_A NEW FACE_
I think it was about a fortnight after that conversation in which my father
had expressed his opinion, and given me the mysterious charge about the
old oak cabinet in his library, as already detailed, that I was one night
sitting at the great drawing-room window, lost in the melancholy reveries
of night, and in admiration of the moonlighted scene. I was the only
occupant of the room; and the lights near the fire, at its farther end,
hardly reached to the window at which I sat.
The shorn grass sloped gently downward from the windows till it met the
broad level on which stood, in clumps, or solitarily scattered, some of the
noblest timber in England. Hoar in the moonbeams stood those graceful
trees casting their moveless shadows upon the grass, and in the background
crowning the undulations of the distance, in masses, were piled those woods
among which lay the solitary tomb where the remains of my beloved mother
rested.
The air was still. The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon,
and the frosty stars blinked brightly. Everyone knows the effect of such a
scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in
the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and
anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance. As my eyes
rested on those, to me, funereal but glorious woods, which formed the
background of the picture, my thoughts recurred to my father's mysterious
intimations and the image of the approaching visitor; and the thought of
the unknown journey saddened me.
In all that concerned his religion, from very early association, there was
to me something of the unearthly and spectral.
When my dear mamma died I was not nine years old; and I remember, two days
before the funeral, there came to Knowl, where she died, a thin little man,
with large black eyes, and a very grave, dark face.
He was shut up a good deal with my dear father, who was in deep affliction;
and Mrs. Rusk used to say, 'It is rather odd to see him praying with that
little scarecrow from London, and good Mr. Clay ready at call, in the
village; much good that little black whipper-snapper will do him!'
With that little black man, on the day after the funeral, I was sent out,
for some reason, for a walk; my governess was ill, I know, and there was
confusion in the house, and I dare say the maids made as much of a holiday
as they could.
I remember feeling a sort of awe of this little dark man; but I was not
afraid of him, for he was gentle, though sad--and seemed kind. He led me
into the garden--the Dutch garden, we used to call it--with a balustrade,
and statues at the farther front, laid out in a carpet-pattern of
brilliantly-coloured flowers. We came down the broad flight of Caen stone
steps into this, and we walked in silence to the balustrade. The base was
too high at the spot where we reached it for me to see over; but holding my
hand, he said, 'Look through that, my child. Well, you can't; but _I_ can
see beyond it--shall I tell you what? I see ever so much. I see a cottage
with a steep roof, that looks like gold in the sunlight; there are tall
trees throwing soft shadows round it, and flowering shrubs, I can't say
what, only the colours are beautiful, growing by the walls and windows, and
two little children are playing among the stems of the trees, and we are on
our way there, and in a few minutes shall be under those trees ourselves,
and talking to those little children. Yet now to me it is but a picture in
my brain, and to you but a story told by me, which you believe. Come, dear;
let us be going.'
So we descended the steps at the right, and side by side walked along the
grass lane between tall trim walls of evergreens. The way was in deep
shadow, for the sun was near the horizon; but suddenly we turned to the
left, and there we stood in rich sunlight, among the many objects he had
described.
'Is this your house, my little men?' he asked of the children--pretty
little rosy boys--who assented; and he leaned with his open hand against
the stem of one of the trees, and with a grave smile he nodded down to me,
saying--
'You see now, and hear, and _feel_ for yourself that both the vision and
the story were quite true; but come on, my dear, we have further to go.'
And relapsing into silence we had a long ramble through the wood, the same
on which I was now looking in the distance. Every now and then he made me
sit down to rest, and he in a musing solemn sort of way would relate some
little story, reflecting, even to my childish mind, a strange suspicion
of a spiritual meaning, but different from what honest Mrs. Rusk used
to expound to me from the Parables, and, somehow, startling in its very
vagueness.
Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark
mysterious little 'whipper-snapper' through the woodland glades. We came,
to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey,
pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained
steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor
mamma laid. At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried
bitterly, repeating, 'Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!' and so went on
weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent. There was a stone
bench some ten steps away from the tomb.
'Sit down beside me, my child,' said the grave man with the black eyes,
very kindly and gently. 'Now, what do you see there?' he asked, pointing
horizontally with his stick towards the centre of the opposite structure.
'Oh, _that_--that place where poor mamma is?'
'Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over.
But----'
Here he mentioned a name which I think must have been Swedenborg, from what
I afterwards learnt of his tenets and revelations; I only know that it
sounded to me like the name of a magician in a fairy tale; I fancied he
lived in the wood which surrounded us, and I began to grow frightened as he
proceeded.
'But Swedenborg sees beyond it, over, and _through_ it, and has told me all
that concerns us to know. He says your mamma is not there.'
'She is taken away!' I cried, starting up, and with streaming eyes, gazing
on the building which, though I stamped my feet in my distraction, I was
afraid to approach. 'Oh, _is_ mamma taken away? Where is she? Where have
they brought her to?'
I was uttering unconsciously very nearly the question with which Mary,
in the grey of that wondrous morning on which she stood by the empty
sepulchre, accosted the figure standing near.
'Your mamma is alive but too far away to see or hear us. Swedenborg,
standing here, can see and hear her, and tells me all he sees, just as I
told you in the garden about the little boys and the cottage, and the trees
and flowers which you could not see, but you believed in when _I_ told you. So
I can tell you now as I did then; and as we are both, I hope, walking on to
the same place just as we did to the trees and cottage. You will surely see
with your own eyes how true the description is which I give you.'
I was very frightened, for I feared that when he had done his narrative we
were to walk on through the wood into that place of wonders and of shadows
where the dead were visible.
He leaned his elbow on his knee, and his forehead on his hand, which
shaded his downcast eyes. In that attitude he described to me a beautiful
landscape, radiant with a wondrous light, in which, rejoicing, my mother
moved along an airy path, ascending among mountains of fantastic height,
and peaks, melting in celestial colouring into the air, and peopled with
human beings translated into the same image, beauty, and splendour. And
when he had ended his relation, he rose, took my hand, and smiling gently
down on my pale, wondering face, he said the same words he had spoken
before--
'Come, dear, let us go.'
'Oh! no, no, _no_--not now,' I said, resisting, and very much frightened.
'Home, I mean, dear. We cannot walk to the place I have described. We can
only reach it through the gate of death, to which we are all tending, young
and old, with sure steps.'
'And where is the gate of death?' I asked in a sort of whisper, as we
walked together, holding his hand, and looking stealthily. He smiled sadly
and said--
'When, sooner or later, the time comes, as Hagar's eyes were opened in the
wilderness, and she beheld the fountain of water, so shall each of us see
the door open before us, and enter in and be refreshed.'
For a long time following this walk I was very nervous; more so for the
awful manner in which Mrs. Rusk received my statement--with stern lips and
upturned hands and eyes, and an angry expostulation: 'I do wonder at
you, Mary Quince, letting the child walk into the wood with that limb of
darkness. It is a mercy he did not show her the devil, or frighten her out
of her senses, in that lonely place!'
Of these Swedenborgians, indeed, I know no more than I might learn from
good Mrs. Rusk's very inaccurate talk. Two or three of them crossed in the
course of my early life, like magic-lantern figures, the disk of my very
circumscribed observation. All outside was and is darkness. I once tried to
read one of their books upon the future state--heaven and hell; but I grew
after a day or two so nervous that I laid it aside. It is enough for me
to know that their founder either saw or fancied he saw amazing visions,
which, so far from superseding, confirmed and interpreted the language of
the Bible; and as dear papa accepted their ideas, I am happy in thinking
that they did not conflict with the supreme authority of holy writ.
Leaning on my hand, I was now looking upon that solemn wood, white and
shadowy in the moonlight, where, for a long time after that ramble with the
visionary, I fancied the gate of death, hidden only by a strange glamour,
and the dazzling land of ghosts, were situate; and I suppose these earlier
associations gave to my reverie about my father's coming visitor a wilder
and a sadder tinge.