be very

careful over him. No one can do with him what you can. You must help him

to be good, for that is the chief duty of every one towards a neighbour,

and particularly of a wife towards a husband."

Amy was crying afresh, and made no answer; but there was not the most

shadowy token of resentment in her weeping.

CHAPTER L.

THINGS AT HOME.

In the meantime things had been going very gloomily at Yrndale. Mrs.

Raymount was better in health but hardly more cheerful. How could she

be? how get over the sadness that her boy was such? But the thing that

most oppressed her was to see the heart of his father so turned from the

youth. What would become of them if essential discord invaded their

home! Cornelius had not been pleasant, even she was to herself compelled

to admit, since first he began to come within sight of manhood; but she

had always looked to the time when growing sense would make him cast

aside young-mannish ways; and this was the outcome of her cares and

hopes and prayers for him! Her husband went about listless and sullen.

He wrote no more. How could one thus disgraced in his family presume to

teach the world anything! How could he ever hold up his head as one that

had served his generation, when this was the kind of man he was to leave

behind him for the life of the next! Cornelius's very being cast doubt

on all he had ever said or done!

He had been proud of his children: they were like those of any common

stock! and the shame recoiled upon himself. Bitterly he recalled the

stain upon his family in generations gone by. He had never forged or

stolen himself, yet the possibility had remained latent in him, else how

could he have transmitted it? Perhaps there were things in which he

might have been more honest, and so have killed the latent germ and his

child not have had it to develop! Far into the distance he saw a

continuous succession of dishonest Raymounts, nor succession only but

multiplication, till streets and prisons were swarming with them. For

hours he would sit with his hands in his pockets, scarcely daring to

think, for the misery of the thoughts that came crowding out the moment

the smallest chink was opened in their cage. He had become short, I do

not say rough in his speech to his wife. He would break into sudden

angry complaints against Hester for not coming home, but stop dead in

the middle, as if nothing was worth being angry about now, and turn away

with a sigh that was almost a groan. The sight of the children was a

pain to him. Saffy was not one to understand much of grief beyond her

own passing troubles; it was a thing for which she seemed to have little

reception; and her occasionally unsympathetic ways were, considering her

age, more of a grief to her mother than was quite reasonable; she feared

she saw in her careless glee the same root which in her brother flowered

in sullen disregard. Mark was very different. The father would order

Saffy away, but the boy might come and go as he pleased, nor give him

any annoyance, although he never or scarcely ever took any notice of

him. He had been told nothing of the cause of his parents' evident

misery. When the news came of Corney's illness, his mother told him of

that; but he had sympathy and penetration enough to perceive that there

must be something amiss more than that: if this were all, they would

have told him of it when first they began to be changed! And when the

news came that he was getting better, his father did not seem the least

happier! He would sometimes stand and gaze at his father, but the

solemn, far-off, starry look of the boy's eyes never seemed to disturb

him. He loved his father as few boys love, and yet had a certain dread

of him and discomfort in his presence, which he could not have accounted

for, and which would vanish at once when he spoke to him. He had never

recovered the effects of being so nearly drowned, and in the readier

apprehension caused by accumulated troubles his mother began to doubt if

ever he would be well again. He had got a good deal thinner; his food

did not seem to nourish him; and his being seemed slipping away from the

hold of the world. He was full of dreams and fancies, all of the higher

order of things where love is the law. He did not read much that was

new, for he soon got tired with the effort to understand; but he would

spend happy hours alone, seeming to the ordinary eye to be doing

nothing, because his doing was with the unseen. So-called religious

children are often peculiarly disagreeable, mainly from false notions of

the simple thing religion in their parents and teachers; but in truth

nowhere may religion be more at home than in a child. A strong

conscience and a loving regard to the desires of others were Mark's

chief characteristics. When such children as he die, we may well imagine

them wanted for special work in the world to which they go. If the very

hairs of our head are all numbered, and he said so who knew and is true,

our children do not drop hap-hazard into the near world, neither are

they kept out of it by any care or any power of medicine: all goes by

heavenliest will and loveliest ordinance. Some of us will have to be

ashamed of our outcry after our dead. Beloved, even for your dear faces

we can wait awhile, seeing it is His father, your father and our father

to whom you have gone, leaving us with him still. Our day will come, and

your joy and ours, and all shall be well.

The attachment of Mark to the major continued growing.

"When Majie comes," he said one of those days, "he must not go again."

"Why, Markie?" asked his mother, almost without a meaning, for her

thought was with her eldest-born, her disgrace.

"Because, if he does," he answered, "I shall not see much of him."

The mother looked at the child, but said nothing. Sorrow was now the

element of her soul. Cornelius had destroyed the family heart; the

family must soon be broken up, and vanish in devouring vacancy! Do you

ask where was her faith? I answer, Just where yours and mine is when we

give thanks trusting in the things for which we give thanks; when we

rest in what we have, in what we can do, in what people think of us, in

the thought of the friends we have at our back, or in anything whatever

but the living, outgoing power of the self-alive--the one causing

potency in the heart of our souls, and in every clothing of those souls,

from nerve, muscle, and skin to atmosphere and farthest space. The

living life is the one power, the only that can, and he who puts his

trust or hope in anything else whatever is a worshipper of idols. He who

does not believe in God must be a truster in that which is lower than

himself.

Mark seldom talked about his brother. Before he went away the last time

he had begun to shrink from him a little, as if with some instinct of an

inward separation. He would stand a little way off and look at him as if

he were a stranger in whom he was interested, and as if he himself were

trying to determine what mental attitude he must assume towards him.

When he heard that he was ill, the tears came in his eyes, but he did

not speak.

"Are you not sorry for Corney?" said his mother.

"I'm sorry," he answered, "because it must make him unhappy. He does not

like being ill."

"_You_ don't like being ill, I'm sure Mark!" returned his mother,

apprehending affectation.

"I don't mind it much," answered the boy, looking far away--as it seemed

to his mother, towards a region to which she herself had begun to look

with longing. The way her husband took their grief made them no more a

family, but a mere household. He brooded alone and said nothing. They

did not share sorrow as they had shared joy.

At last came a letter from Hester saying that in two days she hoped to

start with Corney to bring him home. The mother read the letter, and

with a faded gleam of joy on her countenance, passed it to her husband.

He took it, glanced at it, threw it from him, rose, and left the room.

For an hour his wife heard him pacing up and down his study; then he

took his hat and stick and went out. What he might have resolved upon

had Corney been returning in tolerable health, I do not know--possibly

to kick him out of the house for his impudence in daring to show his

face there; but even this wrathful father, who thought he did well to be

angry, could not turn from his sickly child, let him be the greatest

scoundrel under the all-seeing sun? But not therefore would he receive

or acknowledge him! Swine were the natural companions of the prodigal,

and the sooner he was with them the better! There was truth in the

remark, but hell in the spirit of it: for the heart of the father was

turned from his son. The Messiah came to turn the hearts of the fathers

to their children. Strange it should ever have wanted doing! But it

wants doing still. There is scarce a discernible segment of the round of

unity between many fathers and their children.

Gerald Raymount went walking through the pine-woods on his hills. Little

satisfaction lay in land to which such a son was to succeed! No! the

land was his own! not an acre, not as much as would bury him, should the

rascal have! Alas! he had taken honesty as a matter of course in

_his_ family. Were they not _his_ children? He had not thought

of God as the bond of life between him and them, nor sought to nourish

the life in them. He was their father and was content with them. He had

pondered much the laws by which society proceeds and prospers, but had

not endeavoured in his own case to carry towards perfection the relation

that first goes to the making of society: the relation between himself

and his children had been left to shift for itself. He had never known

anything of what was going on in the mind of his son. He had never asked

himself if the boy loved the truth--if he cared that things should stand

in him on the footing of eternal reason, or if his consciousness was

anything better than the wallowing of a happy-go-lucky satisfaction in

being. And now he was astonished to find _his_ boy no better than

the common sort of human animal! My reader may say he was worse, for

there is the stealing; but that is just the point in which I see him

likest the common run of men, while in his home relations he was worse.

It is my conviction that such an act of open disgrace as he had been

guilty of, may be the outcome of evil more easy to cast off than that

indicated by home-habits embodying a selfishness regarded embodied in

families, and which perhaps are as a mere matter of course. There is

little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they

have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are

daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and

more capable. Few seem to understand that the true end is not to keep

their children from doing what is wrong, though that is on the way to

it, but to render them incapable of doing wrong. While one is capable of

doing wrong, he is no nearer right than if that wrong were done--not so

near as if the wrong were done and repented of. Some minds are never

roused to the true nature of their selfishness until having clone some

patent wrong, the eyes of the collective human conscience are fixed with

the essence of human disapprobation and general repudiation upon them.

Doubtless in the disapproving crowd are many just as capable of the

wrong as they, but the deeper nature in them, God's and not yet theirs

utters its disapproval, and the culprit feels it. Happy he if then at

last he begin to turn from the evil itself, so repenting! This Cornelius

had not begun to do yet, but his illness, while perhaps it delayed the

time when the thought of turning should present itself, made it more

likely the thought would be entertained when it did present itself.

The father came back from his lonely walk, in which his communion with

nature had been of the smallest, as determined as before that his son,

having unsonned himself, should no more be treated as a son. He could

not refuse him shelter in his house for a time, but he should be in it

on sufferance--in no right of sonship, and should be made to understand

it was so!

But the heart of the mother was longing after her boy, like a human hen

whose chicken had run from under her wing and come to grief. He had

sinned, he had suffered, and was in disgrace--good reasons why the

mother's heart should cling to the youth, why her arms should long to

fold him to her bosom! The things which made his father feel he could

not speak to him again, worked in the deeper nature of the mother in

opposite fashion. In her they reached a stratum of the Divine. Was he

unlovely?--she must love him the more! Was he selfish and

repellent?--she must get the nearer to him! Everything was reason to her

for love and more love. If he were but with her! She would clasp him so

close that evil should not touch him! Satan himself could not get at him

with her whole mother-being folded round him! She had been feeling of

late as if she could not get near him: now that sickness had reduced his

strength, and shame his proud spirit, love would have room to enter and

minister! The good of all evil is to make a way for love, which is

essential good. Therefore evil exists, and will exist until love destroy

and cast it out. Corney could not keep his mother out of his heart now!

She thought there were ten things she could do for him now to one she

could have done for him before! When, oh when would he appear, that her

heart might go out to meet him!

CHAPTER LI.

THE RETURN.

The day came. It was fine in London. The invalid was carefully wrapt up

for the journey. Hester, the major and Miss Dasomma followed the young

couple to the station. There the latter received the poor little wife,

and when the train was out of sight, took her home with her. The major

who got into the next carriage, at every stop ran to see if anything was

wanted; and when they reached the station got on the box of the carriage

the mother had sent to meet them. Thus Hester bore her lost sheep

home--in little triumph and much anxiety. When they stopped at the door

no one was on the outlook for them. The hall was not lighted and the

door was locked. The major rang the bell. Ere the door was opened Hester

had got down and stood waiting. The major took the youth in his arms and

carried him into the dining-room, so weary that he could scarcely open

his eyes. There seemed no light in the house, except the candle the man

brought when he came to open the door. Corney begged to be put to bed.

"I wish Amy was here!" he murmured. Hester and the major were talking

together.

She hurried from the room and returned in a moment.

"I was sure of it," she whispered to the major. "There is a glorious

fire in his room, and everything ready for him. The house is my father,

but the room is my mother, and my mother is God."

The major took him again, and carried him up the stair--so thin and

light was he. The moment they were past the door of her room, out came

the mother behind them in her dressing gown, and glided pale and

noiseless as the disembodied after them. Hester looked round and saw

her, but she laid her finger on her lips, and followed without a word.

When they were in the room, she came to the door, looked in, and watched

them, but did not enter. Cornelius did not open his eyes. The major laid

him down on the sofa near the fire. A gleam of it fell on his face. The

mother drew a sharp quick breath and pressed her hands against her

heart: there was his sin upon his face, branding him that men might know

him. But therewith came a fresh rush from the inexhaustible fountain of

mother-love. She would have taken him into her anew, with all his sin

and pain and sorrow, to clear away in herself brand and pollution, and

bear him anew--even as God bears our griefs, and carries our sorrows,

destroys our wrongs, taking their consequences on himself, and gives us

the new birth from above. Her whole wounded heart seemed to go out to

him in one trembling sigh, as she turned to go back to the room where

her husband sat with hopeless gaze fixed on the fire. She had but

strength to reach the side of the bed, and fell senseless upon it. He

started up with a sting of self-accusation: he had killed her, exacting

from her a promise that by no word would she welcome the wanderer that

night. For she would not have her husband imagine in his bitterness that

she loved the erring son more than the father whose heart he had all but

broken, and had promised. She was, in truth, nearly as anxious about the

one as the other, for was not the unforgivingness of the one as bad--was

it not even worse than the theft of the other.

He lifted her, laid her on the bed, and proceeded to administer the

restoratives he now knew better than any other how to employ. In a

little while he was relieved, her eyelids began to tremble. "My baby!"

she murmured, and the tears began to flow.

"Thank God!" he said, and got her to bed.

But strange to say, for all his stern fulfilment of duty, he did not

feel fit to lie down by his wife. He would watch: she might have another

bad turn!

From the exhaustion that followed excess of feeling, she slept. He sat

watchful by the fire. She was his only friend, he said, and now she and

he were no more of one mind! Never until now had they had difference!

Hester and the major got Corney to bed, and instantly he was fast

asleep. The major arranged himself to pass the night by the fire, and

Hester went to see what she could do for her mother. Knocking softly at

the door and receiving no answer, she peeped in: there sat her father

and there slept her mother: she would not disturb them, but, taking her

share in the punishment of him she had brought home, retire without

welcome or good-night. She too was presently fast asleep. There was no

gnawing worm of duty undone or wrong unpardoned in her bosom to keep her

awake. Sorrow is sleepy, pride and remorse are wakeful.

CHAPTER LII.

A HEAVENLY VISION.

The night began differently with the two watchers. The major was

troubled in his mind at what seemed the hard-heartedness of the mother,

for he loved her with a true brotherly affection. He had not seen her

looking in at the door; he did not know the cause of her appearing so

withdrawn and unmotherly: he forgot his shilling novel and his sherry

and water, and brooded over the thing. He could not endure the

low-minded cub, he said to himself; he would gladly, if only the wretch

were well enough, give him a sound horse-whipping; but to see him so

treated by father and mother was more than he could bear: he began to

pity a lad born of parents so hard-hearted. What would have become of

himself, he thought, if his mother had treated him so? He had never, to

be sure, committed any crime against society worse than shocking certain

ridiculously proper people; but if she had made much of his foibles and

faults, he might have grown to be capable of doing how could he tell

what? who would turn out a mangy dog that was his own dog! If the fellow

were his he would know what to do with him! He did not reflect that just

because he was not his, he did not feel the wounds that disabled from

action. It was easy for him unhurt to think what he would do if he were

hurt. Some things seem the harder to forgive the greater the love. It is

but a false seeming, thank God, and comes only of selfishness, which

makes both the love and the hurt seem greater than they are.

And as the major sat thinking and thinking, the story came back to him

which his mother had so often told him and his brothers, all now gone

but himself, as they stood or sat or lay gathered round her on the

Sunday evenings in the nursery--about the boy that was tired of being at

home, and asked his father for money to go away; and how his father gave

it him, thinking it better he should go than grumble at the best he

could give him; and how he grew very naughty, and spent his money in

buying things that were not worth having, and in eating and drinking

with greedy, coarse, ill behaved people, till at last he had nothing

left to buy food with, and had to feed swine to earn something; and how

he fell a thinking, and would go home. It all came back to his mind just

as his mother used to tell it--how the poor prodigal, ragged and dirty

and hungry, set out for home, and how his father spied him coming a

great way off, and knew him at once, and set out running to meet him,

and fell on his neck and kissed him. This father would not even look at

the son that had but just escaped the jaws of death! True, the prodigal

came home repentant; but the father did not wait to know that, but ran

to meet him and fell on his neck and kissed him!

As the major thus reflected, he kept coming nearer and nearer to the

individual I lurking at the keyhole of every story. Only he had to go

home, else how was his father to receive him.

"I wonder now," he said, "if when a man die that is counted for going

home! I hardly think it; that is a thing the man can't help at all; he

has no hand in the doing of it. Who would come out to meet a fellow

because he was flung down dead at his door. I fear I should find myself

in no better box than this young rascal when he comes home because he

can't help it!"

The end of it was that the major, there in the middle of the night, went

down on his knees, and, as he had not now done since the eve of his last

battle, tried to say the prayers his mother had taught him. Presently he

found himself saying things she had not taught him--speaking from his

heart as if one was listening, one who in the dead of the night did not

sleep, but kept wide awake lest one of his children should cry.

"It is time," said the major to himself the next day, "that I began to

think about going home. I will try again to-night!"

In his wife's room Gerald Raymount sat on into the dead waste and middle

of the night. At last, as his wife continued quietly asleep, he thought

he would go down to his study, and find something to turn his thoughts

from his misery. None such had come to him as to his friend. He had been

much more of a religious man than the major--had his theories concerning

both the first and the second table of the law; nor had he been merely a

talker, though his talk, as with all talkers, was constantly ahead of

his deed: well is it for those whose talk is not ahead of their

endeavor! but it was the _idea_ of religion, and the thousand ideas

it broods, more than religion itself, that was his delight. He

philosophized and philosophized well of the relations between man and

his maker, of the necessity to human nature of belief in a God, of the

disastrous consequences of having none, and such like things; but having

such an interest is a very different thing from being in such relations

with the father that the thought of him is an immediate and ever

returning joy and strength. He did not rejoice in the thought of the

inheritance of the saints in light, as the inheriting of the nature of

God, the being made partaker of the father's essential blessedness: he

was far yet from that. He was so busy understanding with his intellect,

that he missed the better understanding of heart and imagination. He was

always so pleased with the thought of a thing, that he missed the thing

itself--whose _possession_, and not its thought is essential. Thus

when the trial came, it found him no true parent. The youth of course

could not be received either as clean-handed or as repentant; but love

is at the heart of every right way, and essential forgiveness at

the-heart of every true treatment of the sinner, even in the very

refusal of external forgiveness. That the father should not have longed

above all things for his son's repentance; that he should not have met

even a seeming return; that he should have nourished resentment because

the youth had sinned against _his_ family in which beauty as his he

had gloried; that he should care to devise no measures for generating a

sense of the evil he had done, and aiding repentance as makes

forgiveness a necessary consequence; that he should, instead, ruminate

how to make him feel most poignantly his absolute scorn of him, his

loathing of his all but convict son--this made the man a kind of

paternal Satan who sat watching by the repose of the most Christian,

because most loving, most forgiving, most self-forgetting mother,

stirring up in himself fresh whirlwinds of indignation at the incredible

thing which had become the fact of facts, lying heaviest, stinging

deepest, seeming unchangeable. That it might prove a blessing, he would

have spurned as a suggestion equally degrading and absurd. "What is done

is done," he would have said, in the mingled despair of pride and pride

of despair; "and all the power of God cannot make the thing otherwise.

We can hold up our heads no more for ever. My own son has not only

disgraced but fooled me, giving men good cause to say, 'Physician, heal

thyself.'"

He rose, and treading softly lest he should wake the only being he

_felt_ love for now, and whom he was loving less than before, for

self-love and pride are antagonistic to all loves, left the room and

went to his study. The fire was not yet out; he stirred it and made it

blaze, lighted his candles, took a book from a shelf, sat down, and

tried to read. But it was no use; his thoughts were such that they could

hold no company with other thoughts: the world of his kind was shut out;

he was a man alone, because a man unforgiving and unforgiven. His soul

slid into the old groove of miserable self-reiteration whose only result

was more friction-heat; and so the night slid away.

The nominal morning, if not the dawn was near, when, behold, a wonder of

the night! The door between the study and the old library opened so

softly that he heard nothing, and ere he was aware a child in long white

gown stood by his side. He started violently. It was Mark--but asleep!

He had seen his mother and father even more than usually troubled all

day, and their trouble had haunted him in his sleep; it had roused him

without waking him from his dreams, and the spirit of love had directed

his feet to the presence of his father. He stood a little way from him,

his face white as his dress, not a word issuing from his mouth, silent,

haunted by a smile of intense quiet, as of one who, being comforted,

would comfort. There was also in the look a slight something like

idiocy, for his soul was not precisely with his body; his thoughts,

though concerning his father, were elsewhere; the circumstances of his

soul and of his body were not the same; and so, being twinned, that is,

divided, _twained_, he was as one beside himself. His eyes,

although open, evidently saw nothing; and thus he stood for a little

time.

There had never been tender relations between Mark and his father like

those between the boy and his mother and sister. His father was always

kind to him, but betwixt him and his boys he had let grow a sort of hard

skin. He had not come so near to them as to the feminine portion of his

family--shrank indeed from close relations with their spirits, thoughts

or intents. It arose, I imagine, from an excess of the masculine element

in his nature. Even when as merest children they came to be kissed

before going to bed, he did not like the contact of their faces with

his. No woman, and perhaps not many men will understand this; but it was

always a relief to Mr. Raymount to have the nightly ceremony over. He

thought there was nothing he would not do for their good; and I think

his heart must in the main have been right towards them: he could hardly

love and honour his wife as he did, and not love the children she had

given him. But the clothes of his affections somehow did not sit easy on

him, and there was a good deal in his behaviour to Cornelius that had

operated unfavourably on the mind of the youth. Even Mark, although, as

I have said, he loved him as few boys love a father, was yet a little

afraid of him--never went to him with confidence--never snuggled close

to him--never sat down by his side to read his book in a heaven of

twilight peace, as he would by his mother's. He would never have gone to

his father's room for refuge from sleeplessness.

Not recognizing his condition his father was surprised and indeed

annoyed as well as startled to see him: he was in no mood for such a

visit. He felt also strangely afraid of the child, he could not have

told why. Wretched about one son, he was dismayed at the nocturnal visit

of the other. The cause was of course his wrong condition of mind; lack

of truth and its harmony in ourselves alone can make us miserable; there

is a cure for everything when that is cured. No ill in our neighbours,

if we be right in ourselves, will ever seem hopeless to us; but while we

stand wrapped in our own selfishness, our neighbour may well seem

incurable; for not only is there nothing in us to help their redemption,

but there is that in ourselves, and cherished in us, which cannot be

forgiven, but must be utterly destroyed.

There was an unnatural look, at the same time pitiful and lovely, about

the boy, and the father sat and stared in gathering dread. He had nearly

imagined him an angel of some doom.

Suddenly the child stretched out his hands to him, and with upcast,

beseeching face, and eyes that seemed to be seeing far off, came close

to his knee. Then the father remembered how once before, when a tiny

child, he had walked in his sleep, and how, suddenly wakened from it, he

had gone into a kind of fit, and had for a long time ailed from the

shock. Instantly anxious that nothing of the kind should occur again, he

took the child softly in his arms, lifted him to his knees, and held him

gently to his bosom. An expression of supreme delight came over the

boy's face--a look of absolute contentment mingled with hope. He put his

thin hands together, palm to palm, as if saying his prayers, but lifted

his countenance to that of his father. His gaze, however, though not its

direction, was still to the infinite. And now his lips began to move,

and a murmur came from them, which grew into words audible. He was

indeed praying to his father, but a father closer to him than the one

upon whose knees he sat.

"Dear God," said the child--and before I blame the familiarity, I must

know that God is displeased with such address from the mouth of a child:

for this was not a taught prayer he neither meant nor felt--