STRUGGLES.
He stopped at the Manor House, for it was only beginning to be late,
to inquire after Leopold. Helen received him with her usual
coldness--a manner which was in part assumed for self-protection,
for in his presence she always felt rebuked, and which had the
effect of a veil between them to hide from her much of the curate's
character that might otherwise have been intelligible to her.
Leopold, she said, was a little better, but Wingfold walked home
thinking what a happy thing it would be if God were to take him
away.
His interest in Helen deepened and deepened. He could not help
admiring her strength of character even when he saw it spent for
worse than nought; and her devotion to her brother was lovely,
notwithstanding the stains of selfishness that spotted it. Her moral
standard was indeed far from lofty, and as to her spiritual nature,
that as yet appeared nowhere. And yet the growth in her was
marvellous when he thought of what she had seemed before this
trouble came. One evening as he left Leopold, he heard her singing,
and stood on the stair to listen. And to listen was to marvel. For
her voice, instead of being hard and dry, as when he heard it
before, was, without any loss of elasticity, now liquid and
mellifluous, and full of feeling. Its tones were borne along like
the leaves on the wild west wind of Shelley's sonnet. And the
longing of the curate to help her from that moment took a fresh
departure, and grew and grew. But as the hours and days and weeks
passed, and the longing found no outlet, it turned to an almost
hopeless brooding upon the face and the form, yea the heart and soul
of the woman he so fain would help, until ere long he loved her with
the passion of a man mingled with the compassion of a prophet. He
saw that something had to be done IN her--perhaps that some saving
shock in the guise of ruin had to visit her; that some door had to
be burst open, some roof blown away, some rock blasted, that light
and air might have free course through her soul's house, without
which that soul could never grow stately like the house it
inhabited. Whatever might be destined to effect this, for the chance
of rendering poorest and most servile aid, he would watch and did
watch, in silence and self-restraint, lest he should be betrayed
into any presumptuous word that might breathe frost instead of balm
upon the buds of her delaying Spring. If he might but be allowed to
minister when at length the sleeping soul should stir! If its waking
glance--ah! if it might fall on him! As often as the thought
intruded, his heart would give one delirious bound, then couch
ashamed of its presumption. He would not, he dared not look in that
direction. He accused himself of mingling earthly motives and
feelings with the unselfish and true, and scorned himself because of
it. And was not Bascombe already the favoured friend of her heart?
Yet how could it be of her heart? for what concern had hearts in a
common unbelief? None; but there were the hearts--the man and the
woman--notwithstanding, who might yet well be drawn together by the
unknown divine which they also shared; and that Helen, whose foot
seemed now to approach and now to shun the line betwixt the kingdom
of this world and the kingdom of heaven, should retire with such a
guide into the deserts of denial and chosen godlessness, was to
Wingfold a thought of torture almost unendurable. The thought of its
possibility, nay, probability--for were not such unfitnesses
continually becoming facts?--threatened sometimes to upset the
whole fabric of his faith, although reared in spite of theology,
adverse philosophy, and the most honest and bewildering doubt. That
such a thing should be possible seemed at those times to bear more
against the existence of a God than all the other grounds of
question together. Then a shudder would go to the very deeps of his
heart, and he would lay himself silent before the presence for a
time; or make haste into the solitudes--not where the sun shone and
the water ran, but where the light was dim and the wind low in the
pine woods. There, where the sombre green vaults were upheld by a
hundred slender columns, and the far-receding aisles seemed to lead
to the ancestral home of shadows, there, his own soul a shadow of
grief and fear among the shades of the gloomy temple, he bowed his
heart before the Eternal, gathered together all the might of his
being, and groaned forth in deepest effort of a will that struggled
to be: "Thy will be done, and not mine." Then would his spirit again
walk erect, and carry its burden as a cross and not as a gravestone.
Sometimes he was sorely perplexed to think how the weakness, as he
called it, had begun, and how it had grown upon him. He could not
say it was his doing, and what had he ever been aware of in it
against which he ought to have striven? Came not the whole thing of
his nature, a nature that was not of his design, and was beyond him
and his control--a nature that either sprung from a God, or grew out
of an unconscious Fate? If from the latter, how was such as he to
encounter and reduce to a constrained and self-rejecting reason a
Self unreasonable, being an issue of the Unreasoning, which Self was
yet greater than he, its vagaries the source of his intensest
consciousness and brightest glimpses of the ideal and all-desirable.
If on the other hand it was born of a God, then let that God look to
it, for, sure, that which belonged to his nature could not be evil
or of small account in the eyes of him who made him in his own
image. But alas! that image had, no matter how, been so defaced,
that the will of the man might even now be setting itself up against
the will of the God! Did his love then spring from the God-will or
the man-will? Must there not be some God-way of the thing, all
right and nothing wrong?--But he could not compass it, and the
marvel to himself was that all the time he was able to go on
preaching, and that with some sense of honesty and joy in his work.
In this trouble more than ever Wingfold felt that if there was no
God, his soul was but a thing of rags and patches out in the
masterless pitiless storm and hail of a chaotic universe. Often
would he rush into the dark, as it were, crying for God, and ever he
would emerge therefrom with some tincture of the light, enough to
keep him alive and send him to his work. And there, in her own seat,
Sunday after Sunday, sat the woman whom he had seen ten times, and
that for no hasty moments, during the week, by the bedside of her
brother, yet to whom only now, in the open secrecy of the pulpit,
did he dare utter the words of might he would so fain have poured
direct into her suffering heart. And there, Sunday after Sunday, the
face he loved bore witness to the trouble of the heart he loved yet
more: that heart was not yet redeemed! oh, might it be granted him
to set some little wind a blowing for its revival and hope! As often
as he stood up to preach, his heart swelled with the message he
bore--a message of no private interpretation, but for the healing of
the nations, yet a message for her, and for the healing of every
individual heart that would hear and take, and he spoke with the
freedom and dignity of a prophet. But when he saw her afterwards, he
scarcely dared let his eyes rest a moment on her face, would only
pluck the flower of a glance flying, or steal it at such moments
when he thought she would not see. She caught his glance however far
oftener than he knew, and was sometimes aware of it without seeing
it at all. And there was that in the curate's behaviour, in his
absolute avoidance of self-assertion, or the least possible
intrusion upon her mental privacy--in the wrapping of his garments
around him as it were, that his presence might offend as little as
might be, while at the same time he was full of simple direct
ministration to her brother, without one side-glance that sought
approval of her, which the nobility of the woman could not fail to
note, and seek to understand.
It was altogether a time of great struggle with Wingfold. He seemed
to be assailed in every direction, and to feel the strong house of
life giving way in every part, and yet he held on--lived, which he
thought was all, and, without knowing it, grew. Perhaps it may be
this period that the following verses which I found among his papers
belong: he could not himself tell me.--
Out of my door I run to do the thing
That calls upon me. Straight the wind of words
Whoops from mine ears the sounds of them that sing
About their work--My God! my Father-King.
I turn in haste to see thy blessed door,
But lo! a cloud of flies and bats and birds,
And stalking vapours, and vague monster herds,
Have risen and lighted, rushed and swollen between.
Ah me! the house of peace is there no more.
Was it a dream then? Walls, fireside, and floor,
And sweet obedience, loving, calm, and free,
Are vanished--gone as they had never been.
I labour groaning. Comes a sudden sheen!--
And I am kneeling at my Father's knee,
Sighing with joy, and hoping utterly.