That night Richard could not rest. His brain wrought unceasingly.
He had caught cold and was feverish. After his hot haste to reach his
brother and sister, he had stood on the stair till his temperature sank
low. When at length he slept, he kept starting awake from troublous
dreams, and this went on through the night. In the morning he felt
better, and rose and set to his work, shivering occasionally. All the
week he was unwell, and coughed, but thought the attack an ordinary
cold. When Sunday came, he kept his bed, in the hope of getting rid of
it; but the next day he was worse. He insisted on getting up, however:
he must not seem to be ill, for he was determined, if he could stand,
to go to the concert! What with weariness and shortness of breath and
sleepiness, however, it was all he could do to stick to his work. But
he held on till the evening, when, watching his opportunity, he slipped
from the house and made his way, with the help of an omnibus, to the
hall.
It was dire work waiting till the door to the orchestra was opened.
The air was cold, his lungs heavily oppressed, and his languor almost
overpowering. But Paradise was within that closed door, and he was
passing through the pains of death to enter into bliss! When at length
it seemed to yield to his prayers, he almost fell in the rush, but the
good-humoured crowd itself succoured the pale youth, and helped him in:
to look at him was to see that he was ill!
The moment the music began, he forgot every discomfort. For, with the
first chord of the violins, as if ushered in and companied by the angels
themselves of the sweet sounds, Barbara came flitting down the centre of
the wide space toward her usual seat. The rows of faces that filled the
area were but the waves on which floated the presence of Barbara; the
music was the natural element of her being; it flowed from her as from
its fountain, radiated from her like odour. It fashioned around her a
nimbus of sound, like that made by the light issuing from the blessed
ones, as beheld by Dante, which revealed their presence but hid them in
its radiance, as the moth is hid in the silk of its cocoon. Richard felt
entirely well. The warmth entered into him, and met the warmth generated
in him. All was peace and hope and bliss, quaintest mingling of
expectation and fruition. Even Arthur Lestrange beside Barbara could not
blast his joy. He saw him occasionally offer some small attention; he
saw her carelessly accept or refuse it. Barbara gazed at him anxiously,
he thought; but he did not know he looked ill; he had forgotten himself.
When the concert was over, he hastened from the orchestra. The moment
he issued, the cold wind seized and threatened to strangle him, but he
conquered in the struggle, and reached the human torrent debouching in
Regent-street. Against it he made gradual way, until he stood near the
inner door of the hall. In a minute or two he saw her come, slowly with
the crowd, her hand on Arthur's arm, her eyes anxiously searching for
Richard. The moment they found him, her course took a drift toward him,
and her face grew white as his, for she saw more plainly that he was
ill. They edged nearer and nearer; their hands met through the crowd;
their letters were exchanged, and without a word they parted. As Barbara
reached the door, she turned one moment to look for him, and he saw a
depth of care angelic in her eyes. Arthur turned too and saw him,
but Richard was so changed he did not recognize him, and thought the
suffering look of a stranger had roused the sympathy of his companion.
How he got home, Richard could not have told. Ere he reached the house,
he was too ill to know anything except that he had something precious in
his possession. He managed to get to bed--not to leave it for weeks. A
severe attack of pneumonia had prostrated him, and he knew nothing of
his condition or surroundings. He had not even opened his letter. He
remembered at intervals that he had a precious thing somewhere, but
could not recall what it was.
When he came to himself after many days, it was with a wonderful delight
of possession, though whether the object possessed was a thing, or a
thought, or a feeling, or a person, he could not distinguish.
“Where is it?” he said, nor knew that he spoke till he heard his own
voice.
“Under your pillow,” answered his mother.
He turned his eyes, and saw her face as he had never seen it
before--pale, and full of yearning love and anxious joy. There was a
gentleness and depth in its expression that was new to him. The divine
motherhood had come nearer the surface in her boy's illness.
Partly from her anxiety about what she had done and what she had yet to
do, the show of her love had, as the boy grew up, gradually retired; her
love burned more, and shone less. If Jane Tuke had been able to let her
love appear in such forms as suited its strength, I doubt whether the
teaching of his father would have had much power upon Richard; certainly
he would have been otherwise impressed by the faith of his mother. He
would have been prejudiced in favour of the God she believed in, and
would have sought hard to account for the ways attributed to him. None
the less would it have been through much denial and much suffering that
he arrived at anything worth calling faith; while the danger would have
been great of his drifting about in such indifference as does not care
that God should be righteous, and is ready to call anything just which
men in office declare God does, without concern whether it be right or
wrong, or whether he really does it or not--without concern indeed about
anything at all that is God's. He would have had phantoms innumerable
against him. He would have supposed the Bible said things about God
which it does not say, things which, if it did say them, ought to be
enough to make any honest man reject the notion of its authority as an
indivisible whole. He would have had to encounter all the wrong notions
of God, dropped on the highway of the universe, by the nations that went
before in the march of humanity. He would have found it much harder to
work out his salvation, to force his freedom from the false forms given
to truth by interpreters of little faith, for they would have seemed
born in him because loved into him.
“What did you say, mother dear?” he returned, all astray, seeming to
have once known several things, but now to know nothing at all.
“It is under your pillow, Richard,” she said again, very tenderly.
“What is it, mother? Something seems strange. I don't know what to ask
you. Tell me what it means.”
“You have been very ill, my boy; that is what it means.”
“Have I been out of my mind?”
“You have been wandering with the fever, nothing more.”
“I have been thinking so many things, and they all seemed real!--And you
have been nursing me all the long time?”
“Who should have been nursing you, Richard? Do you think I would let any
one else nurse my own child? Didn't I nurse the--”
She stopped; she had been on the point of saying--“the mother that bore
you?” Her love of her dead sister was one with her love of that sister's
living child.
He lay silent for a time, thinking, or rather trying to think, for he
felt like one vainly endeavouring to get the focus of a stereoscopic
picture. His mind kept going away from him. He knew himself able
to think, yet he could not think. It was a revelation to him of our
helplessness with our own being, of our absolute ignorance of the modes
in which our nature works--of what it is, and what we can and cannot do
with it.
“Shall I get it for you, dear?” said his mother.
The morning after the concert, he had taken Barbara's letter from under
his pillow, and would not let it out of his hand. His mother, fearing
he would wear it to pieces, once and again tried to remove it; but the
moment she touched it, he would cry out and strike; and when in his
restless turning he dropped it, he showed himself so miserable that
she could not but put it in his hand again, when he would lie perfectly
quiet for a while. Dreaming of Barbara however, I fancy, he at length
forgot her letter, and his mother again put it under his pillow. With
the Lord, we shall forget even the gospel of John.
She drew out the crumpled, frayed envelope, and gave it him. The moment
he touched it, everything came back to him.
“Now I remember, mother!” he cried. “Thank you, mother! I will try to be
a better boy to you. I am sorry I ever vexed you.”
“You never vexed me, Richard!” said the mother-heart; “--or if ever you
did, I've forgotten it. And now that God has given you back to us, we
must see whether we can't do something better for you!”
Richard was so weary that he did not care to ask what she meant, and in
a moment was asleep, with the letter in his hand.
When at length he was able to read it, it caused him not a little
pleasure, and some dismay. He read that her father was determined she
should marry Mr. Lestrange; but her mother was against it; and there was
as much dissension at home as ever. She believed lady Ann had talked
her father into it, for he had not always favoured the idea. There was
indeed greater reason now why both lady Ann and her father should desire
it, for there was every likelihood of her being left sole heir to the
property, as her brother could not, the doctors said, live many months.
She was sure her mother was trying to do right, and she herself did all
she could to please her father, but nothing less than her consent to his
plans for what he called her settlement in life, would satisfy him, and
that she could not give.
She hoped Richard was not forgetting the things they had such talks
about in the old days. If it were not for those things, she could not
now bear life, or rightly take her part in it. She was almost never
alone, and now in constant danger of interruption, so that he must not
wonder if her letter broke off abruptly, for she might be wanted any
moment. She was leading, or rather being led, a busy life of nothing at
all--a life not worth living. Her father, set on, she had no doubt, by
lady Ann, had brought her up to town while yet her mother was unable to
accompany them, so that she had had to go where, and do what lady Ann
pleased. But her mother had at last, exerting herself even beyond her
strength, come up to stand by her girl, as she said: she would have no
lady Ann interfering with her! She had herself married a man she had not
learned to respect, and she was determined her girl should make her own
choice--or keep as she was, if she pleased! She was not going to hold
her child down for them to bury in money!--And with this the letter
broke off.
Barbara's openness about her parents was in harmony with her simplicity
and straightforwardness. She was proud of her mother and the way she put
things, therefore told all to Richard.
He had a bad night, with delirious dreams, and for some days made little
progress. His anxiety to be well, that he might see Barbara, and learn
how things were going with her; also that he might again see Alice and
Arthur, for whom he feared much, retarded his recovery.
“If the woman is drinking herself to death,” he said to himself, “I
wish she would be quick about it! In this world she is doing no good to
herself, and much harm to others!” But it would be the ruin, he said to
himself, of all hope in the care and love of God, to believe that she
could be allowed to live a moment longer than it was well she should
live. Then he thought how wise must be a God who, to work out his
intent, would take all the conduct, good and bad, all the endeavours of
all his children, in all their contrarieties, and out of them bring the
right thing. If he knew such a God, one to trust in absolutely, he would
lie still without one movement of fear, he would go to sleep without
one throb of anxiety about any he loved! The perfect Love would not fail
because one of his children was sick! He would try to be quiet, if only
in the hope that there was a perfect heart of hearts, thinking love to
and into and about all its creatures. If there was such a splendour, he
would either make him well, and send him out again to do for Alice and
Arthur what he could, or he would let him die and go where all he loved
would come after him--where he might perhaps help to prepare a place for
them!
If matter be all, then must all illness be blinding; if spirit be the
deeper and be the causer, then some sicknesses may well be openers of
windows into the unseen. It is true that in one mood we are ready to
doubt the conclusions of another mood; but there is a power of judging
between the moods themselves, with a perception of their character and
nature, and the comparative clarity of insight in each; and he who is
able to judge the moods, may well judge the judgments of the moods.
One of the benefits of illness is, that either from general weakness,
or from the brain's being cast into quiescence, habits are broken for
a time, and more simple, childlike, and natural modes of thought and
feeling, modes more approximate to primary and original modes, come
into action, whereby the right thing has a better chance. A man's
self-stereotyped thinking is unfavourable to revelation, whether through
his fellows, or direct from the divine. If there be a divine quarter,
those must be opener to its influences who are not frozen in their
own dullness, cased in their own habits, bound by their own pride to
foregone conclusions, or shut up in the completeness of human error,
theorizing beyond their knowledge and power.
Having thus in a measure given himself up, Richard began to grow better.
It is a joy to think that a man may, while anything but sure about God,
yet come into correlation with him! How else should we be saved at all?
For God alone is our salvation; to know him is salvation. He is in us
all the time, else we could never move to seek him. It is true that only
by perfect faith in him can we be saved, for nothing but perfect faith
in him is salvation; there is no good but him, and not to be one with
that good by perfect obedience, is to be unsaved; but one better thought
concerning him, the poorest desire to draw near him, is an approach to
him. Very unsure of him we may be: how should we be sure of what we do
not yet know? but the unsureness does not nullify the approach. A man
may not be sure that the sun is risen, may not be sure that the sun will
ever rise, yet has he the good of what light there is. Richard was fed
from the heart of God without knowing that he was indeed partaking of
the spirit of God. He had been partaking of the body of God all his
life. The world had been feeding him with its beauty and essential
truth, with the sweetness of its air, and the vastness of its vault
of freedom. But now he had begun, in the words of St. Peter, to be a
partaker of the divine nature.
It was a long time before he was strong again--in fact he never would
be so strong again in this world. His mother took him to the seaside,
where, in a warm secluded bay on the south coast, he was wrapt closer,
shall I not say, in the garments of the creating and reviving God. He
was again a child, and drew nearer to the heart of his mother than he
had ever drawn before. Believing he knew her sad secret, he set himself
to meet her every wish--which was always some form of anxiety about
himself. He spoke so gently to her, that she felt she had never until
now had him her very child. How little men think, alas, of the duty that
lies in _tone_! But Richard was started on a voyage of self-discovery.
He had begun to learn that regions he had thought wholesome, productive
portions of his world, were a _terra incognita_ of swamps and sandy
hills, haunted with creeping and stinging things. When a man finds he
is not what he thought, that he has been talking fine things, and but
imagining he belonged to their world, he is on the way to discover that
he is not up to his duty in the smallest thing. When, for very despair,
it seems impossible to go on, then he begins to know that he needs more
than himself; that there is none good but God; that, if he can gain no
help from the perfect source of his being, that being ought not to have
been given him; and that, if he does not cry for help to the father
of his spirit, the more pleasant existence is, the less he deserves it
should continue. Richard was beginning to feel in his deepest nature,
where alone it can be felt, his need of God, not merely to comfort him
in his sorrows, and so render life possible and worth living, but to
make him such that he could bear to regard himself; to make him such
that he could righteously consent to be. The only thing that can
reassure a man in respect of the mere fact of his existence, is to know
himself started on the way to grow better, with the hope of help from
the source of his being: how should he by himself better that which he
was powerless to create? All betterment must be radical: of the roots of
his being he knows nothing. His existence is God's; his betterment must
be God's too!--God's through honest exercise by man of that which is
highest in man--his own will, God's best handiwork. By actively willing
the will of God, and doing what of it lies to his doing, the man takes
the share offered him in his own making, in his own becoming. In willing
actively and operatively to be that which he was made in order to be, he
becomes creative--so far as a man may. In this kind also he becomes like
his Father in heaven.
If a reader say Richard was too young to think thus, it only proves that
_he_ could not think so at Richard's age, and goes for little. I may be
interpreting, and rendering more definite the thoughts and feelings
that passed through him: it does not follow that I misrepresent. Many
thoughts must be made more definite in expression, else they could not
be expressed at all; many feelings are as hazy as real, and some of them
must be left to music.
He grew in graciousness and in favour with God and his mother. Often
did she meditate whether the hour was not come for the telling of her
secret, but now one thing, now another deterred her. One time she feared
the excitement in the present state of his health; another, she judged
it unfair to the husband who had behaved with such generosity, to yield
him no part in the pleasure of the communication.
Once, to comfort him when he seemed depressed, she ventured to say--
“Would you like better to go to Oxford or to Cambridge, Richard?”
He looked up with a smile.
“What makes you ask that, mammy?” he rejoined.
“Perhaps it could be managed!” she answered--leaving him to suppose his
father might send him.
“Is it because you think I shall never be able to work again?--Look at
that!” he returned, extending an arm on which the muscle had begun to
put in an appearance.
“It's not for your strength,” she answered. “For that, you could do well
enough! But think of the dust! It's so irritating to the lungs! And then
there's the stooping all day long!”
“Never mind, mother; I'm quite able for it, dust and all--or at least
shall soon be. We mustn't be anxious about others any more than about
ourselves. Doesn't the God you believe in tell you so?”
“Don't you believe in him then, Richard?” said his mother sadly.
“I think I do--a little--in a sort of a way--believe in God--but I hope
to believe in him ten thousand times more!”
His mother gave a sigh.
“What more would you have, mother dear?” said Richard. “A man cannot be
a saint all at once!”
“No, indeed, nor a woman either!” she answered. “I've been a believer
all these years, and I'm no nearer a saint than ever.”
“But you're trying to be one, ain't you, mammy?”
She made him no reply, and presently reverted to their former
topic--perhaps took refuge in it.
“I think it might be managed--some day!” she said. “You could go on
with your trade after, if you liked. Why shouldn't a college-man be a
tradesman? Why shouldn't a tradesman know as much as a gentleman?”
“Why, indeed, mother! If I thought it wouldn't be too much for father
and you, there are not many things I should like better than going to
Oxford. You are good to me like God himself!”
“Richard!” said his mother, shocked. She thought she served God by going
to church, not by being like him in every word and look of love she gave
her boy.
The mere idea of going to college, and thus taking a step nearer to
Barbara, began immediately to better his health. It gave him many a
happy thought, many a cottage and castle in the air, with more of a
foundation than he knew. But his mother did not revert to it; and one
day suddenly the thought came to Richard that perhaps she meant to apply
to sir Wilton for the means of sending him. Castle and cottage fell in
silent ruin. His soul recoiled from the idea with loathing--as much for
his mother's sake as his own. Having married his reputed father, she
must have no more relation, for good any more than for bad, with sir
Wilton--least of all for his sake! To her he was dead; and ought to be
as dead as disregard could make him! So, at least, thought Richard. He
was sorry he had confessed he should like to go to Oxford. If his mother
again alluded to the thing, he would tell her he had changed his mind,
and would not interrupt the exercise of his profession as surgeon to old
books.