HOME AGAIN.
I will not detain my readers with the record of the few days we spent in
London. In writing the account of it, as in the experience of the time
itself, I feel that I am near home, and grow the more anxious to reach it.
Ah! I am growing a little anxious after another home, too; for the house of
my tabernacle is falling to ruins about me. What a word _home_ is! To think
that God has made the world so that you have only to be born in a certain
place, and live long enough in it to get at the secret of it, and
henceforth that place is to you a _home_ with all the wonderful meaning in
the word. Thus the whole earth is a home to the race; for every spot of it
shares in the feeling: some one of the family loves it as _his_ home. How
rich the earth seems when we so regard it--crowded with the loves of home!
Yet I am now getting ready to _go home_--to leave this world of homes and
go home. When I reach that home, shall I even then seek yet to go home?
Even then, I believe, I shall seek a yet warmer, deeper, truer home in the
deeper knowledge of God--in the truer love of my fellow-man. Eternity will
be, my heart and my faith tell me, a travelling homeward, but in jubilation
and confidence and the vision of the beloved.
When we had laid Connie once more in her own room, at least the room which
since her illness had come to be called hers, I went up to my study. The
familiar faces of my books welcomed me. I threw myself in my reading-chair,
and gazed around me with pleasure. I felt it so homely here. All my old
friends--whom somehow I hoped to see some day--present there in the spirit
ready to talk with me any moment when I was in the mood, making no claim
upon my attention when I was not! I felt as if I should like, when the
hour should come, to die in that chair, and pass into the society of the
witnesses in the presence of the tokens they had left behind them.
I heard shouts on the stair, and in rushed the two boys.
"Papa, papa!" they were crying together.
"What is the matter?"
"We've found the big chest just where we left it."
"Well, did you expect it would have taken itself off?"
"But there's everything in it just as we left it."
"Were you afraid, then, that the moment you left it it would turn itself
upside down, and empty itself of all its contents on the floor?"
They laughed, but apparently with no very keen appreciation of the attempt
at a joke.
"Well, papa, I did not think anything about it; but--but--but--there
everything is as we left it."
With this triumphant answer they turned and hurried, a little abashed, out
of the room; but not many moments elapsed before the sounds that arose from
them were sufficiently reassuring as to the state of their spirits.
When they were gone, I forgot my books in the attempt to penetrate and
understand the condition of my boys' thoughts; and I soon came to see that
they were right and I was wrong. It was the movement of that undeveloped
something in us which makes it possible for us in everything to give
thanks. It was the wonder of the discovery of the existence of law. There
was nothing that they could understand, _à priori_, to necessitate the
remaining of the things where they had left them. No doubt there was a
reason in the nature of God, why all things should hold together, whence
springs the law of gravitation, as we call it; but as far as the boys could
understand of this, all things might as well have been arranged for flying
asunder, so that no one could expect to find anything where he had left it.
I began to see yet further into the truth that in everything we must give
thanks, and whatever is not of faith is sin. Even the laws of nature reveal
the character of God, not merely as regards their ends, but as regards
their kind, being of necessity fashioned after ideal facts of his own being
and will.
I rose and went down to see if everybody was getting settled, and how the
place looked. I found Ethel already going about the house as if she had
never left it, and as if we all had just returned from a long absence and
she had to show us home-hospitality. Wynnie had vanished; but I found her
by and by in the favourite haunt of her mother before her marriage--beside
the little pond called the Bishop's Basin, of which I do not think I have
ever told my readers the legend. But why should I mention it, for I cannot
tell it now? The frost lay thick in the hollow when I went down there to
find her; the branches, lately clothed with leaves, stood bare and icy
around her. Ethelwyn and I had almost forgotten that there was anything out
of the common in connection with the house. The horror of this mysterious
spot had laid hold upon Wynnie. I resolved that that night I would, in her
mother's presence, tell her all the legend of the place, and the whole
story of how I won her mother. I did so; and I think it made her trust us
more. But now I left her there, and went to Connie. She lay in her bed;
for her mother had got her thither at once, a perfect picture of blessed
comfort. There was no occasion to be uneasy about her. I was so pleased
to be at home again with such good hopes, that I could not rest, but went
wandering everywhere--into places even which I had not entered for ten
years at least, and found fresh interest in everything; for this was home,
and here I was.
Now I fancy my readers, looking forward to the end, and seeing what a small
amount of print is left, blaming me; some, that I have roused curiosity
without satisfying it; others, that I have kept them so long over a dull
book and a lame conclusion. But out of a life one cannot always cut
complete portions, and serve them up in nice shapes. I am well aware that I
have not told them the _fate_, as some of them would call it, of either of
my daughters. This I cannot develop now, even as far as it is known to me;
but, if it is any satisfaction to them to know this much--and it will be
all that some of them mean by _fate_, I fear--I may as well tell them now
that Wynnie has been Mrs. Percivale for many years, with a history well
worth recounting; and that Connie has had a quiet, happy life for nearly
as long, as Mrs. Turner. She has never got strong, but has very tolerable
health. Her husband watches her with the utmost care and devotion. My
Ethelwyn is still with me. Harry is gone home. Charlie is a barrister of
the Middle Temple. And Dora--I must not forget Dora--well, I will say
nothing about her _fate_, for good reasons--it is not quite determined yet.
Meantime she puts up with the society of her old father and mother, and is
something else than unhappy, I fully believe.
"And Connie's baby?" asks some one out of ten thousand readers. I have no
time to tell you about her now; but as you know her so little, it cannot be
such a trial to remain, for a time at least, unenlightened with regard to
her _fate._
The only other part of my history which could contain anything like
incident enough to make it interesting in print, is a period I spent in
London some few years after the time of which I have now been writing. But
I am getting too old to regard the commencement of another history with
composure. The labour of thinking into sequences, even the bodily labour of
writing, grows more and more severe. I fancy I can think correctly still;
but the effort necessary to express myself with corresponding correctness
becomes, in prospect, at least, sometimes almost appalling. I must
therefore take leave of my patient reader--for surely every one who
has followed me through all that I have here written, well deserves the
epithet--as if the probability that I shall write no more were a certainty,
bidding him farewell with one word: _"Friend, hope thou in God,"_ and for
a parting gift offering him a new, and, I think, a true rendering of the
first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews:
"Now faith is the essence of hopes, the trying of things unseen."
Good-bye.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3, by George MacDonald