THE LAWN.
Leopold had begun to cough, and the fever continued. Every afternoon
came the red flush to his cheek, and the hard glitter into his eye.
His talk was then excited, and mostly about his coming trial. To
Helen it was terribly painful, and she confessed to herself that but
for Wingfold she must have given way. Leopold insisted on seeing Mr.
Hooker every time he called, and every time expressed the hope that
he would not allow pity for his weak state to prevent him from
applying the severe remedy of the law to his moral condition. But in
truth it began to look doubtful whether disease would not run a race
with law for his life, even if the latter should at once proceed to
justify a claim. From the first Faber doubted if he would ever
recover from the consequences of that exposure in the churchyard,
and it soon became evident that his lungs were more than affected.
His cough increased, and he began to lose what little flesh he had.
One day Faber expressed his conviction to Wingfold that he was
fighting the disease at the great disadvantage of having an unknown
enemy to contend with.
"The fellow is unhappy," he said, "and if that lasts another month,
I shall throw up the sponge. He has a good deal of vitality, but it
is yielding, and by that time he will be in a galloping
consumption."
"You must do your best for him," said Wingfold, but in his heart he
wished, with an honest affection, that he might not succeed.
Leopold, however, seemed to have no idea of his condition, and the
curate wondered what he would think or do were he to learn that he
was dying. Would he insist on completing his confession, and urging
on a trial? He had himself told him all that had passed with the
magistrate, and how things now were as he understood them, but it
was plain that he had begun to be uneasy about the affair, and was
doubtful at times whether all was as it seemed. The curate was not
deceived. He had been present during a visit from Mr. Hooker, and
nothing could be plainer than the impression out of which the good
man spoke. Nor could he fail to suspect the cunning kindness of
George Bascombe in the affair. But he did not judge that he had now
the least call to interfere. The poor boy had done as much as lay
either in or out of him in the direction of duty, and was daily
becoming more and more unfit either to originate or carry out a
further course of action. If he was in himself capable of anything
more, he was, in his present state of weakness, utterly unable to
cope with the will of those around him.
Faber would have had him leave the country for some southern
climate, but he would not hear of it, and Helen, knowing to what
extremities it might drive him, would not insist. Nor, indeed, was
he now in a condition to be moved. Also the weather had grown
colder, and he was sensitive to atmospheric changes as any creature
of the elements.
But after a fortnight, when it was now the middle of the autumn, it
grew quite warm again, and he revived and made such progress that he
was able to be carried into the garden every day. There he sat in a
chair on the lawn, with his feet on a sheepskin, and a fur cloak
about him. And for all the pain at his heart, for all the misery in
which no one could share, for all the pangs of a helpless jealousy,
checked only by a gnawing remorse, both of which took refuge in the
thought of following through the spheres until he found her, cast
himself at her feet, spoke the truth, and became, if he might, her
slave for ever, failing which he could but turn and go wandering
through the spheres, seeking rest and finding none, save indeed
there were some salvation even for him in the bosom of his God--I
say that, somehow, with all this on the brain and in the heart of
him, the sunshine was yet pleasant to his eyes, while it stung him
to the soul; the soft breathing of the wind was pleasant to his
cheek, while he cursed himself for the pleasure it gave him; the few
flowers that were left looked up at him mournfully and he let them
look, nor turned his eyes away, but let the tears gather and flow.
The first agonies of the encounter of life and death were over, and
life was slowly wasting away. Oh what might not a little joy do for
him! But where was the joy to be found that could irradiate such a
darkness even for one fair memorial moment?
One hot noon Wingfold lay beside him on the grass. Neither had
spoken for some time: the curate more and more shrunk from speech to
which his heart was not directly moved. As to what might be in
season or out of season, he never would pretend to judge, he said,
but even Balaam's ass knew when he had a call to speak. He plucked a
pale red pimpernel and handed it up over his head to Leopold. The
youth looked at it for a moment, and burst into tears. The curate
rose hastily.
"It is so heartless of me." said Leopold, "to take pleasure in such
a childish innocence as this!"
"It merely shows," said the curate, laying his hand gently on his
shoulder, "that even in these lowly lovelinesses, there is a
something that has its root deeper than your pain; that, all about
us, in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a
power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in a daisy, now in a
windwaft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and
sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us; that the
same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not
yet the flowers, also is all about us--inside, the Spirit; outside,
the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us; and when they
meet, then the sign without, and the longing within, become one in
light, and the man no more walketh in darkness, but knoweth whither
he goeth."
As he ended thus, the curate bent over and looked at Leopold. But
the poor boy had not listened to a word he said. Something in his
tone had soothed him, but the moment he ceased, the vein of his
grief burst out bleeding afresh. He clasped his thin hands together,
and looked up in an agony of hopeless appeal to the blue sky, now
grown paler as in fear of the coming cold, though still the air was
warm and sweet, and cried,
"Oh! if God would only be good and unmake me, and let darkness cover
the place where once was me! That would be like a good God! All I
should be sorry for then would be, that there was not enough of me
left for a dim flitting Will-o'-the-wisp of praise, ever singing my
thankfulness to him that I was no more.--Yet even then my deed would
remain, for I dare not ask that she should die outright also--that
would be to heap wrong upon wrong. What an awful thing being is! Not
even my annihilation could make up for my crime, or rid it out of
the universe."
"True, Leopold!" said the curate. "Nothing but the burning love of
God can rid sin out of anywhere. But are you not forgetting him who
surely knew what he undertook when he would save the world? No more
than you could have set that sun flaming overhead, with its
million-miled billows and its limitless tempests of fire, can you
tell what the love of God is, or what it can do for you, if only by
enlarging your love with the inrush of itself. Few have such a cry
to raise to the Father as you, such a claim of sin and helplessness
to heave up before him, such a joy even to offer to the great
Shepherd who cannot rest while one sheep strays from his flock, one
prodigal haunts the dens of evil and waste. Cry to him, Leopold, my
dear boy. Cry to him again and yet again, for he himself said that
men ought always to pray and not faint, for God did hear and would
answer although he might seem long about it. I think we shall find
one day that nobody, not the poet of widest sweep and most daring
imagination, not the prophet who soars the highest in his ardour to
justify the ways of God to men, not the child when he is most fully
possessed of the angel that in heaven always beholds the face of the
Father of Jesus, has come or could have come within sight of the
majesty of his bestowing upon his children. For did he not, if the
story be true, allow torture itself to invade the very soul's
citadel of his best beloved, as he went to seek the poor ape of a
prodigal, stupidly grinning amongst his harlots?"
Leopold did not answer, and the shadow lay deep on his face for a
while; but at length it began to thin, and at last a feeble
quivering smile broke through the cloud, and he wept soft tears of
refreshing.
It was not that the youth had turned again from the hope of rest in
the Son of Man; but that, as everyone knows who knows anything of
the human spirit, there must be in its history days and seasons,
mornings and nights, yea deepest midnights. It has its alternating
summer and winter, its storm and shine, its soft dews and its
tempests of lashing hail, its cold moons and prophetic stars, its
pale twilights of saddest memory, and its golden gleams of brightest
hope. All these mingled and displaced each other in Leopold's ruined
world, where chaos had come again, but over whose waters a mightier
breath was now moving.
And now after much thought, the curate saw that he could not hope to
transplant into the bosom of the lad the flowers of truth that
gladdened his own garden: he must sow the seed from which they had
sprung, and that seed was the knowledge of the true Jesus. It was
now the more possible to help him in this way, that the wild beast
of his despair had taken its claws from his bosom, had withdrawn a
pace or two, and couched watching. And Wingfold soon found that
nothing calmed and brightened him like talk about Jesus. He had
tried verse first--seeking out the best within his reach wherein
loving souls have uttered their devotion to the man of men; but here
also the flowers would not be transplanted. How it came about he
hardly knew, but he had soon drifted into rather than chosen another
way, which way proved a right one: he would begin thinking aloud on
some part of the gospel story, generally that which was most in his
mind at the time--talking with himself, as it were, all about it. He
began this one morning as he lay on the grass beside him, and that
was the position in which he found he could best thus soliloquize.
Now and then but not often Leopold would interrupt him, and perhaps
turn the monologue into dialogue, but even then Wingfold would
hardly ever look at him: he would not disturb him with more of his
presence than he could help, or allow the truth to be flavoured with
more of his individuality than was unavoidable. For every
individuality, he argued, has a peculiar flavour to every other, and
only Jesus is the pure simple humanity that every one can love, out
and out, at once. In these mental meanderings, he avoided nothing,
took notice of every difficulty, whether able to discuss it fully or
not, broke out in words of delight when his spirit was moved, nor
hid his disappointment when he failed in getting at what might seem
good enough to be the heart of the thing. It was like hatching a
sermon in the sun instead of in the oven. Occasionally, when, having
ceased, he looked up to know how his pupil fared, he found him fast
asleep--sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a tear on his face.
The sight would satisfy him well. Calm upon such a tormented sea
must be the gift of God; and the curate would then sometimes fall
asleep himself--to start awake at the first far-off sound of Helen's
dress as it swept a running fire of fairy fog-signals from the half-
opened buds of the daisies, and the long heads of the rib-grass,
when he would rise and saunter a few paces aside, and she would bend
over her brother, to see if he were warm and comfortable. By this
time all the old tenderness of her ministration had returned, nor
did she seem any longer jealous of Wingfold's.
One day she came behind them as they talked. The grass had been mown
that morning, and also she happened to be dressed in her riding-
habit and had gathered up the skirt over her arm, so that on this
occasion she made no sound of sweet approach. Wingfold had been
uttering one of his rambling monologues--in which was much without
form, but nothing void.
"I don't know quite," he had been saying, "what to think about that
story of the woman they brought to Jesus in the temple--I mean how
it got into that nook of the gospel of St. John, where it has no
right place.--They didn't bring her for healing or for the rebuke of
her demon, but for condemnation, only they came to the wrong man for
that. They dared not carry out the law of stoning, as they would
have liked, I suppose, even if Jesus had condemned her, but perhaps
they hoped rather to entrap him who was the friend of sinners into
saying something against the law.--But what I want is, to know how
it got there,--just there, I mean, betwixt the seventh and eighth
chapters of St. John's Gospel. There is no doubt of its being an
interpolation--that the twelfth verse, I think it is, ought to join
on to the fifty-second. The Alexandrian manuscript is the only one
of the three oldest that has it, and it is the latest of the three.
I did think once, but hastily, that it was our Lord's text for
saying I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, but it follows quite as well on
his offer of living water. One can easily see how the place would
appear a very suitable one to any presumptuous scribe who wished to
settle the question of where it should stand.--I wonder if St. John
told the lovely tale as something he had forgotten, after he had
finished dictating all the rest. Or was it well known to all the
evangelists, only no one of them was yet partaker enough of the
spirit of him who was the friend of sinners, to dare put it on
written record, thinking it hardly a safe story to expose to the
quarrying of men's conclusions? But it doesn't matter much: the tale
must be a true one. Only--to think of just this one story, of
tenderest righteousness, floating about like a holy waif through the
world of letters!--a sweet gray dove of promise that can find no
rest for the sole of his foot! Just this one story of all stories a
kind of outcast! and yet as a wanderer, oh, how welcome! Some
manuscripts, I understand, have granted it a sort of outhouse-shelter
at the end of the gospel of St. Luke. But it all matters nothing, so
long as we can believe it; and true it must be, it is so like him
all through. And if it does go wandering as a stray through the
gospels, without place of its own, what matters it so long as it
can find hearts enough to nestle in, and bring forth its young of
comfort!--Perhaps the woman herself told it, and, as with the woman
of Samaria, some would and some would not believe her.--Oh! the eyes
that met upon her! The fiery hail of scorn from those of the Pharisees--the
light of eternal sunshine from those of Jesus!--I was reading the
other day, in one of the old Miracle Plays, how each that looked on
while Jesus wrote with his finger on the ground, imagined he was
writing down his individual sins, and was in terror lest his neighbour
should come to know them.--And wasn't he gentle even with those to
whom he was sharper than a two-edged sword! and oh how gentle to her
he would cover from their rudeness and wrong! LET THE SINLESS THROW!
And the sinners went out, and she followed--to sin no more. No reproaches,
you see! No stirring up of the fiery snakes! Only don't do it again.--I
don't think she did it again:--do you?"
It was just here that Helen came and stood behind Leopold's chair.
The curate lay on the grass, and neither saw her.