Thomas Wingfold, Curate V1
by
George MacDonald

Part 2 out of 3



the reflex of himself in Bascombe's brain; but nothing more whatever
could he recall.

Like finger-posts dim seen, on a moorland journey, through the
gathering fogs, Sunday after Sunday passed. I will not request my
reader to accompany me across the confusions upon which was blowing
that wind whose breath was causing a world to pass from chaos to
cosmos. One who has ever gone through any experience of the kind
himself, will be able to imagine it; to one who has not, my
descriptions would be of small service: he would but shrink from the
representation as diseased and of no general interest. And he would
be so far right, that the interest in such things must be most
particular and individual, or none at all.

The weeks passed and seemed to bring him no light, only increased
earnestness in the search after it. Some assurance he must find
soon, else he would resign his curacy, and look out for a situation
as tutor.

Of course all this he ought to have gone through long ago! But how
can a man go through anything till his hour be come? Saul of Tarsus
was sitting at the feet of Gamaliel when our Lord said to his
apostles--"Yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will
think that he doeth God service." Wingfold had all this time been
skirting the wall of the kingdom of heaven without even knowing that
there was a wall there, not to say seeing a gate in it. The fault
lay with those who had brought him up to the church as to the
profession of medicine, or the bar, or the drapery business--as if
it lay on one level of choice with other human callings. Nor were
the honoured of the church who had taught him free from blame, who
never warned him to put his shoes from off his feet for the holiness
of the ground. But how were they to warn him, if they had sowed and
reaped and gathered into barns on that ground, and had never
discovered therein treasure more holy than libraries, incomes, and
the visits of royalty? As to visions of truth that make a man sigh
with joy, and enlarge his heart with more than human tenderness--how
many of those men had ever found such treasure in the fields of the
church? How many of them knew save by hearsay whether there be any
Holy Ghost! How then were they to warn other men from the dangers of
following in their footsteps and becoming such as they? Where, in a
general ignorance and community of fault, shall we begin to blame?
Wingfold had no time to accuse anyone after the first gush of
bitterness. He had to awake from the dead and cry for light, and was
soon in the bitter agony of the cataleptic struggle between life and
death.

He thought afterwards, when the time had passed, that surely in this
period of darkness he had been visited and upheld by a power whose
presence and even influence escaped his consciousness. He knew not
how else he could have got through it. Also he remembered that
strange helps had come to him; that the aspects of nature then
wonderfully softened towards him, that then first he began to feel
sympathy with her ways and shows, and to see in them all the working
of a diffused humanity. He remembered how once a hawthorn bud set
him weeping; and how once, as he went miserable to church, a child
looked up in his face and smiled, and how in the strength of that
smile he had walked boldly to the lectern.

He never knew how long he had been in the strange birth agony, in
which the soul is as it were at once the mother that bears and the
child that is born.






CHAPTER XIII.

A REPORT OF PROGRESS.





In the meantime George Bascombe came and went; every visit he showed
clearer notions as to what he was for, and what he was against;
every visit he found Helen more worthy and desirable than
theretofore, and flattered himself he made progress in the
conveyance of his opinions and judgments over into her mind. His
various accomplishments went far in aid of his design. There was
hardly anything Helen could do that George could not do as well, and
some he could do better, while there were many things George was at
home in which were sealed to her. The satisfaction of teaching such
a pupil he found great. When at length he began to make love to her,
Helen found it rather agreeable than otherwise; and, if there was a
little more MAKING in it than some women would have liked, Helen was
not sufficiently in love with him to detect its presence. Still the
pleasure of his preference was such that it opened her mind with a
favourable prejudice towards whatever in the shape of theory or
doctrine he would have her receive; and much that a more experienced
mind would have rejected because of its evident results in practice,
was by her accepted in the ignorance which confined her regard of
his propositions to their intellectual relations, and prevented her
from following them into their influences upon life, which would
have reflected light upon their character. For life in its real
sense was to her as yet little more definite and present than a
dream that waits for the coming night. Hence, when her cousin at
length ventured to attack even those doctrines which all women who
have received a Christian education would naturally be expected to
revere the most, she was able to listen to him unshocked. But she
little thought, or he either, that it was only in virtue of what
Christian teaching she had had that she was capable of appreciating
what was grand in his doctrine of living for posterity without a
hope of good result to self beyond the consciousness that future
generations of perishing men and women would be a little more
comfortable, and perhaps a little less faulty therefrom. She did not
reflect, either, that no one's theory concerning death is of much
weight in his youth while life FEELS interminable, or that the gift
of comfort during a life of so little value that the giver can part
with it without regret, is scarcely one to be looked upon as a
mighty benefaction.

"But truth is truth," George would have replied.

What you profess to teach them might be a fact, but could never be a
truth, I answer. And the veiy value which you falsely put upon facts
you have learned to attribute to them from the supposed existence of
something at the root of all facts--namely, TRUTHS, or eternal laws
of being. Still, if you believe that men will be happier from
learning your discovery that there is no God, preach it, and prosper
in proportion to its truth. No; that from my pen would be a
curse--no, preach it not, I say, until you have searched all spaces
of space, up and down, in greatness and smallness--where I grant
indeed, but you cannot know, that you will not find him--and all
regions of thought and feeling, all the unknown mental universe of
possible discovery--preach it not until you have searched that also,
I say, lest what you count a truth should prove to be no fact, and
there should after all be somewhere, somehow, a very, living God, a
Truth indeed, in whom is the universe. If you say, "But I am
convinced there is none," I answer--You may be convinced that there
is no God such as this or that in whom men imagine they believe, but
you cannot be convinced there is no God.

Meantime George did not forget the present of this life in its
future, continued particular about his cigars and his wine, ate his
dinners with what some would call a good conscience and I would call
a dull one, were I sure it was not a good digestion they really
meant, and kept reading hard and to purpose.

Matters as between the two made no rapid advance. George went on
loving Helen more than any other woman, and Helen went on liking
George next best to her brother Leopold. Whether it came of
prudence, of which George possessed not a little, of coldness of
temperament, or a pride that would first be sure of acceptance, I do
not know, but he made no formal offer yet of handing himself over to
Helen, and certainly Helen was in no haste to hear, more than he to
utter, the irrevocable.






CHAPTER XIV.

JEREMY TAYLOR.





One Tuesday morning, in the spring, the curate received by the local
post the following letter dated from The Park-Gate.

"Respected Sir,

"An obligation on my part which you have no doubt forgotten gives me
courage to address you on a matter which seems to me of no small
consequence concerning yourself. You do not know me, and the name at
the end of my letter will have for you not a single association. The
matter itself must be its own excuse.

"I sat in a free seat at the Abbey church last Sunday morning. I had
not listened long to the sermon ere I began to fancy I foresaw what
was coming, and in a few minutes more I seemed to recognise it as
one of Jeremy Taylor's. When I came home, I found that the best
portions of one of his sermons had, in the one you read, been
wrought up with other material.

"If, sir, I imagined you to be one of such as would willingly have
that regarded as their own which was better than they could produce,
and would with contentment receive any resulting congratulations, I
should feel that I was only doing you a wrong if I gave you a hint
which might aid you in avoiding detection; for the sooner the truth
concerning such a one was known, and the judgment of society brought
to bear upon it, the better for him, whether the result were
justification or the contrary. But I have read that in your
countenance and demeanour which convinces me that, however custom
and the presence of worldly elements in the community to which you
belong may have influenced your judgment, you require only to be set
thinking of a matter, to follow your conscience with regard to
whatever you may find involved in it. I have the honour to be,
respected sir,

"Your obedient servant and well-wisher,

"Joseph Polwarth."

Wingfold sat staring at the letter, slightly stunned. The feeling
which first grew recognizable in the chaos it had caused, was
vexation at having so committed himself; the next, annoyance with
his dead old uncle for having led him into such a scrape. There in
the good doctor's own handwriting lay the sermon, looking nowise
different from the rest! Had he forgotten his marks of quotation? Or
to that sermon did he always have a few words of extempore
introduction? For himself he was as ignorant of Jeremy Taylor as of
Zoroaster. It could not be that that was his uncle's mode of making
his sermons? Was it possible they could all be pieces of literary
mosaic? It was very annoying. If the fact came to be known, it would
certainly be said that he had attempted to pass off Jeremy Taylor's
for his own--as if he would have the impudence to make the attempt,
and with such a well-known writer! But what difference did it make
whether the writer was well or ill known? None, except as to the
relative probabilities of escape and discovery! And should the
accusation be brought against him, how was he to answer it? By
burdening the reputation of his departed uncle with the odium of the
fault? Was it worse in his uncle to use Jeremy Taylor than in
himself to use his uncle? Or would his remonstrants accept the
translocation of blame? Would the church-going or chapel-going
inhabitants of Glaston remain mute when it came to be discovered
that since his appointment he had not once preached a sermon of his
own? How was it that knowing all about it in the background of his
mind, he had never come to think of it before? It was true that,
admirer of his uncle as he was, he had never imagined himself
reaping any laurels from the credit of his sermons; it was equally
true however that he had not told a single person of the hidden
cistern whence he drew his large discourse. But what could it matter
to any man, so long as a good sermon was preached, where it came
from? He did not occupy the pulpit in virtue of his personality, but
of his office, and it was not a place for the display of
originality, but for dispensing the bread of life.--From the stores
of other people?--Yes, certainly--if other people's bread was
better, and no one the worse for his taking it. "For me, I have
none," he said to himself. Why then should that letter have made him
uncomfortable? What had he to be ashamed of? Why should he object to
being found out? What did he want to conceal? Did not everybody know
that very few clergymen really made their own sermons? Was it not
absurd, this mute agreement that, although all men knew to the
contrary, it must appear to be taken for granted that a man's
sermons were of his own mental production? Still more absurd as well
as cruel was the way in which they sacrificed to the known falsehood
by the contempt they poured upon any fellow the moment they were
able to say of productions which never could have been his, that
they were by this man or that man, or bought at this shop or that
shop in Great Queen Street or Booksellers' Row. After that he was an
enduring object for the pointed finger of a mild scorn. It was
nothing but the old Spartan game of--steal as you will and enjoy as
you can: you are nothing the worse; but woe to you if you are caught
in the act! There WAS something contemptible about the whole thing.
He was a greater humbug than he had believed himself, for upon this
humbug which he now found himself despising he had himself been
acting diligently! It dawned upon him that, while there was nothing
wrong in preaching his uncle's sermons, there was evil in yielding
to cast any veil, even the most transparent, over the fact that the
sermons were not his own.






CHAPTER XV

THE PARK GATE.





He had however one considerate, even friendly parishioner, it
seemed, whom it became him at least to thank for his openness. He
ceased to pace the room, sat down at his writing-table, and
acknowledged Mr. Polwarth's letter, expressing his obligation for
its contents, and saying that he would do himself the honour of
calling upon him that afternoon, in the hope of being allowed to say
for himself what little could be said, and of receiving counsel in
regard to the difficulty wherein he found himself. He sent the note
by his land-lady's boy, and as soon as he had finished his lunch,
which meant his dinner, for he could no longer afford to dull his
soul in its best time for reading and thinking, he set out to find
Park Gate, which he took for some row of dwellings in the suburbs.

Going in the direction pointed out, and finding he had left all the
houses behind him, he stopped at the gate of Osterfield Park to make
further inquiry. The door of the lodge was opened by one whom he
took, for the first half second, to be a child, but recognized the
next as the same young woman whose book he had picked up in the
fields a few months before. He had never seen her since, but her
deformity and her face together had made it easy to remember her.

"We have met before," he said, in answer to her courtesy and smile,
"and you must now do me a small favour if you can."

"I shall be most happy, sir. Please come in," she answered.

"I am sorry I cannot at this moment, as I have an engagement. Can
you tell me where Mr. Polwarth of the Park Gate lives?"

The girl's smile of sweetness changed to one of amusement as she
repeated, in a gentle voice through which ran a thread of suffering,

"Come in, sir, please. My uncle's name is Joseph Polwarth, and this
is the gate to Osterfield Park. People know it as the Park-gate."

The house was not one of those trim, modern park-lodges, all angles
and peaks, which one sees everywhere now-a-days, but a low cottage,
with a very thick, wig-like thatch, into which rose two astonished
eyebrows over the stare of two half-awake dormer-windows. On the
front of it were young leaves and old hips enough to show that in
summer it must be covered with roses.

Wingfold entered at once, and followed her through the kitchen, upon
which the door immediately opened, a bright place, with stone floor,
and shining things on the walls, to a neat little parlour, cozy and
rather dark, with a small window to the garden behind, and a smell
of last year's roses.

"My uncle will be here in a few minutes," she said, placing a chair
for him. "I would have had a fire here, but my uncle always talks
better amongst his books. He expected you, but my lord's steward
sent for him up to the new house."

He took the chair she offered him, and sat down to wait. He had not
much of the gift of making talk--a questionable accomplishment,
--and he never could approach his so-called inferiors but as his
equals, the fact being that in their presence he never felt any
difference. Notwithstanding his ignorance of the lore of
Christianity, Thomas Wingfold was, in regard to some things, gifted
with what I am tempted to call a divine stupidity. Many of the
distinctions and privileges after which men follow, and of the
annoyances and slights over which they fume, were to the curate
inappreciable: he did not and could not see them.

"So you are warders of the gate here, Miss Polwarth?" he said,
assuming that to be her name, and rightly, when the young woman, who
had for a moment left the room, returned.

"Yes," she answered, "we have kept it now for about eight years,
sir.--It is no hard task. But I fancy there will be a little more to
do when the house is finished."

"It is a long way for you to go to church."

"It would be, sir; but I do not go," she said.

"Your uncle does."

"Not very often, sir."

She left the door open and kept coming and going between the kitchen
and the parlour, busy about house affairs. Wingfold sat and watched
her as he had opportunity with growing interest.

She had the full-sized head that is so often set on a small body,
and it looked yet larger from the quantity of rich brown hair upon
it--hair which some ladies would have given their income to
possess. Clearly too it gave pleasure to its owner, for it was
becomingly as well as carefully and modestly dressed. Her face
seemed to Wingfold more interesting every fresh peep he had of it,
until at last he pronounced it to himself one of the sweetest he had
ever seen. Its prevailing expression was of placidity, and something
that was not contentment merely: I would term it satisfaction, were
I sure that my reader would call up the very antipode of
SELF-satisfaction. And yet there were lines of past and shadows of
present suffering upon it. The only sign however that her poor
crooked body was not at present totally forgotten, was a slight shy
undulation that now and then flickered along the lines of her
sensitive mouth, seeming to indicate a shadowy dim-defined thought,
or rather feeling, of apology, as if she would disarm prejudice by
an expression of sorrow that she could not help the pain and
annoyance her unsightliness must occasion. Every feature in her thin
face was good, and seemed, individually almost, to speak of a loving
spirit, yet he could see ground for suspecting that keen expressions
of a quick temper could be no strangers upon those delicately
modelled forms. Her hands and feet were both as to size and shape
those of a mere child.

He was still studying her like a book which a boy reads by stealth,
when with slow step her uncle entered the room.

Wingfold rose and held out his hand.

"You are welcome, sir," said Polwarth, modestly, with the strong
grasp of a small firm hand. "Will you walk upstairs with me, where
we shall be undisturbed? My niece has, I hope, already made my
apologies for not being at home to receive you.--Rachel, my child,
will you get us a cup of tea, and by the time it is ready we shall
have got through our business, I daresay."

The face of Wingfold's host and new friend in expression a good deal
resembled that of his niece, but bore traces of yet greater
suffering--bodily, and it might be mental as well. It did not look
quite old enough for the whiteness of the plentiful hair that
crowned it, and yet there was that in it which might account for the
whiteness.

His voice was a little dry and husky, streaked as it were with the
asthma whose sounds made that big disproportioned chest seem like
the cave of the east wind; but it had a tone of dignity and decision
in it, quite in harmony with both matter and style of his letter,
and before Wingfold had followed him to the top of the steep narrow
straight staircase, all sense of incongruity in him had vanished
from his mind.






CHAPTER XVI.

THE ATTIC.





The little man led the way into a tolerably large room, with
down-sloping ceiling on both sides, lighted by a small window in the
gable, near the fireplace, and a dormer window as well. The low
walls, up to the slope, were filled with books; books lay on the
table, on the bed, on chairs, and in corners everywhere.

"Aha!" said Wingfold, as he entered and cast his eyes around, "there
is no room for surprise that you should have found me out so easily,
Mr. Polwarth! Here you have a legion of detectives for such
rascals."

The little man turned, and for a moment looked at him with a
doubtful and somewhat pained expression, as if he had not been
prepared for such an entrance on a solemn question; but a moment's
reading of the curate's honest face, which by this time had a good
deal more print upon it than would have been found there six months
agone, sufficed; the cloud melted into a smile, and he said
cordially,

"It is very kind of you, sir, to take my presumption in such good
part. Pray sit down, sir. You will find that chair a comfortable
one."

"Presumption!" echoed Wingfold. "The presumption was all on my part,
and the kindness on yours. But you must first hear my explanation,
such as it is. It makes the matter hardly a jot the better, only a
man would not willingly look worse, or better either, than he is,
and besides, we must understand each other if we would be friends.
However unlikely it may seem to you, Mr. Polwarth, I really do share
the common weakness of wanting to be taken exactly for what I am,
neither more nor less."

"It is a noble weakness, and far enough from common, I am sorry to
think," returned Polwarth.

The curate then told the gate-keeper of his uncle's legacy, and his
own ignorance of Jeremy Taylor.

"But," he concluded, "since you set me about it, my judgment has
capsized itself, and it now seems to me worse to use my uncle's
sermons than to have used the bishop's, which anyone might discover
to be what they are."

"I see no harm in either," said Polwarth, "provided only it be above
board. I believe some clergymen think the only evil lies in
detection. I doubt if they ever escape it, and believe the amount of
successful deception in that kind to be very small indeed. Many in a
congregation can tell, by a kind of instinct, whether a man be
preaching his own sermons or not. But the worse evil appears to me
to lie in the tacit understanding that a sermon must SEEM to be a
man's own, although all in the congregation know, and the would-be
preacher knows that they know, that it is none of his."

"Then you mean, Mr. Polwarth, that I should solemnly acquaint my
congregation next Sunday with the fact that the sermon I am about to
read to them is one of many left me by my worthy uncle, Jonah
Driftwood, D.D., who, on his death-bed, expressed the hope that I
should support their teaching by my example, for, having gone over
them some ten or fifteen times in the course of his incumbency, and
bettered each every time until he could do no more for it, he did
not think, save by my example, I could carry further the enforcement
of the truths they contained:--shall I tell them all that?"

Polwarth laughed, but with a certain seriousness in his merriment,
which however took nothing from its genuineness, indeed seemed
rather to add thereto.

"It would hardly be needful to enter so fully into particulars," he
said. "It would be enough to let them know that you wished it
understood between them and you, that you did not profess to teach
them anything of yourself, but merely to bring to bear upon them the
teaching of others. It would raise complaints and objections,
doubtless; but for that you must be prepared if you would do
anything right."

Wingfold was silent, thoughtful, saying to himself--"How straight an
honest bow can shoot!--But this involves something awful. To stand
up in that pulpit and speak about myself! I who, even if I had any
opinions, could never see reason for presenting them to other
people! It's my office, is it--not me? Then I wish my Office would
write his own sermons. He can read the prayers well enough!"

All his life, a little heave of pent-up humour would now and then
shake his burden into a more comfortable position upon his bending
shoulders. He gave a forlorn laugh.

"But," resumed the small man, "have you never preached a sermon of
your own thinking--I don't mean of your own making--one that came
out of the commentaries, which are, I am told, the mines whither
some of our most noted preachers go to dig for their first
inspirations--but one that came out of your own heart--your delight
in something you had found out, or something you felt much?"

"No," answered Wingfold; "I have nothing, never had anything worth
giving to another; and it would seem to me very unreasonable to
subject a helpless congregation to the blundering attempts of such a
fellow to put into the forms of reasonable speech things he really
knows nothing about."

"You must know about some things which it might do them good to be
reminded of--even if they know them already," said Polwarth. "I
cannot imagine that a man who looks things in the face as you do,
the moment they confront you, has not lived at all, has never met
with anything in his history which has taught him something other
people need to be taught. I profess myself a believer in preaching,
and consider that in so far as the church of England has ceased to
be a preaching church--and I don't call nine-tenths of what goes by
the name of it PREACHING--she has forgotten a mighty part of her
high calling. Of course a man to whom no message has been personally
given, has no right to take the place of a prophet--and cannot, save
by more or less of simulation--but there is room for teachers as
well as prophets, and the more need of teachers that the prophets
are so few; and a man may right honestly be a clergyman who teaches
the people, though he may possess none of the gifts of prophecy."

"I do not now see well how you are leading me," said Wingfold,
considerably astonished at both the aptness and fluency with which a
man in his host's position was able to express himself. "Pray, what
do you mean by PROPHECY?"

"I mean what I take to be the sense in which St. Paul uses the
word--I mean the highest kind of preaching. But I will come to the
point practically: a man, I say, who does not feel in his soul that
he has something to tell his people, should straightway turn his
energy to the providing of such food for them as he finds feed
himself. In other words, if he has nothing new in his own treasure,
let him bring something old out of another man's. If his own soul is
unfed, he can hardly be expected to find food for other people, and
has no business in any pulpit, but ought to betake himself to some
other employment--whatever he may have been predestined to--I mean,
made fit for."

"Then do you intend that a man SHOULD make up his sermons from the
books he reads?"

"Yes, if he cannot do better. But then I would have him read--not
with his sermon in his eye, but with his people in his heart. Men in
business and professions have so little time for reading or
thinking--and idle people have still less--that their means of
grace, as the theologians say, are confined to discipline without
nourishment, whence their religion, if they have any, is often from
mere atrophy but a skeleton; and the office of preaching is, after
all, to wake them up lest their sleep turn to death; next, to make
them hungry, and lastly, to supply that hunger; and for all these
things, the pastor has to take thought. If he feed not the flock of
God, then is he an hireling and no shepherd."

At this moment, Rachel entered with a small tea-tray: she could
carry only little things, and a few at a time. She cast a glance of
almost loving solicitude at the young man who now sat before her
uncle with head bowed, and self-abasement on his honest countenance,
then a look almost of expostulation at her uncle, as if interceding
for a culprit, and begging the master not to be too hard upon him.
But the little man smiled--such a sweet smile of re-assurance, that
her face returned at once to its prevailing expression of content.
She cleared a place on the table, set down her tray, and went to
bring cups and saucers.






CHAPTER XVII.

POLWARTH'S PLAN.





"I think I understand you now," said Wingfold, after the little
pause occasioned by the young woman's entrance. "You would have a
man who cannot be original, deal honestly in second-hand goods. Or
perhaps rather, he should say to the congregation--'This is not
home-made bread I offer you, but something better. I got it from
this or that baker's shop. I have eaten of it myself, and it has
agreed well with me and done me good. If you chew it well, I don't
doubt you also will find it good.'--Is that something like what you
would have, Mr. Polwarth?"

"Precisely," answered the gate-keeper. "But," he added, after a
moment's delay, "I should be sorry if you stopped there."

"Stopped there!" echoed Wingfold. "The question is whether I can
begin there. You have no idea how ignorant I am--how little I have
read!"

"I have some idea of both, I fancy. I must have known considerably
less than you at your age, for I was never at a university."

"But perhaps even then you had more of the knowledge which, they
say, life only can give."

"I have it now at all events. But of that everyone has enough who
lives his life. Those who gain no experience are those who shirk the
king's highway, for fear of encountering the Duty seated by the
roadside."

"You ought to be a clergyman yourself, sir," said Wingfold, humbly.
"How is it that such as I----"

Here he checked himself, knowing something of how it was.

"I hope I ought to be just what I am, neither more nor less,"
replied Polwarth. "As to being a clergyman, Moses had a better idea
about such things, at least so far as concerns outsides, than you
seem to have, Mr. Wingfold. He would never have let a man who in
size and shape is a mere mockery of the human, stand up to minister
to the congregation. But if you will let me help you, I shall be
most grateful; for of late I have been oppressed with the thought
that I serve no one but myself and my niece. I am in mortal fear of
growing selfish under the weight of my privileges."

A fit of asthmatic coughing seized him, and grew in severity until
he seemed struggling for his life. It was at the worst when his
niece entered, but she showed no alarm, only concern, and did
nothing but go up to him and lay her hand on his back between his
shoulders till the fit was over. The instant the convulsion ceased,
its pain dissolved in a smile.

Wingfold uttered some lame expressions of regret that he should
suffer so much.

"It is really nothing to distress you, or me either, Mr. Wingfold,"
said the little man. "Shall we have a cup of tea, and then resume
our talk?"

"The fact, I find, Mr. Polwarth," said the curate, giving the result
of what had been passing through his mind, and too absorbed in that
to reply to the invitation, "is, that I must not, and indeed cannot
give you half-confidences. I will tell you all that troubles me, for
it is plain that you know something of which I am ignorant,
--something which, I have great hopes, will turn out to be the very
thing I need to know. May I speak? Will you let me talk about
myself?"

"I am entirely at your service, Mr. Wingfold," returned Polwarth,
and seeing the curate did not touch his tea, placed his own cup
again on the table.

The young woman got down like a child from the chair upon which she
had perched herself at the table, and with a kind look at Wingfold,
was about to leave the room.

"No, no, Miss Polwarth!" said the curate, rising; "I shall not be
able to go on if I feel that I have sent you away--and your tea
untouched too! What a selfish and ungrateful fellow I am! I did not
even observe that you had given me tea! But you would pardon me if
you knew what I have been going through. If you don't mind staying,
we can talk and drink our tea at the same time. I am very fond of
tea, when it is so good as I see yours is. I only fear I may have to
say some things that will shock you."

"I will stay till then," replied Rachel, with a smile, and climbed
again upon her chair. "I am not much afraid. My uncle says things
sometimes fit to make a Pharisee's hair stand on his head, but
somehow they make my heart burn inside me.--May I stop, uncle?--I
should like so much!"

"Certainly, my child, if Mr. Wingfold will not feel your presence a
restraint."

"Not in the least," said the curate.

Miss Polwarth helped them to bread and butter, and a brief silence
followed.

"I was brought up to the church," said Wingfold at length, playing
with his teaspoon, and looking down on the table. "It's an awful
shame such a thing should have been, but I don't find out that
anybody in particular was to blame for it. Things are all wrong that
way, in general, I doubt. I pass my examinations with decency,
distinguish myself in nothing, go before the bishop, am admitted a
deacon, after a year am ordained a priest, and after another year or
two of false preaching and of parish work, suddenly find myself
curate in charge of a grand old abbey church; but as to what the
whole thing means in practical relation with myself as a human
being, I am as ignorant as Simon Magus, without his excuse. Do not
mistake me. I think I could stand an examination on the doctrines of
the church, as contained in the articles, and prayer-book generally.
But for all they have done for me, I might as well have never heard
of them."

"Don't be quite sure of that, Mr. Wingfold. At least, they have
brought you to inquire if there be anything in them."

"Mr. Polwarth," returned Wingfold abruptly, "I cannot even prove
there is a God!"

"But the church of England exists for the sake of teaching
Christianity, not proving that there is a God."

"What is Christianity, then?"

"God in Christ, and Christ in man."

"What is the use of that if there be no God?"

"None whatever."

"Mr. Polwarth, can you prove there is a God?"

"No."

"Then if you don't believe there is a God--I don't know what is to
become of me," said the curate, in a tone of deep disappointment,
and rose to go.

"Mr. Wingfold," said the little man, with a smile and a deep breath
as of delight at the thought that was moving in him, "I know him in
my heart, and he is all in all to me. You did not ask whether I
believed in him, but whether I could prove that there was a God. As
well ask a fly, which has not yet crawled about the world, if he can
prove that it is round!"

"Pardon me, and have patience with me," said Wingfold, resuming his
seat. "I am a fool. But it is life or death to me."

"I would we were all such fools!--But please ask me no more
questions; or ask me as many as you will, but expect no answers just
yet. I want to know more of your mind first."

"Well, I will ask questions, but press for no answers.--If you
cannot prove there is a God, do you know for certain that such a one
as Jesus Christ ever lived? Can it be proved with positive
certainty? I say nothing of what they call the doctrines of
Christianity, or the authority of the church, or the sacraments, or
anything of that sort. Such questions are at present of no interest
to me. And yet the fact that they do not interest me, were enough to
prove me in as false and despicable a position as ever man found
himself occupying--as arrant a hypocrite and deceiver as any
god-personating priest in the Delphic temple.--I had rather a man
despised than excused me, Mr. Polwarth, for I am at issue with
myself, and love not my past."

"I shall do neither, Mr. Wingfold. Go on, if you please, sir. I am
more deeply interested than I can tell you."

"Some few months ago then, I met a young man who takes for granted
the opposite of all that I had up to that time taken for granted,
and which now I want to be able to prove. He spoke with contempt of
my profession. I could not defend my profession, and of course had
to despise myself. I began to think. I began to pray--if you will
excuse me for mentioning it. My whole past life appeared like the
figures that glide over the field of a camera obscura--not an
abiding fact in it all. A cloud gathered about me, and hangs about
me still. I call, but no voice answers me out of the darkness, and
at times I am in despair. I would, for the love and peace of
honesty, give up the profession, but I shrink from forsaking what I
may yet possibly find--though I fear, I fear--to be as true as I
wish to find it. Something, I know not what, holds me to it--some
dim vague affection, possibly mere prejudice, aided by a love for
music, and the other sweet sounds of our prayers and responses. Nor
would I willingly be supposed to deny what I dare not say--indeed
know not how to say I believe, not knowing what it is. I should
nevertheless have abandoned everything months ago, had I not felt
bound by my agreement to serve my rector for a year. You are the
only one of the congregation who has shown me any humanity, and I
beg of you to be my friend and help me. What shall I do? After the
avowal you have made, I may well ask you again, How am I to know
that there is a God?"

"It were a more pertinent question, sir," returned Polwarth,--"If
there be a God, how am I to find him?--And, as I hinted before,
there is another question--one you have already put--more pertinent
to your position as an English clergyman: Was there ever such a man
as Jesus Christ?--Those, I think, were your own words: what do you
mean by SUCH a man?"

"Such as he is represented in the New Testament."

"From that representation, what description would you give of him
now? What is that SUCH? What sort of person, supposing the story
true, would you take this Jesus, from that story, to have been?"

Wingfold thought for a while.

"I am a worse humbug than I fancied," he said. "I cannot tell what
he was. My thoughts of him are so vague and indistinct that it would
take me a long time to render myself able to answer your question."

"Perhaps longer still than you think, sir. It took me a very long
time.--"






CHAPTER XVIII.

JOSEPH POLWARTH.





"Shall I tell you," the gate-keeper went on, "something of my life,
in return of the confidence you have honoured me with?"

"Nothing could be more to my mind," answered Wingfold. "And I
trust," he added, "it is no unworthy curiosity that makes me anxious
to understand how you have come to know so much."

"Indeed it is not that I know much," said the little man. "On the
contrary I am the most ignorant person of my acquaintance. You would
be astonished to discover what I don't know. But the thing is that I
know what is worth knowing. Yet I get not a crumb more than my daily
bread by it--I mean the bread by which the inner man lives. The man
who gives himself to making money, will seldom fail of becoming a
rich man; and it would be hard if a man who gave himself to find
wherewithal to still the deepest cravings of his best self, should
not be able to find that bread of life. I tried to make a little
money by book-selling once: I failed--not to pay my debts, but to
make the money; I could not go into it heartily, or give it thought
enough, so it was all right I should not succeed; but what I did and
do make my object, does not disappoint me.

"My ancestors, as my name indicates, were of and in Cornwall, where
they held large property. Forgive the seeming boast--it is but fact,
and can reflect little enough on one like me. Scorn and pain mingled
with mighty hope is a grand prescription for weaning the heart from
the judgments and aspirations of this world. Later ancestors were,
not many generations ago, the proprietors of this very property of
Osterfield, which the uncle of the present Lord de Barre bought, and
to which I, their descendant, am gate-keeper. What with gambling,
drinking, and worse, they deserved to lose it. The results of their
lawlessness are ours: we are what and where you see us. With the
inherited poison, the Father gave the antidote. Rachel, my child, am
I not right when I say that you thank God with me for having THUS
visited the iniquities of the fathers upon the children?"

"I do, uncle; you know I do--from the bottom of my heart," replied
Rachel in a low tender voice.

A great solemnity came upon the spirit of Wingfold, and for a moment
he felt as if he sat wrapt in a cloud of sacred marvel, beyond and
around which lay a gulf of music too perfect to touch his sense. But
presently Polwarth resumed:

"My father was in appearance a remarkably fine man, tall and
stately. Of him I have little to say. If he did not do well, my
grandfather must be censured first. He had a sister very like Rachel
here. Poor Aunt Lottie! She was not so happy as my little one. My
brothers were all fine men like himself, yet they all died young
except my brother Robert. He too is dead now, thank God, and I trust
he is in peace. I had almost begun to fear with himself that he
would never die. And yet he was but fifty. He left me my Rachel with
her twenty pounds a year. I have thirty of my own, and this cottage
we have rent-free for attending to the gate. I shall tell you more
about my brother some day. There are none of the family left now but
myself and Rachel. God in his mercy is about to let it cease.

"I was sent to one of our smaller public schools--mainly, I believe,
because I was an eyesore to my handsome father. There I made, I
fancy, about as good a beginning as wretched health, and the
miseries of a sensitive nature, ever conscious of exposure, without
mother or home to hide its feebleness and deformity, would permit.
For then first I felt myself an outcast. I was the butt of all the
coarser-minded of my schoolfellows, and the kindness of some could
but partially make up for it. On the other hand, I had no haunting
and irritating sense of wrong, such as I believe not a few of my
fellows in deformity feel--no burning indignation, or fierce impulse
to retaliate on those who injured me, or on the society that scorned
me. The isolation that belonged to my condition wrought indeed to
the intensifying of my individuality, but that again intensified my
consciousness of need more than of wrong, until the passion
blossomed almost into assurance, and at length I sought even with
agony the aid to which my wretchedness seemed to have a right. My
longing was mainly for a refuge, for some corner into which I might
creep, where I should be concealed and so at rest. The sole triumph
I coveted over my persecutors was to know that they could not find
me--that I had a friend stronger than they. It is no wonder I should
not remember when I began to pray, and hope that God heard me. I
used to fancy to myself that I lay in his hand and peeped through
his fingers at my foes. That was at night, for my deformity brought
me one blessed comfort--that I had no bedfellow. This I felt at
first as both a sad deprivation and a painful rejection, but I
learned to pray the sooner for the loneliness, and the heartier from
the solitude which was as a chamber with closed door.

"I do not know what I might have taken to had I been made like other
people, or what plans my mother cherished for me. But it soon became
evident, as time passed and I grew no taller but more mis-shapen,
that to bring me up to a profession would be but to render my
deformity the more painful to myself. I spent, therefore, the first
three years after I left school at home, keeping out of my father's
way as much as possible, and cleaving fast to my mother. When she
died, she left her little property between me and my brother. He had
been brought up to my father's profession--that of an engineer. My
father could not touch the principal of this money, but neither,
while he lived, could we the interest. I hardly know how I lived for
the next three or four years--it must have been almost on charity, I
think. My father was never at home, and but for the old woman who
had been our only attendant all my life, I think very likely I
should have starved. I spent my time mostly in reading--whatever I
could lay my hands upon--and that not carelessly, but with such
reflection as I was capable of. One thing I may mention, as showing
how I was still carried in the same direction as before--that,
without any natural turn for handicraft, I constructed for myself a
secret place of carpenter's work in a corner of the garret, small
indeed, but big enough for a couch on which I could lie, and a table
as long as the couch. That was all the furniture. The walls were
lined from top to bottom with books, mostly gathered from those
lying about the house. Cunningly was the entrance to this nest
contrived: I doubt if anyone may have found it yet. If some
imaginative, dreamy boy has come upon it, what a find it must have
been to him! I could envy him the pleasure. There I always went to
say my prayers and read my bible. But sometimes The Arabian Nights,
or some other book of entrancing human invention, would come
between, and make me neglect both, and then I would feel bad and
forsaken;--for as yet I knew little of the heart to which I cried
for shelter and warmth and defence.

"Somewhere in this time at length, I began to feel dissatisfied,
even displeased with myself. At first the feeling was vague,
altogether undefined--a mere sense that I did not fit into things,
that I was not what I ought to be, what was somehow and by the
Authority required of me. This went on, began to gather roots rather
than send them out, grew towards something more definite. I began to
be aware that, heavy affliction as it was to be made so different
from my fellows, my outward deformity was but a picture of my inward
condition. There nothing was right. Many things which in theory I
condemned, and in others despised, were yet a part of myself, or, at
best, part of evil disease cleaving fast unto me. I found myself
envious and revengeful and conceited. I discovered that I looked
down on people whom I thought less clever than myself. Once I caught
myself scorning a young fellow to whose disadvantage I knew nothing,
except that God had made him handsome enough for a woman. All at
once one day, with a sickening conviction it came upon me--with one
of those sudden slackenings of the cord of self-consciousness, in
which it doubles back quivering, and seems to break, while the man
for an instant beholds his individuality apart from himself, is
generally frightened at it, and always disgusted--a strange and indeed
awful experience, which if it lasted longer than its allotted moment,
might well drive a man mad who had no God to whom to offer back his
individuality, in appeal against his double consciousness--it was in
one of these cataleptic fits of the spirit, I say, that I first saw
plainly what a contemptible little wretch I was, and writhed in the
bright agony of conscious worthlessness.

"I now concluded that I had been nothing but a pharisee and a
hypocrite, praying with a bad heart, and that God saw me just as
detestable as I saw myself, and despised me and was angry with me. I
read my bible more diligently than ever for a time, found in it
nothing but denunciation and wrath, and soon dropped it in despair.
I had already ceased to pray.

"One day a little boy mocked me. I flew into a rage, and, rendered
by passion for the moment fleet and strong, pursued and caught him.
Whatever may be a man's condition of defence against evil, I have
learnt that he cannot keep the good out of him. When the boy found
himself in my clutches, he turned on me a look of such terror that
it disarmed me at once, and, confounded and distressed to see a
human being in such abject fear, a state which in my own experience
I knew to be horrible, ashamed also that it should be before such a
one as myself, I would have let him go instantly, but that I could
not without first having comforted him. But not a word of mine could
get into his ears, and I saw at length that he was so PRE-possessed,
that every tone of kindness I uttered, sounded to him a threat:
nothing would do but let him go. The moment he found himself free,
he fled headlong into the pond, got out again, ran home, and told,
with perfect truthfulness I believe, though absolute inaccuracy,
that I threw him in. After this I tried to govern my temper, but
found that the more I tried, the more even that I succeeded
outwardly, that is, succeeded in suppressing the signs and deeds of
wrath, the less could I keep down the wrath in my soul. I then tried
never to think about myself at all, and read and read--not the
bible--more and more, in order to forget myself. But ever through
all my reading and thinking I was aware of the lack of harmony at
the heart of me: I was not that which it was well to be; I was not
at peace; I lacked; was distorted; I was sick. Such were my
feelings, not my reflections. All that time is as the memory of an
unlovely dream--a dream of confusion and pain.

"One evening, in the twilight, I lay alone in my little den, not
thinking, but with mind surrendered and passive to what might come
into it. It was very hot--indeed sultry. My little skylight was
open, but not a breath of air entered. What preceded I do not know,
but the face of the terrified boy rose before me, or in me rather,
and all at once I found myself eagerly, painfully, at length almost
in an agony, persuading him that I would not hurt him, but meant
well and friendlily towards him. Again I had just let him go in
despair, when the sweetest, gentlest, most refreshing little waft of
air came in at the window and just went BEING, hardly moving, over
my forehead. Its greeting was more delicate than even my mother's
kiss, and yet it cooled my whole body. Now whatever, or whencesoever
the link, if any be supposed needful to account for the fact, it
kept below in the secret places of the springs, for I saw it not;
but the next thought of which I was aware was--What if I
misunderstood God the same way the boy had misunderstood me! and the
next thing was to take my New Testament from the shelf on which I
had laid it aside.

"Another evening of that same summer, I said to myself that I would
begin at the beginning and read it through. I had no definite idea
in the resolve; it seemed a good thing to do, and I would do it. It
would serve towards keeping up my connection in a way with THINGS
ABOVE. I began, but did not that night get through the first chapter
of St. Matthew. Conscientiously I read every word of the genealogy,
but when I came to the twenty-third verse and read: 'Thou shalt call
his name Jesus; FOR HE SHALL SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS,' I
fell on my knees. No system of theology had come between me and a
common-sense reading of the book. I did not for a moment imagine
that to be saved from my sins meant to be saved from the punishment
of them. That would have been no glad tidings to me. My sinfulness
was ever before me, and often my sins too, and I loved them not, yet
could not free myself of them. They were in me and of me, and how
was I to part myself from that which came to me with my
consciousness, which asserted itself in me as one with my
consciousness? I could not get behind myself so as to reach its
root. But here was news of one who came from behind that root itself
to deliver me from that in me which made being a bad thing! Ah, Mr.
Wingfold! what if, after all the discoveries made, and all the
theories set up and pulled down, amid all the commonplaces men call
common sense, notwithstanding all the over-powering and excluding
self-assertion of things that are seen, ever crying, 'Here we are,
and save us there is nothing: the Unseen is the Unreal!'--what if, I
say, notwithstanding all this, it should yet be that the strongest
weapon a man can wield is prayer to one who made him! What if the
man who lifts up his heart to the unknown God even, be entering,
amid the mockery of men who worship what they call natural law and
science, into the region whence issues every law, and where the very
material of science is born!

"To tell you all that followed, if I could recall and narrate it in
order, would take hours. Suffice it that from that moment I was a
student, a disciple. Soon to me also came then the two questions:
HOW DO I KNOW THAT THERE IS A GOD AT ALL? and--HOW AM I TO KNOW THAT
SUCH A MAN AS JESUS EVERY LIVED? I could answer neither. But in the
meantime I was reading the story--was drawn to the man there
presented--and was trying to understand his being, and character,
and principles of life and action. And, to sum all in a word, many
months had not passed ere I had forgotten to seek an answer to
either question: they were in fact questions no longer: I had seen
the man Christ Jesus, and in him had known the Father of him and of
me. My dear sir, no conviction can be got, or if it could be got,
would be of any sufficing value, through that dealer in second-hand
goods, the intellect. If by it we could prove there is a God, it
would be of small avail indeed: we must see him and know him, to
know that he was not a demon. But I know no other way of knowing
that there is a God but that which reveals WHAT he is--the only idea
that could be God--shows him in his own self-proving existence--and
that way is Jesus Christ as he revealed himself on earth, and as he
is revealed afresh to every heart that seeks to know the truth
concerning him."

A pause followed, a solemn one, and then again Polwarth spoke:

"Either the whole frame of existence," he said, "is a wretched,
miserable unfitness, a chaos with dreams of a world, a chaos in
which the higher is for ever subject to the lower, or it is an
embodied idea growing towards perfection in him who is the one
perfect creative Idea, the Father of lights, who suffers himself
that he may bring his many sons into the glory which is his own
glory."






CHAPTER XIX.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.





"But," said Wingfold--"only pray do not think I am opposing you; I
am in the straits you have left so far behind: how am I to know that
I should not merely have wrought myself up to the believing of that
which I should like to be true?"

"Leave that question, my dear sir, until you know what that really
is which you want to believe. I do not imagine that you have more
than the merest glimmer of the nature of that concerning which you,
for the very reason that you know not what it is, most rationally
doubt. Is a man to refuse to withdraw his curtains lest some flash
in his own eyes should deceive him with a vision of morning while
yet it is night? The truth to the soul is as light to the eyes: you
may be deceived, and mistake something else for light, but you can
never fail to know the light when it really comes."

"What then would you have of me?--what am I to DO?" said Wingfold,
who, having found his master, was docile as a child, but had not
laid firm enough hold upon what he had last said.

"I repeat," said Polwarth, "that the community whose servant you are
was not founded to promulgate or defend the doctrine of the
existence of a Deity, but to perpetuate the assertion of a man that
he was the son and only revealer of the Father of men, a fact, if it
be a fact, which precludes the question of the existence of a God,
because it includes the answer to it. Your business, therefore, even
as one who finds himself in your unfortunate position as a
clergyman, is to make yourself acquainted with that man: he will be
to you nobody save in revealing, through knowledge of his inmost
heart, the Father to you. Take then your New Testament as if you had
never seen it before, and read--to find out. If in him you fail to
meet God, then go to your consciousness of the race, your
metaphysics, your Plato, your Spinosa. Till then, this point
remains: there was a man who said he knew him, and that if you would
give heed to him, you too should know him. The record left of him is
indeed scanty, yet enough to disclose what manner of man he was--his
principles, his ways of looking at things, his thoughts of his
Father and his brethren and the relations between them, of man's
business in life, his destiny, and his hopes."

"I see plainly," answered the curate, "that what you say, I must do.
But how, while on duty as a clergyman, I DO NOT KNOW. How am I, with
the sense of the unreality of my position ever growing upon me, and
my utter inability to supply the wants of the congregation, save
from my uncle's store of dry provender, which it takes me a great
part of my time so to modify as, in using it, to avoid direct
lying--with all this pressing upon me, and making me restless and
irritable and self-contemptuous, how AM I to set myself to such
solemn work, wherein a man must surely be clear-eyed and
single-hearted, if he would succeed in his quest?--I must resign my
curacy."

Mr. Polwarth thought a little.

"It would be well, I think, to retain it for a time at least while
you search," he said. "If you do not within a month see prospect of
finding him, then resign. In any case, your continuance in the
service must depend on your knowledge of the lord of it, and his
will concerning you."

"May not a prejudice in favour of my profession blind and deceive
me?"

"I think it will rather make YOU doubtful of conclusions that
support it."

"I will go and try," said Wingfold, rising; "but I fear I am not the
man to make discoveries in such high regions."

"You are the man to find what fits your own need if the thing be
there," said Polwarth. "But to ease your mind for the task: I know
pretty well some of our best English writers of the more practical
and poetic sort in theology--the two qualities go together--and if
you will do me the favour to come again to-morrow, I shall be able,
I trust, to provide you wherewithal to feed your flock, free of that
duplicity which, be it as common as the surplice, and as fully
connived as laughed at by that flock, is yet duplicity. There is no
law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an
eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word."

"I will not attempt to thank you," said Wingfold, "but I will do as
you tell me. You are the first real friend I have ever had--except
my brother, who is dead."

"Perhaps you have had more friends than you are aware of. You owe
something to the man, for instance, who, with his outspoken
antagonism, roused you first to a sense of what was lacking to you."

"I hope I shall be grateful to God for it some day," returned
Wingfold. "I cannot say that I feel much obligation to Mr. Bascombe.
And yet when I think of it,--perhaps--I don't know--what ought a man
to be more grateful for than honesty?"

After a word of arrangement for next day the curate took his leave,
assuredly with a stronger feeling of simple genuine respect than he
had ever yet felt for man. Rachel bade him good night with her fine
eyes filled with tears, which suited their expression, for they
always seemed to be looking through sorrow to something beyond it.

"If this be a type of the way the sins of the fathers are visited
upon the children," said the curate to himself, "there must be more
in the progression of history than political economy can explain. It
would drive us to believe in an economy wherein rather the
well-being of the whole was the result of individual treatment, and
not the well-being of the individual the result of the management of
the whole?"

I will not count the milestones along the road on which Wingfold now
began to journey. Some of the stages, however, will appear in the
course of my story. When he came to any stiff bit of collar-work,
the little man generally appeared with an extra horse. Every day
during the rest of that week he saw his new friends.






CHAPTER XX.

A STRANGE SERMON.





On the Sunday the curate walked across the churchyard to the morning
prayer very much as if the bells, instead of ringing the people to
church, had been tolling for his execution. But if he was going to
be hanged, he would at least die like a gentleman, confessing his
sin. Only he would it were bed-time, and all well. He trembled so
when he stood up to read that he could not tell whether or not he
was speaking in a voice audible to the congregation. But as his hour
drew near, the courage to meet it drew near also, and when at length
he ascended the pulpit stairs, he was able to cast a glance across
the sea of heads to learn whether the little man was in the poor
seats. But he looked for the big head in vain.

When he read his text, it was to a congregation as listless and
indifferent as it was wont to be. He had not gone far, however,
before that change of mental condition was visible in the faces
before him, which a troop of horses would have shown by a general
forward swivelling of the ears. Wonderful to tell, they were
actually listening. But in truth it was no wonder, for seldom in
any, and assuredly never in that church, had there been heard such
an exordium to a sermon.

His text was--"Confessing your faults one to another." Having read
it with a return of the former trembling, and paused, his brain
suddenly seemed for a moment to reel under a wave of extinction that
struck it, then to float away upon it, and then to dissolve in it,
as it interpenetrated its whole mass, annihilating thought and
utterance together. But with a mighty effort of the will, in which
he seemed to come as near as man could come to the willing of his
own existence, he recovered himself and went on. To do justice to
this effort, my reader must remember that he was a shy man, and that
he knew his congregation but too well for an unsympathetic
one--whether from their fault or his own mattered little for the
nonce. It had been hard enough to make up his mind to the attempt
when alone in his study, or rather, to tell the truth, in his
chamber, but to carry out his resolve in the face of so many faces,
and in spite of a cowardly brain, was an effort and a victory
indeed. Yet after all, upon second thoughts, I see that the true
resolve was the victory, sweeping shyness and every other opposing
weakness along with it. But it wanted courage of yet another sort to
make of his resolve a fact, and his courage, in that kind as well,
had never yet been put to the test or trained by trial. He had not
been a fighting boy at school; he had never had the chance of riding
to hounds; he had never been in a shipwreck, or a house on fire; had
never been waked from a sound sleep with a demand for his watch and
money; yet one who had passed creditably through all these trials,
might still have carried a doubting conscience to his grave rather
than face what Wingfold now confronted.

From the manuscript before him he read thus:

"'Confess your faults one to another.'--This command of the apostle,
my hearers, ought to justify me in doing what I fear some of you may
consider almost as a breach of morals--talking of myself in the
pulpit. But in the pulpit has a wrong been done, and in the pulpit
shall it be confessed. From Sunday to Sunday, standing on this spot,
I have read to you, without word of explanation, as if they formed
the message I had sought and found for you, the thoughts and words
of another. Doubtless they were better than any I could have given
you from my own mind or experience, and the act had been a righteous
one, had I told you the truth concerning them. But that truth I did
not tell you.--At last, through words of honest expostulation, the
voice of a friend whose wounds are faithful, I have been aroused to
a knowledge of the wrong I have been doing. Therefore I now confess
it. I am sorry. I will do so no more.

"But, brethren, I have only a little garden on a bare hill-side, and
it hath never yet borne me any fruit fit to offer for your
acceptance; also, my heart is troubled about many things, and God
hath humbled me. I beg of you, therefore, to bear with me for a
little while, if, doing what is but lawful and expedient both, I
break through the bonds of custom in order to provide you with food
convenient for you. Should I fail in this, I shall make room for a
better man. But for your bread of this day, I go gleaning openly in
other men's fields--fields into which I could not have found my
way, in time at least for your necessities, and where I could not
have gathered such full ears of wheat, barley, and oats but for the
more than assistance of the same friend who warned me of the wrong I
was doing both you and myself. Right ancient fields are some of
them, where yet the ears lie thick for the gleaner. To continue my
metaphor: I will lay each handful before you with the name of the
field where I gathered it; and together they will serve to show what
some of the wisest and best shepherds of the English flock have
believed concerning the duty of confessing our faults." He then
proceeded to read the extracts which Mr. Polwarth had helped him to
find--and arrange, not chronologically, but after an idea of growth.
Each handful, as he called it, he prefaced with one or two words
concerning him in whose field he had gleaned it.

His voice steadied and strengthened as he read. Renewed contact with
the minds of those vanished teachers gave him a delight which
infused itself into the uttered words, and made them also joyful;
and if the curate preached to no one else in the congregation,
certainly he preached to himself, and before it was done had entered
into a thorough enjoyment of the sermon.

A few in the congregation were disappointed because they had looked
for a justification and enforcement of the confessional, thinking
the change in the curate could only have come from that portion of
the ecclesiastical heavens towards which they themselves turned
their faces. A few others were scandalized at such an innovation on
the part of a young man who was only a curate. Many however declared
that it was the most interesting sermon they had ever heard in their
lives--which perhaps was not saying much.

Mrs. Ramshorn made a class by herself. Not having yet learned to
like Wingfold, and being herself one of the craft, with a knowledge
of not a few of the secrets of the clerical--prison-house, shall I
call it, or green-room?--she was indignant with the presumptuous
young man who degraded the pulpit to a level with the dock. Who
cared for him? What was it to a congregation of respectable people,
many of them belonging to the first county families, that he, a mere
curate, should have committed what he fancied a crime against them!
He should have waited until it had been laid to his charge. Couldn't
he repent of his sins, whatever they were, without making a boast of
them in the pulpit, and exposing them to the eyes of a whole
congregation? She had known people make a stock-in-trade of their
sins! What was it to them whether the washy stuff he gave them by
way of sermons was his own foolishness or some other noodle's!
Nobody would have troubled himself to inquire into his honesty, if
he had but held his foolish tongue. Better men than he had preached
other people's sermons and never thought it worth mentioning. And
what worse were the people? The only harm lay in letting them know
it; that brought the profession into disgrace, and prevented the
good the sermon would otherwise have done, besides giving the
enemies of the truth a handle against the church. And then such a
thing to call a sermon! As well take a string of blown eggs to
market! Thus she expatiated, half the way home, before either of her
companions found an opportunity of saying a word.

"I am sorry to differ from you, aunt," said Helen. "I thought the
sermon a very interesting one. He read beautifully."

"For my part," said Bascombe, who was now a regular visitor from
Saturdays to Mondays, "I used to think the fellow a muff, but, by
Jove! I've changed my mind. If ever there was a plucky thing to do,
that was one, and there ain't many men, let me tell you, aunt, who
would have the pluck for it.--It's my belief, Helen," he went on,
turning to her and speaking in a lower tone, "I've had the honour of
doing that fellow some good. I gave him my mind about honesty pretty
plainly the first time I saw him. And who can tell what may come
next when a fellow once starts in the right way! We shall have him
with us before long. I must look out for something for him, for of
course he'll be in a devil of a fix without his profession."

"I am so glad you think with me, George!" said Helen. "There was
always something I was inclined to like about Mr. Wingfold. Indeed I
should have liked him quite if he had not been so painfully modest."

"Notwithstanding his sheepishness, though," returned Bascombe,
"there was a sort of quiet self-satisfaction about him, and the way
he always said Don't you think? as if he were Socrates taking
advantage of Mr. Green and softly guiding him into a trap, which I
confess made me set him down as conceited; but, as I say, I begin to
change my mind. By Jove! he must have worked pretty hard too in the
dust-bins to get together all those bits of gay rag and resplendent
crockery!"

"You heard him say he had help," said Helen.

"No, I don't remember that."

"It came just after that pretty simile about gleaning in old
fields."

"I remember the simile, for I thought it a very absurd one--as if
fields would lie gleanable for generations!"

"To be sure--now you point it out!" acquiesced Helen.

"The grain would have sprouted and borne harvests a hundred. If a
man will use figures, he should be careful to give them legs. I
wonder whom he got to help him--not the rector, I suppose?"

"The rector!" echoed Mrs. Ramshorn, who had been listening to the
young people's remarks with a smile of quiet scorn on her lip,
thinking what an advantage was experience, even if it could not make
up for the loss of youth and beauty--"The last man in the world to
lend himself to such a miserable makeshift and pretence! Without
brains enough even to fancy himself able to write a sermon of his
own, he flies to the dead,--to their very coffins as it were--and I
will not say STEALS from them, for he does it openly, not having
even shame enough to conceal his shame!"

"I like a man to hold his face to what he does, or thinks either,"
said Bascombe.

"Ah, George!" returned his aunt, in tones of wisdom, "by the time
you have had my experience, you will have learned a little
prudence."

Meantime, so far as his aunt was concerned, George did use prudence,
for in her presence he did not hold his face to what he thought. He
said to himself it would do her no good. She was so prejudiced! and
it might interfere with his visits.--She, for her part, never had
the slightest doubt of his orthodoxy: was he not the son of a
clergyman and canon?--a grandson of the church herself?






CHAPTER XXI.

A THUNDERBOLT.





Sometimes a thunderbolt, as men call it, will shoot from a clear
sky; and sometimes into the midst of a peaceful family, or a yet
quieter individuality, without warning of gathered storm above, or
lightest tremble of earthquake beneath, will fall a terrible fact,
and from the moment everything is changed. That family or that life
is no more what it was--probably never more can be what it was.
Better it ought to be, worse it may be--which, depends upon itself.
But its spiritual weather is altered. The air is thick with cloud,
and cannot weep itself clear. There may come a gorgeous sunset
though.

It were a truism for one who believes in God to say that such
catastrophes, so rending, so frightful, never come but where they
are needed. The Power of Life is not content that they who live in
and by him should live poorly and contemptibly. If the presence of
low thoughts which he repudiates, yet makes a man miserable, how
must it be with him if they who live and move and have their being
in him are mean and repulsive, or alienated through self-sufficiency
and slowness of heart?

I cannot report much progress in Helen during the months of winter
and spring. But if one wakes at last, wakes at all, who shall dare
cast the stone at him--that he ought to have awaked sooner? What man
who is awake will dare to say that he roused himself the first
moment it became possible to him? The main and plain and worst,
perhaps only condemnation is--that when people do wake they do not
get up. At the same time, however, I can hardly doubt that Helen was
keeping the law of a progress slow as the growth of an iron-tree.

Nothing had ever yet troubled her. She had never been in love, could
hardly be said to be in love now. She went regularly to church, and
I believe said her prayers night and morning--yet felt no
indignation at the doctrines and theories propounded by George
Bascombe. She regarded them as "George's ideas," and never cared to
ask whether they were true or not, at the same time that they were
becoming to her by degrees as like truth as falsehood can ever be.
For to the untruthful mind the false CAN seem the true. Meantime she
was not even capable of giving him the credit he deserved, in that,
holding the opinions he held, he yet advocated a life spent for the
community--without, as I presume, deriving much inspiration thereto
from what he himself would represent as the ground of all
conscientious action, the consideration, namely, of its reaction
upon its originator. Still farther was it from entering the field of
her vision that possibly some of the good which distinguished
George's unbelief from that of his brother ephemera of the last
century, was owing to the deeper working of that leaven which he
denounced as the poisonous root whence sprung all the evil diseases
that gnawed at the heart of society.

One night she sat late, making her aunt a cap. The one sign of
originality in her was the character of her millinery, of which kind
of creation she was fond, displaying therein both invention as to
form, and perception as to effect, combined with lightness and
deftness of execution. She was desirous of completing it before the
next morning, which was that of her aunt's birthday. They had had
friends to dine with them who had stayed rather late, and it was now
getting towards one o'clock. But Helen was not easily tired, and was
not given to abandoning what she had undertaken; so she sat working
away, and thinking, not of George Bascombe, but of one whom she
loved better--far better--her brother Leopold. But she was thinking
of him not quite so comfortably as usual. Certain anxieties she had
ground for concerning him had grown stronger, for the time since she
heard from him had grown very long.

All at once her work ceased, her hands were arrested, her posture
grew rigid: she was listening. HAD she heard a noise outside her
window? My reader may remember that it opened on a balcony, which
was at the same time the roof of a veranda that went along the back
of the house, and had a stair at one end to the garden.

Helen was not easily frightened, and had stopped her needle only
that she might listen the better. She heard nothing. Of course it
was but a fancy! Her hands went on again with their work.--But that
was really very like a tap at the window! And now her heart did beat
a little faster, if not with fear, then with something very like it,
in which perhaps some foreboding was mingled. But she was not a
woman to lay down her arms upon the inroad of a vague terror. She
quietly rose, and, saying to herself it must be one of the pigeons
that haunted the balcony, laid her work on the table, and went to
the window. As she drew one of the curtains a little aside to peep,
the tap was plainly and hurriedly though softly repeated, and at
once she swept it back. There was the dim shadow of a man's head
upon the blind, cast there by an old withered moon low in the west!
Perhaps it was something in the shape of the shadow that made her
pull up the blind so hurriedly, and yet with something of the awe
with which we take "the face-cloth from the face." Yes, there was a
face!--frightful, not as that of a corpse, but as that of a spectre
from whose soul the scars of his mortal end have never passed away.
Helen did not scream--her throat seemed to close and her heart to
cease. But her eyes continued movelessly fixed on the face even
after she knew it was the face of her brother, and the eyes of the
face kept staring back into hers through the glass with such a look
of concentrated eagerness that they seemed no more organs of vision,
but caves of hunger, nor was there a movement of the lips towards
speech. The two gazed at each other for a moment of rigid silence.
The glass that separated them might have been the veil that divides
those who call themselves the living from those whom they call the
dead.

It was but a moment by the clock, though to the after-consciousness
it seemed space immeasurable. She came to herself, and slowly,
noiselessly, though with tremulous hand, undid the sash, and opened
the window. Nothing divided them now, yet he stood as before,
staring into her face. Presently his lips began to move, but no
words came from them.

In Helen, horror had already roused the instinct of secrecy. She put
out her two hands, took his face between them, and said in a hurried
whisper, calling him by the pet name she had given him when a child,

"Come in, Poldie, and tell me all about it."

Her voice seemed to wake him. Slowly, with the movements of one half
paralyzed, he shoved and dragged himself over the windowsill,
dropped himself on the floor inside, and lay there, looking up in
her face like a hunted animal, that hoped he had found a refuge, but
doubted. Seeing him so exhausted, she turned from him to go and get
some brandy, but a low cry of agony drew her back. His head was
raised from the floor and his hands were stretched out, while his
face entreated her, as plainly as if he had spoken, not to leave
him. She knelt and would have kissed him, but he turned his face
from her with an expression which seemed of disgust.

"Poldie," she said, "I MUST go and get you something. Don't be
afraid. They are all sound asleep."

The grasp with which he had clutched her dress relaxed, and his hand
fell by his side. She rose at once and went, creeping through the
slumberous house, light and noiseless as a shadow, but with a heart
that seemed not her own lying hard in her bosom. As she went she had
to struggle both to rouse and to compose herself, for she could not
think. An age seemed to have passed since she heard the clock strike
twelve. One thing was clear--her brother had been doing something
wrong, and dreading discovery, had fled to her. The moment this
conviction made itself plain to her, she drew herself up with the
great deep breath of a vow, as strong as it was silent and
undefined, that he should not have come to her in vain.
Silent-footed as a beast of prey, silent-handed as a thief, lithe in
her movements, her eye flashing with the new-kindled instinct of
motherhood to the orphan of her father, it was as if her soul had
been suddenly raised to a white heat, which rendered her body
elastic and responsive.






CHAPTER XXII.

LEOPOLD.





She re-entered her room with the gait of a new-born goddess treading
the air. Her brother was yet prostrate where she had left him. He
raised himself on his elbow, seized with trembling hand the glass
she offered him, swallowed the brandy at a gulp, and sank again on
the floor. The next instant he sprang to his feet, cast a terrified
look at the window, bounded to the door and locked it, then ran to
his sister, threw his arms about her, and clung to her like a
trembling child. But ever his eyes kept turning to the window.

Though now twenty years of age, and at his full height, he was
hardly so tall as Helen. Swarthy of complexion, his hair dark as the
night, his eyes large and lustrous, with what Milton calls "quel
sereno fulgor d' amabil nero," his frame nervous and slender, he
looked compact and small beside her.

She did her utmost to quiet him, unconsciously using the same words
and tones with which she had soothed his passions when he was a
child. All at once he raised his head and drew himself back from her
arms with a look of horror, then put his hand over his eyes, as if
her face had been a mirror and he had seen himself in it.

"What is that on your wristband, Leopold?" she asked. "Have you hurt
yourself?"

The youth cast an indescribable look on his hand, but it was not
that which turned Helen so deadly sick: with her question had come
to her the ghastly suspicion that the blood she saw was not his, and
she felt guilty of an unpardonable, wicked wrong against him. But
she would never, never believe it! A sister suspect her only brother
of such a crime! Yet her arms dropped and let him go. She stepped
back a pace, and of themselves, as it were, her eyes went wandering
and questioning all over him, and saw that his clothes were torn and
soiled--stained--who could tell with what?

He stood for a moment still and submissive to their search, with
face downcast. Then, suddenly flashing his eyes on her, he said, in
a voice that seemed to force its way through earth that choked it
back,

"Helen, I am a murderer, and they are after me. They will be here
before daylight."

He dropped on his knees, and clasped hers.

"O sister! sister! save me, save me!" he cried in a voice of agony.

Helen stood without response, for to stand took all her strength.
How long she fought that horrible sickness, knowing that, if she
moved an inch, turned from it a moment, yielded a hair's-breadth, it
would throw her senseless on the floor, and the noise of her fall
would rouse the house, she never could even conjecture. All was dark
before her, as if her gaze had been on the underside of her
coffin-lid, and her brain sank and swayed and swung in the coils of
the white snake that was sucking at her heart. At length the
darkness thinned; it grew a gray mist; the face of her boy-brother
glimmered up through it, like that of Dives in hell-fire to his
guardian-angel as he hung lax-winged and faint in the ascending
smoke. The mist thinned, and at length she caught a glimmer of his
pleading, despairing, self-horrified eyes: all the mother in her
nature rushed to the aid of her struggling will; her heart gave a
great heave; the blood ascended to her white brain, and flushed it
with rosy life; her body was once more reconciled and obedient; her
hand went forth, took his head between them, and pressed it against
her.

"Poldie, dear," she said, "be calm and reasonable, and I will do all
I can for you. Here, take this.--And now, answer me one question"

"You won't give me up, Helen?"

"No. I will not."

"Swear it, Helen."

"Ah, my poor Poldie! is it come to this between you and me?"

"Swear it, Helen."

"So help me God, I will not!" returned Helen, looking up.

Leopold rose, and again stood quietly before her, but again with
downbent head, like a prisoner about to receive sentence.

"Do you mean what you said a moment since--that the police are in
search of you?" asked Helen, with forced calmness.

"They must be. They must have been after me for days--I don't know
how many. They will be here soon. I can't think how I have escaped
them so long. Hark! Isn't that a noise at the street-door?--No,
no.--There's a shadow on the curtains!--No! it's my eyes; they've
cheated me a thousand times. Helen! I did not try to hide her; they
must have found her long ago."

"My God!" cried Helen; but checked the scream that sought to follow
the cry.

"There was an old shaft near," he went on, hurriedly. "If I had
thrown her down that, they would never have found her, for there
must be choke-damp at the bottom of it enough to kill a thousand of
them. But I could not bear the thought of sending the lovely thing
down there--even to save my life."

He was growing wild again; but the horror had again laid hold upon
Helen, and she stood speechless, staring at him.

"Hide me--hide me, Helen!" he pleaded. "Perhaps you think I am mad.
Would to God I were! Sometimes I think I must be. But this I tell
you is no madman's fancy. If you take it for that, you will bring me
to the gallows. So, if you will see me hanged,----"

He sat down and folded his arms.

"Hush! Poldie, hush!" cried Helen, in an agonized whisper. "I am
only thinking what I can best do. I cannot hide you here, for if my
aunt knew, she would betray you by her terrors; and if she did not
know, and those men came, she would help them to search every corner
of the house. Otherwise there might be a chance."

Again she was silent for a few moments; then, seeming suddenly to
have made up her mind, went softly to the door.

"Don't leave me!" cried Leopold.

"Hush! I must. I know now what to do. Be quiet here until I come
back."

Slowly, cautiously, she unlocked it, and left the room. In three or
four minutes she returned, carrying a loaf of bread and a bottle of
wine. To her dismay Leopold had vanished. Presently he came creeping
out from under the bed, looking so abject that Helen could not help
a pang of shame. But the next moment the love of the sister, the
tender compassion of the woman, returned in full tide, and swallowed
up the unsightly thing. The more abject he was, the more was he to
be pitied and ministered to.

"Here, Poldie," she said, "you carry the bread, and I will take the
wine. You must eat something, or you will be ill."

As she spoke she locked the door again. Then she put a dark shawl
over her head, and fastened it under her chin. Her white face shone
out from it like the moon from a dark cloud.

"Follow me, Poldie," she said, and putting out the candles, went to
the window.

He obeyed without question, carrying the loaf she had put into his
hands. The window-sash rested on a little door; she opened it, and
stepped on the balcony. As soon as her brother had followed her, she
closed it again, drew down the sash, and led the way to the garden,
and so, by the door in the sunk fence, out upon the meadows.






CHAPTER XXIII.

THE REFUGE.





The night was very dusky, but Helen knew perfectly the way she was
going. A strange excitement possessed her, and lifted her above all
personal fear. The instant she found herself in the open air, her
faculties seemed to come preternaturally awake, and her judgment to
grow quite cool. She congratulated herself that there had been no
rain, and the ground would not betray their steps. There was enough
of light in the sky to see the trees against it, and partly by their
outlines she guided herself to the door in the park-paling, whence
she went as straight as she could for the deserted house.
Remembering well her brother's old dislike to the place, she said
nothing of their destination; but, when he suddenly stopped, she
knew that it had dawned upon him. For one moment he hung back, but a
stronger and more definite fear lay behind, and he went on.

Emerging from the trees on the edge of the hollow, they looked down,
but it was too dark to see the mass of the house, or the slightest
gleam from the surface of the lake. All was silent as a deserted
churchyard, and they went down the slope as if it had been the
descent to Hades. Arrived at the wall of the garden, they followed
its buttressed length until they came to a tall narrow gate of
wrought iron, almost consumed with rust, and standing half open. By
this they passed into the desolate garden, whose misery in the
daytime was like that of a ruined soul, but now hidden in the
night's black mantle. Through the straggling bushes with their arms
they forced and with their feet they felt their way to the front
door of the house, the steps to which, from the effects of various
floods, were all out of the level in different directions. The door
was unlocked as usual, needing only a strong push to open it, and
they entered. How awfully still it seemed!--much stiller than the
open air, though that had seemed noiseless. There was not a rat or a
black beetle in the place. They groped their way through the hall,
and up the wide staircase, which gave not one crack in answer to
their needlessly careful footsteps: not a soul was within a mile of
them. Helen had taken Leopold by the hand, and she now led him
straight to the closet whence the hidden room opened. He made no
resistance, for the covering wings of the darkness had protection in
them. How desolate must the soul be that welcomes such protection!
But when, knowing that thence no ray could reach the outside, she
struck a light, and the spot where he had so often shuddered was
laid bare to his soul, he gave a cry and turned and would have
rushed away. Helen caught him, he yielded, and allowed her to lead
him into the room. There she lighted a candle, and as it came
gradually alive, it shed a pale yellow light around, and revealed a
bare chamber, with a bedstead and the remains of a moth-eaten
mattress in a corner. Leopold threw himself upon it, uttering a
sound that more resembled a choked scream than a groan. Helen sat
down beside him, took his head on her lap, and sought to soothe him
with such tender loving words as had never before found birth in her
heart, not to say crossed her lips. She took from her pocket a
dainty morsel, and tried to make him eat, but in vain. Then she
poured him out a cupful of wine. He drank it eagerly, and asked for
more, which she would not give him. But instead of comforting him,
it seemed only to rouse him to fresh horror. He clung to his sister
as a child clings to the nurse who has just been telling him an evil
tale, and ever his face would keep turning from her to the door with
a look of frightful anticipation. She consoled him with all her
ingenuity, assured him that for the present he was perfectly safe,
and, thinking it would encourage a sense of concealment, reminded
him of the trap in the floor of the closet and the little chamber
underneath. But at that he started up with glaring eyes.

"Helen! I remember now," he cried. "I knew it at the time! Don't you
know I never could endure the place? I foresaw, as plainly as I see
you now, that one day I should be crouching here for safety with a
hideous crime on my conscience. I told you so, Helen, at the time.
Oh! how could you bring me here?"

He threw himself down again, and hid his face on her lap.

With a fresh inroad of dismay Helen thought he must be going mad,
for this was the merest trick of his imagination. Certainly he had
always dreaded the place, but never a word of that sort had he said
to her. Yet there was a shadow of possible comfort in the
thought--for, what if the whole thing should prove an hallucination!
But whether real or not, she must have his story.

"Come, dearest Poldie, darling brother!" she said, "you have not yet
told me what it is. What is the terrible thing you have done? I
daresay it's nothing so very bad after all!"

"There's the light coming!" he said, in a dull hollow voice, "--The
morning! always the morning coming again!"

"No, no, dear Poldie!" she returned. "There is no window here--at
least it only looks on the back stair, high above heads; and the
morning is a long way off."

"How far?" he asked, staring in her eyes--"twenty years? That was
just when I was bom! Oh that I could enter a second time into my
mother's womb, and never be born! Why are we sent into this cursed
world? I would God had never made it. What was the good? Couldn't he
have let well alone?"

He was silent. She must get him to sleep.

It was as if a second soul had been given her to supplement the
first, and enable her to meet what would otherwise have been the
exorbitant demands now made upon her. With an effort of the will
such as she could never before have even imagined, she controlled
the anguish of her own spirit, and, softly stroking the head of the
poor lad, which had again sought her lap, compelled herself to sing
him for lullaby a song of which in his childhood he had been very
fond, and with which, in all the importance of imagined motherhood,
she had often sung him to sleep. And the old influence was potent
yet. In a few minutes the fingers which clutched her hand relaxed,
and she knew by his breathing that he slept. She sat still as a
stone, not daring to move, hardly daring breathe enough to keep her
alive, lest she should rouse him from his few blessed moments of
self-nothingness, during which the tide of the all-infolding ocean
of peace was free to flow into the fire-torn cave of his bosom. She
sat motionless thus, until it seemed as if for very weariness she
must drop in a heap on the floor, but that the aches and pains which
went through her in all directions held her body together like ties
and rivets. She had never before known what weariness was, and now
she knew it for all her life. But like an irritant, her worn body
clung about her soul and dulled it to its own grief, thus helping it
to a pitiful kind of repose. How long she sat thus she could not
tell--she had no means of knowing, but it seemed hours on hours, and
yet, though the nights were now short, the darkness had not begun to
thin. But when she thought how little access the light had to that
room, she began to grow uneasy lest she should be missed from her
own, or seen on her way back to it. At length some involuntary
movement woke him. He started to his feet with a look of wild
gladness. But there was scarcely time to recognise it before it
vanished.

"My God, it is true then!" he shrieked. "O Helen, I dreamed that I
was innocent--that I had but dreamed I had done it. Tell me that I'm
dreaming now. Tell me! tell me!--Tell me that I am no murderer!"

As he spoke, he seized her shoulder with a fierce grasp, and shook
her as if trying to wake her from the silence of a lethargy.

"I hope you are innocent, my darling. But in any case I will do all
I can to protect you," said Helen. "Only I shall never be able
unless you control yourself sufficiently to let me go home."

"No, Helen!" he cried; "you must not leave me. If you do, I shall go
mad. SHE will come instead."

Helen shuddered inwardly, but kept her outward composure.

"If I stay with you, just think, dearest, what will happen," she
said. "I shall be missed, and all the country will be raised to look
for me. They will think I have been--"--She checked herself.

"And so you might be--so might anyone," he cried, "so long as I am
loose--like the Rajah's man-eating horse. O God! It has come to
this!" And he hid his face in his hands.

"And then you see, my Poldie," Helen went on as calmly as she could,
"they would come here and find us; and I don't know what might come
next."

"Yes, yes, Helen! Go, go directly. Leave me this instant," he said,
hurriedly, and took her by the shoulders, as if he would push her
from the room, but went on talking. "It must be, I know; but when
the light comes I shall go mad. Would to God I might, for the day is
worse than the darkness; then I see my own black against the light.
Now go, Helen. But you WILL come back to me as soon as ever you can?
How shall I know when to begin to look for you? What o'clock is it?
My watch has never been--since--. Ugh! the light will be here soon.
Helen, I know now what hell is.--Ah! Yes."--As he spoke he had been
feeling in one of his pockets.--"I will not be taken alive.--Can you
whistle, Helen?"

"Yes, Poldie," answered Helen, trembling. "Don't you remember
teaching me?"

"Yes, yes.--Then, when you come near the house, whistle, and go on
whistling, for if I hear a step without any whistling, I shall kill
myself."

"What have you got there?" she asked in renewed terror, noticing
that he kept his hand in the breast pocket of his coat.

"Only the knife," he answered calmly.

"Give it to me," she said, calmly too.

He laughed, and the laugh was more terrible than any cry.

"No; I'm not so green as that," he said. "My knife is my only
friend! Who is to take care of me when you are away? Ha! ha!"

She saw that the comfort of the knife must not be denied him. Nor
did she fear any visit that might drive him to its use--except
indeed the police WERE to come upon him--and then--what better
could he do? she thought.

"Well, well, I will not plague you," she said. "Lie down and I will
cover you with my shawl, and you can fancy it my arms round you. I
will come to you as soon as ever I can."

He obeyed. She spread her shawl over him and kissed him.

"Thank you, Helen," he said quietly.

"Pray to God to deliver you, dear," she said.

"He can do that only by killing me," he returned. "I will pray for
that. But do you go, Helen. I will try to bear my misery for your
sake."

He followed her from the room with eyes out of which looked the very
demon of silent despair.

I will not further attempt to set forth his feelings. The
incredible, the impossible, had become a fact-AND HE WAS THE MAN. He
who knows the relief of waking from a dream of crime to the
jubilation of recovered innocence, to the sunlight that blots out
the thing as untrue, may by help of that conceive the misery of a
delicate nature suddenly filled with the clear assurance of horrible
guilt. Such a misery no waking but one that annihilated the past
could ever console. Yes, there is yet an awaking--if a man might but
attain unto it--an awaking into a region whose very fields are full
of the harmony sovereign to console, not merely for having
suffered--that needs little consoling, but for having inflicted the
deepest wrong.

The moment Helen was out of sight, Leopold drew a small silver box
from an inner pocket, eyed it with the eager look of a hungry
animal, took from it a portion of a certain something, put it in his
mouth, closed his eyes, and lay still.






CHAPTER XXIV.

HELEN WITH A SECRET.





When Helen came out into the corridor, she saw that the day was
breaking. A dim, dreary light filled the dismal house, but the
candle had prevented her from perceiving the little of it that could
enter that room withdrawn. A pang of fear shot to her soul, and like
a belated spectre or a roused somnambulist she fled across the park.
It was all so like a horrible dream, from which she must wake in
bed! yet she knew there was no such hope for her. Her darling lay in
that frightful house, and if anyone should see her, it might be
death to him. But yet it was very early, and two hours would pass
before any of the workmen would be on their way to the new house.
Yet, like a murderer shaken out of the earth by the light, she fled.
When she was safe in her own room, ere she could get into bed, she
once more turned deadly sick, and next knew by the agonies of coming
to herself that she had fainted.

A troubled, weary, EXCITED sleep followed. She woke with many a
start, as if she had sinned in sleeping, and instantly for very
weariness, dozed off again. How kind is weariness sometimes! It is


 


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