At school, Richard had been friendly with a boy of gentle nature, not
many years older than himself. The boy had stood his friend in more
than one difficulty, and Richard heartily loved him. But he had suddenly
disappeared from the school, and so from Richard's ken: for years he had
not seen him. One evening, as he was carrying home a book, he met this
Arthur Manson, looking worn and sad. He would have avoided Richard, but
he stopped him, and presently the old friendship was dominant. Arthur
told him his story. He had had to leave school because of the sudden
cessation, from what cause he did not know, of a certain annuity his
mother had till then enjoyed--rendering it imperative that he should
earn his own living, and contribute to her support, for although she
still had a little money, it was not nearly enough. His sister was at
work with a dressmaker, but as yet earning next to nothing. His mother
was a lady, he said, and had never done any work. He was himself in a
counting-house in the City, with a salary of forty pounds. He told him
where they lived, and Richard promised to go and see him, which he did
the next Sunday.
His friend's mother lived in a little house of two floors, one of a long
row lately built. The furniture was much too large, and it was difficult
to move in the tiny drawing-room. It showed a feeble attempt at
decoration, which made it look the poorer. Accustomed to his mother's
care of her things, Richard perceived a difference: these were much
finer but neglected, and looked as if they felt it. At their evening
meal, however, the tea was good, and the bread and butter were of the
best.
The mother was a handsome middle-aged woman--not so old, Richard somehow
imagined, as she looked. She was stout and florid, with plenty of black,
rather coarse hair, and seemed to Richard to have the carriage of a
lady, but not speech equal to her manners. She was polite to him, but
not apparently interested in her son's friend. Yet several times he
found her gazing at him with an expression that puzzled him. He had,
however, too clear a conscience to be troubled by any scrutiny. All
the evening Arthur's face wore the same look of depression, and Richard
wondered what could be amiss. He learned afterward that the mother was
so self-indulgent, and took so little care to make the money go as far
as it could, that he had not merely to toil from morning to night at
uncongenial labour, but could never have the least recreation, and was
always too tired when he came home to understand any book he attempted
to read. Richard learned also that he had no greatcoat, and went to
the City in the winter with only a shabby comforter in addition to the
clothes he had worn all the summer. But it was not Arthur who told him
this.
The girl was a graceful little creature, with the same sad look her
brother had, but not the same depression. She seemed more delicate,
and less capable of labour; yet her hours were longer than his, and her
confinement greater. Alice had to sit the whole day plying her needle,
while Arthur was occasionally sent out to collect money. But her
mistress was a kind-hearted woman, and not having a fashionable
_clientèle_, had not yet become indifferent to the well-being of her
work-women. She even paid a crippled girl a trifle for reading to them,
stipulating only that she should read fast, for she found the rate of
their working greatly influenced by the rate of the reading. Life, if
harder, was therefore not quite so uninteresting to Alice as to Arthur,
and that might be why she seemed to have more vitality. Like her mother
she had a quantity of hair, as dark as hers, but finer; dark eyes, not
without meaning; irregular but very pleasing and delicate features; and
an unusually white rather than pale complexion, with a sort of sallow
glow under the diaphanous skin. There was not a little piquancy in the
expression of her countenance, and Richard felt it strangely attractive.
The youths found they had still tastes in common, although Arthur had
neither time nor strength to follow them. Richard spoke of some book he
had been reading. Arthur was interested, but Alice so much that Richard
offered to lend it her: it was the first time she had heard a book
spoken of in such a tone--one of suppressed feeling, almost veneration.
The mother did not join in their talk, and left them soon--her daughter
said to go to church.
“She always goes by herself,” Alice added. “She sees we are too tired to
go.”
They sat a long time with no light but that of the fire. Arthur seemed
to gather courage, and confessed the hopeless monotony of his life. He
complained of no privation, only of want of interest in his work.
“Do _you_ like your work?” he asked Richard.
“Indeed I do!” Richard answered. “I would sooner handle an old book than
a bunch of bank-notes!”
“I don't doubt it,” returned Arthur. “To me your workshop seems a
paradise.”
“Why don't you take up the trade, then? Come to us and I will teach you.
I do not think my father would object.”
“I learn nothing where I am!” continued Arthur.
“Our boat is not over-manned,” resumed Richard. “Say you will come, and
I will speak to my father.”
“I wish I could! But how are we to live while I am learning?--No; I must
grind away till--”
He stopped short, and gave a sigh.
“Till when, Arty?” asked his sister.
“Till death set me free,” he answered.
“You wouldn't leave me behind, Arty!” said Alice; and rising, she put
her arm round his neck.
“I wouldn't if I could help it,” he replied.
“It's a cowardly thing to want to die,” said Richard.
“I think so sometimes.”
“There's your mother!”
“Yes,” responded Arthur, but without emotion.
“And how should I get on without you, Arty?” said his sister.
“Not very well, Ally. But it wouldn't be for long. We should soon meet.”
“Who told you that?” said Richard almost rudely.
“Don't you think we shall know each other afterwards?” asked Arthur,
with an expression of weary rather than sad surprise.
“I would be a little surer of it before I talked so coolly of leaving a
sister like that! I only wish _I_ had one to care for!”
A faint flush rose on the pale face of the girl, and as swiftly faded.
“Do you think, then, that this life is only a dream?” she said,
looking up at Richard with something in her great eyes that he did not
understand.
“Anyhow,” he answered, “I would bear a good deal rather than run the
risk of going so fast asleep as to stop dreaming it. A man can die any
time,” he continued, “but he can't dream when he pleases! I would wait!
One can't tell when things may take a turn! There are many chances on
the cards!”
“That's true,” replied Arthur; but plainly the very chances were a
weariness to him.
“If Arthur had enough to eat, and time to read, and a little amusement,
he would be as brave as you are, Mr. Tuke!” said Alice. “--But you can't
mean to say there will be no more of anything for us after this world!
To think I should never see Arty again, would make me die before my
time! I should be so miserable I would hardly care to keep him as long
as I might. We must die some day, and what odds whether it be a few days
sooner, or a few days later, if we're never going to meet again?”
“The best way is not to think about it,” returned Richard. “Why should
you? Look at the butterflies! They take what comes, and don't grumble at
their sunshine because there's only one day of it.”
“But when there's no sunshine that day?” suggested Alice.
“Well, when they lie crumpled in the rain, they're none the worse that
they didn't think about it beforehand! We must make the best of what we
have!”
“It's not worth making the best of,” cried Alice indignantly, “if that's
all!”
My reader may well wonder at Richard: how could he be a lover of our
best literature and talk as he did? or rather, talking as he did,
how could he love it? But he had come to love it while yet under the
influence of what his aunt taught him, poor as was her teaching. Then
his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun
to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its
imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the
forces of the brain, sole and supreme.
In matters of conduct, John Tuke and his wife were well agreed;
in matters of opinion, they differed greatly. Jane went to church
regularly, listened without interest, and accepted without question;
had her husband gone, he would have listened with the interest of utter
dissent. When Jane learned that her husband no longer “believed in the
Bible,” she was seized with terror lest he should die without repentance
and be lost. Thereupon followed fear for herself: was not an atheist
a horribly wicked man?--and she could not feel that John was horribly
wicked! She tried her hardest, but could not; and concluded therefore
that his unbelief must be affecting her. She prayed him to say nothing
against the Bible to Richard--at least before he arrived at years
of discretion. This John promised; but subtle effluences are subtle
influences.
John Tuke did right so far as he knew--at least he thought he did--and
refused to believe in any kind of God; Jane did right, she thought, as
far as she knew--and never imagined God cared about her: let him who has
a mind to it, show the value of the difference!
Tuke was a thinking man;--that is, set a going in any direction that
interested him, he could take a few steps forward without assistance.
But he could start in no direction of himself. At a small club to which
he belonged, he had been brought in contact with certain ideas new to
him, and finding himself able to grasp them, felt at once as if they
must be true. Certain other ideas, new to him, coming self-suggested in
their train, he began immediately to imagine himself a thinker, able to
generate notions to which the people around him were unequal. He began
to grow self-confident, and so to despise. Taking courage then to deny
things he had never believed, had only not thought about, and finding
he thereby gave offence, he chose to imagine himself a martyr for the
truth. He did not see that a denial involving no assertion, cannot
witness to any truth; nor did he perceive that denial in his case meant
nothing more than non-acceptance of things asserted. Had he put his
position logically, it would have been this: I never knew such things;
I do not like the notion of them; therefore I deny them: they do not
exist. But no man really denies a thing which he knows only by the
words that stand for it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he
denied only a God that could have no existence.
A man will be judged, however, by his truth toward what he professes to
believe; and John was far truer to his perception of the duty of man to
man than are ninety-nine out of the hundred of so-called Christians to
the things they profess to believe. How many men would be immeasurably
better, if they would but truly believe, that is, act upon, the smallest
part of what they untruly profess to believe, even if they cast aside
all the rest. John cast aside an allegiance to God which had never been
more than a mockery, and set about delivering his race from the fear of
a person who did not exist. For, true enough, there was no God of the
kind John denied; only, what if, in delivering his kind from the tyranny
of a false God, he aided in hiding from them the love of a true God--of
a God that did and ought to exist? There are other passions besides
fear, and precious as fear is hateful. If there be a God and one has
never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that he
could not get proof of his existence. Is a child not to seek his father,
because he cannot prove he is alive?
The aunt continued to take the boy to church, and expose him, for it was
little more she did, to a teaching she could not herself either supply
or supplement. It was the business of the church to teach Christianity!
her part was to accept it, and bring the child where he also might
listen and accept! But what she accepted as Christianity, is another
question; and whether the acceptance of anything makes a Christian, is
another still.
How much of Christianity a child may or may not learn by going to
church, it is impossible to say; but certainly Richard did not learn
anything that drew his heart to Jesus of Nazareth, or caught him in
any heavenly breeze, or even the smallest of celestial whirlwinds! He
learned nothing even that made unwelcome such remarks as his father
would now and then let fall concerning the clergy and the way they
followed their trade; while the grin, full of conscious superiority,
with which he unconsciously accompanied them, found its reflection in
the honourable but not yet humble mind, beginning to be aware of its own
faculty, and not aware that the religion presented in his aunt's
church, a religion neither honourable nor elevating, was but the dullest
travesty of the religion of St. Paul. Richard had, besides, read several
books which, had his uncle been _careful_ of the promise he had given
his wife, he would have intentionally removed instead of unintentionally
leaving about.
In the position Richard had just taken toward his new friends, he was
not a little influenced by the desire to show himself untrammelled by
prevailing notions, and capable of thinking for himself; but this was
far from all that made him speak as he did. Many young fellows are as
ready to deny as Richard, but not many feel as strongly that life rests
upon what we know, that knowledge must pass into action. The denial of
every falsehood under the sun would not generate one throb of life.
Richard told his adoptive parents where he had been, and asked if
he might invite his new friends for the next Sunday. They made no
objection, and when Arthur and Alice came, received them kindly. Richard
took Arthur to the shop, and showed him the job he was engaged upon at
the time, lauding his department as affording more satisfaction than
mere binding.
“For,” he said, “the thing that is not, may continue not to be; but the
thing that is, should be as it was meant to be. Where it is not such,
there is an evil that wants remedy. It may be that the sole remedy is
binding, but that involves destruction, therefore is a poor thing beside
renovation.”
The argument came from a well of human pity in himself, deeper than
Richard knew. But both the pity he felt and the _truth_ in what he said
came from a source eternal of which he yet knew nothing.
“It would be much easier,” continued Richard, “to make that volume
look new, but how much more delightful to send it out with a revived
assertion of its ancient self!”
Some natures have a better chance of disclosing the original in them,
that they have not been to college, and set to think in other people's
grooves, instead of those grooves that were scored in themselves long
before the glacial era.
“For my part,” said Arthur, “I feel like a book that needs to be fresh
printed, not to say fresh bound! I don't feel why I am what I am. I
would part with it all, except just being the same man!”
While the youths were having their talk, Alice was in Jane's bedroom,
undergoing an examination, the end and object of which it was impossible
she should suspect. Caught by a certain look in her sweet face,
reminding her of a look that was anything but sweet, Jane had set
herself to learn from her what she might as to her people and history.
“Is your father alive, my dear?” she asked, with her keen black eyes on
Alice's face.
That grew red, and for a moment the girl did not answer. Jane pursued
her catechizing.
“What was his trade or profession?” she inquired.
The girl said nothing, and the merciless questioner went on.
“Tell me something about him, dear. Do you remember him? Or did he die
when you were quite a child?”
“I do not remember him,” answered Alice. “I do not know if I ever saw
him.”
“Did your mother never tell you what he was like?”
“She told me once he was very handsome--the handsomest man she ever
saw--but cruel--so cruel! she said.--I don't want to talk about him,
please, ma'am!” concluded Alice, the tears running down her cheeks.
“I'm sorry, my dear, to hurt you, but I'm not doing it from curiosity.
You have a look so like a man I once knew,--and your brother has
something of the same!--that in fact I am bound to learn what I can
about you.”
“What sort was the man we put you in mind of?” asked Alice, with a
feeble attempt at a smile. “Not a _very_ bad man, I hope!”
“Well, not very good--as you ask me.--He was what people call a
gentleman!”
“Was that all?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought he was a nobleman!”
“Oh!--well, he wasn't that; he was a baronet.”
Alice gave a little cry.
“Do tell me something about him,” she said. “What do you know about
him?”
“More than I choose to tell. We will forget him now, if you please!”
There was in her voice a tone of displeasure, which Alice took to
be with herself. She was in consequence both troubled and perplexed.
Neither made any more inquiries. Jane took her guest back to the
sitting-room.
The moment her brother came from the workshop, Alice said to him--
“Are you ready, Arthur? We had better be moving!”
Arthur was a gentle creature, and seldom opposed her; he seemed only
surprised a little, and asked if she was ill. But Richard, who had all
the week been looking forward to a talk with Alice, and wanted to show
her his little library, was much disappointed, and begged her to change
her mind. She insisted, however, and he put on his hat to walk with
them.
But his aunt called him, and whispered that she would be particularly
obliged to him if he would go to church with her that evening. He
expostulated, saying he did not care to go to church; but as she
insisted, he yielded, though not with the best grace.
Before another Sunday, there came, doubtless by his aunt's management,
an invitation to spend a few weeks with his grandfather, the blacksmith.
Richard was not altogether pleased, for he did not like leaving his
work; but his aunt again prevailed with him, and he agreed to go. In
this, as in most things, he showed her a deference such as few young men
show their mothers. Her influence came, I presume, through the strong
impression of purpose she had made on him.
His uncle objected to his going, and grumbled a good deal. As the
brewer looks down on the baker, so the bookbinder looked down on the
blacksmith.
He said the people Richard would see about his grandfather, were not
fit company for the heir of Mortgrange! But he knew the necessity of his
going somewhere for a while, and gave in.