Thomas Wingfold, Curate
by
George MacDonald
Part 9 out of 9
"Within an hour," answered the curate. "I will see you safe to it."
"Excuse me; I prefer going alone."
"That I cannot permit."
"I must go to my lodgings first."
"I will go with you."
She cast on him a look of questioning hate, yielded, and laid two
fingers on his offered arm.
They walked out of the church together and to the cottage where, for
privacy, she had lodged. There he left her for half an hour, and,
yielding to her own necessities and not his entreaties, she took
some refreshment. In the glowing sullenness of foiled revenge, the
smoke of which was crossed every now and then by a flash of hate,
she sat until he returned.
"Before I go with you to the train," said the curate,
re-entering, "you must give me your word to leave young Lingard
unmolested. I know my friend Mr. Drew has no desire to trouble you,
but I am equally confident that he will do whatever I ask him. If
you will not promise me, from the moment you get into the train you
shall be watched.--Do you promise?"
She was silent, with cold gleaming eyes, for a time, then said,
"How am I to know that this is not a trick to save his life?"
"You saw him; you could see he is dying. I tell you I do not think
he can live a month. His disease is making rapid progress. He must
go with the first of the cold weather."
She could not help believing him.
"I promise," she said. "But you are cruel to compel a mother to
forgive the villain that stabbed her daughter to the heart."
"If the poor lad were not dying, I should see that he gave himself
up, as indeed he set out to do some weeks ago, but was frustrated by
his friends. He is dying for love of her. I believe I say so with
truth. Pity and love and remorse and horror of his deed have brought
him to the state you saw him in. To be honest with you, he might
have got better enough to be tortured for a while in a madhouse, for
no jury would have brought him in anything but insane at the time,
with the evidence that would have been adduced; but in his anxiety
to see me one day--for his friends at that time did not favour my
visits, because I encouraged him to surrender--he got out of the
house alone to come to me, but fainted in the churchyard, and lay on
the damp earth for the better part of an hour, I fancy, before we
found him. Still, had it not been for the state of his mind, he
might have got over that too.--As you hope to be forgiven, you must
forgive him."
He held out his hand to her. She was a little softened, and gave him
hers.
"Allow me one word more," said the curate, "and then we shall go:
Our crimes are friends that will hunt us either to the bosom of God,
or the pit of hell."
She looked down, but her look was still sullen and proud.
The curate rose, took up her bag, went with her to the station, got
her ticket, and saw her off.
Then he hastened back to Drew, and told him the whole story.
"Poor woman!" said her husband. "--But God only knows how much _I_
am to blame for all this. If I had behaved better to her she might
never have left me, and your poor young friend would now be well and
happy."
"Perhaps consuming his soul to a cinder with that odious drug," said
Wingfold. "'Tis true, as Edgar in King Lear says:
The gods are just,
and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us;
but he takes our sins on himself, and while he drives them out of us
with a whip of scorpions he will yet make them work his ends. He
defeats our sins, makes them prisoners, forces them into the service
of good, chains them like galley-slaves to the rowing-benches of the
gospel-ship, or sets them like ugly gurgoyles or corbels or brackets
in the walls of his temples.--No, that last figure I retract. I
don't like it. It implies their continuance."
"Poor woman!" said Mr. Drew again, who for once had been inattentive
to the curate. "Well! she is sorely punished too."
"She will be worse punished yet," said the curate, "if I can read
the signs of character. SHE is not repentant yet--though I did spy
in her just once a touch of softening."
"It is an awful retribution," said the draper, "and I may yet have
to bear my share--God help me!"
"I suspect it is the weight of her own crime that makes her so
fierce to avenge her daughter. I doubt if anything makes one so
unforgiving as guilt unrepented of."
"Well, I must try to find out where she is, and keep an eye upon
her."
"That will be easy enough. But why?"
"Because, if, as you think, there is more evil in store for her, I
may yet have it in my power to do her some service.--I wonder if Mr.
Polwarth would call that DIVINE SERVICE," he added, with one of his
sunny smiles.
"Indeed he would," answered the curate.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE BEDSIDE.
George Bascombe, when he went to Paris, had no thought of deserting
Helen. But he had good ground for fearing that it might be ruinous
both to Lingard and himself to undertake his defence. From Paris he
wrote often to Helen, and she replied--not so often, yet often
enough to satisfy him; and as soon as she was convinced that Leopold
could not recover, she let him know, whereupon he instantly began
his preparations for returning.
Before he came, the weather had changed once more. It was now cold,
and the cold had begun at once to tell upon the invalid. There are
some natures to which cold, moral, spiritual, or physical, is
lethal, and Lingard's was of the class. When the dying leaves began
to shiver in the breath of the coming winter, the very brightness of
the sun to look gleamy, and nature to put on the unfriendly aspect
of a world not made for living in but for shutting out--when all
things took the turn of reminding man that his life lay not in them,
Leopold began to shrink and withdraw. He could not face the ghastly
persistence of the winter, which would come, let all the souls of
the summer-nations shrink and protest as they might; let them creep
shivering to Hades; he would have his day.
His sufferings were now considerable, but he never complained.
Restless and fevered and sick at heart, it was yet more from the
necessity of a lovely nature than from any virtue of will that he
was so easy to nurse, accepting so readily all ministrations. Never
exacting and never refusing, he was always gently grateful, giving a
sort of impression that he could have been far more thankful had he
not known the object of the kindnesses so unworthy. Next to
Wingfold's and his sister's, the face he always welcomed most was
that of the gate-keeper--indeed I ought hardly to say NEXT to
theirs; for if the curate was to him as a brother, Polwarth was like
a father in Christ. He came every day, and every day, almost till
that of his departure, Leopold had something to ask him about or
something to tell him.
"I am getting so stupid, Mr. Polwarth!" he said once. "It troubles
me much. I don't seem to care for anything now. I don't want to hear
the New Testament: I would rather hear a child's story--something
that did not want thinking about. If I am not coughing, I am
content. I could lie for hours and hours and never think more than
what goes creeping through my mind no faster than a canal in
Holland. When I am coughing,--I don't think about anything then
either--only long for the fit to be over and let me back again into
Sleepy Hollow. All my past life seems to be gone from me. I don't
care about it. Even my crime looks like something done ages ago. I
know it is mine, and I would rather it were not mine, but it is as
if a great cloud had come and swept away the world in which it took
place. I am afraid sometimes that I am beginning not to care even
about that. I say to myself, I shall be sorry again by and by, but I
can't think about it now. I feel as if I had handed it over to God
to lay down where I should find it again when I was able to think
and be sorry."
This was a long utterance for him to make, but he had spoken slowly,
and with frequent pauses. Polwarth did not speak once, feeling that
a dying man must be allowed to ease his mind after his own fashion,
and take as much time to it as he pleased. Helen and Wingfold both
would have told him he must not tire himself, but that Polwarth
never did. The dying should not have their utterances checked, or
the feeling of not having finished forced upon them. They will
always have plenty of the feeling without that.
A fit of coughing compelled him to break off, and when it was over,
he lay panting and weary, but with his large eyes questioning the
face of Polwarth. Then the little man spoke.
"He must give us every sort of opportunity for trusting him," he
said. "The one he now gives you, is this dulness that has come over
you. Trust him through it, submitting to it and yet trusting against
it, and you get the good of it. In your present state perhaps you
cannot even try to bring about by force of will any better state of
feeling or higher intellectual condition; but you can say to God
something like this: "See, Lord, I am dull and stupid, and care for
nothing: take thou care of everything for me, heart and mind and
all. I leave all to thee. Wilt thou not at length draw me out of
this my frozen wintery state? Let me not shrink from fresh life and
thought and duty, or be unready to come out of the shell of my
sickness when thou sendest for me. I wait thy will. I wait even the
light that I feel now as if I dared not encounter for weariness of
body and faintness of spirit."
"Ah!" cried Leopold, "there you have touched it! How can you know so
well what I feel?"
"Because I have often had to fight hard to keep death to his own
province, and not let him cross over into my spirit."
"Alas! I am not fighting at all; I am only letting things go."
"You are fighting more than you know, I suspect, for you are
enduring, and that patiently. Suppose Jesus were to knock at the
door now, and it was locked; suppose you knew it was he, and there
was no one in the room to open it for him; suppose you were as weak
as you are now, and seemed to care as little about him or anything
else: what would you do?"
Leopold looked half amazed, as if wondering what his friend could be
driving at with such a question.
"What else could I do but get up and open it?" he said.
"Would you not be tempted to lie still and wait till some one came."
"No."
"Would you not say in your heart, 'The Lord knows I am very weak,
and I should catch cold, and the exertion would make me cough
dreadfully, and he won't mind if I lie still?'"
"That I wouldn't! What should I care what came to me? What would it
matter so long as I got one look at him! Besides, if he didn't want
me to get up, he wouldn't knock."
"But suppose you knew that the moment you turned the key you would
drop down, and when the Lord came in you would not see him."
"I can't think where you want to take me, Mr. Polwarth!" said the
youth. "Even if I knew I should drop dead the moment I got out on
the floor, what would it matter! I should get to him the sooner
then, and tell him why I didn't open the door. Can you suppose for a
moment I should let any care for this miserable body of mine come
between my eyes and the face of my Lord?"
"You see then that you do care about him a little, though a minute
ago you didn't think it! There are many feelings in us that are not
able to get up stairs the moment we call them. Be as dull and stupid
as it pleases God to let you be, and trouble neither yourself nor
him about that, only ask him to be with you all the same."
The little man dropped on his knees by the bedside, and said,
"O Lord Jesus, be near when it seems to us, as it seemed to thee
once, that our Father has forsaken us, and gathered back to himself
all the gifts he once gave us. Even thou who wast mighty in death,
didst need the presence of thy Father to make thee able to endure:
forget not us the work of thy hands, yea, the labour of thy heart
and spirit. O remember that we are his offspring, neither
accountable for our own being, nor able to comfort or strengthen
ourselves. If thou wert to leave us alone, we should cry out upon
thee as on the mother who threw her babes to the wolves--and there
are no wolves able to terrify thee. Ah Lord! we know thou leavest us
not, only in our weakness we would comfort our hearts with the music
of the words of faith. Thou canst not do other than care for us,
Lord Christ, for whether we be glad or sorry, slow of heart or full
of faith, all the same are we the children of thy Father. He sent us
here, and never asked us if we would; therefore thou must be with
us, and give us repentance and humility and love and faith, that we
may indeed be the children of thy Father who is in heaven. Amen."
While Polwarth was yet praying, the door had opened gently behind
him, and Helen, not knowing that he was there, had entered with
Bascombe. He neither heard their entrance, nor saw the face of
disgust that George made behind his back. What was in Bascombe's
deepest soul who shall tell? Of that region he himself knew nothing.
It was a silent, holy place into which he had never yet entered--
therefore lonely and deserted as the top of Sinai after the cloud
had departed. No--I will not say that: who knows what is where man
cannot or will not look? If George had sought there, perhaps he
might have found traces of a presence not yet altogether vanished.
In what he called and imagined his deeepest soul, however, all he
was now conscious of was a perfect loathing of the monstrous
superstition so fitly embodied before him. The prayer of the
kneeling absurdity was to him an audacious mockery of the
infrangible laws of Nature: this hulk of misshapen pottery actually
presuming to believe that an invisible individual heard what he said
because he crooked his hinges to say it! It did not occur to George
that the infrangible laws of Nature she had herself from the very
first so agonizingly broken to the poor dwarf, she had been to him
such a cruel step-mother, that he was in evil case indeed if he
could find no father to give him fair play and a chance of the
endurable. Was he so much to blame if he felt the annihilation
offered by such theorists as George, not altogether a satisfactory
counterpoise either to its existence or its loss? If, even, he were
to fancy in his trouble that the old fable of an elder brother,
something more humble than grand handsome George Bascombe and more
ready to help his little brothers and sisters, might be true, seeing
that an old story is not necessarily a false one, and were to try
after the hints it gave, surely in his condition such folly, however
absurd to a man of George Bascombe's endowments, might of the more
gifted ephemeros be pardoned if not pitied. Nor will I assert that
he was altogether unaware of any admixture of the sad with the
ludicrous when he saw the amorphous agglomerate of human shreds and
patches kneeling by the bedside of the dying murderer, to pray some
comfort into his passing soul. But his "gorge rose at the nonsense
and stuff of it," while through Helen ran a cold shudder of disgust
at the familiarity and irreverence of the little spiritual prig.
How many of the judgments we are told not to judge and yet do judge,
must make the angels of the judging and the judged turn and look at
each other and smile a sad smile, ere they set themselves to forget
that which so sorely needs to be forgotten.
Polwarth rose from his knees unaware of a hostile presence.
"Leopold," he said, taking his hand, "I would gladly, if I might,
walk with you through the shadow. But the heart of all hearts will
be with you. Rest in your tent a little while, which is indeed the
hollow of the Father's hand turned over you, with your strong
brother watching the door. Your imagination cannot go beyond the
truth of him who is the Father of lights, or of him who is the Elder
Brother of men."
Leopold answered only with his eyes. Polwarth turned to go, and saw
the on-lookers. They stood between him and the door, but parted and
made room for him to pass. Neither spoke. He made a bow first to one
and then to the other, looking up in the face of each, unabashed by
smile or scorn or blush of annoyance, but George took no notice,
walking straight to the bed the moment the way was clear. Helen's
conscience, however, or heart, smote her, and, returning his bow,
she opened the door for her brother's friend. He thanked her, and
went his way.
"Poor dear fellow!" said George kindly, and stroked the thin hand
laid in his: "can I do anything for you?"
"Nothing but be good to Helen when I am gone, and tell her now and
then that I'm not dead, but living in the hope of seeing her again
one day before long. She might forget sometimes--not me, but that,
you know."
"Yes, yes, I'll see to it," answered George, in the evil tone of one
who faithfully promises a child an impossibility. Of course there
was no more harm in lying to a man who was just on the verge of
being a man no more, and becoming only an unpleasant mass of
chemicals, which a whole ant-heap of little laws would presently be
carrying outside the gates of the organic, than there had been in
lying to him when he supposed him a madman. Neither could anyone
blame him for inconsistency; for had he not always said in the
goodness of his heart, that he would never disturb the faith of old
people drawing nigh their end, because such no more possessed the
needful elasticity of brain to accommodate themselves to the
subversion of previous modes of feeling and thought, unavoidable to
the adoption of his precious revelation. Precious he did believe it,
never having himself one of those visions of infinite hope, which,
were his theory once proved as true as he imagined it, must then
indeed vanish for ever.
"Do you suffer much?" asked George.
"Yes--a good deal."
"Pain?"
"Not so much;--sometimes. The weakness is the worst. But it doesn't
matter: God is with me."
"What good does that do you?" asked George, forgetting himself, half
in contempt, half in a curiosity which he would have called, and
which perhaps was, scientific.
But Leopold took it in good faith, and answered,
"It sets it all right, and makes me able to be patient."
George laid down the hand he held, and turned sadly to Helen, but
said nothing.
The next moment Wingfold entered. Helen kissed the dying hand, and
left the room with George.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE GARDEN.
Tenderly he led her into the garden, and down the walks now bare of
bordering flowers. To Helen it looked like a graveyard; the dry
bushes were the memorials of the buried flowers, and the cypress and
box trees rose like the larger monuments of shapely stone. The day
was a cold leaden one, that would have rained if it could, to get
rid of the deadness at its heart, but no tears came. To the
summer-house they went, under the cedar, and sat down. Neither spoke
for some time.
"Poor Leopold!" said George at length, and took Helen's hand.
She burst into tears, and again for some time neither spoke.
"George, I can't bear it!" she said at length.
"It is very sad," answered George. "But he had a happy life, I don't
doubt, up to--to--"
"What does that matter now? It is all a horrible farce.--To begin so
fair and lovely, and end so stormy and cold and miserable!"
George did not like to say what he thought, namely, that it was
Leopold's own doing. He did not see that therein lay the deepest
depth of the misery--the thing that of all things needed help: all
else might be borne; the less that COULD be borne the better.
"It IS horrible," he said. "But what can be done? What's done is
done, and nobody can help it."
"There should be somebody to help it," said Helen.
"Ah! Should be!" said George. "--Well, it's a comfort it will soon
be over!"
"Is it?" returned Helen almost sharply. "--But he's not your
brother, and you don't know what it is to lose him! Oh, how desolate
the world will be without my darling!"
And again her tears found way.
"All that I can do to make up for the loss, dearest Helen," said
George,--
"Oh George!" she cried, starting to her feet, "is there NO hope? I
don't mean of his getting better--that we do know the likelihoods
of--but is there no hope of SOME TIME seeing him again? We know so
little about all of it! MIGHT there not be some way?"
But George was too honest in himself, and too true to his
principles, to pretend anything to Helen. Hers was an altogether
different case from Leopold's. Here was a young woman full of health
and life and hope, with all her joys before her! Many suns must set
before her sun would go down, many pale moons look lovely in her
eyes, ere came those that would mock her with withered memories--a
whole hortus siccus of passion-flowers. Why should he lie to HER of
a hope beyond the grave? Let the pleasures of the world be the
dearer to her for the knowledge that they must so soon depart; let
love be the sweeter for the mournful thought that it is a thing of
the summer, and that when the winter comes it shall be no more! But
perhaps George forgot one point. I will allow that the insects of a
day, dying in a moment of delightful fruition, are blessed; but when
the delicate Psyche, with her jewel-feathered wings, is beat about
by a wind full of rain until she lies draggled in the dirt; when
there are no more flowers, or if there be, the joy of her hovering
is over, and yet death comes but slowly; when the mourners are going
about the streets ere ever the silver cord is loosed; when the past
looks a mockery and the future a blank;--then perhaps, even to the
correlatives of the most triumphant natural selection, it may not
merely seem as if something were wrong somewhere, but even as if
there ought to be somebody to set wrong right. If Psyche should be
so subdued to circumstance as to accept without question her
supposed fate, then doubly woe for Psyche!
But if George could not lie, it was not necessary for him to speak
the truth: silence was enough. A moment of it was all Helen could
endure. She rose hastily, left the wintered summer-house, and walked
back to the sick-chamber. George followed a few paces behind, so far
quenched that he did not overtake her to walk by her side, feeling
he had no aid to offer her. Doubtless he could have told her of help
at hand, but it was help that must come, that could neither be given
nor taken, would not come the sooner for any prayer, and indeed
would not begin to exist until the worst should be over: the nearest
George came to belief in a saving power, was to console himself with
the thought that TIME would do everything for Helen.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE DEPARTURE.
As Leopold slowly departed, he seemed to his sister to draw along
with him all that was precious in her life. She felt herself grow
dull and indifferent. It was to no purpose that she upbraided
herself with heartlessness; seemingly heartless her bosom remained.
It was not that her mind was occupied with anything else than her
brother, or drew comfort from another source; her feelings appeared
to be dying with him who had drawn them forth more than any other.
The battle was ending without even the poor pomp and circumstance of
torn banners and wailful music.
Leopold said very little during the last few days. His fits, of
coughing were more frequent, and in the pauses he had neither
strength nor desire to speak. When Helen came to his bedside, he
would put out his hand to her, and she would sit down by him and
hold it warm in hers. The hand of his sister was the point of the
planet from which, like his mount of ascension, the spirit of the
youth took its departure;--when he let that go, he was gone. But he
died asleep, as so many do; and fancied, I presume, that he was
waking into his old life, when he woke into his new one.
Wingfold stood on the other side of the bed, with Polwarth by him,
for so had the departing wished it, and although he made no sign, I
cannot but think he reaped some content therefrom. While yet he
lingered, one of Helen's listless, straying glances was arrested by
the countenance of the gate-keeper. It was so still and so rapt that
she thought he must be seeing within the veil, and regarding what
things were awaiting her brother on the reverse of the two-sided
wonder. But it was not so. Polwarth saw no more than she did: he was
ONLY standing in the presence of him who is not the God of the
dead but of the living. Whatever lay in that Will was the life of
whatever came of that Will, that is, of every creature, and no to
that Will, to the face of the Father, he lifted, in his prayerful
thought, the heart and mind and body of the youth now passing
through the birth of death. "I know not," he would have said, had he
been questioned concerning his spiritual attitude, "how my prayer
should for another work anything with the perfect Giver, but at
least I will not leave my friend behind when I go into the presence
of his Father and my Father. And I believe there is something in it
I cannot yet see."
Wingfold's anxiety was all for Helen. He could do no more for
Leopold, nor did he need more from man. As to many of the things
that puzzled them most, he was on his way to know more; he would
soon be in the heart of what seemed likely to remain a long secret
to him. But there was his sister, about to be left behind him
without his hopes; for her were dreary days at hand; and the curate
prayed the God of comfort and consolation to visit her.
Mrs. Ramshorn would now and then look in at the noiseless door of
the chamber of death, but she rightly felt her presence was not
desired, and though ready to help, did not enter. Neither did
George--not from heartlessness, but that he judged it better to
leave the priests of falsehood undisturbed in the exercise of their
miserable office. What did it matter how many comforting lies were
told to a dying man? What COULD it matter? There was small danger of
their foolish prayers and superstitious ceremonies evoking a deity
from the well-ordered, self-evolved sphericity of interacting law,
where not a pin-hole of failure afforded space out of which he might
creep. No more could they deprive the poor lad of the bliss of
returning into the absolute nothingness whence he had crept--to
commit a horrible crime against immortal society, and creep back
again, with a heart full of love and remorse and self-abhorrence,
into the black abyss. Therefore, why should he not let them tell
their lies and utter their silly incantations? Aloof and unharmed he
stood, safe on the shore, all ready to reach the rescuing hand to
Helen, the moment she should turn her eyes to him, for the help she
knew he had to give her. Certainly, for her sake, he would rather
she were not left unprotected to such subtle and insinuating
influences; but with the power of his mind upon her good sense, he
had no fear of the result. Not that he expected her to submit at
once to the wholesome regimen and plain diet he must prescribe her:
the soft hand of Time must first draw together the edges of her
heart's wound.
But the deadness of Helen's feelings, the heartlessness because of
which she cried out against herself, seemed, in a vague way, by
herself unacknowledged yet felt, if not caused by, yet associated
with some subtle radiation from the being of George Bascombe. That
very morning when he came into the breakfast-room so quietly that
she had not heard him, and, looking up, saw him unexpectedly, he
seemed for a moment, she could not tell why, the dull fountain of
all the miserable feeling--not of loss, but of no loss, which
pressed her heart flat in her bosom. The next moment she accused
herself of the grossest injustice, attributing it to the sickness of
soul which the shadow of death had wrought in her; for was not
George the only true friend she had ever had? If she lost him she
must be lonely indeed!--The feeling lingered notwithstanding, and
when she thought it dispelled, began to gather again immediately.
At the same time she shrunk from Wingfold as hard and unsympathetic.
True he had been most kind, even tender, to her brother, but to him
he had taken a fancy, having found in him one whom he could work
upon and fashion to his own liking: poor Poldie had never been one
of the strongest of men. But to her, whom he could not model after
his own ideas, who required a reason for the thing anyone would have
her believe--to her he had shown the rough side of his nature, going
farther than any gentleman ought, even if he was a clergyman, in
criticizing her conduct. He might well take example of her cousin
George! What a different sort of artillery HE had brought to bear
upon the outstanding fortress of her convictions!
So would she say within herself, again and again, in different
forms, not knowing how little of conviction there was in the
conclusions she seemed to come to--how much of old habit and
gratitude on the one hand, and pride and resentment upon the
other.-And there still was that feeling! she could not drive it
away. It was like trying to disperse a fog with a fan.
The outside weather, although she was far past heeding that, was in
harmony with her soul's weather. A dull dark-grey fog hung from the
sky, and without much obscuring the earth altogether hid the sun.
The air was very cold. There was neither joy nor hope anywhere. The
bushes were leafless and budless, the summer gone, the spring not
worth hoping for, because it also would go: spring after spring
came--for nothing but to go again! Things were so empty and wretched
that pain and grief, almost fear itself, would have been welcome.
The world around her, yes, all her life, all herself, was but the
cold dead body of a summer-world. And Leopold was going to be buried
with the summer. His smiles had all gone with the flowers. The weeds
of his troubles were going also, for they would die with him. But he
would not know it and be glad, any more than she, who was left
caring for neither summer nor winter, joy nor sorrow, love nor hate,
the past nor the future.
Many such thoughts wandered hazily through her mind as she now sat
holding the hand of him who was fast sleeping away from her into
death. Her eyes were fixed on the window through which he had
entered that terrible night, but she saw nothing beyond it.
"He is gone" said Polwarth in a voice that sounded unknown to the
ears of Helen, and as he spoke he kneeled.
She started up with a cry, and looked in her brother's face. She had
never seen anyone die, and yet she saw that he was dead.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE SUNSET.
How the terrible time, terrible for its very dulness and
insensibility, passed until it brought the funeral, Helen could not
have told. It seemed to her, as she looked back upon it, a bare
blank, yet was the blank full of a waste weariness of heart. The
days were all one, outside and inside. Her heart was but a lonely
narrow bay to the sea of cold immovable fog that filled the world.
No one tried to help, no one indeed knew her trouble. Everyone took
it for grief at the loss of her brother, while to herself it was the
oppression of a life that had not even the interest of pain. The
curate had of course called to inquire after her, but had not been
invited to enter. George had been everywhere with help, but had no
word to speak.
The day of the funeral came, in thin fog and dull cold. The few
friends gathered. The body was borne to the Abbey. The curate
received it at the gate in the name of the church--which takes our
children in its arms, and our bodies into its garden--save indeed
where her gardener is some foolish priest who knows not the heart of
his mother, and will pick and choose among her dead;--the lovely
words of the last-first of the apostles, were read; and earth was
given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great
workman works withal. Cold was Helen's heart, cold her body, cold
her very being. The earth, the air, the mist, the very light was
cold. The past was cold, the future yet colder. She would have
grudged Leopold his lonely rest in the grave, but that she had not
feeling enough even for that. Her life seemed withering away from
her, like an autumn flower in the frosts of winter; and she, as if
she had been but a flower, did not seem to care. What was life
worth, when it had not strength to desire even its own continuance?
Heartless she returned from the grave, careless of George's mute
attentions, not even scornful of her aunt's shallow wail over the
uncertainty of life and all things human,--so indifferent to the
whole misery that she walked straight up to the room, hers once
more, from which the body had just been carried, and which, for so
many many weary weeks, had been the centre of loving pain, sometimes
agony. Once more she was at peace--but what a peace!
She took off her cloak and bonnet, laid them on the bed, went to the
window, sat down, and gazed, hardly seeing, out on the cold garden
with its sodden earth, its leafless shrubs, and perennial trees of
darkness and mourning. The meadow lay beyond, and there she did see
the red cow busily feeding, and was half-angry with her. Beyond the
meadow stood the trees, with the park behind them. And yet further
behind lay the hollow with the awful house in its bosom, its dismal
haunted lake and its ruined garden. But nothing moved her. She could
have walked over every room in that house without a single quaver of
the praecordia. Poldie was dead, but was it not well? Even if he had
not been in trouble, what should his death matter? She would die
soon herself and for ever: what did that or anything else matter?
Might she but keep this dulness of spirit, and never more wake to
weep foolish tears over an existence the whole upstanding
broad-based fact of which was not worth one drop in the rivers of
weeping that had been flowing ever since the joyless birth of this
unconceived, ill-fated, unfathered world! To the hour of death
belonged jubilation and not mourning; the hour of birth was the hour
of sorrow. Back to the darkness! was the cry of a life whose very
being was an injury, only there was no one to have done the injury.
Thus she sat until she was summoned to dinner--early for the sake of
the friends whose home lay at a distance. She ate and drank and took
her share in the talk as matter of course, believing all at the
table would judge her a heartless creature, and careless of what
they might think or say. But they judged her more kindly and more
truly than she judged herself. They saw through her eyes the deeps
whose upward ducts were choked with the frost of an unknown despair.
No sooner was she at liberty than again she sought her room, not
consciously from love to her brother who had died there, but because
the deadness of her heart chose a fitting loneliness: and again she
seated herself at the window.
The dreary day was drawing to a close, and the night, drearier it
could not be, was at hand. The gray had grown darker, and she sat
like one waiting for the night like a monster coming to claim its
own and swallow her up.
Something--was it an invasion of reviving light? caused her to lift
her eyes. Away, sideways from her window, in the west, the mist had
cleared a little--somewhere about the sun. Thinner and thinner it
grew. No sun came forth: he was already down; but a canopy of faint
amber grew visible, stretched above his tomb. It was the stuff of
which sad smiles are made, not a thing that belonged to gladness.
But only he who has lost his sorrow without regaining his joy, can
tell how near sorrow lieth to joy. Who that has known the dull paths
of listless no-feeling, would not have his sorrow back with all its
attendant agonies?
The pale amber spread, dilute with light, and beneath it lay the
gray of the fog, and above it the dark blue of cloud--not of sky.
The soul of it was so still, so resigned, so sad, so forsaken, that
she who had thought her heart gone from her, suddenly felt its wells
were filling, and soon they overflowed. She wept. At what? A colour
in the sky! Was there then a God that knew sadness--and was that a
banner of grief he hung forth to comfort the sorrowful with
sympathy? Or was it but a godless colour which the heart varnished
with its own grief? Or if the human heart came from nothing and was
sad, why might not the aspects of nature come from nothing and be
sad too--wrought in harmony with the unutterable woe of humanity?
Then either is man the constructive centre of the world, and its
meanings are but his own face looking back upon him from the mirror
of his own projected atmosphere, and comfort there is none; or he is
not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and
colours the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man
the one conscious point and object of a vast derision--insentient
nature grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks
and makes mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all,
being at once that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but
writhes in agony under the mockery. Such as Bascombe reply that they
find it not so. I answer--For the best of reasons, that it is not
so.
Helen's doubts did not stay her weeping, as doubt generally does;
for the sky with its sweet sadness was before her, and deep in her
heart a lake of tears, which, now that it had begun to flow, would
not be stayed. She knew not why she wept, knew not that it was the
sympathy of that pale amber of sad resignation which brought her
relief: but she wept and wept, until her heart began to stir, and
her tears came cooler and freer.
"Oh Poldie! my own Poldie!" she cried at length, and fell upon her
knees--not-to worship the sky--not to pray to Poldie, or even for
Poldie--not indeed to pray at all, so far as she knew; yet I doubt
if it was merely and only from the impulse of the old childish habit
of saying prayers.
But in a moment she grew restless. There was no Poldie! She rose and
walked about the room. And he came back to her soul, her desolate
brother, clothed, alas! in the rags and tatters of all the unkind
and unjust thoughts she had ever had concerning him, and wearing on
his face the reflection of her worse deeds. She had stood between
him and the only poor remnant of peace, consolation, and hope that
it was possible he should have; and it was through the friends whom
she had treated with such distance and uncordiality that he did
receive it. Then out rushed from the chamber of her memory the
vision of the small dark nervous wild-looking Indian boy who gazed
at her but for one questioning moment, then shot into her arms and
nestled in her bosom. How had she justified that faith? She had
received, and sheltered, and shielded him, doubtless, and would have
done so with her life, yet, when it came to the test, she had loved
herself better than him, and would have doomed him to agony rather
than herself to disgrace. Oh Poldie! Poldie! But he could not hear!
Never, for evermore, should she utter to him word of sorrow or
repentance! never beg his forgiveness, or let him know that now she
knew better, and had risen above such weakness and selfishness!
She stopped, and looked sadly from the window. The sky was cloudless
overhead, and the amber pall was fainter and clearer over the tomb
of the sun. She turned hastily to the bed where lay her cloak and
bonnet, put them on with trembling hands, and went out by that same
window into the garden. She could not help a shudder as she stood in
the dark passage unlocking the door in the sunk fence, but the next
minute she was crossing the meadow through the cold frosty twilight
air, now clear of its fog, and seeming somehow to comfort, uplift,
and strengthen her. The red cow was still feeding there. She stopped
and talked to her a little. She seemed one of Poldie's friends, and
Poldie had come back to her heart if he might never more to her
arms, and she was now on her way to one of his best friends, whom,
as more worthy, he had loved even better than her, and whom she had
not honoured as they deserved or as he must have desired. To get
near them, would be to get nearer to Poldie. At least she would be
with those whom he had loved, and who, she did not doubt, still
loved him, believing him still alive. She could not go to the
curate, but she could go to the Polwarths; no one would blame her
for that-except indeed George. But even George should not come
between her and what mere show of communion with Poldie was left
her! She would keep her freedom--would rather break with George than
lose an atom of her liberty! She would be no clay for his hands to
mould after his pleasure!
She opened the door in the fence and entered the park, seeming to
recover strength with every step she took towards Poldie's friends.
It was almost dark when she stood at the lodge-door and knocked.
CHAPTER XXVI.
AN HONEST SPY.
No one answered Helen's knock. She repeated it, and still no answer
came. Her heart might have failed her, but that she heard voices:
what if they were talking about Leopold? At length, after knocking
four or five times, she heard the step as of a child coming down a
stair; but it passed the door. Clearly no one had heard her. She
knocked yet again, and immediately it was opened by Rachel. The
pleasured surprise that shone up in her face when she saw who it was
that stood without, was lovely to see, and Helen, on whose miserable
isolation it came like a sunrise of humanity, took no counsel with
pride, but, in simple gratitude for the voiceless yet eloquent
welcome, bent down and kissed her. The little arms were flung about
her neck, and the kiss returned with such a gentle warmth and
restrained sweetness as would have satisfied the most fastidious in
the matter of salute--to which class, however, Helen did not belong,
for she seldom kissed anyone. Then Rachel took her by the hand, and
led her into the kitchen, placed a chair for her near the fire, and
said,
"I AM sorry there is no fire in the parlour. The gentlemen are in my
uncle's room. Oh, Miss Lingard, I do wish you could have heard how
they have been talking!"
"Have they been saying anything about my brother?" asked Helen.
"It's all about him," she replied.
"May I ask who the gentlemen are?" said Helen doubtfully.
"Mr. Wingfold and Mr. Drew. They are often here."
"Is it--do you mean Mr. Drew, the draper?"
"Yes. He is one of Mr. Wingfold's best pupils. He brought him to my
uncle, and he has come often ever since."
"I never heard that--Mr. Wingfold--took pupils.--I am afraid I do
not quite understand you.
"I would have said DISCIPLES," returned Rachel smiling; "but that
has grown to feel such a sacred word--as if it belonged only to the
Master, that I didn't like to use it. It would say best what I mean
though; for there are people in Glaston that are actually mending
their ways because of Mr. Wingfold's teaching, and Mr. Drew was the
first of them. It is long since such a thing was heard of in the
Abbey. It never was in my time."
Helen sighed. She wished it had remained possible for her also to
become one of Mr. Wingfold's pupils, but how could she now when she
had learned that what he had to teach was at best but a lovely
phantasm, sprung of the seething together of the conscience and
imagination. George could give account of the whole matter: religion
invariably excited the imagination and weakened the conscience;--witness
the innumerable tales concerning Jesus invented in the first of the
Christian centuries, and about this and that saint in those that
followed! Helen's experience in Leopold's case had certainly been
different, but the other fact remained. Alas, she could not be a pupil
of Mr. Wingfold! She could no longer deceive herself with such comfort.
And yet!--COME UNTO ME, AND _I_ WILL GIVE YOU REST.
"I do wish I could hear them," she said.
"And why not?" returned Rachel. "There is not one of them would not
be glad to see you. I know that."
"I am afraid I should hinder their talk. Would they speak just as
freely as if I were not there? Not that I know why they shouldn't,"
she added; "only the presence of any stranger--"
"You are no stranger to Mr. Wingfold or my uncle," said Rachel, "and
I daresay you know Mr. Drew?"
"To tell you the truth, Miss Polwarth, I have not behaved as I
should either to your uncle or Mr. Wingfold. I know it now that my
brother is gone. They were so good to him! I feel now as if I had
been possessed with an evil spirit. I could not bear them to be more
to him than I was. Oh, how I should like to hear what they are
saying! I feel as if I should get a glimpse of Leopold--almost, if I
might. But I couldn't face them all together. I could not go into
the room."
Rachel was silent for a moment, thinking. Then she said:
"I'll tell you what then: there's no occasion. Between my uncle's
room and mine there's a little closet, where you shall sit and hear
every word. Nothing will divide you from them but a few thin old
boards."
"That would hardly be honourable though--would it?"
"I will answer for it. I shall tell my uncle afterwards. There may
be cases where the motive makes the right or the wrong. It's not as
if you were listening to find out secrets. I shall be in the room,
and that will be a connecting link, you know: they never turn me
out. Come now. We don't know what we may be losing."
The desire to hear Leopold's best friends talk about him was strong
in Helen, but her heart misgave her: was it not unbecoming? She
would be in terror of discovery all the time. In the middle of the
stair, she drew Rachel back and whispered,
"I dare not do it."
"Come on," said Rachel. "Hear what I shall say to them first. After
that you shall do as you please."
Evidently, so quick was her response, her thoughts had been going in
the same direction as Helen's.
"Thank you for trusting me," she added, as Helen again followed her.
Arrived at the top, the one stood trembling, while the other went
into the room.
"Uncle," said Rachel, "I have a friend in the house who is very
anxious to hear you and our friends speak your minds to each other,
but for reasons does not wish to appear: will you allow my friend to
listen without being seen?"
"Is it your wish, Rachel, or are you only conveying the request of
another?" asked her uncle.
"It is my wish," answered Rachel. "I really desire it--if you do not
mind."
She looked from one to another as she spoke. The curate and the
draper indicated a full acquiescence.
"Do you know quite what you are about, Rachel?" asked Polwarth.
"Perfectly, uncle," she answered. "There is no reason why you should
not talk as freely as if you were talking only to me. I will put my
friend in the closet, and you need never think that anyone is in the
house but ourselves."
"Then I have no more to say," returned her uncle with a smile. "Your
FRIEND, whoever he or she may be, is heartily welcome."
Rachel rejoined Helen, who had already drawn nearer to the door of
the closet, and now seated herself right willingly in its shelter,
amidst an atmosphere odorous of apples and herbs. Already the talk
was going on just as before. At first each of the talkers did now
and then remember there was a listener unseen but found, when the
conversation came to a close, that he had for a long time forgotten
it.
CHAPTER XXVII.
WHAT HELEN HEARD,
Although satisfied that, after what Rachel had said to the men,
there could be no impropriety in her making use of the privilege
granted her, Helen felt oddly uncomfortable at first. But soon the
fancy came, that she was listening at the door of the other world to
catch news of her Leopold, and that made her forget herself and put
her at peace. For some time, however, the conversation was
absolutely unintelligible to her. She understood the words and
phrases, and even some of the sentences, but as she had no clue to
their drift, the effort to understand was like attempting to realize
the span of a rainbow from a foot or two of it appearing now and
then in different parts and vanishing again at once. It was chiefly
Polwarth, often Wingfold, and now and then Drew that spoke, Rachel
contributing only an occasional word. At length broke something of a
dawn over the seeming chaos. The words from which the light that
first reached Helen flowed, were the draper's.
"I can't think, for all that," he said, "why, if there be life
beyond the grave, and most sincerely I trust there is--I don't see
why we should know so little about it. Confess now, Mr.
Polwarth!--Mr. Wingfold!" he said appealingly, "--does it not seem
strange that, if our dearest friends go on living somewhere else,
they should, the moment they cease to breathe, pass away from us
utterly--so utterly that from that moment neither hint nor trace nor
sign of their existence ever reaches us? Nature, the Bible, God
himself says nothing about how they exist or where they are, or why
they are so silent--cruelly silent if it be in their power to
speak,--therefore, they cannot; and here we are left not only with
aching hearts but wavering faith, not knowing whither to turn to
escape the stare of the awful blank, that seems in the very
intensity of its silence to shout in our ears that we are but dust
and return to the dust!"
The gate-keeper and curate interchanged a pleased look of surprise
at the draper's eloquence, but Polwarth instantly took up his
answer.
"I grant you it would be strange indeed if there were no good reason
for it," he said.
"Then do you say," asked Wingfold. "that until we see, discover, or
devise some good reason for the darkness that overhangs it, we are
at liberty to remain in doubt as to whether there be any life within
the cloud?"
"I would say so," answered Polwarth, "were it not that we have the
story of Jesus, which, if we accept it, is surely enough to satisfy
us both as to the thing itself, and as to the existence of a good
reason, whether we have found one or not, for the mystery that
overshadows it."
"Still I presume we are not forbidden to seek such a reason," said
the curate.
The draper was glancing from the one to the other with evident
anxiety.
"Certainly not," returned the gate-keeper. "For what else is our
imagination given us but the discovery of good reasons that are, or
the invention of good reasons that may perhaps be?"
"Can you then imagine any good reason," said Drew, "why we should be
kept in such absolute ignorance of everything that befalls the
parted spirit from the moment it quits its house with us?"
"I think I know one," answered Polwarth. "I have sometimes fancied
it might be because no true idea of their condition could possibly
be grasped by those who remain in the tabernacle of the body; that
to know their state it is necessary that we also should be clothed
in our new bodies, which are to the old as a house to a tent. I
doubt if we have any words in which the new facts could be imparted
to our knowledge, the facts themselves being beyond the reach of any
senses whereof we are now in actual possession. I expect to find my
new body provided with new, I mean OTHER senses beyond what I now
possess: many more may be required to bring us into relation with
all the facts in himself which God may have shadowed forth in
properties, as we say, of what we call matter. The spaces all around
us, even to those betwixt star and star, may be the home of the
multitudes of the heavenly host, yet seemingly empty to all who have
but our provision of senses. But I do not care to dwell upon that
kind of speculation. It belongs to a lower region, upon which I
grudge to expend interest while the far loftier one invites me,
where, if I gather not the special barley of which I am in search, I
am sure to come upon the finest of wheat.--Well, then, for my
reason: There are a thousand individual events in the course of
every man's life, by which God takes a hold of him--a thousand
breaches by which he would and does enter, little as the man may
know it; but there is one universal and unchanging grasp he keeps
upon the race, yet not as the race, for the grasp is upon every
solitary single individual that has a part in it: that grasp
is--death in its mystery. To whom can the man who is about to die in
absolute loneliness and go he cannot tell whither, flee for refuge
from the doubts and fears that assail him, but to the Father of his
being?"
"But," said Drew, "I cannot see what harm would come of letting us
know a little--as much at least as might serve to assure us that
there was more of SOMETHING on the other side."
"Just this," returned Polwarth, "that, their fears allayed, their
hopes encouraged from any lower quarter, men would, as usual, turn
away from the fountain to the cistern of life, from the ever fresh
original creative Love to that drawn off and shut in. That there are
thousands who would forget God if they could but be assured of such
a tolerable state of things beyond the grave as even this wherein we
now live, is plainly to be anticipated from the fact that the doubts
of so many in respect of religion concentrate themselves now-a-days
upon the question whether there is any life beyond the grave; a
question which, although no doubt nearly associated with
religion,--as what question worth asking is not?--does not
immediately belong to religion at all. Satisfy such people, if you
can, that they shall live, and what have they gained? A little
comfort perhaps--but a comfort not from the highest source, and
possibly gained too soon for their well-being. Does it bring them
any nearer to God than they were before? Is he filling one cranny
more of their hearts in consequence? Their assurance of immortality
has not come from a knowledge of him, and without him it is worse
than worthless. Little indeed has been gained, and that with the
loss of much. The word applies here which our Lord in his parable
puts into the mouth of Abraham: If they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the
dead. He does not say they would not believe in a future state
though one rose from the dead--although most likely they would soon
persuade themselves that the apparition after all was only an
illusion--[Footnote: See Lynch's admirable sermon on this subject.]
but that they would not be persuaded to repent, though one rose from
the dead; and without that, what great matter whether they believed
in a future state or not? It would only be the worse for them if
they did. No, Mr. Drew! I repeat, it is not a belief in immortality
that will deliver a man from the woes of humanity, but faith in the
God of life, the father of lights, the God of all consolation and
comfort. Believing in him, a man can leave his friends, and their
and his own immortality, with everything else--even his and their
love and perfection, with utter confidence in his hands. Until we
have the life in us, we shall never be at peace. The living God
dwelling in the heart he has made, and glorifying it by inmost
speech with himself--that is life, assurance, and safety. Nothing
less is or can be such."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
WHAT HELEN HEARD MORE
"A word you dropped the other day," said the curate, "set me
thinking of the note-worthy fact that belief in God and belief in
immortality cease together. But I do not see the logic of it. If we
are here without God, why may we not go on there without God? I
marvel that I have heard of no one taking up and advocating the
view. What a grand discovery it would be for some people--that not
only was there no God to interfere with them, and insist on their
becoming something worth being, but that they were immortal
notwithstanding! that death was only the passage of another birth
into a condition of enlarged capacity for such bliss as they enjoyed
here, but more exalted in degree, perhaps in kind, and altogether
preferable."
"I know one to whom the thought would not have been a new one," said
Polwarth. "Have you not come upon a passage in my brother's
manuscript involving the very idea?"
"Not yet. I read very slowly and pick up all the crumbs. I wish we
had had the book here. I should have so much liked to hear you read
from it again."
The gate-keeper rose and went to his cabinet.
"The wish is easily gratified," he said. "I made a copy of
it,--partly for security, partly that I might thoroughly enter into
my brother's thoughts."
"I wonder almost you lend the original then," said Wingfold.
"I certainly could not lend the copy to any man I could not trust
with the original," answered Polwarth. "But I never lent either
before."--He was turning over the leaves as he spoke.--"The
passage," he went on, "besides for its own worth, is precious to me
as showing how, through all his madness, his thoughts haunted the
gates of wisdom.--Ah! here it is!
"'About this time I had another strange vision, whether in the body
or out of the body, I cannot tell. I thought, as oftener than once
before, that at length I was dying. And it seemed to me that I did
die, and awake to the consciousness of a blessed freedom from the
coarser and more ponderous outer dress I had hitherto worn, being
now clad only in what had been up to this time an inner garment, and
was a far more closely fitting one. The first delight of which I was
aware was coolness--a coolness that hurt me not--the coolness as of
a dewy summer eve, in which a soft friendly wind is blowing; and the
coolness was that of perfect well-being, of the health that cometh
after fever, when a sound sleep hath divided it away and built a
rampart between; the coolness of undoubted truth, and of love that
has surmounted passion and is tenfold love.'
"He goes on to give further and fuller account of his
sensations,--ventures even on the anticipated futility of an attempt
to convey a notion of one of his new senses. I leave all that for
your own reading, Mr. Wingfold.
"'But where was I? That I could not tell. I am here was all I could
say; but then what more could I ever have said?--Gradually my sight
came to me, or the light of the country arose, I could not tell
which, and behold, I was in the midst of a paradise, gorgeous yet
gracious, to describe which I find no words in the halting tongues
of earth, and I know something of them all, most of them well. If I
say a purple sea was breaking in light on an emerald shore, the
moment the words are written, I see them coarse and crude as a boy's
first attempt at landscape; yet are there no better wherewith to
tell what first filled my eyes with heavenly delight.
"'The inhabitants were many, but nowhere were they crowded. There
was room in abundance, and wild places seemed to be held sacred for
solitude.'
"I am only picking up a sentence here and there, as I hasten to the
particular point," said Polwarth, looking down the page.
"'But the flowers! and the birds! and above all the beauty of the
people! And they dwelt in harmony. Yet on their foreheads lay as it
seemed a faint mist, or as it were the first of a cloud of coming
disquiet.
"'And I prayed him, Tell me, sir, whither shall I go to find God and
say unto him, Lo, here I am! And he answered and said to me, Sir, I
but dimly know what thou meanest. Say further. And I stood for an
hour, even as one astonied. Then said I, All my long life on the
world whence I came, I did look to find God when death should take
me. But lo, now--And with that my heart smote me, for in my former
life I had oftentimes fallen into unbelief and denied God: was this
now my punishment--that I should never find him? And my heart grew
cold in my body, and the blood curdled therein. Then the man
answered and said, It is true that in generations past, for so I
read in our ancient books, men did believe in one above them and in
them, who had wrought them to that they were, and was working them
to better still; but whether it be that we have now gained that
better, and there is nothing higher unto which we may look,
therefore no need of the high one, I know not, but truly we have
long ceased so to believe, and have learned that, as things are, so
they have been, and so they shall be. Then fell as it were a cold
stone into the core of my heart, and I questioned him no farther,
for I bore death in my heart, even as a woman carrieth her unborn
child. No God! I cried, and sped away into a solitude and shrieked
aloud, No God! Nay, but ere I believe it, I will search through all
creation, and cry aloud as I go. I will search until I find him, and
if I find him not,--. With that my soul would have fainted in me,
had I not spread forth my wings and rushed aloft to find him.
"'For the more lovely anything I saw, the more gracious in colour or
form, or the more marvellous in the law of its working, ever a fresh
pang shot to my heart: if that which I had heard should prove true,
then was there no Love such as seemed to me to dwell therein, the
soul of its beauty, and all the excellence thereof was but a
delusion of my own heart, greedy after a phantom perfection. No God!
no Love! no loveliness, save a ghastly semblance thereof! and the
more ghastly that it was so like loveliness, and yet was not to be
loved upon peril of prostitution of spirit. Then in truth was heaven
a fable, and hell an all-embracing fact! for my very being knew in
itself that if it would dwell in peace, the very atmosphere in which
it lived and moved and breathed must be love, living love, a one
divine presence, truth to itself, and love to me, and to all them
that needed love, down to the poorest that can but need it, and
knoweth it not when it cometh. I knew that if love was not all in
all, in fact as well as in imagination, my life was but a dreary
hollow made in the shape of a life, and therefore for ever hungry
and never to be satisfied. And again I spread wings--no longer as it
seemed of hope, but wings of despair, yet mighty, and flew. And I
learned thereafter that despair is but the hidden side of hope.'
"Here follow pages of his wanderings in quest of God. He tells how
and where he inquired and sought, searching into the near and minute
as earnestly as into the far and vast, watching at the very pores of
being, and sitting in the gates of the mighty halls of assembly--but
all in vain. No God was to be found.
"'And it seemed to me,' he says at last, 'that, as I had been the
wanderer of earth, so was I now doomed to be the wanderer of heaven.
On earth I wandered to find death, and men called me the everlasting
Jew; in heaven I wandered to find God, and what name would they give
me now?
"'At last my heart sank within me wholly, and I folded my wings, and
through years I also sank and sank, and alighted at length upon the
place appointed for my habitation--that namely wherein I found
myself first after death. And alighting there, I fell down weary and
slept.
"'And when I awoke I turned upon my side in the despair of a life
that was neither in my own power nor in that of one who was the
Father of me, which life therefore was an evil thing and a tyrant
unto me. And lo! there by my side I beheld a lily of the field such
as grew on the wayside in the old times betwixt Jerusalem and
Bethany. Never since my death had I seen such, and my heart awoke
within me, and I wept bitter tears that nothing should be true,
nothing be that which it had seemed in the times of old. And as I
wept I heard a sound as of the falling of many tears, and I looked,
and lo a shower as from a watering-pot falling upon the lily! And I
looked yet again, and I saw the watering-pot, and the hand that held
it; and he whose hand held the pot stood by me and looked at me as
he watered the lily. He was a man like the men of the world where
such lilies grow, and was poorly dressed, and seemed like a
gardener. And I looked up in his face, and lo--the eyes of the Lord
Jesus! and my heart swelled until it filled my whole body and my
head, and I gave a great cry, and for joy that turned into agony I
could not rise, neither could I speak, but I crept on my hands and
my knees to his feet, and there I fell down upon my face, and with
my hands I lifted one of his feet and did place it upon my head, and
then I found voice to cry, O master! and therewith the life departed
from me. And when I came to myself the master sat under the tree,
and I lay by his side, and he had lifted my head upon his knees. And
behold, the world was jubilant around me, for Love was Love and Lord
of all. The sea roared, and the fulness thereof was love; and the
purple and the gold and the blue and the green came straight from
the hidden red heart of the Lord Jesus. And I closed my eyes for
very bliss; nor had I yet bethought me of the time when first those
eyes looked upon me, for I seemed to have known them since first I
began to be. But now when for very bliss I closed my eyes, my sin
came back to me, and I remembered. And I rose up, and kneeled down
before him, and said, O Lord, I am Ahasuerus the Jew, the man who
would not let thee rest thy cross upon the stone before my workshop,
but drave thee from it.--Say no more of that, answered my Lord, for
truly I have myself rested in thy heart, cross and all, until the
thing thou diddest in thy ignorance is better than forgotten, for it
is remembered in love. Only see thou also make right excuse for my
brethren who, like thee then, know not now what they do. Come and I
will bring thee to the woman who died for thee in the burning fire.
And I said, O Lord, leave me not, for although I would now in my
turn right gladly die for her, yet would I not look upon that woman
again if the love of her would make me love thee one hair the less--
thou knowest. And the Lord smiled upon me and said, Fear not,
Ahasuerus; my love infolds and is the nest of all love. I fear not;
fear thou not either. And I arose and followed him. And every tree
and flower, yea every stone and cloud, with the whole earth and sea
and air, were full of God, even the living God--so that now I could
have died of pure content. And I followed my Lord.'"
The gate-keeper was silent, and so were they all. At length Rachel
rose softly, wiping the tears from her eyes, and left the room. But
she found no one in the closet. Helen was already hastening across
the park, weeping as she went.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE CURATE'S RESOLVE.
The next day was Sunday.
Twelve months had not yet elapsed since the small events with which
my narrative opened. The change which had passed, not merely upon
the opinions, but in the heart and mind and very being of the
curate, had not then begun to appear even to himself, although its
roots were not only deep in him but deep beyond him, even in the
source of him; and now he was in a state of mind, a state of being,
rather, of whose nature at that time he had not, and could not have
had, the faintest fore-feeling, the most shadowy conception. It had
been a season of great trouble, but the gain had been infinitely
greater; for now were the bonds of the finite broken, he had burst
the shell of the mortal, and was of those over whom the second death
hath no power. The agony of the second birth was past, and he was a
child again--only a child, he knew, but a child of the kingdom; and
the world, and all that God cared about in it, was his, as no
miser's gold could ever belong to its hoarder, while the created
universe, yea and the uncreated also whence it sprang, lay open to
him in the boundless free-giving of the original Thought. "All
things are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's:" he
understood the words even as he who said them understood them, and
as the wise of this world never will understand them until first
they become fools that they may be wise.
At the same time a great sorrow threatened him from the no less
mysterious region of his relations to humanity; but if that region
and its most inexplicable cares were beyond the rule of the Life
that dwelt in him, then was that Life no true God, and the whole
thing was false; for he loved Helen with a love that was no
invention or creation of his own, and if not his, then whose?
Certainly not of one who, when it threatened to overwhelm him, was
unable to uphold him under it! This thing also belonged to the God
of his being. A poor God must he be for men or women who did not
care about the awful things involved in the relation between them!
Therefore even in his worst anxieties about Helen,--I do not mean in
his worst seasons of despair at the thought of never gaining her
love--he had never yet indeed consciously regarded the winning of
her as a possibility--but at those times when he most plainly saw
her the submissive disciple of George Bascombe, and the two seemed
to his fancy to be straying away together "into a wide field, full
of dark mountains;" when he saw her, so capable of the noblest,
submitting her mind to the entrance of the poorest, meanest,
shabbiest theories of life, and taking for her guide one who could
lead her to no conscious well-being, or make provision for
sustainment when the time of suffering and anxiety should come, or
the time of health and strength be over when yet she must live on;
when he saw her adopting a system of things whose influence would
shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush her
imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above
Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and
condition of an Aztec--even then was he able to reason with himself:
"She belongs to God, not to me; and God loves her better than ever I
could love her. If she should set out with her blind guide, it will
be but a first day's journey she will go--through marshy places and
dry sands, across the far breadth of which, lo! the blue mountains
that shelter the high vales of sweetness and peace." And with this
he not only tried to comfort himself, but succeeded--I do not say to
contentment, but to quiet. Contentment, which, whatever its
immediate shape, to be contentment at all, must be the will of God,
lay beyond. Alas that men cannot believe there is such a thing as
"that good and acceptable and perfect will of God!" To those that do
believe it, it is the rejoicing of a conscious deliverance.
And now this Sunday, Wingfold entered the pulpit prepared at last to
utter his resolve. Happily nothing had been done to introduce the
confusing element of another will. The bishop had heard nothing of
the matter, and if anything had reached the rector, he had not
spoken. Not one of the congregation, not even Mrs. Ramshorn, had
hinted to him that he ought to resign. It had been left altogether
with himself. And now he would tell them the decision to which the
thought he had taken had conducted him. I will give a portion of his
sermon--enough to show us how he showed the congregation the state
of his mind in reference to the grand question, and the position he
took in relation to his hearers.
"It is time, my hearers," he said, "because it is now possible, to
bring to a close that uncertainty with regard to the continuance of
our relation to each other, which I was, in the spring-time of the
year, compelled by mental circumstance to occasion. I then forced
myself, for very dread of the honesty of an all-knowing God, to
break through every convention of the church and the pulpit, and
speak to you of my most private affairs. I told you that I was sure
of not one of those things concerning which it is taken for granted
that a clergyman must be satisfied; but that I would not at once
yield my office, lest in that act I should seem to declare unbelief
of many a thing which even then I desired to find true. In leaving
me undisturbed either by complaint, expostulation, or proffered
instruction, you, my hearers, have granted me the leisure of which I
stood in need. Meantime I have endeavoured to show you the best I
saw, while yet I dared not say I was sure of anything. I have thus
kept you, those at least who cared to follow my path, acquainted
with my mental history. And now I come to tell you the practical
result at which I have arrived.
"But when I say that I will not forsake my curacy, still less my
right and duty to teach whatever I seem to know, I must not therein
convey the impression that I have attained that conviction and
assurance the discovery of the absence of which was the cause of the
whole uncertain proceeding. All I now say is, that in the story of
Jesus I have beheld such grandeur--to me apparently altogether
beyond the reach of human invention, such a radiation of divine
loveliness and truth, such hope for man, soaring miles above every
possible pitfall of Fate; and have at the same time, from the
endeavour to obey the word recorded as his, experienced such a
conscious enlargement of mental faculty, such a deepening of moral
strength, such an enhancement of ideal, such an increase of faith,
hope, and charity towards all men, that I now declare with the
consent of my whole man--I cast in my lot with the servants of the
Crucified; I am content even to share their delusion, if delusion it
be, for it is the truth of the God of men to me; I will stand or
fall with the story of my Lord; I will take my chance--I speak not
in irreverence but in honesty--my chance of failure or success in
regard to whatever may follow in this life or the life to come, if
there be a life to come--on the words and will of the Lord Jesus
Christ, whom if, impressed as I am with the truth of his nature, the
absolute devotion of his life, and the essential might of his being,
I yet obey not, I shall not only deserve to perish, but in that very
refusal draw ruin upon my head. Before God I say it--I would rather
be crucified with that man, so it might be as a disciple and not as
a thief that creeps, intrudes, or climbs into the fold, than I would
reign with him over such a kingdom of grandeur as would have
satisfied the imagination and love-ambition of his mother. On such
grounds as these I hope I am justified in declaring myself a
disciple of the Son of Man, and in devoting my life and the renewed
energy and enlarged, yea infinite hope which he has given me, to his
brothers and sisters of my race, that if possible I may gain some to
be partakers of the blessedness of my hope. Henceforth I am, not IN
HOLY ORDERS, I reject the phrase, but UNDER holy orders, even the
orders of Christ Jesus, which is the law of liberty, the law whose
obedience alone can set a man free from in-burrowing slavery.
"And if any man yet say that, because of my lack of absolute
assurance, I have no right to the sacred post,--Let him, I answer,
who has been assailed by such doubts as mine, and from the citadel
of his faith sees no more one lingering shadow of a foe--let him
cast at me the first stone! Vain challenge! for such a one will
never cast a stone at man or woman. But let not him whose belief is
but the absence of doubt, who has never loved enough that which he
thinks he believes to have felt a single fear lest it should not be
true--let not that man, I say, cast at me pebble from the brook, or
cloven rock from the mount of the law, for either will fall hurtless
at my feet. Friends, I have for the last time spoken of myself in
this place. Ye have borne with me in my trials, and I thank you.
Those who have not only borne but suffered, and do now rejoice with
me, I thank tenfold. I have done--
"Save for one word to the Christians of this congregation:
"The waves of infidelity are coming in with a strong wind and a
flowing tide. Who is to blame? God it cannot be, and for
unbelievers, they are as they were. It is the Christians who are to
blame. I do not mean those who are called Christians, but those who
call and count themselves Christians. I tell you, and I speak to
each one of whom it is true, that you hold and present such a
withered, starved, miserable, death's-head idea of Christianity;
that you are yourselves such poverty-stricken believers, if
believers you are at all; that the notion you present to the world
as your ideal, is so commonplace, so false to the grand, gracious,
mighty-hearted Jesus--that YOU are the cause why the truth hangs its
head in patience, and rides not forth on the white horse, conquering
and to conquer. You dull its lustre in the eyes of men; you deform
its fair proportions; you represent not that which it is, but that
which it is not, yet call yourselves by its name; you are not the
salt of the earth, but a salt that has lost its savour, for ye seek
all things else first, and to that seeking the kingdom of God and
his righteousness shall never be added. Until you repent and believe
afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by
himself, and not the muffled form of something vaguely human and
certainly not all divine, which the false interpretations of men
have substituted for him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the
main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes
in like a flood. For the sake of the progress of the truth, and that
into nobler minds than yours, it were better you joined the ranks of
the enemy, and declared what I fear with many of you is the fact,
that you believe not at all. But whether in some sense you believe
or not, the fact remains, that, while you are not of those
Christians who obey the word of the master, DOING the things he says
to them, you are of those Christians, if you WILL be called by the
name, to whom he will say, I never knew you: go forth into the outer
darkness. Then at least will the church be rid of you, and the
honest doubter will have room to breathe the divine air of the
presence of Jesus.
"But oh what unspeakable bliss of heart and soul and mind and sense
remains for him who like St. Paul is crucified with Christ, who
lives no more from his own self, but is inspired and informed and
possessed with the same faith towards the Father in which Jesus
lived and wrought the will of the Father! If the words attributed to
Jesus are indeed the words of him whom Jesus declared himself, then
truly is the fate of mankind a glorious one,--and that, first and
last, because men have a God supremely grand, all-perfect in
God-head; for that is, and that alone can be, the absolute bliss of
the created."
CHAPTER XXX.
HELEN AWAKE.
That Sunday-dinner was a very quiet meal. An old friend of Mrs.
Ramshorn, a lady-ecclesiastic like herself, dined with them; what
the two may have said to each other in secret conclave, I cannot
tell, but not a word of remark upon Mr. Wingfold or his sermon was
heard at table.
As she was leaving the room, Bascombe whispered Helen to put on
something and come to him in the garden. Helen glanced at the window
as if doubtful. It was cold, but the sun was shining; the weather
had nothing to do with it; she had but taken a moment to think. She
pressed her lips together--and consented. George saw she would
rather not go, but he set it down to a sisterly unwillingness to
enjoy herself when her brother could no longer behold the sun, and
such mere sentiment must not be encouraged.
When the cypresses and box-trees had come betwixt them and the
house, he offered his arm, but Helen preferred being free. She did
not refuse to go into the summer-house with him; but she took her
place on the opposite side of the little table. George however spied
no hint of approaching doom.
"I am sorry to have to alter my opinion of that curate," he said as
he seated himself. "There was so much in him that I took to promise
well. But old habit, the necessities of existence, and the fear of
society have been too much for him--as they will always be for most
men. He has succumbed at last, and I am sorry! I did think he was
going to turn out an honest man!"
"And you have come to the certain conclusion that he is not an
honest man, George?"
"Assuredly."
"Why?"
"Because he goes on to teach what he confesses he is not sure
about."
"He professes to be sure that it is better than anything he is sure
about.--You teach me there is no God: are you absolutely certain
there is not?"
"Yes; absolutely certain."
"On what grounds?"
"On grounds I have set forth to you twenty times, Helen, dear,"
answered George a little impatiently. "I am not inclined to talk
about them now.--I can no more believe in a god than in a dragon."
"And yet a dragon was believable to the poets that made our old
ballads; and now geology reveals that some-such creatures did at one
time actually exist."
"Ah! you turn the tables on me there, Helen! I confess my parallel a
false one."
"A truer one than you think, perhaps," said Helen. "That a thing
should seem absurd to one man, or to a thousand men, will not make
it absurd in its own nature; and men as good and as clever as you,
George, have in all ages believed in a God. Only their notion of God
may have been different from yours. Perhaps their notion was a
believable one, while yours is not."
"By Jove, Helen! you've got on with your logic. I feel quite
flattered! So far as I am aware you have had no tutor in that branch
but myself! You'll soon be too much for your master, by Jove!"
Like the pied piper, Helen smiled a little smile. But she said
seriously,
"Well, George, all I have to suggest is--What if, after all your
inability to believe it, things should at last prove, even to your--
satisfaction, shall I say?--that there IS a God?"
"Don't trouble yourself a bit about it, Helen," returned George,
whose mind was full of something else, to introduce which he was
anxiously, and heedlessly, clearing the way: "I am prepared to take
my chance, and all I care about is whether you will take your chance
with me. Helen, I love you with my whole soul."
"Oh! you have a soul, then, George? I thought you hadn't!"
"It IS a foolish form of speech, no doubt," returned Bascombe, a
little disconcerted, as was natural. "--But to be serious, Helen, I
do love you."
"How long will you love me if I tell you I don't love you?"
"Really, Helen, I don't see how to answer such a question. I don't
understand you at all to-day! Have I offended you? I am very sorry
if I have, but I am quite in the dark as to when or where or how."
"Tell me then," said Helen, heedless of his evident annoyance and
discomfort, "how long will you love me if I love you in return?"
"For ever and ever."
"Another form of speech?"
"You know what I mean well enough. I shall love you as long as I
live."
"George, I never could love a man who believed I was going to die
for ever."
"But, Helen," pleaded Bascombe, "if it can't be helped, you know!"
"But you are content it should be so. You believe it willingly. You
scoff at any hint of a possible immortality."
"Well, but, Helen, what difference can it make between you and me?"
returned George, whom the danger of losing her had rendered for the
moment indifferent even to his most cherished theory. "If there
should be anything afterwards, of course I should go on loving you
to the very extreme of the possible."
"While now you don't love me enough to wish I may live and not die!
Leaving that out of view however, it makes all the difference to the
love I should have to expect of you. It may be only a whim--I can
prove nothing any more than you--but I have a--whim then--to be
loved as an immortal woman, the child of a living God, and not as a
helpless bastard of Nature!--I beg your pardon--I forget my
manners."
That a lady should utter such a word!--and that lady, Helen!--George
was shocked. Coming on the rest, it absolutely bewildered him. He
sat silent perforce. Helen saw it, and yielded to a moment's
annoyance with herself, but presently resumed:
"I have given you the advantage, George, and wronged myself. But I
don't care MUCH. I shall only take the better courage to speak my
mind.--You come asking me to love you, and my brother lying
mouldering in the earth--all there is of him, you tell me! If you
believed he was alive still, and I should find him again some day,
there would be no reason why you should not speak of love even now;
for where does anyone need love more than at the brink of the grave?
But to come talking of love to me, with the same voice that has but
just been teaching me that the grave is the end of all, and my
brother gone down into it for ever--I tell you, cousin--I must say
it--it seems to me hardly decent. For me at least--I will NOT be
loved with the love that can calmly accept such a fate. And I will
never love any man, believing that, if I outlive him, my love must
thereafter be but a homeless torrent, falling ever into a bottomless
abyss. Why should I make of my heart a roaring furnace of regrets
and self-accusations? The memory of my brother is for me enough. Let
me keep what freedom is possible to me; let me rather live the life
of a cold-blooded animal, and die in the ice that gathers about me.
But before I sit down to await such an end, I shall know whether I
am indeed compelled to believe as you do that there is no God, that
Death is my lord and master, that he will take me as he has taken my
brother and yet I shall never see him more. No, cousin George, I
need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one? Yes, I
know you think you can explain it all, but the way you account for
it is just as miserable as what you would put in its place. I am not
complete in myself like you. I am not able to live without a God. I
will seek him until I find him, or drop into the abyss where all
question and answer ceases. Then in the end I shall be no worse than
you would have me at the beginning--no, it will be nothing so bad,
for then I shall not know my misery as you would have me know it
now. If we are creatures of nothing, in spite of all the outcry of
our souls against that fate, what mighty matter is it if, thus
utterly befooled of Nature, we should also a little fool ourselves,
by believing in a lovely hope that looks like a promise, and seems
as if it ought to be true? How can a devotion to the facts of her
existence be required of one whose nature has been proved to her a
lie?--You speak from the facts of your nature, George; I speak from
the facts of mine."
Helen had come awake at last! It would have suited George better had
she remained a half-quickened statue, responsive only to himself,
her not over-potent Pygmalion. He sat speechless--with his eyes
fixed on her.
"You need no God," she went on, "therefore you seek none. If you
need none, you are right to seek none, I dare say. But I need a
God--oh, I cannot tell how I need him, if he be to be found! and by
the same reasoning I will give my life to the search for him. To the
last I will go on seeking him, for if once I give in, and confess
there is no God, I shall go mad--mad, and perhaps kill somebody
like poor Poldie. George, I have said my say. I would not have come
into the garden but to say it. Good-bye."
As she spoke she rose and held out her hand to him. But in the
tumult of more emotions than I can well name--amongst the rest
indignation, dismay, disappointment, pride, and chagrin, he lost
himself while searching in vain for words, paid no heed to her
movement, and lifted no hand to take that she offered.
With head erect she walked from the summer-house.
"The love of a lifetime!--a sweet invitation!" she said to herself,
as with the slow step of restrained wrath she went up the garden.
George sat for some minutes as she had left him. Then he broke the
silence in his own ears and said,
"Well, I'm damned!"
And so he was--for the time--and a very good thing too, for he
required it.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THOU DIDST NOT LEAVE.
The next day the curate found himself so ill at ease, from the
reaction after excitement of various kinds, that he determined to
give himself a holiday. His notion of a holiday was a very simple
one: a day in a deep wood, if such could be had, with a volume fit
for alternate reading and pocketing as he might feel inclined. Of
late no volume had been his companion in any wanderings but his New
Testament.
There was a remnant of real old-fashioned forest on the Lythe, some
distance up: thither he went by the road, the shortest way, to
return by the winding course of the stream. It was a beautiful day
of St. Martin's summer. In the forest, if the leaves were gone,
there was the more light, and sun and shadow played many a lovely
game. But he saw them as though he saw them not, for fear and hope
struggled in his heart, and for a long time prayer itself could not
atone them. At length a calm fell, and he set out to return home,
down the bank of the river.
Many-hued and many-shaped had been the thoughts, not that came to
him from the forest, but that he had carried thither with him:
through all and each of them, ever and again had come dawning the
face of Helen, as he had seen it in church the day before, where she
sat between her aunt and her cousin, so unlike either. For, to their
annoyance, she had insisted on going to church, and to hers, they
had refused to let her go alone. And in her face the curate had seen
something he had never seen there until then,--a wistful look, as if
now she would be glad to pick up any suitable crumb to carry home
with her. In that dawn of coming childhood, though he dared not yet
altogether believe it such, the hard contemptuous expression of
Bascombe's countenance, and the severe disapproval in Mrs.
Ramshorn's, were entirely lost upon him.
All the way down the river, the sweet change haunted him. When he
got into the park, and reached that hollow betwixt the steep ferny
slopes where he sat on the day with which my narrative opens, he
seated himself again on the same stone, and reviewed the past twelve
months. This was much such a day as that, only the hour was
different: it was the setting sun that now shone upon the ferns, and
cast shadows from them big enough for oaks. What a change had passed
upon him! That day the New Testament had been the book of the
church--this day it was a fountain of living waters to the man
Thomas Wingfold. He had not opened his Horace for six months. Great
trouble he had had; both that and its results were precious. Now a
new trouble had come, but that also was a form of life: he would
rather love and suffer and love still, a thousand times rather, than
return to the poverty of not knowing Helen Lingard; yet a thousand
times rather would he forget Helen Lingard than lose from his heart
one word of the Master, whose love was the root and only pledge and
security of love, the only power that could glorify it--could
cleanse it from the mingled selfishness that wrought for its final
decay and death.
The sun was down ere he left the park, and the twilight was rapidly
following the sun as he drew near to the Abbey on his way home.
Suddenly, more like an odour than a sound, he heard the organ, he
thought. Never yet had he heard it on a week-day: the organist was
not of those who haunt their instrument. Often of late had the
curate gazed on that organ as upon a rock filled with sweet waters,
before which he stood a Moses without his rod; sometimes the solemn
instrument appeared to him a dumb Jeremiah that sat there from
Sunday to Sunday, all the week long, with his head bowed upon his
hands, and not a Jebusite to listen to him: if only his fingers had
been taught the craft, he thought, how his soul would pour itself
out through the song-tubes of that tabernacle of sweetness and
prayer, and on the blast of its utterance ascend to the throne of
the most high! Who could it be that was now peopling the silence of
the vast church with melodious sounds, worshipping creatures of the
elements? If the winds and the flames of fire are his augels, how
much more the grandly consorting tones of the heavenly organ! He
would go and see what power informed the vaporous music.
He entered the church by one of the towers, in which a stair led
skyward, passing the neighbourhood of the organ, and having a door
to its loft. As he ascended, came a pause in the music;--and then,
like the breaking up of a summer cloud in the heavenliest of
rain-showers, began the prelude to the solo in the Messiah, THOU
DIDST NOT LEAVE HIS SOUL IN HELL. Up still the curate crept softly.
All at once a rich full contralto voice--surely he had heard it
before--came floating out on the torrent, every tone bearing a word
of sorrowful triumph in its bosom.
He reached the door. Very gently he opened it, and peeped in. But
the back of the organ was towards him, and he could see nothing. He
stepped upon the tiles of the little apse. One stride cleared the
end of the organ, and he saw the face of the singer: it WAS Helen
Lingard!
She started. The music folded its wings and dropped--like a lark
into its nest. But Helen recovered herself at once, rose from her
ministration at the music-altar, and approached the curate.
"Have I taken too great a liberty?" she said, in a gentle, steady
voice.
"No, surely," he answered. "I am sorry I startled you. I wish you
would wake such sounds oftener."
"He didn't leave my brother's soul in hell, did he, Mr. Wingfold?"
she said abruptly, and her eyes shone through the dusk.
"If ever a soul was taken out of hell, it was Leopold's," returned
the curate. "And it lifts mine out of it too," he added, "to hear
you say so."
"I behaved very badly to you. I confess my fault. Will you forgive
me?" she said.
"I love you too much to be able to forgive you:" that was the word
in the curate's heart, but a different found its way to his lips.
"My heart is open to you, Miss Lingard," he said: "take what
forgiveness you think you need. For what I can tell, it may be my
part to ask forgiveness, not to grant it. If I have been harder to
you than there was need, I pray you to forgive me. Perhaps I did not
enter enough into your difficulties."
"You never said one word more than was right, or harder than I
deserved. Alas! I can no more--in this world at least--ask Leopold
to forgive me, but I can ask you and Mr. Polwarth, who were as the
angels of God to him, to pardon me for him and for yourselves too. I
was obstinate and proud and selfish.--Oh, Mr. Wingfold, can you, do
you really believe that Leopold is somewhere? Is he alive this
moment? Shall I ever--ever--I don't mind if it's a thousand years
first--but shall I EVER see him again?"
"I do think so. I think the story must be true that tells us Jesus
took to himself again the body he left on the cross, and brought it
with him out of its grave."
"Will you take me for a pupil--a disciple--and teach me to
believe--or hope, if you like that word better--as you do?" said
Helen humbly.
How the heart of the curate beat--like the drum of a praising
orchestra!
"Dear Miss Lingard," he answered, very solemnly, "I can teach you
nothing; I can but show you where I found what has changed my life
from a bleak November to a sunny June--with its thunder-storms no
doubt--but still June beside November. Perhaps I could help you a
little if you were really set out to find Jesus, but you must
yourself set out. It is you who must find him. Words of mine, as the
voice of one crying in the wilderness, may let you know that one is
near who thinks he sees him, but it is you who must search, and you
who must find. If you do search, you will find, with or without help
of mine.--But it is getting dark.--You have the key of the north
door, I suppose?"
"Yes."
"Then will you lock the door, and take the key to Mrs. Jenkins. I
will stay here a while, and then follow you home, if you will allow
we, where we can have a little talk together. Ah, what an anthem the
silent organ will play for me!"
Helen turned and went down into the church, and thence home.
The curate remained with the organ. It was silent, and so were his
lips, but his heart--the music was not latent there, for his praise
and thanksgiving ascended, without voice or instrument, essential
harmony, to the ear that hears thought, and the heart that vibrates
to every chord of feeling in the hearts it has created. Ah! what is
it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or
a sweetness and a grace? Alone in the dusky church, the curate's
ascended like a song of the angels, for his heart was all a
thanksgiving--not for any perfected gift, but for many a lovely
hope. He knelt down by the organ and worshipped the God and Father
of the Lord Jesus Christ--that God and no other was the God of his
expectation. When he rose from his knees, the church was dark, but
through the windows of the clerestory many stars were shining.
THE END.
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