AN INCIDENT.
It was a fair morning of All Hallows' summer. The trees were nearly
despoiled, but the grass was green, and there was a memory of spring
in the low sad sunshine: even the sunshine, the gladdest thing in
creation, is sad sometimes. There was no wind, nothing to fight
with, nothing to turn his mind from its own miserable perplexities.
How endlessly his position as a clergyman, he thought, added to his
miseries! Had he been a man unpledged, he could have taken his own
time to think out the truths of his relations; as it was, he felt
like a man in a coffin: out he must get, but had not room to make a
single vigorous effort for freedom! It did not occur to him yet
that, uupressed from without, his honesty unstung, he might have
taken more time to find out where he was than would have been either
honest or healthful.
He came to a stile where his path joined another that ran both ways,
and there seated himself, just as the same strange couple I have
already described as met by Miss Lingard and Mr. Bascombe approached
and went by. After they had gone a good way, he caught sight of
something lying in the path, and going to pick it up, found it was a
small manuscript volume.
With the pleasurable instinct of service, he hastened after them.
They heard him, and turning waited his approach. He took off his
hat, and presenting the book to the young woman, asked if she had
dropped it. Possibly, had they been ordinary people of the class to
which they seemed to belong, he would not have uncovered to them,
for he naturally shrunk from what might be looked upon as a display
of courtesy, but their deformity rendered it imperative. Her face
flushed so at sight of the book, that, in order to spare her
uneasiness, Wingfold could not help saying with a smile,
"Do not be alarmed: I have not read one word of it."
She returned his smile with much sweetness, and said--
"I see I need not have been afraid."
Her companion joined in thanks and apologies for having caused him
so much trouble. Wingfold assured them it had been but a pleasure.
It was far from a scrutinizing look with which he regarded them, but
the interview left him with the feeling that their faces were
refined and intelligent, and their speech was good. Again he lifted
his rather shabby hat, the man responded with equal politeness in
removing from a great grey head one rather better, and they turned
from each other and went their ways, the sight of their malformation
arousing in the curate no such questions as those with which it had
agitated the tongue, if not the heart, of George Bascombe, to widen
the scope of his perplexities. He had heard the loud breathing of
the man, and seen the projecting eyes of the woman, but he never
said to himself therefore that they were more hardly dealt with than
he. Had such a thought occurred to him, he would have comforted the
pain of his sympathy with the reflection that at least neither of
them was a curate of the church of England who knew positively
nothing of the foundation upon which that church professed to stand.
How he got through the Sunday he never could have told. What times a
man may get through--he knows not how! As soon as it was over, it
was all a mist--from which gleamed or gloomed large the face of
George Bascombe with its keen unbelieving eyes and scornful lips.
All the time he was reading the prayers and lessons, all the time he
was reading his uncle's sermon, he had not only been aware of those
eyes, but aware also of what lay behind them--seeing and reading
the reflex of himself in Bascombe's brain; but nothing more whatever
could he recall.
Like finger-posts dim seen, on a moorland journey, through the
gathering fogs, Sunday after Sunday passed. I will not request my
reader to accompany me across the confusions upon which was blowing
that wind whose breath was causing a world to pass from chaos to
cosmos. One who has ever gone through any experience of the kind
himself, will be able to imagine it; to one who has not, my
descriptions would be of small service: he would but shrink from the
representation as diseased and of no general interest. And he would
be so far right, that the interest in such things must be most
particular and individual, or none at all.
The weeks passed and seemed to bring him no light, only increased
earnestness in the search after it. Some assurance he must find
soon, else he would resign his curacy, and look out for a situation
as tutor.
Of course all this he ought to have gone through long ago! But how
can a man go through anything till his hour be come? Saul of Tarsus
was sitting at the feet of Gamaliel when our Lord said to his
apostles--"Yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will
think that he doeth God service." Wingfold had all this time been
skirting the wall of the kingdom of heaven without even knowing that
there was a wall there, not to say seeing a gate in it. The fault
lay with those who had brought him up to the church as to the
profession of medicine, or the bar, or the drapery business--as if
it lay on one level of choice with other human callings. Nor were
the honoured of the church who had taught him free from blame, who
never warned him to put his shoes from off his feet for the holiness
of the ground. But how were they to warn him, if they had sowed and
reaped and gathered into barns on that ground, and had never
discovered therein treasure more holy than libraries, incomes, and
the visits of royalty? As to visions of truth that make a man sigh
with joy, and enlarge his heart with more than human tenderness--how
many of those men had ever found such treasure in the fields of the
church? How many of them knew save by hearsay whether there be any
Holy Ghost! How then were they to warn other men from the dangers of
following in their footsteps and becoming such as they? Where, in a
general ignorance and community of fault, shall we begin to blame?
Wingfold had no time to accuse anyone after the first gush of
bitterness. He had to awake from the dead and cry for light, and was
soon in the bitter agony of the cataleptic struggle between life and
death.
He thought afterwards, when the time had passed, that surely in this
period of darkness he had been visited and upheld by a power whose
presence and even influence escaped his consciousness. He knew not
how else he could have got through it. Also he remembered that
strange helps had come to him; that the aspects of nature then
wonderfully softened towards him, that then first he began to feel
sympathy with her ways and shows, and to see in them all the working
of a diffused humanity. He remembered how once a hawthorn bud set
him weeping; and how once, as he went miserable to church, a child
looked up in his face and smiled, and how in the strength of that
smile he had walked boldly to the lectern.
He never knew how long he had been in the strange birth agony, in
which the soul is as it were at once the mother that bears and the
child that is born.