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The Ravens and the Angels, with Other Stories and Parables

by Elizabeth Rundle Charles · English · Gutenberg #35346 · 426,820 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ravens and the Angels, with Other Stories and Parables

Author: Elizabeth Rundle Charles


        
Release date: February 21, 2011 [eBook #35346]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35346

Credits: E-text prepared by Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif, Josephine Paolucci, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RAVENS AND THE ANGELS, WITH OTHER STORIES AND PARABLES ***


E-text prepared by Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif, Josephine Paolucci, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



THE RAVENS AND THE ANGELS:

With Other Stories and Parables.

by

MRS. RUNDLE CHARLES

Author of
"The Schoenberg-Cotta Family," &c. &c.







London:
T. Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row.
Edinburgh; and New York.
1894
All Rights Reserved.




Contents.


   THE RAVENS AND THE ANGELS,                      7

   ECCE HOMO,                                     33

   THE COTTAGE BY THE CATHEDRAL,                  59

   THE UNKNOWN ARCHITECT OF THE MINSTER,          69

   ONLY THE CRYPT,                                74

   THE SEPULCHRE AND THE SHRINE,                  80

   THE CATHEDRAL CHIMES,                          91

   THE RUINED TEMPLE,                             98

   THE CLOCK-BELL AND THE ALARM-BELL,            106

   THE BLACK SHIP,                               109

   THE ISLAND AND THE MAIN LAND,                 125

   THE JEWEL OF THE ORDER OF THE KING'S OWN,     137

   THE ACORN,                                    148

   PASSAGES FROM THE LIFE OF A FERN,             153

   THORNS AND SPINES,                            158

   PARABLES IN HOUSEHOLD THINGS,                 161

   "THINGS USING US,"                            166

   SUNSHINE, DAYLIGHT, AND THE ROCK,             170

   WANDERERS AND PILGRIMS,                       172

   THE ARK AND THE FORTRESS,                     175

   THE THREE DREAMS,                             178

   THOU AND I,                                   183

   WHAT MAKES THINGS MUSICAL,                    187

   THE SONG WITHOUT WORDS,                       192




_The Ravens and the Angels._

A STORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.


I.

In those old days, in that old city, they called the Cathedral--and they
thought it--the house of God. The Cathedral was the Father's house for
all, and therefore it was loved and honoured, and enriched with lavish
treasures of wealth and work, beyond any other father's house.

The Cathedral was the Father's house, and therefore close to its gates
might nestle the poor dwellings of the poor,--too poor to find a shelter
anywhere besides; because the central life and joy of the house of God
was the suffering, self-sacrificing Son of Man; and dearer to Him, now
and for ever, as when He was on earth, was the feeblest and most fallen
human creature He had redeemed than the most glorious heavenly
constellation of the universe He had made.

And so it happened that when Berthold, the stone-carver, died, Magdalis,
his young wife, and her two children, then scarcely more than babes,
Gottlieb and little Lenichen, were suffered to make their home in the
little wooden shed which had once sheltered a hermit, and which nestled
into the recess close to the great western gate of the Minster.

Thus, while, inside, from the lofty aisles pealed forth, night and day,
the anthems of the choir, close outside, night and day, rose also, even
more surely, to God, the sighs of a sorrowful woman and the cries of
little children whom all her toil could hardly supply with bread.
Because, He hears the feeblest wail of want, though it comes not from a
dove or even from a harmless sparrow, but a young raven. And He does
_not_ heed the sweetest anthem of the fullest choir, if it is a mere
pomp of sound. Because, while the best love of His meanest creatures is
precious to Him, the second-best of His loftiest creatures is
intolerable to Him. He heeds the shining of the drops of dew and the
rustling of the blades of grass. But from creatures who can love He
cannot accept the mere outside offering of creatures which can only make
a pleasant sound.

All this, or such as this, the young mother Magdalis taught her babes as
they could bear it.

For they needed such lessons.

The troubles of the world pressed on them very early, in the shape
little children can understand--little hands and feet nipped with frost,
hunger and darkness and cold.

Not that the citizens of that city were hypocrites, singing the praises
of God, whilst they let His dear Lazaruses vainly crave at their gates
for their crumbs. But Magdalis was very tender and timid, and a little
proud; proud not for herself, but for her husband and his babes. And she
was also feeble in health. She was an orphan herself, and she had
married, against the will of her kindred in a far-off city, the young
stone-carver, whose genius they did not appreciate, whose labour and
skill had made life so rich and bright to his family while he lived, and
whose early death had left them all so desolate.

For his dear sake, she would not complain. For herself it had been
easier to die, and for his sake she would not bring the shame of beggary
on his babes. Better for them to enter into this life maimed of
strength, she thought, by meagre food, than tainted with the taint of
beggary.

Rather, she thought, would their father himself have seen them go hungry
to bed than deserve that the fingers of other children should be pointed
scornfully at them as "the little beggars by the church door," the door
of the church in which she gloried to think there were stones of his
carving.

So she toiled on, carving for sale little devotional symbols--crosses,
and reliquaries, and lilies, and lambs--with the skill she had learnt
from him, and teaching the little ones, as best she could, to love and
work and suffer. Only teaching them, perhaps, not quite enough to
_hope_. For the lamp of hope burnt low in her own heart, and therefore
her patience, not being enough the patience of hope, lacked something of
sweetness. It never broke downward into murmurs, but it too seldom
soared upward into praise.

So it happened that one frosty night, about Christmas-tide, little
Gottlieb lay awake, very hungry, on the ledge of the wall, covered with
straw, which served him for a bed.

It had once been the hermit's bed. And very narrow Gottlieb thought it
must have been for the hermit, for more than once he had been in peril
of falling over the side, in his restless tossings. He supposed the
hermit was too good to be restless, or perhaps too good for the dear
angels to think it good for him to be hungry, as they evidently did
think it good for Gottlieb and Lenichen, or they would be not good
angels at all, to let them hunger so often, not even as kind as the
ravens which took the bread to Elijah when they were told. For the dear
Heavenly Father had certainly told the angels always to take care of
little children.

The more Gottlieb lay awake and tossed and thought, the further off the
angels seemed.

For, all the time, under the pillow lay one precious crust of bread, the
last in the house until his mother should buy the loaf to-morrow.

He had saved it from his supper in an impulse of generous pity for his
little sister, who so often awoke, crying with hunger, and woke his poor
mother, and would not let her go to sleep again.

He had thought how sweet it would be, when Lenichen awoke the next
morning, to appear suddenly, as the angels do, at the side of the bed
where she lay beside her mother, and say,--

"Dear Lenichen! see, God has sent you this bit of bread as a Christmas
gift."

For the next day was Christmas Eve.

This little plan made Gottlieb so happy that at first it felt as good to
him as eating the bread.

But the happy thought, unhappily, did not long content the hungry animal
part of him, which craved, in spite of him, to be filled; and, as the
night went on, he was sorely tempted to eat the precious crust--his very
own crust--himself.

"Perhaps it was ambitious of me, after all," he said to himself, "to
want to seem like a blessed angel, a messenger of God, to Lenichen.
Perhaps, too, it would not be true. Because, after all, it would not be
exactly God who sent the crust, but only me."

And with the suggestion, the little hands which had often involuntarily
felt for the crust, brought it to the hungry little mouth.

But at that moment it opportunely happened that his mother made a little
moan in her sleep, which half awakened Lenichen, who murmured, sleepily,
"Little mother, mother, bread!"

Whereupon, Gottlieb blushed at his own ungenerous intention, and
resolutely pushed back the crust under the pillow. And then he thought
it must certainly have been the devil who had tempted him to eat, and he
tried to pray.

He prayed the "Our Father" quite through, kneeling up softly in bed, and
lingering fondly, but not very hopefully, on the "Give us our daily
bread."

And then again he fell into rather melancholy reflections how very
often he had prayed that same prayer and had been hungry, and into
distracting speculations how the daily bread could come, until at last
he ventured to add this bit of his own to his prayers,--

"Dear, holy Lord Jesus, you were once a little child, and know what it
feels like. If Lenichen and I are not good enough for you to send us
bread by the blessed angels, do send us some by the poor ravens. We
would not mind at all, if they came from you, and were _your_ ravens,
and brought us real bread. And if it is wrong to ask, please not to be
displeased, because I am such a little child, and I don't know better,
and I want to go to sleep!"

Then Gottlieb lay down again, and turned his face to the wall, where he
knew the picture of the Infant Jesus was, and forgot his troubles and
fell asleep.

The next morning he was awaked, as so often, by Lenichen's little bleat;
and he rose triumphantly, and took his crust to her bedside.

Lenichen greeted him with a wistful little smile, and put up her face
for a kiss; but her reception of the crust was somewhat disappointing.

She wailed a little because it was "hard and dry;" and when Gottlieb
moistened it with a few drops of water, she took it too much, he felt,
as a mere common meal, a thing of course, and her natural right.

He had expected that, in some way, the hungry hours it had cost him
would have been kneaded into it, and would have made it a kind of
heavenly manna for her.

To him it had meant hunger, and heroism, and sleepless hours of
endurance. It seemed strange that to Lenichen it should seem nothing
more than a hard, dry, common crust.

But to the mother it was much more.

She understood all; and, because she understood so much, she said
little.

She only smiled, and said he looked more than ever like his father; and
as he sat musing rather sadly while she was dressing, and Lenichen had
fallen asleep again, she pointed to the little peaceful sleeping face,
the flaxen hair curling over the dimpled arm, and she said,--

"That is thy thanks--just that the little one is happy. The dear
Heavenly Father cares more, I think, for such thanks than for any other;
just to see the flowers grow, just to hear the birds sing to their
nestlings, just to see His creatures good and happy, because of His
gifts. Those are about the best thanks for Him, and for us."

But Gottlieb looked up inquiringly.

"Yet He likes us to say 'Thank you,' too? Did you not say all the Church
services, all the beautiful cathedral itself, is just the people's
'Thank you' to God? Are we not going to church just to say 'Thank you,'
to-day?"

"Yes, darling," she said. "But the 'Thank you' we _mean_ to say is worth
little unless it is just the blossom and fragrance of the love and
content always in the heart. God cares infinitely for our loving Him,
and loves us to thank Him if we do. He does not care at all for the
thanks without the love, or without the content."

And as she spoke these words, Mother Magdalis was preaching a little
sermon to herself also, which made her eyes moisten and shine.

So she took courage, and contrived to persuade the children and herself
that the bread-and-water breakfast that Christmas-Eve morning had
something quite festive about it.

And when they had finished with a grace which Gottlieb sang, and
Lenichen lisped after him, she told him to take the little sister on his
knee and sing through his songs and hymns, while she arrayed herself in
the few remnants of holiday dress left her.

And as she cleaned and arranged the tiny room, her heart was lighter
than it had been for a long time.

"I ought to be happy," she said to herself, "with music enough in my
little nest to fill a church."

When Gottlieb had finished his songs, and was beginning them over again,
there was a knock at the door, and the face of old Hans the dwarf
appeared at the door, as he half opened it.

"A good Christmas to thee and thy babes, Mother Magdalis! Thy son is
born indeed with a golden spoon in his mouth," croaked old Hans in his
hoarse, guttural voice.

The words grated on Magdalis. Crooked Hans's jokes were apt to be
as crooked as his temper and his poor limbs, and to give much
dissatisfaction, hitting on just the sore points no one wanted to be
touched.

She felt tempted to answer sharply, but the sweet Christmas music had
got into her heart, and she only said, with tears starting to her
eyes,--

"If he was, neighbour, all the gold was lost and buried long ago."

"Not a bit of it!" rejoined Hans. "Didn't I hear the gold ring this very
instant? The lad has gold in his mouth, I say! Give him to me, and you
shall see it before night."

She looked up reproachfully, the tears fairly falling at what she
thought such a cruel mockery from Hans, who knew her poverty, and had
never had from her or hers the rough words he was too much used to from
every one.

"The golden days are over for me," was all she said.

"Nay! They have yet to begin," he replied. "Your Berthold left more
debtors than you know, Frau Magdalis. And old Hans is one of them. And
Hans never forgets a debt, black or white. Let the lad come with me, I
say. I know the choir-master at the Cathedral. And I know he wants a
fine high treble just such as thy Gottlieb's, and will give anything for
it. For if he does not find one, the Cistercians at the new convent will
draw away all the people, and we shall have no money for the new organ.
They have a young Italian, who sings like an angel, there; and the
young archduchess is an Italian, and is wild about music, and lavishes
her gifts wherever she finds it good."

Magdalis looked perplexed and troubled.

"To sell the child's voice seems like selling part of himself,
neighbour," she said at length; "and to sell God's praises seems like
selling one's own soul."

"Well, well! Those are thy proud burgher notions," said Hans, a little
nettled. "If the Heavenly Father pleases to give thee and the little
ones a few crumbs for singing His matins and evensong, it is no more
than He does for the robins, or, for that matter, for the very ravens,
such as me, that croak to Him with the best voice they have."

At these words, Gottlieb, who had been listening very attentively,
gently set little Lenichen down, and, drawing close to Hans, put his
little hand confidingly in his.

"I will go with neighbour Hans, mother!" he said, decisively. "The dear
Lord Himself has sent him."

"Thou speakest like a prophet," said the mother, smiling tenderly at his
oracular manner, "a prophet and a king in one. Hast thou had a vision?
Is thy will indeed the law of the land?"

"Yes, mother," he said, colouring, "the dear Lord Jesus has made it
quite plain. I asked Him, if we were not good enough for Him to send us
an angel, to send us one of His ravens, and He has sent us Hans!"

Hans laughed, but not the grim, hoarse laugh which was habitual to him,
and which people compared to the croaking of a raven; it was a hearty,
open laugh, like a child's, and he said,--

"Let God's raven lead thee, then, my lad, and the mother shall see if we
don't bring back the bread and meat."

"I did not ask for meat," said Gottlieb, gravely, "only for bread."

"The good God is wont to give more than we either desire or deserve,"
croaked Hans, "when He sets about giving at all."


II.

There was no time to be lost.

The services of the day would soon begin, and Hans had set his heart on
Gottlieb's singing that very day in the Cathedral.

The choir-master's eyes sparkled as he listened to the boy; but he was
an austere man, and would not utter a word to make the child think
himself of value.

"Not bad raw material," he said, "but very raw. I suppose thou hast
never before sung a note to any one who understood music?"

"Only for the mother and the little sister," the child replied in a low,
humble tone, beginning to fear the raven would bring no bread after all,
"and sometimes in the Litanies and the processions."

"Sing no more for babes and nurses, and still less among the beggars in
the street-processions," pronounced the master, severely. "It strains
and vulgarizes the tone. And, with training, I don't know but that,
after all, we might make something of thee--in time, in time."

Gottlieb's anxiety mastered his timidity, and he ventured to say,--

"Gracious lord! if it is a long time, how can we all wait? I thought it
would be to-day! The mother wants the bread to-day."

Something in the child's earnest face touched the master, and he said,
more gently,--

"I did not say you might not _begin_ to-day. You must begin this hour,
this moment. Too much time has been lost already."

And at once he set about the first lesson, scolding and growling about
the child setting his teeth like a dog, and mincing his words like a
fine lady, till poor Gottlieb's hopes more than once sank very low.

But, at the end of a quarter of an hour's practice, the artist in the
choir-master entirely overcame the diplomatist.

He behaved like a madman. He took the child in his arms and hugged him,
like a friendly bear; he set him on the table and made him sing one
phrase again and again, walking round and round him, and rubbing his
hands and laughing with delight; and, finally, he seized him and bore
him in triumph to the kitchen, and said to his housekeeper,--

"Ursula, bring out the finest goose and the best preserves and puddings
you have. We must feast the whole choir, and, may be, the Dean and
Chapter. The archduke and the young archduchess will be here at Easter.
But we shall be ready for them. Those beggarly Cistercians haven't a
chance. The lad has the voice of an angel, and the ear--the ear--well,
an ear as good as my own."

"The child may well have the voice of an angel," scolded old Ursula, "he
is like to be among the angels soon enough!"

For the hope, and the fear, and the joy had quite overcome the child,
enfeebled as he was by meagre fare; his lips were quite pale, and his
cheeks.

Moreover, the last order of the choir-master had not been quite
re-assuring to him. The fat goose and the puddings were good, indeed;
but he would have preferred his mother and Lenichen being feasted in his
honour, rather than the choir and the chapter.

And besides, though little more than seven years old, he was too much of
a boy quite to enjoy his position on the master's shoulder. He felt it
too babyish to be altogether honourable to the protector of Lenichen and
incipient bread-winner of the family. And, therefore, he was relieved
when he found himself once more safely on the ground.

But when Ursula set before him a huge plate of bread and meat, his manly
composure all but gave way. It was more of an approach to a feast than
any meal he had ever participated in, and he was nearly choked with
repressed tears of gratitude.

It was so evident _now_ that Hans was altogether an orthodox and
accredited raven!

At first, as the child sat mute and wondering before the repast, with a
beautiful look of joy and prayer in his blue eyes, Ursula thought he was
saying his grace, and respected his devotion. But as the moments passed
on, and still he did not attempt to eat, she became impatient.

"There is a time for everything," she murmured, at length. "That will do
for thy grace! Now quick to the food! Thou canst finish the grace, if
thou wilt, in music, in the church by-and-by."

But then the child took courage, and said,--

"The ravens--that is, the good God--surely do not mean all this for me.
Dear, gracious lady, let me run with the plate to the mother and
Lenichen; and I will be back again in two minutes, and sing all day, if
the master likes."

Ursula was much moved at the child's filial love, and also at his
politeness.

"The little one has discrimination," she said to herself. "One can see
he is of a good stock. He recognizes that I am no peasant, but the
daughter of a good burgher house."

And, in spite of the remonstrances of her master, she insisted on giving
the lad his way.

"I will accompany him, myself," said she.

And, without further delay or parley, she walked off, under the very
eyes of the master, with the boy, and also with a considerable portion
of his own dinner, in addition to the plate she had already set before
Gottlieb.

       *       *       *       *       *

A very joyful and miraculous intervention it seemed to Mother Magdalis
when Gottlieb re-entered the hermit's cell, under the stately convoy of
the choir-master's housekeeper, and with food enough to feed the frugal
little household for a week.

The two women greeted each other ceremoniously and courteously, as
became two German housewives of good burgher stock.

"The little lad has manners worthy of a burgomaster," said Ursula. "We
shall see him with the gold chain and the fur robes yet, and his mother
a proud woman."

With which somewhat worldly benediction, she left the little family to
themselves, conjuring Gottlieb to return in less than an hour, for the
master was not always as manageable as this morning.

And when they were alone, Gottlieb was not ashamed to hide his tears on
his mother's heart.

"See, darling mother!" he said, "the dear Saviour did send the raven!
Perhaps, one day, He will make us good enough for Him to send the
angels."

Then the simple family all knelt down and thanked God from their hearts,
and Gottlieb added one especial bit of his own of praise and prayer for
his kind Hans, of whom, on account of his grim face and rough voice, he
had stood in some dread.

"Forgive me, dear Lord Jesus," he said, "that I did not know how good he
was!"

And when they had eaten their hasty Christmas feast, and the mother was
smoothing his hair and making the best of his poor garments, Gottlieb
said, looking up gravely in her face,--

"Who knows, mother, if Hans is only a raven now, that the good God may
not make him, his very self, the angel?"

"Perhaps God _is_ making Hans into the angel even now," replied the
mother.

And she remembered for a long time the angelic look of love and devotion
in the child's eyes.

For she knew very well the Cathedral choir was no angelic host.

She knew she was not welcoming her boy that morning to a haven, but
launching him on a voyage of many perils. But she knew, also, that it is
only by such perils, and through such voyages, that men, that saints,
are made.


III.

The next day Gottlieb began his training among the other choristers.

It was not easy.

The choir-master showed his appreciation of his rare treasure by
straining every nerve to make it as perfect as possible; and therefore
he found more fault with Gottlieb than with any one else.

The other boys might, he could not but observe, sing carelessly enough,
if the general harmony were but good; but every note of his seemed as if
it were a solo which the master's ear never missed, and not the
slightest mistake was allowed to pass.

The other choristers understood very well what this meant, and some of
them were not a little jealous of the new favourite, as they called him.
But to little Gottlieb it seemed hard and strange. He was always
straining to do his very best, and yet he never seemed to satisfy. The
better he did, the better the master wanted him to do, until he grew
almost hopeless.

He would not, for the world, complain to his mother; but on the third
evening she observed that he looked very sad and weary, and seemed
scarcely to have spirits to play with Lenichen.

She knew it is of little use to ask little children what ails them,
because so often their trouble is that they do not know. Some little
delicate string within is jarred, and they know nothing of it, and think
the whole world is out of tune. So she quietly put Lenichen to bed, and
after the boy had said his prayers as usual at her knee, she laid her
hand on his head, and caressingly stroked his fair curls, and then she
lifted up his face to hers and kissed the little troubled brow and
quivering lips.

"Dear little golden mouth!" she said, fondly, "that earns bread, and
sleep, for the little sister and for me! I heard the sweet notes to-day,
and I thanked God. And I felt as if the dear father was hearing them
too, even through the songs in heaven."

The child's heart was opened, the quivering lips broke into a sob, and
the face was hidden on her knee.

"It will not be for long, mother!" he said. "The master has found fault
with me more than ever to-day. He made me sing passage after passage
over and over, until some of the boys were quite angry, and said,
afterwards, they wished I and my voice were with the old hermit who
houses us. Yet he never seemed pleased. He did not even say it was any
better."

"But he never gave thee up, darling!" she said.

"No; he only told me to come early, alone, to-morrow, and he would give
me a lesson by myself, and perhaps I should learn better."

A twinkle of joy danced in her eyes, dimmed with so many tears.

"Silly child!" she said fondly, "as silly as thy poor mother herself!
The master only takes trouble, and chastens and rebukes, because he
thinks it is worth while; because thou art trying, and learning, and art
doing a little better day by day. He knows what thy best can be, and
will never be content with anything but thy very best."

"Is it that, mother? Is it indeed that?" said the boy, looking up with a
sudden dawning of hope.

And a sweet dawn of promise met him in his mother's eyes as she
answered,--

"It is even that, my own, for thee and for me!"


IV.

With a glad heart, Gottlieb dressed the next morning before Lenichen was
awake, and was off to the choir-master for his lesson alone.

The new hope had inspired him, and he sang that morning to the content
even of the master, as he knew, not by his praise, but by his summoning
Ursula from the kitchen to listen, unable to resist his desire for the
sympathy of a larger audience.

Ursula was not exactly musical, nor was she demonstrative, but she
showed her satisfaction by appropriating her share of the success.

"_I_ knew what was wanting!" she said significantly. "The birds and the
blessed angels may sing on crumbs or on the waters of Paradise; but
goose and pudding are a great help to the Alleluias here below."

"The archduchess will be enraptured, and the Cistercians will be
furious!" said the choir-master, equally pleased at both prospects.

But this Gottlieb did not hear, for he had availed himself of the first
free moment to run home and tell his mother how things had improved.

After that, Gottlieb had no more trouble about the master. The old man's
severity became comprehensible and dear to him, and a loving liberty and
confidence came into his bearing toward him, which went to the heart of
the childless old man, so that dearer than the praise of the
archduchess, or even the discomfiture of the Cistercians, became to him
the success and welfare of the child.

But then, unknown to himself, the poor boy entered on a new chapter of
temptations.

The other boys, observing the choir-master's love for him, grew jealous,
and called him sometimes "the master's little angel," and sometimes
"the little beggar of the hermitage," or "Dwarf Hans's darling."

He was too brave and manly a little fellow to tell his mother all these
little annoyances. He would not for the world have spoiled her joy in
her little "Chrysostom," her golden-mouthed laddie. But once they
followed him to her door, and she heard them herself. The rude words
smote her to the heart, but she only said,--

"Thou art not ashamed of the hermit's house, nor of being old Hans's
darling?"

"I hope, never!" said the child with a little hesitation. "God sent him
to us, and I love him. But it _would_ be nice if dear Hans sometimes
washed his face!"

Magdalis smiled, and hit on a plan for bringing this about. With some
difficulty she persuaded the old man to take his dinner every Sunday and
holiday with them, and she always set an ewer of water--and a towel,
relic of her old burgher life--by him, before the meal.

"We were a kind of Pharisees in our home," she said, "and except we
washed our hands, never ate bread."

Hans growled a little, but he took the hint, for her sake and the boy's,
and gradually found the practice so pleasant on its own account, that
the washing of his hands and face became a daily process.

On his patron saint's day (St. John, February 8), Mother Magdalis went a
step further, and presented him with a clean suit of clothes, very
humble but neat and sound, of her own making out of old hoards. Not for
holidays only, she said, but that he might change his clothes every day,
after work, as her Berthold used.

"Dainty burgher ways," Hans called them, but he submitted, and Gottlieb
was greatly comforted, and thought his old friend a long way advanced in
his transformation into an angel.

So, between the sweetness of the boy's temper and of the dear mother's
love which folded him close, the bitter was turned into sweet within
him.

But Ursula, who heard the mocking of the boys with indignation, was not
so wise in her consolations.

"Wicked, envious little devils!" said she. "Never thou heed them, my
lamb! They would be glad enough, any of them, to be the master's angel,
or Dwarf Hans's darling, for that matter, if they could. It is nothing
but mean envy and spite, my little prince, my little wonder; never thou
heed them!"

And then the enemy crept unperceived into the child's heart.

Was he indeed a little prince and a wonder, on his platform of gifts and
goodness? And were all those naughty boys far below him, in another
sphere, hating him as the little devils in the mystery-plays seemed to
hate and torment the saints?

Had the "raven" been sent to him, after all, as to the prophet of old,
not only because he was hungry and pitied by God, but because he was
good and a favourite of God?

It seemed clear he was something quite out of the common. He seemed the
favourite of every one, except those few envious, wicked boys.

The great ladies of the city entreated for him to come and sing at their
feasts. And all their guests stopped in the midst of their eager talk to
listen to him, and they gave him sweetmeats and praised him to the
skies; and they offered him wine from their silver flagons, and when he
refused it, as his mother had desired him, they praised him more than
ever; and once the host himself, the burgomaster, emptied the silver
flagon of the wine he had refused, and told him to take it home to his
mother and tell her she had a child whose dutifulness was worth more
than all the silver in the city.

But when he told his mother this, instead of looking delighted, as he
expected, she looked grave, and almost severe, and said,--

"You only did your duty, my boy. It would have been a sin and a shame to
have done otherwise. And, of course, you would not for the world."

"Certainly I would not, mother," he said.

But he felt a little chilled. Did his mother think it was always so easy
for boys to do their duty? and that every one did it?

Other people seemed to think it a very uncommon and noble thing to do
one's duty. And what, indeed, could the blessed saints do more?

So the slow poison of praise crept into the boy's heart. And while he
thought his life was being filled with light, unknown to him the shadows
were deepening,--the one shadow which eclipses the sun, the terrible
shadow of self.

For he could not but be conscious how, even in the cathedral, a kind of
hush and silence fell around when he began to sing.

And instead of the blessed presence of God filling the holy place, and
his singing in it, as of old, like a happy little bird in the sunshine,
his own sweet voice seemed to fill the place, rising and falling like a
tide up and down the aisles, leaping to the vaulted roof like a fountain
of joy, and dropping into the hearts of the multitude like dew from
heaven.

And as he went out, in his little white robe, with the choir, he felt
the eyes of the people on him, and he heard a murmur of praise, and now
and then words such as "That is little Gottlieb, the son of the widow
Magdalis. She may well be proud of him. He has the voice and the face of
an angel."

And then, in contrast, outside in the street, from the other boys, "See
how puffed up the little prince is! He cannot look at any one lower than
the bishop or the burgomaster!"

So, between the chorus of praise and the other chorus of mockery, it was
no wonder that poor Gottlieb felt like a being far removed from the
common herd. And, necessarily, any one of the flock of Christ who feels
that, cannot be happy, because if we are far away from the common flock,
we cannot be near the Good Shepherd, who always keeps close to the
feeblest, and seeks those that go astray.


V.

It was not long before the watchful eye of the mother observed a little
change creeping over the boy--a little more impatience with Lenichen, a
little more variableness of temper; sometimes he would dance exultingly
home as if he were scarcely treading the common earth, sometimes he
would return with a depression which made the simple work and pleasures
of the home seem dull and wearisome.

So it went on until the joyful Easter-tide was drawing near. On Palm
Sunday there was to be a procession of the children.

As the mother was smoothing out the golden locks which fell like
sunbeams on the white vestments, she said, "It is a bright day for thee
and me, my son. I shall feel as if we were all in the dear old Jerusalem
itself, and my darling had gathered his palms on Olivet itself, and the
very eyes of the blessed Lord Himself were on thee, and His ears
listening to thee crying out thy Hosannas, and His dear voice speaking
of thee and through thee, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me.'"

But Gottlieb looked grave and rather troubled.

"So few seem thinking just of _His_ listening," he said doubtfully.
"There are the choir-master and the Dean and Chapter, and the other
choristers, and the Cistercians, and the mothers of the other
choristers, who wish them to sing best."

She took his hand. "So there were in that old Jerusalem," she said. "The
Pharisees, who wanted to stop the children's singing; and even the dear
disciples, who often thought they might be troublesome to the Master.
But the little ones sang for Him; and He knew, and was pleased. And that
is all we have to think of now."

He kissed her, and went away with a lightened brow.

Many of the neighbours came in that afternoon to congratulate Magdalis
on her boy--his face, his voice, his gentle ways.

"And then he sings with such feeling," said one. "One sees it is in his
heart."

But in the evening Gottlieb came home very sad and desponding. For some
time he said nothing, and then, with a brave effort to restrain his
tears, he murmured,--

"Oh, mother! I am afraid it will soon be over. I heard one of the
priests say he thought they had a new chorister at the Cistercians whose
voice is as good as mine. So that the archduchess may not like our choir
best, after all."

The mother said nothing for a moment, and then she said,--

"_Whose_ praise and love will the boy at the Cistercian convent sing,
Gottlieb, if he has such a lovely voice?"

"God's!--the dear Heavenly Father and the Saviour!" he said reverently.

"And you, my own? Will another little voice on earth prevent His hearing
you? Do the thousands of thousands always singing to Him above prevent
His hearing you? And what would the world do if the only voice worth
listening to were thine? It cannot be heard beyond one church, or one
street. And the good Lord has ten thousand churches, and cities full of
people who want to hear."

"But thou, mother! Thou and Lenichen, and the bread!"

"It was the raven that brought the bread," she said smiling; "and thou
art not even a raven,--only a little child to pick up the bread the
raven brought."

He sat silent a few minutes, and then the terrible cloud of self and
pride dropped off from his heart like a death-shroud, and he threw
himself into her arms.

"Oh, mother, I see it all!" he said. "I am free again. I have only to
sing to the blessed Lord of all, quite sure He listens, to Him alone,
and to all else as just a little one of the all He loves."

And after the evening meal, and a game with Lenichen, the boy crept out
to the Cathedral to say his prayers in one of the little chapels, and to
thank God.

He knelt in the Lady chapel before the image of the Infant Christ on the
mother's knees.

And as he knelt there, it came into his heart that all the next week was
Passion week, "the still week," and would be silent; and the tears
filled his eyes as he remembered how little he had enjoyed singing that
day.

"How glad the little children of Jerusalem must have been," he thought,
"that they sang to Jesus when they could. I suppose they never could
again; for the next Friday He was dead. Oh, suppose He never let me sing
to Him again!"

And tears and repressed sobs came fast at the thought, and he murmured
aloud, thinking no one was near,--

"Dear Saviour, only let me sing once more here in church to you, and I
will think of no one but you; not of the boys who laugh at me, nor the
people who praise me, nor the Cistercians, nor the archduchess, nor even
the dear choir-master, but only of you, of you, and perhaps of mother
and Lenichen. I could not help that, and you would not mind it. You and
they love me so much more than any one, and I love you really so much
more than all besides. Only believe it, and try me once more."

As he finished, in his earnestness the child spoke quite loud, and from
a dark corner in the shadow of a pillar suddenly arose a very old man in
a black monk's robe, with snow-white hair, and drew close to him, and
laid his hand on his shoulder, and said,--

"Fear not, my son. I have a message for thee."

At first, Gottlieb was much frightened; and then, when he heard the
kind, tremulous old voice, and saw the lovely, tender smile on the
wrinkled, pallid old face, he thought God must really have sent him an
angel at last, though certainly not because he was good.

"Look around on these lofty arches, and clustered columns, and the long
aisles, and the shrines of saints, and the carved wreaths of flowers and
fruits, and the glorious altar! Are these wonderful to thee? Couldst
thou have thought of them, or built them?"

"I could as easily have made the stars, or the forests!" said the child.

"Then look at me," the old man said, with a gentle smile on his
venerable face, "a poor worn-out old man, whom no one knows. This
beautiful house was in my heart before a stone of it was reared. God put
it in my heart. I planned it all. I remember this place a heap of poor
cottages as small as thine; and now it is a glorious house of God. And I
was what they called the master-builder. Yet no man knows me, or says,
'Look at him!' They look at the Cathedral, God's house; and that makes
me glad in my inmost soul. I prayed that I might be nothing, and all the
glory be His; and He has granted my prayer. And I am as little and as
free in this house which I built as in His own forests, or under His own
stars; for it is His only, as they are His. And I am nothing but His own
little child, as thou art. And He has my hand and thine in His, and will
not let us go."

The child looked up, nearly certain now that it must be an angel. To
have lived longer than the Cathedral seemed like living when the morning
stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

"Then God will let me sing here next Easter!" he said, looking
confidingly in the old man's face.

"Thou shalt sing, and I shall see, and I shall hear thee, but thou wilt
not hear or see me!" said the old man, taking both the dimpled hands in
one of his. "And the blessed Lord will listen, as to the little children
in Jerusalem of old. And we shall be His dear, happy children for
evermore."

Gottlieb went home and told his mother. And they both agreed, that if
not an angel, the old man was as good as an angel, and was certainly a
messenger of God.

To have been the master-builder of the Cathedral of which it was
Magdalis's glory and pride that her husband had carved a few of the
stones!

The master-builder of the Cathedral, yet finding his joy and glory in
being a little child of God!


VI.

The "silent week" that followed was a solemn time to the mother and the
boy.

Every day, whatever time could be spared from the practice with the
choir, and from helping in the little house and with his mother's
wood-carving, or from playing with Lenichen in the fields, Gottlieb
spent in the silent Cathedral, draped as it was in funereal black for
the Sacred Life given up to God for man.

"How glad," he thought again and again, "the little children of
Jerusalem must have been that they sang when they could to the blessed
Jesus! They little knew how soon the kind hands that blessed them would
be stretched on the cross, and the kind voice that would not let their
singing be stopped would be moaning 'I thirst.'"

But he felt that he, Gottlieb, ought to have known; and if ever he was
allowed to sing his Hosannas in the choir again, it would feel like the
face of the blessed Lord himself smiling on him, and His voice saying,
"Suffer this little one to come unto Me. I have forgiven him."

He hoped also to see the master-builder again; but nevermore did the
slight, aged form appear in the sunshine of the stained windows, or in
the shadows of the arches he had planned.

And so the still Passion week wore on.

Until once more the joy-bells pealed out on the blessed Easter morning.

The city was full of festivals. The rich were in their richest holiday
raiment, and few of the poor were so poor as not to have some sign of
festivity in their humble dress and on their frugal tables.

Mother Magdalis was surprised by finding at her bedside a new dress such
as befitted a good burgher's daughter, sent secretly the night before
from Ursula by Hans and Gottlieb, with a pair of enchanting new crimson
shoes for little Lenichen, which all but over-balanced the little maiden
altogether with the new sense of possessing something which must be a
wonder and a delight to all beholders.

The archduke and the beautiful Italian archduchess had arrived the night
before, and were to go in stately procession to the Cathedral. And
Gottlieb was to sing in the choir, and afterwards, on the Monday, to
sing an Easter greeting for the archduchess at the banquet in the great
town-hall.

The mother's heart trembled with some anxiety for the child.

But the boy's was only trembling with the great longing to be allowed to
sing once more his Hosannas to the blessed Saviour, among the children.

It was given him.

At first the eager voice trembled for joy, in the verse he had to sing
alone, and the choir-master's brows were knitted with anxiety. But it
cleared and steadied in a moment, and soared with a fulness and freedom
none had ever heard in it before, filling the arches of the Cathedral
and the hearts of all.

And the beautiful archduchess bent over to see the child, and her soft,
dark eyes were fixed on his face, as he sang, until they filled with
tears; and, afterwards, she asked who the mother of that little angel
was.

But the child's eyes were fixed on nothing earthly, and his heart was
listening for another voice--the Voice all who listen for it shall
surely hear.

And it said in the heart of the child, that day, "Suffer the little one
to come unto Me. Go in peace. Thy sins are forgiven."

A happy, sacred evening they spent that Easter in the hermit's cell, the
mother and the two children, the boy singing his best for the little
nest, as before for the King of kings.

Still, a little anxiety lingered in the mother's heart about the pomp of
the next day.

But she need not have feared.

When the archduchess had asked for the mother of the little chorister
with the heavenly voice, the choir-master had told her what touched her
much about the widowed Magdalis and her two children; and old Ursula and
the master between them contrived that Mother Magdalis should be at the
banquet, hidden behind the tapestry.

And when Gottlieb, robed in white, with blue feathery wings, to
represent a little angel, came close to the great lady, and sang her the
Easter greeting, she bent down and folded him in her arms, and kissed
him.

And then once more she asked for his mother, and, to Gottlieb's surprise
and her own, the mother was led forward, and knelt before the
archduchess.

Then the beautiful lady beamed on the mother and the child, and, taking
a chain and jewel from her neck, she clasped it round the boy's neck,
and said, in musical German with a foreign accent,--

"Remember, this is not so much a gift, as a token and sign that I will
not forget thee and thy mother, and that I look to see thee and hear
thee again, and to be thy friend."

And as she smiled on him, the whole banqueting-hall--indeed, the whole
world--seemed illuminated to the child.

And he said to his mother as they went home,--

"Mother, surely God has sent us an angel at last. But, even for the
angels, we will never forget His dear ravens. Won't old Hans be glad?"

And the mother was glad; for she knew that God who giveth grace to the
lowly had indeed blessed the lad, because all his gifts and honours were
transformed, as always in the lowly heart, not into pride, but into
love.

But when the boy ran eagerly to find old Hans, to show him the jewel
and tell him of the princely promises, Hans was nowhere to be found; not
in the hermit's house, where he was to have met them and shared their
little festive meal, nor at his own stall, nor in the hut in which he
slept.

Gottlieb's heart began to sink.

Never had his dear old friend failed to share in any joy of theirs
before.

At length, as he was lingering about the old man's little hut,
wondering, a sad, silent company came bearing slowly and tenderly a
heavy burden, which at last they laid on Hans's poor straw pallet.

It was poor Hans himself, bruised and crushed and wounded in his
struggles to press through the crowd to see his darling, his poor
crooked limbs broken and unable to move any more.

But the face was untouched; and when they had laid him on the couch, and
the languid eyes opened and rested on the beloved face of the child
bending over him bathed in tears, a light came over the poor rugged
features, and shone in the dark, hollow eyes, such as nothing on earth
can give--a wonderful light of great, unutterable love, as they gazed
into the eyes of the child, and then, looking upward, seemed to open on
a vision none else could see.

"Jesus! Saviour! I can do no more. Take care of him, Thou thyself,
Jesus, Lord!"

He said no more--no prayer for himself, only for the child.

Then the eyes grew dim, the head sank back, and with one sigh he
breathed his soul away to God.

And such an awe came over the boy that he ceased to weep.

He could only follow the happy soul up to God, and say voicelessly in
his heart,--

"Dear Lord Jesus! I understand at last! The raven was the angel. And
Thou hast let me see him for one moment as he is, as he is now with
Thee, as he will be evermore!"




_Ecce homo_

A STORY OF THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND.


I.

"_Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini._"[1] Again and again the words
of the old Latin hymn echoed through the aisles of the Minster.

It was the dusk of a short winter's day in the year of our Lord One
Thousand.

The shadowed spaces were filled with a vast crowd; all the city had
gathered together to hear the stranger monk. He had come into the city
yesterday, and was to leave to-morrow.

It was reported that he came from an island beyond the seas, of an
ancient race, rich in saints when the Teutons were still wild heathen
tribes; from the borders of the sea without a shore.

All was mystery about him. He flitted through the land like a wandering
voice, a voice crying in the wilderness. No man knew certainly whence he
came or whither he went. He came not so much to teach or to preach, as
to utter a great "cry," and be gone.

It was the old cry, that the generations of men are as the crops of
grass, mown down surely by the mower; and the glory of man as the flower
of the grass, scattered before the mowing-time by any passing wind.

But the old cry would scarcely have gathered the people together and
riveted them in breathless, awe-struck attention as this voice gathered
and fixed them.

To the old cry was added a new cry, "an exceeding great and bitter cry."

"The mowers are at hand, the harvest is come. It may not be to-day or
to-morrow. But _this year_ it will be.

"It is the Saturday night of the ages.

"The world is doomed.

"The thousand years have run their course at last. The long-suffering of
God has an end.

"You may sow your fields this spring.

"You may possibly reap the seed you sow this autumn.

"But you will never see another spring.

"You will never reap another harvest.

"'_Apparebit repentina._' Suddenly and so soon!

"You may keep one more Easter.

"But before the next the graves will have been opened. The resurrection
to endless woe or joy will have come.

"You may even possibly keep one more Christmas. But it will be the last.
It must be all but the last day of the world, for before its octave has
dawned '_apparebit repentina_.'

"He will have come. Not as a babe smiling on His mother's knee, not as
the lowly Saviour to the manger, to live, and teach, and heal, and
suffer, and die.

"As the Judge, to punish, to reward, to avenge.

"And before Him all the world will be gathered, all the ages, and all
the nations.

"But not in one band; in two bands. Divided for ever into two flocks.
Not Teuton and Latin, not rich and poor, not noble and slave, not clergy
and laity, not learned and ignorant; but wicked and good, just and
unjust, merciful and unmerciful, those who love God and men, and those
who love only themselves.

"And the division exists now.

"'_Apparebit repentina_,' His fan in His hand; the winnowing fan. What
does the fan do? It only stirs the air; it stirs the wind of God. It
does not make the wheat wheat, or the chaff chaff. It only divides them;
the wheat into the garner, the chaff _away_.

"Away _whither_?

"It does not make wheat wheat, or tares tares.

"The wheat to the barn; the tares whither? In bundles to be burned.

"This year, this year, in His heavens, or in His fires.

"And what will be burned in His fires? Your gold? your houses? your
harvests? Nay, earthly fires can do that.

"You, you yourselves: in His fires.

"'_Apparebit repentina_.'

"Suddenly, and this year.

"At early dawn, at dead of night, in the hush of the summer morn, in
twilight such as this? We know not. The day and the hour knoweth no man.

"But this year; suddenly, as the lightning which comes before the
thunder.

"As the thief on the slumbering household, as the tramp of the foe on
the slumbering army.

"If ye will, if ye can, sleep on still!

"But listen! already is there no rumble of the far-off storm? no faint
far-off murmur of His footsteps?

"When the thunder-peal comes, it will be too late to warn. The
_lightning will have come first_, shrivelling the earth like a heap of
dry grass, and heaven like a roll of old parchments, leaving you alone
with your Judge; all the world there, and each one as much alone with
Him as if no one else were there, seen through, searched through,
scorched through with one gleam of the eyes that are as a flame of fire.

"Before you the Judge, behind you the flames. The Judge so terrible
that the wicked will rush backward from Him into the fire rather than
meet those eyes again, those eyes which are as a flame of fire searching
and burning through and through.

"And what do they search? _You_, for sin. What will they burn? You,
_with_ your sin, if you will not give up the sin."

And then he laid bare sin after sin--avarice, evil-speaking, wrongs
wrought, wrongs unforgiven, injustice, envy, unmercifulness, pride,
selfishness in all its disguises--until heart after heart felt itself
seen through and laid bare.

Then turning and pointing to the great Crucifix above them he said,--

"Not one of you, not one of us but has helped to weave that crown, to
drive in those nails, to pierce that heart.

"Repent, for He is at hand.

"'_Apparebit repentina._' Suddenly and so soon."

And then suddenly the penetrating voice ceased, and there was a great
hush, broken now and then by a sob, as, high above them, catching the
last rays of the wintry sun, the sacred bowed Head, and the outstretched
hands, rose lifted up on high.

And when the hush began to break up again into separate movement, and
the voice which had bound the multitude into unity had ceased for some
minutes, and one and another turned their eyes again towards the pulpit,
it was empty.

And none in that city ever saw the face of the preacher or heard his
voice again.

Like a voice crying in the wilderness, he vanished again into the
wilderness, and was heard no more.

But from the voices of the choir, begun it was scarcely known how, broke
forth in a long wail the hymn--

    "Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini."

When the last notes of the solemn chant had died away, and once more
left a silence in the vast church, the multitude still kept together. A
common instinct of unity seemed to have come on them, as on a besieged
city, or on a ship in a storm.

Not to one, here and there, uncertainly, as death came; but to all!
Suddenly, and this year, the one great event was to come, which was to
unite them all and to divide them all for ever!

Not that this message and this terror were altogether new to them. Long
it had been floating in the air that the distracted world was not to
last beyond the thousand years.

The probability had long loomed vaguely before them; and now this
stranger came and proclaimed, with assured conviction, the certainty.

They waited and waited on, as if listening for the first peal of the
Last Trump; but no sound broke the stillness. The dusk silently died
into the dark, the last rays faded from the Crucifix to which the monk
had pointed, and then slowly the congregation began to creep away to
their homes.

Out of the silent church under the solemn silent vault of stars; each
household again beneath its own roof, yet all still under that great
roof of heaven from which at any moment might burst the final fires.

The city roofs, great and little for the time had become the shadows,
and the upper light shone terribly through.

There was little talking on the way home through the streets, none of
that eager bubbling up of pent-up thoughts which marks the dispersing of
a great listening throng. The mighty common expectation which united
all, sent each back into his own life with great searchings of heart.

For the day at hand was to be a Judgment Day. The day of the great
gathering was also to be the day of the great dividing.


II.

Two fellow-students, Hermann and Gottfried, went back to the Abbey
School together.

And when they reached their cells, Hermann flung his books into a corner
and cried, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity; vain instruments of vain
learning, farewell! Of what use is it to climb a few steps higher than
our fellow-men, if all are to be levelled again at the bar of God so
soon?"

But Gottfried knelt at the little window of his cell, and looked up at
the stars and said, "O Thou Holy and Beautiful, it has been a joy to
brush off a few grains of the dust which hid Thy works. What will it be
to see Thee as Thou art?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Old Gammer Truedchen, whose stall was close to the Minster door, crept
silently into her chamber that night; for her stall of beads and cakes
was a wasp's nest of malicious gossip where all dark surmises and evil
reports naturally gathered, sure of something to feed on and something
to sting. And she felt somewhat pricked in conscience; for the preacher
had spoken of "the measure wherewith we mete being measured to us
again," and of evil-speaking _in itself_, whether false or true, being
sure to be severely judged in that day. She did not quite see the
justice of it: if people were to be punished for their evil deeds, why
was she to be punished for foreseeing and antedating the verdict?
Nevertheless, if that was, as the monk said, the rule of the Supreme
Court, it might be as well to take care. And, moreover, one might
sometimes make mistakes. She must admit to herself that possibly she had
been a little too hasty and hard about that poor orphan-girl whose
character had afterwards been cleared, but not soon enough to satisfy
her lover, who had believed the evil report, and gone and died in the
wars, and left her to die of a broken heart at home. She had only
repeated what others hinted, but no one was infallible, not even the
whole town, which might, perhaps, be one reason why the giving sentence
beforehand was objected to. And it certainly might be as well to be
careful, if one's words, even one's whispers, were to be brought up
against one in public on that day, and before another year.

       *       *       *       *       *

Master Gregory, the exchanger, went home to his chests of treasure; and
on his way he passed the widowed daughter of his old master the
goldsmith, looking pinched and poor as usual, with a racking cough,
leading her two frail, half-starved children. They were neatly clothed,
as always, in their patched garments; and she greeted him with her
wonted gentle friendliness, expecting nothing from him.

But his heart smote him.

"Perhaps I did make rather a hard bargain when her husband died," he
said; "and her father certainly had been good to me. It is true she
should not have married as she did, and I have left her more than she
lost in my will. But if this monk is right, wills and testaments will
not henceforth count for much in the reckoning of that Day. I might as
well, perhaps, do something for her at once."

And that night, as he counted over his gold and parchments (for in those
days misers had more visual delight in their possessions than they have
now), the parchments seemed to shrivel in the light of the fire which
was to consume the very heavens as a scroll, and instead of the pleasant
ring of gold, the dry rustle of dead leaves was in his ears.

But the poor widowed mother he had passed went home lightened in heart,
with her children. And when she had given them their scanty supper, and
folded them to sleep, she knelt beside them, and her thankful tears fell
on the thin little hands over which she wept.

"Thank God!" she murmured, "at last I may long to go to my beloved; for
we shall go _together_, we three, his babes and I; and he will see his
prayers answered, and will know I did my best for them, and did not
hasten away to him too soon, for all the longing to go."

       *       *       *       *       *

And even the prattling voice of little Hilda, the child of Blind Bruno,
the basketmaker, was hushed as she led her father through the streets,
instead of the faithful dog Keeper, who was growing old. She only clung
to her father's hand closer than usual.

Bruno also was very silent.

Margarethe, the mother, met them, as always, on the threshold; for Bruno
liked no other hands but those which had tended him so faithfully for
twenty years to welcome him, and unloose his cloak, and settle him at
the table or by the hearth. He could not see how thin the hands had
grown, and how worn the face was. The feeble fingers seemed to gather
strength always to do anything for him; and if sometimes he thought they
failed a little, the soft clear voice had always its old tones to cheer
him, and he had always words of tender greeting for her.

But to-night he scarcely seemed to heed even his wife. He leant his head
on his clasped hands for a long time, and said nothing until old Keeper
came, as was his wont, and rubbed his shaggy head against the master's
knees, and little Hilda's hands, for a welcome.

At this, Hilda's composure gave way altogether, and she burst into tears
and sobbed.

"Oh, Keeper, you don't know, and we can't tell you!"

Then Bruno roused himself, and the great cry of the preacher burst from
his lips.

"'_Apparebit repentina_,'" he said; "suddenly it will come, and this
year."

And slowly and solemnly he repeated what they had heard.

A strange joy came over the mother's face as he spoke.

She was lifting up her heart to God and saying,--

"I thank Thee. At last I can long with all my heart to come to Thee. For
we shall not be parted. And I shall not be leaving those Thou gavest me
to keep."

Bruno went on.

"The Judge!" he murmured, "the Avenger, to avenge all wrongs at last!"

And there was a flash of fierce joy on his face, such as might have
gleamed in the eyes of his heathen forefathers, dying in the slaughter
of their foes.

But as she saw it, the quiet delight faded from the mother's face, and
she said tenderly,--

"Our little wrongs, beloved, what will they seem when we see the
nail-prints on His hands and feet?"

"They will not seem little to Him!" replied Bruno sternly.

It was an old controversy between them, and the only one. She had long
ceased to carry on her side of it in any way but in silent prayer.

For the wrong was great, and the doing of it as fresh in her memory as
ever;--the day when her husband's kinsman, Baron Ivo, had entered their
castle and treacherously massacred all who would not acknowledge him to
be the rightful lord; had bound Baron Bruno to a pillar, and had him
blinded, and then had turned them out with their helpless babe into the
frost and snow of the winter night, to wander whither they would, or
die.

Many weary months they had roamed up and down through the land, seeking
redress, until the babe had died. But the enemy was strong, and it was
an age when right could only be held by might. And though many pitied,
none ventured to take up the blinded Baron's cause. And so at last they
crept back to the old city, and found a dwelling beside a brook in the
forest, not far from the city gate, yet in a secret place, where no one
need see them. And Bruno made baskets from the osiers, and she sold
them.

And the poor sightless eyes were healed, but not the heart.

Again and again she had begun to hope the bitter yearning for vengeance
would be softened. Sometimes when his voice faltered as they said the
Lord's Prayer; sometimes when his hand quivered in hers as they knelt
together by the great cross before the hermit's cave; and especially
when, their little Hilda was born, the child of their poverty, the
sunbeam of their dark days.

But always, when she had dared to speak of forgiveness, the old wound
seemed to bleed afresh. And now she felt the old fever was burning in
his heart as fiercely as ever.

Once more that night she pleaded voicelessly with the compassionate
Lord.

"Thou knowest, O merciful One," she said in the depths of her heart, "it
is not his blindness he cannot forgive; it is our poverty and the
child's. It is not his wrong he would have avenged; it is ours. If there
is hatred in his heart, love is beneath the hate, Thou knowest. Forgive,
oh, forgive him! even if he cannot quite forgive."

And then, in her tearful prayers, she pleaded the day when Baron Ivo
himself had come to their hut, pursued by some of the many who had been
turned into beggars, or robbers, by his high-handed tyranny; when, not
seeing Bruno, Bruno had recognized him by his voice, and, nevertheless,
had spared him, and suffered her to hide him from his pursuers, and
suffered the child Hilda to quench his thirst with fresh water from the
spring.

"He could have, avenged himself then," she pleaded. "And, instead, he
saved. Is not that forgiving? Will not that cup of cold water be
remembered by Thee?"

Yet her heart was tossed by anxiety and doubt. Could it be forgiving to
wish evil? And could the unforgiving be forgiven?

That night Bruno also lay awake, and he answered her thoughts, and said
reproachfully to her,--

"Wilt thou, even thou, be hard on me? Forgiveness is Divine; but
vengeance also is Divine. The Judge is just, or we could not trust Him.
If it were a slave, if it were a dog that had been so wronged, must I
not rejoice the wrong-doer should be punished?"

"Thou art wiser than I, my beloved," she said. "I have no wisdom but His
face and His words. '_Father, forgive them_,' He said; and with Him
forgiveness meant Paradise to the forgiven. Else where were we?"

And they said no more.

       *       *       *       *       *

And that night, in the castle of Baron Ivo, the hall was lighted and the
tables were spread for a great feast. The lights flashed from the castle
steep, from many windows, over the forest and the city.

And a feast in Baron Ivo's castle meant a revel; cowed slaves hurrying
about at the master's bidding; guests, many of them scarcely less cowed,
making forced mirth at his pleasure.

To ears that could hear there was always heaviness in the laughter at
Ivo's feasts. The moans from the dungeons below rose across it all.

But on this night the mirth jarred like a cracked bell; and ere they
rose, the seneschal ventured timidly to ask the Baron if he might accept
the ransom offered by the young wife of the latest captive. "Otherwise,"
he said, "death might be beforehand. And if--if, indeed, the Great Day
was so near, and the reckoning was to come so soon!"

Baron Ivo rose with a curse, and strode off to his chamber in the tower
which looked over the forest, with the dungeons at its base.

But no sleep came to him that night. He seemed to hear a long
procession of heavy steps slowly tramping up the turret-stair from the
dungeons to his chamber. Too often, indeed, had the wails of tortured
captives come up that way.

But as he lay tossing on his bed, all the rest seemed to grow faint and
far-off in comparison with one face which had haunted him often
before;--a kinsman's face, with sightless eyes, which riveted his own on
them, and with groping, imploring hands, which he had once ruthlessly
bound. He would have given the world for one glance of those eyes, and
one forgiving clasp of those blindly groping hands.

"So long ago!" he moaned; "so long ago! And never further off! And now
perhaps I shall soon see him close, too late to atone. There to face the
horror which has stung me to crime after crime! For, having committed
this, I had to do the rest, to ward off vengeance, to secure what had
been so hardly won. That first was crime; the rest were self-defence,
the fruit of mortal fear--of fear, and yet also of love, all so terribly
entangled, love to the child my wife left to my care when she died.
_She_ knew nothing of that terrible past, and loved and trusted me. But
the child for whom I would shed my blood, for whom belike I have given
my soul, does she know? Does she love or trust me? Pure and soft as a
white dove, yet those tender eyes search and scorch me through and
through. Is there no repentance, no reparation possible? And that Day
they say coming so soon! Reparation! how can such a wrong be repaired?
Probably they are all long since under the ground, he and the young wife
who stood so unflinchingly by him, and the babe. For if it were possible
to restore him the castle, what of the sight, and the ruined life? It is
not possible; no, it is not possible! That blind beggar in the
forest-hut could _not_ have been Bruno! And if he were to instal that
beggar's family in the castle, what reparation were that?"

He had risen, and was looking down on the forest, and a little gleaming
light caught his eye, and strangely smote his heart. It seemed to come
from where that beggar's hut was. Even yet, after all, _might_ it be
possible to atone?

But on the other side, in the next turret of the castle, a light shone
from the window of his young daughter, his only child.

"Give _her_ inheritance up to them? Never!" he moaned. And once more the
strong will rose and barred the door of repentance which might have been
a door of hope.

But in that turret-chamber of Baron Ivo's daughter, and in the little
hut in the forest, the lamp of prayer never went out.

In the turret the child Beatrix knelt at her window and said,--

"O gentle Jesus! I cannot but be glad, altogether glad at Thy coming. If
I ought to be afraid also, forgive me. But my mother, before she died,
told me Thou wert so gracious and so kind! And Thy face and Thy voice
always seem to me most like hers; and the faces and voices around me
here are harsh and rough, so that I cannot help longing and longing to
see and hear Thine. Thine and my mother's; but even most Thy own,
because of that wonderful love of Thy dying for us. If it were not for
my father! Every one seems in such terror of him; and there was the
piercing wail that day in the dungeon which he could not explain! To me
he is always tender, and yet I find it so hard to return his fondness as
I would. Something in his eyes seems by turns to scorch and to freeze
me. But if he is not ready for Thee, wait, O patient Saviour! wait, and
make him ready! and let that look there can be in his eyes for me, be
there for others and for Thee! Belike I ought to fear Thy coming, Holy
and Mighty One, for myself, but I cannot. And yet I cannot say the 'Veni
cito,' Come quickly, lest it should be too soon for _him_. If he has
done wrong to any man, teach, oh, teach him to make it up before Thou
shalt come!"

And in the little hut the mother Margarethe still pleaded,--

"Holy forgiving Lord Christ! it is not the wrong to himself, it is the
wrong to me and the children he finds it so hard to forgive. And even
Thou, dost Thou forgive cruel unrepented wrong to Thy beloved? Thou who
didst say of Thy sufferers of old, 'Why persecutest thou _Me_?' And
Thou, when Thou forgivest, makest Thy foes Thy friends. Thou forgivest
because thou lovest, and because Thou knowest the most pitiable misery
is not being wronged, but doing wrong, and because Thy forgiveness melts
the hearts of the forgiven. By the touch of Thy love move my husband to
forgive, and let his forgiveness like Thine save the forgiven. I am a
sinful woman, and yet I cannot dread Thy coming. Saviour of sinners,
only for _him_! Wait, oh, wait till he is ready; make him ready, and
then come, oh, come!"

Meantime little Hilda could not sleep all that night, and at last she
could bear her lonely thoughts no longer, and crept out of her little
bed to her mother's side; and finding her awake, she whispered,--

"Oh, mother, what shall we do to-morrow? Will it ever be worth while to
do anything any more but go to church and pray?"

"We may be sure the good God will not forget to feed His sparrows
to-morrow, darling," the mother replied; "and He certainly would not
have us forget our hens and chickens. And if the King Himself were to
come to-morrow, what would He wish thee to be doing but just the little
task He sets thee every day: lighting the fire, and getting thy father's
breakfast, and helping mother, day by day, on to the last, the Great
Day."

"But, oh! mother," the little one resumed with a tremulous voice, "what
will it be like, that Great Day? I saw the Kaiser come into the city
with the horsemen and the trumpets, and the crowd I thought would have
crushed father and me, and broken down the bridge on which we stood.
Will it be like that? Only, the horsemen great angels in the clouds, and
the trumpets thunders, and the whole earth trembling and shaking as the
bridge trembled beneath that rushing crowd, and everything falling to
pieces? Will it be like the great fire when half the street was burned
down--only, instead of half the street, all the world? fire, and nowhere
to flee to? What will that dreadful Day be like?"

"My darling, I know not. No one knows. But the great question for us all
is not, what will the _Day_ be like? but what is the Judge like?"

"And, oh! mother, how are we to know that?"

"Think of the dear Babe in the manger," she said; "think of the patient
Sufferer on the cross; think of the gracious One in the picture taking
the little child in His arms; think of the story of His watching the
poor widow giving her half farthings, and being pleased with her."

"Will the Judge be the same as that, mother?"

"The very same. Not what _it_ will be like, not what the Day will be
like--what He is like matters to us, and what pleases Him."


III.

On the next morning Baron Ivo woke from a heavy sleep, and shook his
night thoughts of his wronged kinsman angrily from him.

The stir of life was in the castle; his labourers going out to his
fields, his woodmen to his forests, his men-at-arms jesting as they
brightened their weapons, whilst one in a full bass voice carolled out
half unconsciously a phrase of the very hymn which had appalled them all
the night before, "_Apparebit repentina_;" but it sounded dream-like, as
the voice of an owl by day. Baron Ivo stood once more on the solid
ground of possession. If the Great Day were to come this very year, it
was only a little sooner than they had feared; and to-day was _here_,
and had to be _lived_. Let the morrow take care of the things of itself!
One thing, indeed, he did. To give up the castle and atone to his
kinsman was indeed a wild fancy; but he would accept the ransom of that
latest captive and set him free. And, although the ransom was in itself
a robbery, it might have been larger; and so he congratulated himself on
having done a good deed.

       *       *       *       *       *

And in the forest-hut blind Bruno awoke the next morning, and as he went
towards the city with his baskets, an armed band dashed past him with
the clatter of arms and spurs: and he heard his kinsman's voice in harsh
tones of command, and the old bitterness was deep in his heart, as he
said to himself, "'_Apparebit repentina._' All wrongs shall be avenged
at last. Better to suffer and be avenged, than to be in Paradise and see
that villain smile there too, his sins forgotten and unpunished."

       *       *       *       *       *

The next morning, when the miser awoke and found all in the familiar
room as usual--the great iron chests solid as ever, his housekeeper
Griselda's voice as sharp as ever when she called him--he wondered a
little at his own panic the night before.

"My master's daughter made a foolish marriage, poor thing!" he said to
himself, "and I am not bound to repair other people's mistakes; and if I
had yielded her a little more from what her father left, she would
probably only have wasted it. It is after all safer in my keeping than
in hers. And if the monk was right, and she does not come in for the
reversion I have secured in my will, that is not my fault; we are not to
know the times and the seasons. However, there is certainly a good deal
about feeding the hungry. I will tell Griselda to boil down those mutton
bones that were left yesterday into broth for the poor woman; she had a
cough."

But when he came down to breakfast, Griselda laughed scornfully at the
suggestion, and said she had given the bones to the dog; and Griselda
being the one being in the world who represented public opinion to him,
and of whom he was afraid, because her scornful honesty was essential to
him, the master's widowed daughter went without the broth. But Gaffer
Gregory trusted the intention would go to his credit. He, indeed, went
himself to market, intending to get a larger joint, so as to have some
to spare; but mutton was dear that week, so he waited till the next
market day. It was not likely the End would come before that.

Habit was stronger than terror. The market day close at hand still
preponderated over any day even a year off.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gammer Truedchen had hardly been seated an hour at her stall, the next
morning, when one of her cronies came with a whisper that the
Burgomaster's young wife had been seen, quite late one night that week,
in one of the lowest lanes of the city, shrouded close in her hood, and
evidently not at all wishing to be recognized.

Truedchen had a twinge about evil-speaking, and the monk's warning; but
after all, as she said to her crony, if somebody did not look after the
morals of the place, what would become of them? The Burgomaster's young
wife was fair as a lily, and had the reputation of a saint, although
"she had always had her doubts, for those were just the dangerous
people, who must be watched, and must not be suffered to impose on
others. And besides, it might be well to teach men like the Burgomaster
to choose their brides in their own town, and not go roaming to strange
cities to bring home young women of whose family no one knew anything."

And so an evil rumour was hatched no one knew how, and a buzz of
malignant murmurs began to gather around the sweet unconscious young
stranger; and when, a month afterwards, the same old crony who had
brought the whisper, came to tell Gammer Truedchen that the Burgomaster's
wife had been visiting a poor sick fellow-townswoman of her own that
evening, and did not wish her husband to know because of his fear of
infection for her, the one evil whisper had hatched a swarm which no
contradiction of Gammer Truedchen's could silence.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the next morning the student who had thrown away his books gathered
them together again, and was intent on his work; for next week there was
to be a great competition for prizes, and the prizes and praises were
precious, and nearer than the Judgment. Where the heart is, the treasure
will be also.

But the student Gottfried, who had rejoiced in science as a revealing of
God, had arisen first, and was below in the infirmary helping the lay
brothers to nurse the sick. For there had been a pestilence in the city,
and the beds were full, and he thought, "_After_ that Day, O Master,
there will be time to learn of Thy works; but there is little time left
to minister to Thee and Thy sick. The time of service is short; I will
_wait_ to _know_!"

And even as he served, he learned many things. Love deepened the
capacity for knowledge. The hours in the intervals of work were more
fruitful than the whole day had been before.


IV.

So the months passed on, and old habits regained their force. The miser
collected the treasure he loved; Gammer Truedchen's stall still gathered
to it the evil reports she welcomed; the student won the honours he
toiled for, and toiled for more; the baron delayed his reparation; blind
Bruno nursed the bitter sense of his wrongs.

Terror could not break the chains of habit. The dread of a Day could not
change the heart.

But all the time mother Margarethe's prayers went up from the hut in the
forest, and the maiden Beatrix's from the turret in the castle.

And little Hilda sought in her heart on all sides for the answer to the
question, not what will the Day be like? but what is the Judge like, and
what pleases Him now?

So it went on until the Holy Week; and then on Good Friday old
Christopher the hermit came from his solitude in the pine forest to
preach to the people.

It seemed to little Hilda he had come on purpose to answer the question
of her heart.

To him, in his solitude among the rocks and the pines, all days were
alike filled with the majesty and the joy of the presence of God, and
with the great pity for the sins and needs of men.

People came to him from cities and villages all around for counsel and
comfort; for to him all human troubles and wants were sacred.

Sometimes the poor mothers left their little children with him while
they went to toil in the fields, and he taught the little ones the
alphabet, and the story of Bethlehem.

Sometimes veteran warriors sought him, and worn-out statesmen, and
perplexed students, and broken-hearted women, or successful men of the
world who had won its prizes and found them dust. And he taught these
also _their_ alphabet, the Our Father, and the Cross.

And now he came to speak in the great Minster, as much alone with each
hearer as when each sought him in the forest-cell; as much alone with
God as when they all left him in the silence of the forest.

His words were simple and quiet.

"_Ecce Homo_," he began. "Behold the Man!"

Then after a pause he continued, "_Apparebit repentina_," and the words
rang on the hearts of many like a knell of broken resolves made when
they had heard them last.

"_What_ will appear suddenly? And _Who_?

"Is it the Day you are dreading, or the Judge?

"Is it the sentence, or Him who will award it?

"Is it the Day, men and women of the world, which is to turn all your
glory into dust? Is it the Day, beloved, which is to turn all your
sorrow into joy?

"Of the Day I can tell you little.

"Of the Man I know a little, and will tell you what I know."

Then for a few minutes he took up another strain, and pictured the
rending rocks, the trembling earth, the terror-stricken multitude, the
shaking of all that seems most solid, the vanishing of all that seems
most permanent.

His words recalled the terrors of the wandering monk, and when he paused
for a minute the hush of awe-stricken expectation lay once more on all
the throng.

But, as they gazed, hushed in terror, the tones which had been echoing
through the aisles like the wail of wild winds, like the hollow
vibrations of thunder among the hills or of the waves in a sea-cave,
changed to tender human appeal.

He spoke of the Babe on the mother's knee; of the Child listening and
learning in the Temple; of the hands that touched the leper; of the lips
that spoke peace to the penitent sinner; of the pity, the justice, and
the patience. And then, turning to the Crucifix, he said, "Beloved, if
we wish, we may know Him better than we know those who dwell by our own
hearths.

"If all the records of that holy life, of its gracious words and mighty
deeds, could be blotted out and lost, I think we might know Him as we
know no heart on earth only from His words as He hung _there_. His
words, and His silence. Seven last words in three hours of silence.

"Listen! the voice is low, the voice which is to rend the tombs. And
yet, though you may fail to hear the gathering of the storm that is
coming, no heart that listens shall fail to catch the murmurs of those
dying lips.

"For the murderers not yet repenting, '_Father, forgive them_.' To the
Blessed Mother, '_Behold thy son_.' To the beloved disciple, '_Behold
thy mother_,'--binding His faithful ones to each other.

"To the poor tortured penitent thief, '_To-day thou shalt be with me in
paradise_.'

"Son of Mary, He cares tenderly for her in the languor of death, and in
the agonies of redemption.

"Son of God, He gives paradise from the cross.

"To you who love, to you who repent, thus He speaks, '_Paradise_,'
'_Behold thy mother, and thy son_.' But to you who have _not_ loved, who
have _not_ repented, still '_Father, forgive_.'

"Look, listen! it is this voice which will award our sentence. Can we
doubt what pleases Him? Beloved, He is love; always; then, and now, and
at that Day.

"Nothing pleases Him but holy love; nothing is like Him but love;
nothing separates from Him but the death of love. What He will be
hereafter, He is now.

"Is there no wrong you can forgive now before it is too late?

"No wrong you can repair now?

"No need you can supply now? No sorrow you can soften?

"It is not yet too late.

"I speak no more. Listen to Him.

"I say to you now, not, look forward to the Day, but _Ecce Homo--Behold
the Man!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

And that night blind Bruno knelt beside his wife Margarethe in the
forest-hut, and said, "Beloved, let us say the Lord's Prayer together. I
can say it from my heart at last," and gentle tears flowed from his
sightless eyes as he murmured, "Forgive, as we forgive."

And in the little turret-chamber of the castle the Baron came and stood
beside his daughter's bed, his hands clasped in agony.

"Child," he said, "I come to make thee homeless and a beggar, and to
make thee hate me."

And he confessed the whole dark story to her, and told her how he meant
to restore the lost inheritance and divest themselves of all.

Then she rose and fell on his breast, and said, "Father, you make me
richer than ever I could have been, and you make me love you as I never
could before. We will go through the world together, thou and I, until
we find the injured kinsman, and restore him all."

And the next morning, before any in the castle were awake, the Baron
went with his daughter down the turret-stairs, and through a postern
gate, down the steep, and through the forest to the hermit's hut.

And the Baron knelt and wept like a child at the hermit's feet.

His was a long shrift. Crimes about which there could be no
self-deception, a life of high-handed wrong. The first wrong which won
him his kinsman's heritage had placed him almost inevitably among the
beasts of prey, and made his dwelling a den of rapine. Yet, happily for
him, he had preserved unsoiled the belief in a just and avenging God.
Sullenly, hopelessly, he had pursued his track of violence; but he had
never been able to falsify to himself this vision of the Just One, or to
hope to appease Him by any payment or fine, save the one he thought it
hopeless to attempt, the reversal of his wrong-doings and leading a just
life.

And now on the Face he had believed irrevocably set against him, for the
first time he had seen the yearning of forgiving pity, not only for the
wronged, but for _him_, the criminal.

A ray of hope, a beam of holy Almighty love dawned on the long polar
night of his soul, and the ice began to melt. And in the light of that
hope he dared to stand face to face with his sins.

But the long array rising before him from his own lips, reflected in the
compassionate sternness of the hermit's eyes, seemed to crush him to the
dust; and when he came out from that terrible hour, he seemed to his
young daughter to have shrunk into a feeble old man.

She drew close to him and laid her hand in his; but as they moved away,
it seemed to her as if it were no longer he who sustained her, but she
who sustained him.

"The holy man has given thee counsel, father," she said tenderly.

"He bids me call all our people together, at once," he said, "and
confess to them my sin, and bid them proclaim my intention of
restitution. That," he said, "is at once the truest penance, and the
surest way to find the means of restitution."

"I will be beside thee, father," she said. "All thy burdens are mine."

"Nay," he said, with a sob in his voice, "it is _thee_ I cannot bear to
degrade."

"Nay," she said, "we _are_ one in the depths together, now, and that
will be the first bitter step on our joyful upward way."

But as they returned, it chanced that they lost the path and found
themselves before the threshold of blind Bruno's hut.

And for the first time since his sorrow, the wronged man's heart was so
light with the joy of forgiving that he was singing as he wove his
baskets, chanting half-unconsciously the hymn "_Apparebit repentina_."

And the tones of the voice seemed familiar to Baron Ivo, and he paused
and looked, and saw the upturned sightless face with the new peace on
it, and recognized his wronged kinsman.

He strode up to him and knelt at his side, and said in a low voice
half-stifled with shame and grief, "Bruno, you are avenged at last; I
can never forgive myself. Can _you_ forgive?" And after a brief pause
from the quivering lips came the pardon,--

"_I forgave you last night_, thank God."

They said no more.

But on the morrow Baron Ivo gathered the whole of his retainers
together, and as many of the townsmen as could come, and leading his
kinsman, with his wife and child, to the chair of state in the great
hall of the castle, he knelt before him and made confession of his
wrong. And then, by his command (his last as their lord), his retainers
took from him arms, and helmet, and sword, and coat of mail, and left
him in rough woollen garments such as his serfs wore, girded with a
rope; humbled and degraded, as he well knew, before no sympathetic
eyes--for, large as the assembly was, there were few in it who had not
against him some memory of rapine and wrong, and through the hall there
was a murmur of execrations.

But the true Baron rose and said, "Let no man reproach him. ONE has
atoned for him, and for me, and for all. Let no man reproach him, or
pity me. For since I have seen that forgiving Face, I am content to be
blind to all beside. _Ecce Homo._ Forgive, as He forgave."

And the hermit lifted the cross on high, and took one hand of the
penitent, while his daughter held the other in both hers, and together
they went forth through the hushed crowd, out of the castle-gates, into
the forest-hut to dwell there alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the miser went home from the hermit's sermon once more a stricken
man--stricken before by terror to the conscience, but now smitten by
love to the heart.

Once more he turned to his coffers. And the gold, which terror for a
night had turned into dead leaves, seemed transmuted into coin of the
Kingdom; for, once more, the thought of the goldsmith's widowed daughter
and her children came to his heart. And this time he made no excuses,
and no delays, but hurrying out alone with eager haste, he searched out
the three destitute ones in their poor chamber in the roof, and took
them home to his house, and fed and clothed them, and made himself their
servant. And so the spell of death passed from his treasures, and they
became living grain.

       *       *       *       *       *

And even to Gammer Truedchen, the power of forgiving love, the might of
the thorn-crowned Face, slowly penetrated. She could not banish from her
heart the tenderness of that gracious countenance. The words, "For envy
they delivered Him, for _envy_," stung her to the heart, and dimly and
slowly she grew to feel herself among those who had accused Him. And His
face seemed to haunt her, with a look in it that recalled the pale
saddened countenance of the Burgomaster's young wife: for lately she
could not help seeing that the lady's fair bright face had grown grave
and white; the shadow of calumny lay heavy on the young life alone in
the strange city.

So it went on, until one day Gammer Truedchen was seized with sudden
illness, and nothing would content her, as she lay tossing on her bed,
but to see again that saddened face whose memory so haunted her.

Willingly the lady came, and the old woman told her all, and the lady
would not leave her until she had nursed her into health again.

And from that time the stall by the Minster door ceased to be a nest of
stinging rumours, and instead, the children came to her, and the
suffering, and a quiet glow fell at eventide on her heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so the new year dawned familiarly on all. But the Great Day dawned
not yet on the world; only on one, under Gaffer Gregory's roof, the
morning of new life had suddenly arisen.

The long struggle with want and toil had worn out the delicate frame of
the goldsmith's widowed daughter, and on the new year's morning the worn
and patient face lay motionless on the pillow with an unutterable peace
stamped on it from the soul which had learned the full meaning of the
words, "Behold the Man."

       *       *       *       *       *

Still, on earth, remained the shadow of the irreparable wrongs; not on
those who had suffered, but on those who had wrought them.

Bruno's sightless eyes had indeed opened on a vision of peace beside
which all earthly light is dark. But from Ivo, who came and did faithful
service to him in his castle, the vision of his crime could never depart
on this side the grave.

To the Burgomaster's wife the calumny proved but as a purifying fire,
making her fair with a more heavenly beauty than before. But to Gammer
Truedchen the harvest of the evil words she had sown was ever returning.

And in the miser's house and heart the blank of the worn-out life he
might have saved lay heavy; while the blessed spirit thus set free was
resting with Him she had so faithfully loved in the Paradise of God.

On the wrong-doers fell indeed healing dews of forgiveness.

But the brows of the sufferers were glorious with the likeness of the
thorn-crowned Lord, and with His own crown of forgiving love.

But to all these forgiven and forgiving, the cry, "_Apparebit
repentina_," the Day shall appear, had become glad tidings of great joy,
because to the heart of each had come, as the command of love and the
inspiration of life, "_Ecce Homo_," Behold the Man!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Suddenly to all appearing the great Day of God shall come."




_The Cottage by the Cathedral._


Close under the walls of the Cathedral, nestling against one of its
buttresses, leant the Cottage in which the little crippled Marie lived.

Time and weather had stained and shaped the rude timbers of which it was
built, and tender mosses had woven their fine tapestries over its roof,
so that it seemed as little out of harmony with the stately building
which looked down on it and sheltered it, as the mosses and lichens on
its own stones.

For all the grandeur of the Cathedral being the grandeur of a house of
God, only made it, like the everlasting hills themselves, "the hills of
God," so much the more the shelter and refuge of the smallest of His
creatures.

Moreover, the Cathedral, for the very reason that it was a house of God,
being also a home and refuge for men, having also been designed, arch by
arch, by loving human thought, and raised, stone by stone, by lowly
human hands, had necessarily a twofold kindred: allying it, on the one
side, with the great temple of the Creator's own building, vaulted with
its infinite depths of starry worlds; and on the other side, with the
lowliest dwelling in which human creatures toil and suffer. Indeed, its
kindred with the cottage was closer than with the stars, because He who
was adored in it became, for our sakes, Himself the greatest Sufferer;
who, while He had made the stars, was made Man, and Himself lived in a
very lowly cottage once for thirty years.

All this little Marie felt, as she lay hour by hour alone on her pallet;
felt, not thought, for the roots of true thoughts in after-life lie deep
in the feelings of the child's heart, which the child cannot utter even
to itself, and which some lips indeed are never opened in this life to
utter to any one: a silence not of much moment, since this is the world
for learning rather than for uttering, and many of our most eloquent
utterances here would seem but as babes' lispings there; while many lips
which have but lisping or stammering speech here, will be opened in very
glorious singing there.

For are not reverence and love the highest religious lessons of
childhood; and indeed of all this life, which is but a childhood? a
reverent uplooking sense of Love and Power unbounded, above, yet very
near us, such as happy children learn from a holy mother's looks and
tones; and little motherless Marie received, in some measure, from the
Cathedral, interpreting to her, with its music and its beauty, the Our
Father and the Apostles' Creed which she had learned from her dying
mother's lips, when too little to understand anything but the sounds.

Marie was very much alone. Her father was a water-carrier, and was
bearing water all day to the thirsty people in the hot streets of the
city, or taking it to their homes. He had to leave quite early to draw
the water fresh from the spring in the cool of the morning. And one of
Marie's two great wishes was that one day she might go with him to the
fountain, and drink the water fresh from the spring. Every morning he
used to place all the things he thought his little girl would need
within her reach; a little white wheaten loaf, a cup of milk, a jug of
water, and, when he had had a prosperous day, some fresh fruit.

Marie thought her father's calling a very high and beautiful one,
although she knew it was not considered glorious in the city, nor one
that would make his name known and honoured. But that she thought little
of; for her father had often told her no one in the city knew the name
of the Architect of the Cathedral; and if his name had faded away from
the memories of men who counted his work the chief glory of their city,
it was plain, Marie thought, that the records of the city must be very
imperfect and very little worth caring about, and that, probably, there
were better records kept somewhere else on quite a different plan.

Water-carrying, besides not being a glorious calling in that city, was
not a lucrative one; so that, in order to eke out the daily bread, Marie
had learned to plait straw for fruit baskets. Agatha, the old woman who
sold fruit by the Cathedral porch, bought them of her; and in return
did, not without many grumblings, all the little household work Marie
would have done with such deft fingers and such a glad heart, had she
been able.

Sometimes, moreover, especially on a rainy day, Mark, Agatha's little
orphan grandson, would spend his play-hours with Marie, and she would
mend his poor ragged clothes as well as she could, and make him
wonderful little toy-baskets of straw lined with orange-peel, and balls
of rags; and in return he would sing her little songs, and the
multiplication-table, and sometimes hymns about Paradise, and the Living
Fountains, and the Temple and the Singers there.

This was Marie's visible world; her father and the Cottage, Agatha and
her fruit-stall, and little Mark, and the Cathedral.

To interpret it, she had the Our Father and the Apostles' Creed. Or
rather, she had them to interpret each other; His invisible things being
understood by the things that are seen, and our visible things by the
things that are not seen.

As to how this interpretation went on, I could say more another time. My
story now is simply of the Cottage and the Cathedral.

From the window by which Marie's bed lay, she could see Agatha's
fruit-stall, and the Cathedral. By propping herself up she could command
the fruit-stall, and see a great deal of the world, though not in its
highest circles. By leaning back as far as she could in one corner, she
could see to the top of the Cathedral tower, with its wonderful crown of
fretted stone; common stone sculptured by man's heart and hands into a
beauty greater than that of any diadem of gems.

Marie liked to think how each stone in that beautiful crown, which
glowed above her in the sunsets and sunrises, and at night was itself
crowned with stars, had been once a common gray stone like the fallen
ones which lay on the ground outside, useless and shapeless.

Of these stones Marie did not like to think. She hoped none of them had
ever been in that glorious crown. She did not think it anything but a
glory for any stone to be made the lowest stone in the uttermost
buttress of the Cathedral. Indeed, the greatest glory, perhaps, for any
stone was to be a hidden stone; altogether hidden, deep beneath the
earth, from human eyes. For such were the very foundation and corner
stones themselves, on which, as on the Unknown Architect, the whole
visible glory rested. But to be a fallen stone, chipped, and marred, and
useless, and crumbling into dust, when it might have been a
resting-place for sunbeams, and for birds to sing welcomes to the
sunbeams from, was a thought which made Marie very sad, and gave a
tremulous depth to her tones when she prayed, "_Lead us not into
temptation_," or tenderly coaxed little Mark not to render railings for
his grandmother's railings, or to use the rough words which he learned
in the streets.

The painted windows of the Cathedral were rather a distress and
perplexity to Marie. Sometimes, it was true, the upper panes glittered a
little in the noontide sunbeams; but, for the most part, they looked
dark and confused. If they had not been painted, she sometimes wistfully
thought, she might have caught glimpses of the glories inside. But
then, of course, they were painted for the people inside, not for those
without.

If she could only once creep Inside to see and to listen!

That was the great longing of her life.

If only once she could feel the great roof bending over her, and the
walls embracing her; if, instead of straining to catch some clear melody
which she might sing over in her heart, out of the dim labyrinth of
those sweet and solemn sounds which reached her where she lay; if she
could only once be among them, hearing the music, knowing the words,
making melody in her heart among the worshippers! Marie thought she
could live happy for the rest of her life on the remembrance; on the
remembrance and the great Hope it would light up.

She did not speak of this longing. She lived, poor little one, with so
keen a sense that her life was necessarily a burden on every one around
her, partly awakened by Agatha's very unconcealed complainings, and much
more by her father's weary looks when he came home at night with his
water-jars and his few hard-earned pence and sat down to his scanty
meal, that she could never bear by look or word to express a wish for
anything that was not absolutely needed or freely offered.

All the more, because she knew so well that the father's love (which was
mother's and father's love to her, and so interpreted to her the Our
Father) would hold any burden light and any sacrifice possible to gain
the motherless child a pleasure or an alleviation of suffering.

So the longing lay deep hidden in her heart, but never came from her
lips, until, one autumn when she seemed to grow brighter than usual, and
a flush came on her pale face sometimes towards evening, one morning her
father, looking fondly at her, said,--

"Child! by Christmas, who knows but we might have thee singing the
Christmas hymns inside the Cathedral!"

Then her whole face was lit up as he had never seen it shine before,
with the streaming out of the long-hidden hope; and drawing his face
down to her, she stroked it as she had been wont when a very little
child, and kissed him, and said,--

"Oh, father, do you think God will give me the joy of going Inside?"

"Why not, darling?" he answered cheerily; "nothing is too good for Him
to give; and what was the Cathedral built for, but for such as thee to
sing His praises inside?"

Yet, even as he spoke, there was something in the light of the wistful
eyes, and in the touch of the feeble feverish hands, that made his
accents falter.

Christmas Eve came. All night the snows fell. In the morning the sun
shone, but the air was keen and cold, and little Marie knew there was no
going Inside for her that day. But she thanked God for making the
outside so beautiful, just as if the angels of the winds had been all
night decorating every ledge and angle and quaint familiar bit of
carving, and all the fretwork of the stone crown, with alabaster and
crystal, or some heavenly blending of glories impossible in earthly
material.

As her father left her for the service, he looked fondly back, and
said,--

"At Easter, darling; inside at Easter!"

But there was no ring of hope in his tones, cheerful as he tried to make
the words; and when he had left her, and the soft dim music floated in
broken cadences to her on her solitary little bed, for once the child
felt not merely alone but lonely, and a few hot, rare tears fell through
her thin fingers as she pressed them on her face.

But she was not alone. And as she lay quietly weeping, sacred words came
into her heart, borne on the sacred music, like the scent of violets on
the winds in spring.

    "_Thy will be done on earth._"

She said it, she wept it, she wept it to her Father in heaven. And
softly, as from the other side of the choir, came back, as from above,
the glorious antiphon--

    "_As it is in heaven._"

The sob of submission came back, as it so often does, in a song of
praise, from the land where the Amens are transfigured into the
Hallelujahs.

    "_As it is in heaven._"

"It will be all Easter there," she thought. "I shall be Inside there at
last!"

When her father came back, and looked anxiously at his darling as he
entered the door, her smile met him like a song of victory and welcome.

"At Easter, darling! Inside the Cathedral at Easter!"

"Yes, father," she said; "one Easter I shall be Inside."

But the hidden fount of joy, from which the smile came, he did not know.
She would not tell him, because to him, at first, she knew it must be a
bitter well of tears.

Slowly she faded away.

The Cathedral, her great stone Poem, her Paradise, rose before her, and
spoke to her, day and night.

But with new readings.

For she had learned that this whole visible world, with its earth and
its heavens, its cities and its cathedrals, this whole transitory life,
is but as the little timber Cottage nestling against the everlasting
walls of the Temple whose builder and maker is God.

Day by day old Agatha grumbled over her household work, yet day by day
more tenderness began to mingle with her complainings.

Day by day little Mark came, attracted irresistibly, he knew not how, by
the gentle voice, although the feeble fingers could mend or make for him
no more. And unconsciously he unlearned the rough lessons of the
streets, and learned a loving reverence from the dying child.

And day by day the father laid the little white loaf, and the milk, and
the water-jug by his darling's bed, only showing his anxiety by never
missing any day now to bring some little gift of fruit to add to it,
were his labour prosperous or not, taking it from his own scanty meal.
And little Marie dared not remonstrate or refuse; she knew the memory of
those little sacrifices would be so precious.

Beyond this tacit understanding, the two did not confess to each other
by word or look that both knew what was at hand.

Only one morning, as he was leaving home, she said to him in a faint
voice, but with a bright smile, "Father, I think God has given you
beautiful work to do--to carry water to those who thirst. Is it not just
what His only Son, our Lord, is doing always for us? He does not stand
at the fountain; He brings the water home, does He not? home to every
one of us, to our very hearts."

Then she added,--

"Father, you will come back early. I think our Lord is coming to take me
to the Fountains of Waters. We shall drink together one morning, father,
fresh from the spring. I think I am going Inside at last."

He did not leave her again.

Days of suffering came.

But before Easter she had exchanged the little Cottage for the
Cathedral. The child had entered in, and was joining in the songs of the
Temple, which is the Father's house, wherein are many mansions.

And Agatha said,--

"We have had a saint with us, a saint of God,--and I did not know it!"

But she grew gentler and kinder. The Cottage where the gentle child had
lived and died had grown as sacred as the Cathedral, and a hush of
reverence was on it which seemed to make harsh words impossible where
she had suffered and entered into rest.

Little Mark said, "My friend is gone." But when he said the Our Father
she had taught him, he understood a little what a heaven it must be
where all the voices were as gentle as Marie's, and all the hearts as
true and kind.

The father said nothing, except to God.

"Our Father which art in heaven," he said, "mine and hers, Thou gavest
me a saint of Thine to be an angel in my home. I thank Thee I knew it
while she was here with me; not first now that she is Inside, at home
with Thee."

But a glory came down on his lowly work from her memory, her words, and
the sense he had of her immortal life, until he too should be called to
the Living Fountains, to hear once more the dear familiar voice, then
long at home in the Hallelujahs, but sure never to forget the tones of
welcome it had on earth for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Sic hat ihren Sprung gethan. Ach wollt' Gott dass ich den Sprung gethan
haette. Ich wollt' mich nicht sehr herwieder sehnen."--MARTIN LUTHER
_(Watchwords for the Warfare of Life_, p. 304).

    Say not they sank to rest,
      As a wave when its force is spent,
    As a weary child on its mother's breast,
      So it seemed; but not thus they went.

    Not thus it seemed to those
      Who watch by our side alway,
    And through the calm of the last repose
      See the dawn of the endless day.

    As a stream the frosts enchain,
      By the touch of Spring set free,
    Vocal and strong bounds forth again,
      Springs forth to meet the sea;

    As a bird of some sunny land,
      Caged in the darkness long,
    Freed by the touch of a friendly hand,
      Springs into light and song.

    We are the feeble, and bound
      In fetters of night and frost;
    Winged, but chained to the ground,
      In fevered slumbers tost.

    The dying, the dead are we;
      The living, the living are they;
    Ever living, from death set free,
      To praise thee, Lord, this day.

    Say not they sank to rest,
      As a wounded bird on the sod;--
    As a waking child to its mother's breast,
      They sprang to life and to God!




_The Unknown Architect of the Minster._

A LEGEND, NOT OF COLOGNE.


In the days when Gothic architecture was still a vital force in the
world, ever spontaneously renewing itself in varied forms, nourishing
itself with all the life around it, enriching itself with all the
changes of the times and seasons, and giving them forth in new and
ever-varying forms of growth and beauty, as living things do, the
Architect of the Minster lived.

Day by day, and night by night, the beautiful thought grew in his heart
and brain. For, as with the Kingdom of God itself, so more or less with
all the works of the Kingdom, is it not "as if a man should cast seed
into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed
should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how"?

All the beauty of all he saw and heard in the City and in the fields
grew into it, the wonder and the joyousness of his childhood, the
aspirations of his youth, the power of his manhood,--all the joys and
sorrows of his life, its sacred memories, and its more sacred hopes.

When, he went through the streets of the City near at hand, the happy
faces of little children, the patient toil of working-men and women, the
furrows on the faces of the aged who could toil no more, all were sacred
to him, and inspiring; for all said: "You are building a home for us, a
home for each, where children's voices shall soar in praise, and the
toil-worn find rest in the sacred shadow, and the aged a foretaste of
the rest to which they are drawing near. A home for all, which, like the
Great Home that abideth, shall unite, not separate."

When he wandered over the undulating reaches of solitary moorland near
the city, or through the shades of forest and copse, or listened to the
little rills trickling from their gravelly sources through the sedges of
the marshy hollows, not a golden arrow of sunshine that shot through the
trees, nor a curve of sedge or grass in the quiet places, but sowed some
germ of beauty in his brain.

The sweep of the great River round meadow and tower, the rush of the
current which linked it with the heart of the land, and the ebb and flow
of the tides which bound it to the heart of the changing sea; the day,
with its revelations of earth, and its awakening of eyes to see and
work; the night, with its revelations of heaven, and its awakening of
souls to see and pray; the steadfast arch of starry sky, which was no
roof, but an unveiling of the Infinite; the changing gleams of cloud and
sunshine, clothing the earth with her robe of light and tears; the
intervening brief glows of dawn and sunset, when earth and sky held
festival with blaze of colour and burst of choral song;--all these sank
deep into his spirit, to live again in the pillars of his forest aisles,
and the arch of the aspiring roof, which, like the starry roof of heaven
itself, was not to shut the adoring heart in and down, but to lift it up
and up for ever.

So the Minster grew--grew as human works do grow, by patient mechanical
toil of brain and hand elaborating the original inspiration, by accurate
measurement, by rigid faithfulness to law, by lowly learning from God's
work, by patient study of man's needs. Curve by curve, line by line,
stone on stone, till the vision of the poet's heart grew into a vision
of beauty for the refreshment of the hearts of all men.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the Architect did not live, on earth, to see his thought grow into
sight.

On a pallet, in a cell of the monastery, he lay, smitten with fever.

And while the thought of his brain was growing into solid stone on the
sunny earth outside his cell, the solid earth itself was passing away,
like a dream, from him.

It was Easter Eve. In the deepest dusk before the dawn, in the silence
of his cell, a stirring and shadowing of something unholy seemed to
darken and disturb the air.

Unloving voices answered each other in hoarse whispers, like a hot, dry
wind through the crisp and shrivelled sedges of a dried-up watercourse.

"Ha!" laughed the voices; "he thinks he has been working for
immortality. But we know better. A century hence, not a creature will
remember his name, any more than they remember or care who planted the
first tree in the forests around the city.

"He dreams of the gratitude of men; and centuries after he has mouldered
into dust, the generations of the dust-born will be gazing up with
stupid wonder at the thing he built, and pouring out their prayers and
praises to the stone roof which rises above his dust and theirs,
fancying their words pierce through, instead of falling back like the
echoes. But we know better.

"Among all the names glorified there, no mention will be made of his. He
fancies his name is written in stone, and in men's hearts. It is written
in dust, and in men's breath. 'Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher,
all is Vanity.'"

A faint ray of gray light crept in through the window of the cell, and
the mocking voices died away among the chill morning winds.

But the Architect lay on his bed in a rapture of gratitude and content.

"Father," he said in his heart, "can this be true? Shall this thing for
which I have thought and toiled indeed grow up into a holy place,
wherein men shall adore Thee for centuries after I am gone--even Thee?
Shall this offering of mine be indeed so accepted on Thine altar? First
me, and then it?--Wilt Thou indeed accept both altogether thus? Wilt
Thou indeed let me be altogether hidden in this thing I have thought, in
it and in Thee?"

Then from all the churches of the city rang forth the Easter bells.

And through the victorious peal of the Resurrection music, through the
slow dawning of the newly-risen light, through the chirping and
carolling of the waking birds, there came to the patient sufferer
voices, and white visions of glory--white so as no fuller on earth can
white them.

And the voices spoke thus into his heart:--

"Thine offering is altogether accepted. Thou and it. Thy work shall live
on earth, faithfully fulfilled according to the thought of thine heart.
Thy name shall be written in Heaven, in the Temple not made with hands.

"Thy work shall live where thou no longer art, to help men for ages, to
be bread to the eater and seed to the sower of the generations to come.
Thy name shall live where thou shalt be; among the great multitude which
no man can number, yet each one of which is graven on One divine and
human Heart.

"For ages to come, whilst thou art blessed and at rest, men and women,
still toiling and struggling on this earth, and children, shall praise
God in this beautiful place of thy building, with such praise as
toiling, sinning, repenting, human creatures can give.

"The voice of the great River shall be heard no more beside it, for the
ebb and flow of the great tide of human life which shall surge round it
on every side.

"Day after day the sunbeams, ever new, shall come and go across its
pillars, like a harp touched by an invisible hand, or be caught in its
delicate traceries and entrapped down into the shadows.

"Easter after Easter, the Resurrection hymns of victory, ever new, shall
echo from its vaulted roofs.

"Generation after generation shall worship there, and pass away, and
rest beneath its shade.

"But thy name shall not be written there.

"Not there, among the dying and the sinning. Above; among the living and
the holy. In the Book of Life. On the heart of the Holiest. For ever and
for ever. Art thou content?"

Softly the light and music died away into heaven.

And the sufferer sighed.

"Content! Are the archangels content before the throne? Father,
Redeemer, hast Thou indeed accepted my work thus? My offering and
me--even me?"

And softly the humble and blessed spirit died away into the eternal
light, into the hands of God, and was satisfied.




_Only the Crypt.[2]_


We are entering the Beautiful Temple of God, said the children, a
brother and a sister, as they passed reverently under the arched doorway
for the first time.

But the roof was low, and the light faint. A feeling of chill and
depression crept over them.

The weight of the vaulted stone roof seemed to crush the spirit. Through
the small, narrow windows, with their diamond panes, the sunbeams crept
in thin silver threads, and soon seemed to grow dim in the damps that
came up from below, or to lose their way among the massive pillars of
the low arched aisles.

"Can this be the Cathedral?" whispered the brother to the sister; "the
glorious House of God our fathers told us of, and we have dreamt of?"

"They said it was the Cathedral," said the sister; "therefore it must
have glories. We may not doubt the Builder, or Him to whom it is built.
Let us rather doubt ourselves. Our eyes will grow used to the light, and
then we shall learn its beauty. Our mother used to say the eyes of
little children had to get used to the light before they could
understand this world."

"Used to the _darkness_!" murmured the boy.

At that moment a patient sunbeam made its way in through one of the
larger windows and lit up patches of the pillars, falling at last in a
golden glory on a brazen cross with an inscription round it, inlaid in
the slab at the base of one of the pillars.

The children knelt down to read the letters. They were a tender record
of the sorrow of parents for the loss of a child.

And as they examined further they found that every stone beneath their
feet bore some similar memorial words.

"Can we be right?" said the boy with a shudder. "I thought we were
coming to a house of worship. We seem to have come into a house of
graves."

They sat down sad and perplexed on the base of one of the pillars.

As they sat there silent, hand in hand, the sound of soft music, happy,
and of an overpowering sweetness, came to them they could not tell
whence, faint, and yet not, it seemed, far off, more as if there were
some barrier between them and it. It seemed around, above, everywhere;
yet the ear could fix on no point to trace it to that they might follow
it.

Soon it ceased. But then the strains were taken up by voices nearer at
hand. This second music had not the delicious perfectness of the first.
Individual voices could be distinctly heard, not blended into a perfect
whole; and some of these were harsh, some were shrill, some tremulous
and broken as if with tears, some too low with fear, some too high as if
from eagerness to be heard; yet the tones were those of reverent
worship, and something of the joy of the first music broke through them
often, like the sunbeams through the dim, chill air.

"We will go near and try to join," said the children. As they went
towards the sound they saw some lamps which had hitherto been hidden
from them by the pillars. These lit up the forms of a kneeling company
of worshippers.

The children came near, and knelt in adoration beside them. In the
worship their hearts took wing and rose into the light, and for a time
they forgot the chill and the gloom.

Yet, even as they knelt, they saw that the little company was not
abiding. There was a continual movement and change in it. The voices
changed. The sweetest and best trained were continually breaking off, in
obedience to some summons the children could not hear; and others who,
like themselves, had all their music to learn, were coming in their
place.

An awe and trembling came again over the children; and the brother
whispered,--

"Can we be right? Can this be the Cathedral? No one seems to stay!
Whither can they go?"

And the sister answered in a soft whisper,--

"We will wait to see. Can they be going to the _other music_?"

Scarcely had the words died from her lips when a maiden who had been
kneeling close beside them, from whose liquid voice and clear reverent
utterance the children had been learning the words of the song, and from
whose pale radiant face they had been drinking in its joyful meaning,
suddenly ceased her singing, and looking up for a moment with an earnest
listening gaze, she seemed to hear some welcome irresistible call, for
she said,--

"For me? Can it be indeed for _me_?" And softly touching the children's
forehead with a touch that seemed to them a blessing, she murmured, "You
will be called too, by-and-by." Then noiselessly she rose and glided
away through the shadow of the arches towards the east, and up a flight
of steps the children had not observed before.

They followed her with eager, anxious gaze, and for a moment, ere she
glided out of sight, there was the streaming of a flood of golden
sunshine down the gloom, from an open door, and once more the sound of
that perfect music they had heard at first.

At that moment there was a pause in the service, and a silver-haired old
man came to the children and bid them welcome.

"You look sad and bewildered, my children," he said.

"Oh, father! tell us what it means," they whispered. "Can we be in the
right place? We thought we were coming to a place of light and of
heavenly singing, full of rejoicing worshippers who delighted to stay
there. But this seems a place of gloom and of graves. Here the
worshippers are a little broken band, and even these do not stay. All is
changing and imperfect. What does it mean?"

The old man smiled. "Where do you think you are?" he said.

"In the Cathedral," they answered. "Are we not in the Cathedral?"

"You are, and you are not!" he said. "This is part of the Cathedral. But
it is only the Crypt. The Church cemetery and the Cathedral school. The
choir children are trained here. But the true Cathedral is above; and,
of necessity, when the choristers are trained, they are called up to
join the services there."

When the children heard this they understood it all.

Thankfully they went to learn their part in the Psalm with the choir
children.

And knowing the Crypt to be only a crypt, its gloom was wonderfully
brightened to them. Its stray sunbeams grew clear and golden, now that
they were understood to be only earnests of the golden day above. Its
broken hymns grew tenfold sweeter, now that they were felt to be but the
learning of the anthems to be sung above.

Precious was every hard lesson of the singing, precious every thin
silver thread of the light, for they were the foretaste or the
preparation of the moment when the door of the true Temple should open,
and the shadows flee away.


BURIED WITH CHRIST.

    Moans of sharpest agony,
    Faintly moaning ceaselessly,
    "Earth is all one grave to me!"
    Greenest fields but churchyard turf,
    Sunniest seas but deadly surf;
    Purest skies one vaulted tomb,
    Death in all homes most at home.

    Moans of sharpest agony!
    Back from far they came to me,
    Echoed from the crystal sea,
    As a chant of victory;
    From the sea's translucent verge
    Back in triumph pealed the dirge:--
    "Earth is all one grave to thee?
    What besides could earth now be,
    Since He died upon the tree,
    Since He died on earth for thee?
    Since beneath it He lay, dim,
    Cold and still each tortured limb,
    Buried are His own with Him,
    Yet the dirge is all a hymn.
    Wouldst thou take the crypt's chill damps,
    And its few sepulchral lamps,
    For His temple spaces high,
    For His depths of starry sky?
    Wouldest thou? Not so would they
    Who one moment breathe His day,
    Who for one brief moment's space
    Have the vision of His face.
    Earth has light for earth's great strife,--
    Where He liveth, there is Life.

    "Earth is all one grave to thee?
    Yet lift up thine eyes and see!
    For the stone is rolled away,
    And He standeth there to-day;
    Patiently by thee will stay
    Till thy heart 'Rabboni' say!
    (He will not forget the clay,
    Thine, nor theirs, by night or day.)
    That 'Rabboni!' faint through fears,
    Sobbed in agony of tears,--
    That alone thy heart can clear
    Those far-off Amens to hear,
    That alone can tune thy heart
    In those songs to take her part.

    "Then thy cry of agony:
    'Earth is all one grave to me,'
    Echoing shall come back to thee
    In a chant of victory,
    Echoed from the crystal sea,
    From the living victors free,
    Ransomed everlastingly."

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Partly suggested by a passage in Longfellow's "Hyperion."




_The Sepulchre and the Shrine._

    "Why seek ye the living among the dead?"


The great torrent of the First Crusade had been sweeping for weeks
through the valley of the Danube. Along that "highway of nations" tribe
after tribe had poured westward, leaving its deposit in castle and
village, on dominant height and in sheltered hollow. And now the rush of
men swept back eastward: no slowly advancing tide of emigration, but a
wild torrent of enthusiasm, which would leave behind it nothing but
graves and the bones of unburied thousands. And yet in that death were
seeds of life.

Week after week the Lady of the Tannenburg had seen from the terrace of
her castle the bands of peasants pass on their way,--men and women and
little children, with the red-cross on the shoulder,--to the Tomb of
Christ, to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel. Multitudes almost
entirely composed of the poor: no plumed helmets or richly caparisoned
war-horses. The red-cross, of common stuff, was fastened on the poor
garments of the peasants. The only chariots were the rough cart drawn by
oxen taken from the plough, carrying the mothers and the little ones,
who were too feeble to walk.

Of geography they knew little more than the children, who cried out as
each town came in sight, "Is that Jerusalem?" The patient oxen would
suffice to carry them and theirs, they thought, to the Master's Grave!

The rich had loans to effect, lands to sell, affairs to arrange,
stewards and agents to appoint, before they could commence the perilous
journey with a fitting escort. Moreover, to them the Holy Land contained
something more than the Sepulchre of Christ. It contained rich Moslem
cities to be plundered, fertile lands to be possessed, fair provinces to
be reigned over. To the poor it contained only the Master's Grave. And
He who leadeth the blind by a way that they know not, led the people
then as now.

The rich, for the most part, came back impoverished. The poor, for the
most part, never came back at all: but from their graves sprang the
first-fruits of freedom for Europe. The religious enthusiasm for which
they died had begun the emancipation of their class. From chattels,
attached to the soil like its crops and its stones, they had become men.
The Master's Grave was theirs to die for, as much as it was their
lords'; the Master's will was theirs to live for, as much as for the
noblest.

Day by day the Lady of the Tannenburg had watched the pilgrim-bands
passing slowly in irregular groups through the broad valley beneath her.
Night by night she had seen the camp-fires gleaming through the
pine-woods, and heard the "_Dieu le veut_" echo from crag to crag. Often
she had sent her only child, young Rudolf, with a band of retainers,
bearing bread and meat from her stores, fruit from her orchards, and
wine from her vineyards, to be distributed among the pilgrims. And night
by night, as the hosts passed by, they knew the Lady's castle by the one
steadfast light from one arched window, which never failed to shed its
faint glow over the castle wall.

It was well known among them that scarcely a year before, her husband,
Sir Rudolf of the Tannenburg, had died. It was said that he had been on
the eve of joining the Crusade; and many a vow was made to the young
Rudolf that his father's name should be faithfully remembered at the
Holy Sepulchre. The boy knew that the tears which came into his mother's
eyes when he told her of those vows were tears that heal. But at last
one evening, as he rose from his prayer at her knee, he looked up into
her face, while a sudden light broke over his, and said,--

"Mother, are not all the people going to the same Holy Grave?"

"The same? Surely, my son," she said, bowing her head reverently. "The
Grave of Christ, our Lord."

"We have our own holy grave, mother!" he replied--"thou and I. But have
we no share in this Grave of Christ?"

"Surely; their Lord is ours," she said; "and His Holy Sepulchre is ours,
in common with all Christendom."

"Then, mother! mother!" he exclaimed, gazing full into her eyes, "let us
also go to the Grave, to weep there, with all His Christendom. Let us do
what my father meant to do. Who will remember his name as we would
there?"

For a few moments she made no reply. The casement stood open, although
it was winter, and through the stillness of the frosty air echoed once
more the solemn, "_Dieu le veut_."

"Out of the mouth of the babes who are Thine, out of the mouth of Thy
poor, O Christ, Thou speakest. I listen--I obey. God wills it.--My boy,"
she said quietly, pressing him to her heart, "God has surely spoken by
thee. My heart speaks by thee. We will go."

She sat beside the child till he slept, till the long lashes shaded the
flushed cheek, and the half-open lips and the small clenched hand seemed
to tell of some boyish dream of conflict with the infidel.

Kneeling beside her sleeping child, she made her first vow in the
presence of all that made life living to her.

And then she went down to keep solitary vigil in the castle-chapel; to
kindle those sepulchral lamps which were seen far across the valley,
which she never suffered any hands but her own to trim or feed.

Her own room was bare and austere as any monastic cell. All her precious
things were lavished on the mortuary chapel, which was her
treasure-chamber, the resting-place she longed to share, the threshold
of the Father's house. On the steps of that memorial altar, which was a
tomb, and there only in the world, she felt at home.

The light of the flickering lamps, contending with the steadfast, silent
moonbeams, wrought strange magical contrasts of glow and gloom on silver
shrine, and polished marble pavement, and jewelled paten, and chalice,
and gold-embroidered drapery; and beyond, on the rich Gothic sculpture,
here and there relieving the shadows of the arched aisle.

And kneeling there once more, she renewed the vow, in the presence of
what made life death to her, and death as the threshold of life.

"_Dieu le veut_," she said, pressing her forehead on the cold marble. "O
Christ, I take the cross on me, for me and for him. Accept it for both,
and shelter us both with Thine."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was early spring.

Forth through the green Danube valley they went,--the mother and her
son, Snorro the old castellan, and Gunhilda the nurse, with other
faithful old servants of the house.

At night they slept under a tent, or in any lowly hut they could find.

In the morning they awoke with no stately walls between them and Nature.

To the boy, the journey amongst the forests and by the streams was one
perpetual holiday.

And on the mother also soft dews of healing began to fall, from sunsets
and sunrises, and the opening of leaves, and the songs of birds, and
the life of all the humble happy creatures.

But most of all from this, that she had stepped down from the cold
height of her solitary sorrow, and went forth as one bearing the common
burden of humanity.

"We are going to the Holy Grave that belongs to us all!" she said to
herself. "We go with Thy poor, Thou who wast poor Thyself! We go to Thy
sepulchre, mortal, mourning human creatures, for Thou also wast mortal
once. Thou also _hast died and hast been buried_!"

Thus, in stooping lowly, nearer her fellow-men, she grew nearer Him who
stooped lowest of all.

"The whole earth is a sepulchre," she said; "for it was Thine! Not our
beloved only; Thou also hast lain in the grave! When we and our beloved
lie down in ours, it will be but where Thou hast lain before."

Meanwhile, all the time the earth was bearing her lowly witness to the
resurrection in opening buds and nestling birds, and all the renewal of
the spring. Yet the Lady thought only, "My love is dead. My Lord has
died."

But one twilight, as they walked together in the sombre shadows of a
pine-forest, the boy said to her,--

"Mother, I heard strange talk last night by the camp-fires. Old Snorro
was talking to Gunhilda, and he said he could not make out all this
wandering to the Sepulchre in the Morning Land. His mother, he said,
used to tell him how, when they lived far away by the Northern Seas, the
young men and maidens mourned for the death of Balder the Good and
Beautiful, the sun-god, until one day a stranger priest came, with the
Cross, from the south, and told them to mourn no longer for the slain
god, for he brought them tidings of One good, and strong, and beautiful,
the Light of all the worlds, who had wrestled with death and had _not_
been overcome, but had broken through the grave and risen in immortal
life to give life to men. If indeed He lived, Snorro said, why did all
the people run away from the places He set them in, to His grave, where
He was not, instead of praying to Him, and trying to please Him in the
heaven where He is? And Gunhilda said Snorro must not talk of things he
did not understand; that it was a good and holy work to wrest the Holy
Grave from the infidel; the priest said so, and the Pope said so; and
how should he know who had only been a Christian at all for two
generations? Old Snorro did not seem satisfied. He said he only wanted
to understand. And she said he ought not to want to understand; that was
like Eve, and like the devil, and was the beginning of all wickedness.
And so they were whispering on when I fell asleep.

"Mother, what did old Snorro mean?"

She took his hand, and they walked on some little time in silence.

"Was old Snorro quite wrong, mother?" the boy said at length.

"Not quite, my son," she said. "I think not altogether wrong. Our Lord
is surely living. Nevertheless, it is surely right that we should
reverence the Holy Grave, and seek to wrest it from the unbeliever."

But that night she had a strange dream. She thought the ancient spirits,
with legends of whom her Northern land was full, were all awake,
careering through the forest like winds, flickering like the flames of
the dying camp-fires, flitting to and fro like shadows; water-spirits
from the forest-pools, dwarfs from the mountains, gnomes from under the
hills. And some were laughing, some were sighing; but all kept saying to
each other,--

"It is the old funeral procession we remember so long ago; it is the
old, old wail. The children of men are mourning once more their Good and
their Beautiful slain, and buried, and lost. Once more they find their
best and dearest in a grave. For a little while we thought the
death-wail was interrupted, swallowed up in the New Song of Life and
Victory. But it has come back. Balder the Beautiful, the Light of
heaven, is slain. This new Light of Life, this new Hope of the children
of men, is also slain. It is the old funeral train, and the old
death-wail. We--the earth-born, spirits of the waters and the forests
and the hills--live on, and send our echoes on from age to age.
They--the heaven-born--die, and mourn, and pay vain worship to their
dead. Once more the religion of the children of men is a pilgrimage to a
grave."

All that day the wondering doubt of old Snorro the Norseman, and the
moans and whispers of that strange dream, sent wild, bewildering echoes
through the Lady's heart.

And that evening it chanced that the encampment lay amidst the ruins of
some deserted dwellings on the outskirts of a walled city.

The Lady could not sleep; and as she lay awake in the silence, broken
only now and then by the howling of wolves from the forest, and the
baying of watch-dogs from the city, every now and then a low faint
moaning fell on her ear, as if from a little distance.

At first she thought it was but some of those strange moanings which the
winds make at night among the woods. She listened more intently, until
she became sure that faint articulate sounds mingled with the moans,
which she knew could only come from a human voice.

Softly she arose, and glided to where the sound seemed to be.

And there, in the angle of one of the charred and shattered walls, she
found a young maiden stretched helplessly on a heap of dry leaves.

At the gentle tones of the Lady's voice, the maiden's eyes languidly
opened.

After a time she consented to take a little food and wine from the
Lady's hands: and then slowly she told how she was of the hated and
hunted Hebrew race, and had lived with her people in this the Jewish
Quarter, outside the city walls, until, two nights ago, a wild band of
Crusaders had fallen on them at midnight, had set fire to their
dwellings, and killed all who could not flee, calling them Infidels and
Enemies of Christ; while she herself, long laid on a sick-bed, unable to
move, had been strangely overlooked, and left there to die alone.

Many days the Lady sat beside her, and tenderly soothed and served her,
refusing to abandon this destitute sufferer, even to pursue the way of
the Holy Cross.

"For," she said, "I would not have Him say to me in that day, 'I was
sick and a stranger, and ye visited Me not.'"

Thus the company of Crusaders went on their way; and the Lady and her
son, with their retainers, were left by themselves among the ruined
dwellings between the city and the forest.

At first the sick girl seemed to revive with the tender care lavished on
her; and her heart opened freely to the motherly heart that had thus
taken her to itself.

"It is very strange," she would say; "what does it all mean? He whom you
worship was one of our people. A good man of your people told me once He
loved our race; and forgave even those who were most cruel to Him; and
wept over our sorrows, which He foresaw; and forbade any to think He did
not love us. Such a lovely portrait the good man drew of your Christ, I
thought if I had lived on earth when He did, I must have been a
Christian. But His Christians hate our race, and never forgive, and hunt
us to death."

"Not all," the Lady said tenderly. "It is He who bade me minister to
you."

"If you are like Him, and all Christians were like you," the maiden
said, "I might be a Christian even now. But all is so strange!" she went
on. "Our people say your Christ is dead, and was buried long ago. But
your Book says He rose again, and lives evermore. Yet all His Christians
seem to think He has left nothing so precious behind, belonging to Him,
as His grave. But if indeed He lay in it only those three days, what was
it more than a sick-bed, from which one rises to new health and
strength? It is strange. If He lives, has He left you nothing more
precious than a grave?"

"Surely He lives!" the Lady said; "and I think He has left us much more
precious and dearer to Him than His grave. Poor child," she said, her
whole face radiant with the thought, "I think _you_ are dearer, dearer
to Him than His Holy Sepulchre. For you may be His living shrine. He
said once in a parable, '_In that ye do it to one of the least of these,
ye do it unto Me_.'"

A heavenly light shone from the dark Oriental eyes of the dying girl.

"Did He say so?" she said. "Then your Christ was indeed different from
those who call themselves by His name."

And soon afterwards she resumed,--

"Lady, it may be that I shall see Him soon--see your Christ. It may be I
shall find He is our Christ. It may be I shall find He was born my
Saviour also, and that He will receive even me among His brethren. It
may be He will be pleased with what you have done for me."

And soon afterwards the large wistful eyes grew languid, and were closed
in death.

       *       *       *       *       *

The morning broke over the pine-tops, and over the towers of the city,
and on the Lady watching beside her sleeping boy, and on the Jewish
maiden sleeping the sleep of death.

And with the morning broke peals of bells from every tower in the city,
and every lonely chapel scattered through the far-off glades of the
forest.

Easter Bells.

The Passion Week had come and passed, unheeded, whilst the Lady sat and
watched through her agony with the dying girl.

And now the Easter burst on her with a glad surprise, as if it had been
the first; as if the tidings of Resurrection had now first burst on her
from heaven.

_The Lord has risen indeed._

It was true. His Sepulchre was empty. But heaven and earth were full of
Him, and of His glory.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Mother," said her boy, when they rose from their morning prayer
together, "what do all these joy-bells mean? Is it a king's marriage, or
a great victory? Can it be that they have rescued the Holy Sepulchre
from the infidel at last?"

"They are indeed ringing for a Great Victory," she replied; "the
greatest ever won. It is Easter Day, my son. This day our Lord left His
grave for ever, and rose victorious over death, and opened the gate of
everlasting life to all believers."

And still the bells pealed joyfully on, from the villages on the plains
and hill-sides, from the rocky castled heights, from the depths of the
forest--

    "Io! revixit,
    Sicuti dixit,
    Pius illaesus,
    Funere Jesus!"

Then, looking on the motionless form stretched in the shroud beside her,
the echo of her own words came back to her,--

"The Lord is risen indeed, and liveth for evermore. Dearer than His
empty grave to Him is every sufferer such as this. His Sepulchre is
empty; suffering men and women are His shrine, where we may meet
Himself."

       *       *       *       *       *

And retracing her steps to her castle, beside it she built a hospice for
the sick and the forsaken, from which she suffered none, Greek or Latin,
Jew or Gentile, to be repelled--the only claim she admitted being need
of succour.

And in thus ministering to His poor, she found indeed, in the depths of
her own heart, that He was risen, living for evermore, and present every
hour.

Through His Sepulchre, the grave of her beloved and her own had become
to her but as an encampment for the night beside the Great Captain's, on
the Battle-field.

In His life she learned that they also lived; and in living unto Him,
once more she found she was living with them.




_The Cathedral Chimes._

A LEGEND.


In a city whose history dates from the ages of silvery bells and stately
buildings, there stood, and stands now for aught I know, a cathedral,
rich in all the endless fancies of Gothic art. Inside, it was solemn
with shade, and gorgeous with light which came in through the elaborate
tracery of the stained windows, many-coloured, and broken as the
sunbeams through a tropical forest. Outside, fretted pinnacles and
carved bell-towers sprang upward, grand yet fairy-like, as if stone
towers rose as easily and naturally towards heaven as oaks and pines.
But the chief glory of this cathedral was its bells. They were the pride
of the city, and the great attraction to strangers. Their history formed
an important part of the civic chronicles.

A lady of a royal house had given them as a thank-offering for her
lord's safe return from the Crusades. All her silver-plate and
ornaments, with spoils of Saracens from the recovered Holy Land, had
been poured into the mould when they were made, so that from their birth
all tender and sacred memories had been fused into their very essence,
and their first tones echoed far-off times and lands. A bishop who
afterwards suffered martyrdom in the hands of African Moslems had
blessed them. Their first peal had sounded in honour of a great
victory. They had summoned the people through ages of conflict to defend
their liberties. They had blended their life with the life of every
home,--in family joys and family sorrows, at wedding, christening, and
funeral. They had made Sundays and holidays glad with their joyous
voices. And last, but not least, by aid of an elaborate mechanism of
hammers, ropes, and pulleys, they had for centuries celebrated the
departure of every hour with a chorale, and every half-hour with a
strain like the versicle of a chant, and every quarter of an hour with a
little sprinkle of sweet sound.

Imagine, then, the dismay of the citizens, when, one Monday morning,
eight o'clock came, and no sound issued from the cathedral; half-past
eight, silence; nine, not a note of warning! Their wonder was increased
when the usual peal rung out, clear and full as ever, for the morning
service, and by mid-day the whole city was in a commotion. It was plain
something must be wrong with the machinery of the chimes.

Immediately the most skilful mechanics of the town, clock-makers, and
bell-founders, with the men of science, and the whole corporation, in a
state-procession, mounted the clock-tower. "We will soon set it right,"
they said to the agitated crowd as they entered the belfry-door. The
ropes of the machinery were tested,--all were sound; not a flaw in the
hammers; not a clog in the wheels; not a crack in the silvery metal.
Microscopes were employed, conjectures were hazarded, experiments of all
kinds were tried, but not a ray of light was thrown on the perplexity.
The clever hands, and the wise heads, and the will of the authorities
were all baffled; and the procession reappeared to the assembled
multitudes with very crestfallen looks.

That afternoon little work was done in the workshops, few lessons were
learned in the schools, all the routine of household habits was
interrupted; and when it grew dark the Great Square was filled with
people who were afraid to separate and go to bed without the sanction
of the cathedral chimes. Many foreboded some terrible disaster to the
city, and some thought the end of the world was come!

But when it was dark a sound very weird and strange, yet with a music
like the old familiar tones, came from the church-tower, as it rose dim
and grand against the starry sky. It was a voice, not human, yet with a
strange likeness to a human voice, silvery as a stream, thrilling as a
battle-trumpet, familiar to each listener as his own,--like the blended
voices of a spirit and a bell.

"We have borne it too long," said the bell-voice. "We were set here on
high for other purposes than men have put us to. Is not this a
cathedral, a sanctuary, and a shrine, sacred with the dust of martyrs,
and dedicated to the service of Heaven? Were not we christened like
immortals? Were not we consecrated like priests? The touch of holy hands
is on us, and shall we be debased to secular uses? Set apart like sacred
ministers in a sacred dwelling, shall we be required to mingle in the
common circumstances of your daily life? Raised on high to be near the
heavens we serve, shall our saintly voices serve to tell you when to eat
and sleep? We have borne it too long. We will still serve Heaven, and
summon you on Sundays and Holydays. We will call you to the solemn
services of the Church. We will, if necessary, sound a triumphant peal
on days of national thanksgiving, in remembrance of the Victory which
first awoke us into music. We will even condescend to ring at your
weddings--because marriage is a sacrament--and at your baptisms. We will
toll solemnly when your spirits pass from earth, and when your bodies
are laid in the churchyard we have seen slowly raised with the dust of
your dying generations. But henceforth expect us not to do work which
your commonest house-clocks can do as well. Let your eight-day
clocks--your gilded time-pieces--call you to work and eat, and rest. We
are sacred things, set solemnly apart from all secular uses. Our
business is with Eternity, and the Church, and Heaven. Call on us no
more to commune with the things of the world, and earth, and time. We
are your cathedral bells, but we will be your household clock-chimes no
longer."

Then the voice died away on the night air. For a few minutes there was
silence, but soon it was broken by sobs and lamentations, and all the
people lifted up their voice as one man, and wept.

The house-father said, "Shall we never more hear your voices calling us
to morning and evening prayer? Whenever you told us it was the hour, the
mother came from her work, and the children from their play, and
together we knelt a united family, and committed each other to God."

And the mother said, "Your voices are blended with every happy household
time. Sweet bells! will you mingle with our family joys no more? In the
morning you wakened us to begin another busy day, and the sun's beams
and your voices came together to call us to serve God in our lowly
calling; and both, we thought, came to us from Heaven; and both, we
thought, were meek and lowly, and ready to minister to us in our daily
lives, because both were sent from Him who came among us once, not to be
ministered unto, but to minister; and both, we thought, had caught
something of the light of the eyes which wept at Bethany, and of the
tones of the voice which spoke at Cana and at Nain. At mid-day you told
me it was time to send the dinner to my husband and my elder sons. At
six your voice was welcome to us all, because we knew the father's step
would soon be on the threshold. At eight you reminded me it was time to
lay the little ones to rest, and many a time have you brought happy and
holy thoughts to me in those psalms you sang to me whilst I hushed my
babes to sleep; and all my every-day life seemed to be more linked with
sacred things, and to become, as it were, a part of the service of God,
because it moved to the music of your voices. And again at night your
tones were welcome, as in the morning, when they told us the day's work
was over, and, wearied, we lay down to peaceful rest; for through the
night we knew your sacred voices would sound to Heaven above our
sleeping city, like the voices of the angels, who rest not day nor
night, saying, Holy, holy, holy. Sweet bells! will you never chime for
us again?"

And the children said, in their clear, sweet, ringing voices, "Dear
chimes! do not cease to play to us. You wake us to the happy day, you
set us free from school, and send us home laughing and dancing for joy;
you call our fathers home to us, at night you sing us to sleep, and your
voices are blended with our mothers' in our happy dreams. Sweet chimes!
you sang so many years to our fathers and mothers; and our grandfathers
remember you when they were little children like us. Dear chimes! sing
to us still."

And from the sick-chamber which looked into the cathedral square, where
the windows were darkened all day, and sand was strewn before the door,
that the din of the passing wheels might jar less roughly on the aching
head within, came a low and plaintive voice:--"Sweet bells! your
commonest tones are sacred to me. You are my church music,--the only
church music I can ever hear. When I hear you chime the hour on Sundays
and on the festivals, I feel myself among the multitude within your
sacred walls; and your voice seems to bear their songs of praise to me,
and I am no more alone, but one of the worshippers. But at night it is I
prize you most. All through the hours of darkness, so often sleepless to
me, your voice is the voice of a friend, familiar as my mother's, yet
solemn as the chants of the choir. It helps me to measure off the hours
of pain, and say, 'Thank God, an hour less of night, and an hour nearer
morning.' And how often, when my suffering is great, you have come with
the old psalm-tune, and every tone has brought its word to me, and
spoken to me as if direct from God, and filled my heart with trust and
peace! Your least sprinkles of sweet sound are precious to me. I fancy
they are like the waters of time falling musically from stone to stone
on their way to the great sea. I feel they are as the echoes of the
footsteps of Him who is drawing nearer and nearer to me; and they draw
my heart nearer to Him. Sweet bells! your commonest tones are sacred;
for what is the World but that which becomes the Church when it learns
how God has loved it, and turns from self to Him? and what is Earth but
the floor of Heaven, which heavenly feet once trod? and what is Time but
the little fragment of Eternity in which we live on earth? Sweet bells!
make not my sleepless night lonely and silent, but sing to me, sing to
us all, as of old. Make all our life sacred by linking every fragment of
our life to God."

But still no responsive sound came from the cathedral tower, and the
people waited on in the silence and the darkness. At last a young
priest, an Augustinian friar, ventured a bold suggestion:--"Are not the
devils proud, and the angels lowly? Did the angel think it beneath him
to say to Elijah, 'Arise, and eat'? Did Gabriel hesitate to descend from
the presence of God to bear to an aged priest the tidings of the birth
of a child? Did that other angel deem it secular to say to Peter the
apostle, 'Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals, and cast thy garment
about thee,' before he led him over the stony streets through the cold
night air? And should our cathedral bells scorn to bid us 'rise and
eat,' or to chime at our births, or to summon us to 'gird and clothe'
ourselves for every day's work? Brethren, proud thoughts, and scorn of
daily service, and voices which call our every-day life common and
unclean, are not from Heaven. The bells are possessed by a proud and
evil spirit. Let us exorcise them."

The suggestion at first startled the people as daring, and irreverent
to the church bells, but in their despair they at length agreed to try
it. A solemn procession of priests and holy men and women mounted the
cathedral tower, and, in ancient formulas, with prayer and incense, and
the music of holy hymns, they exorcised the fiend.

Then at once a tide of pent-up music flowed from the liberated bells!
They conscientiously rang out all at once every hour and half-hour they
had omitted, and then meekly and steadily resumed their wonted chimes,
and continued them ever afterwards, like voices of happy and lowly
angels calling men to wake and pray, to "rise and eat," to pray and
rest; cheering the workman to his daily labour, and welcoming him from
it; chanting to the mother as she lulled her babe; and in the
sick-chamber soothing the lonely hours with melodious sound, and waking
in the lonely heart sweet echoes of the psalms of praise.

Here the Legend ended. I heard, however, afterwards that the young
priest, the Augustinian friar, lived to spread Glad Tidings through the
city, but that he was at last burned in the cathedral square for
preaching to men what he had said about the church bells. Yet in the
flames, it was said, he looked up to the cathedral tower, and sang the
words of a psalm of praise the old bells were chiming, till his voice
was silenced in death. And ever since the chimes have taken up his
message, and chant to those who will listen, hour by hour.

"Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the
glory of God."




_The Ruined Temple._


The Temple was in ruins, and the Priestess sat, a captive in chains,
among its broken and scattered fragments. It had been a temple of the
most ancient form, open to the sky, beautiful beyond any temple upon
earth, beautiful and sacred; and some remnants of its beauty hung about
it still--fragments of exquisite carvings and broken shafts of graceful
columns. But everything was shattered and out of place: the window
tracery shivered in a thousand fragments and strewn on the ground,
columns prostrate, sacred vessels lying rusted among the weeds, the pure
spring which had gushed from beneath the altar choked up and dry, and
instruments of sacred music mute and broken on the ground.

On the walls in some places were the traces of violence, but it was
remarkable that they seemed to have been assaulted only from within.
Indeed, the temple had been a fortress, so impregnably situated and
built that except from within not one stone could ever have been
displaced.

This was, in fact, the saddest part of its history. The temple had been
desecrated before it had been ruined, and in its ruin it was a temple
still, but, alas! no longer sacred to Him in whose honour it had been
reared. Many senseless or loathsome idol-images were carved on the
walls, strangely contrasting, in their shapelessness or deformity, with
the symmetry of every fragment of the original structure. On the broken
altar in the centre stood an image of the Priestess herself. This was
the earliest idol which had entered there, and with the entrance of this
the ruin had begun. The Enemy who had, with subtle flatteries,
introduced this idol had ever since had access to the temple, and step
by step the Priestess had sunk beneath his power. He had led her into
wild orgies, in which she herself had defaced the delicate tracery and
torn down the walls; and when she awoke from the frenzy and wept, as
sometimes she would, he silenced her tears with blows or with mocking
threats of the vengeance of Him to whom the temple had been consecrated.
Sometimes, however, she woke to a moment's full consciousness of the
desolation around her, and then she would wail and lament until he
seemed to fear some unseen Friend would hear; and at such seasons he
grew more gentle, and renewed the old persuasions and flatteries by
which he had misled her at first. He would even encourage her at times,
when all other methods failed, to try and collect the scattered stones,
and repair the breaches in the shattered walls, and restring the broken
harp; for he knew well her puny efforts must fail, and that no hands but
those of the Builder could ever restore the ruin she had wrought. So,
after a few faint endeavours, she, as he expected, would give up in
despair, and sit cowering hopelessly on the ground, afraid of him,
afraid of Him whose priestess she was, afraid of her own voice.

In such bitter hours he would again grow bold, and mock her with the
memory of the past, until the spirit of indignant resistance seemed
roused within her, when, once more softening his tone, he would point
her with flattering words to her own image on the broken altar. He would
show her the beauty still lingering in its marred and weather-worn
features, and help her to decorate it with gay colours and tinsel
ornaments, placing in her hands the golden censer, with the sweet
incense which had been made in happier days for far other uses; and she
would wave the fragrant compound before the idol image of herself. But
with the pure spices which made it sweet, the Enemy had mixed a narcotic
poison, and as she languidly swung the censer to and fro, her brain
would become intoxicated with the voluptuous sweetness, until in a dream
of vain delight, she would fall asleep, and forget all her miseries; and
ever, as she slept, he would rivet faster the chain which, unperceived
by her, was being bound around her, every year making her range of
action narrower and her movements less free.

Wild beasts, also, made their lair in the desolate temple-chambers,
prowling in and out where formerly meek and heavenly beings had
ministered, and making the shattered walls echo with their loud howls
and sullen roarings, where once had sounded strains of pure and joyous
music.

Thus day by day the ruin spread, and the desolation and desecration
became more complete.

But it happened one spring that two little singing-birds came back from
the sunny clime where they had wintered, and began building their nest
above the ancient altar. There was something in the spring-time which
often brought tears to the eyes of the fallen Priestess, she scarcely
knew why. The world seemed then like one happy temple full of thankful
songs; and as, day by day, the sun repaired the ruins of winter, and the
choral services of the woods took a fuller tone, on her heart there fell
the mournful sense of the ruins around her, which no spring-tide could
restore. Yet something of a softer feeling, a melancholy which breathed
of hope, stole over her, as she watched those two happy birds building
their nest, and warbling as they worked.

At last the nest was finished, the happy mother-bird sat on her eggs,
and the pair had much leisure for confidential conversation.

"How desolate this place is," said the mother-bird.

"And it was once so beautiful," replied her mate.

"Why is it not rebuilt?" she asked.

"None can rebuild but the Hand that built," was the mysterious reply.

"But would not the Architect come if asked? He is so good. Was it not He
who taught us to build our nest; and I am sure nothing can be better
done than that."

"That is the difficulty," was the reply. "The Priestess does not know He
is so good, and is afraid to utter His name. If she only called Him, He
would come."

"Is He near enough?"

"He is always near."

"Are you sure?" said the mother-bird. "What can we do to help her?"

"I do not know," replied the mate, "except it is to sing His praise.
Perhaps she may listen, and understand one day how good He is."

So all the spring the little happy creatures chirped and sang, until the
nestlings were fledged, and the whole family flew away.

But their songs had penetrated deep into the Priestess' heart. And one
night, when the Enemy was absent, and the wild beasts prowling far away,
she threw herself on the earth before her desecrated altar, and lamented
and wept. But for the first time her lamentations, instead of solitary,
hopeless wailings, echoing back from the ruined walls, became a broken
cry for help.

"Thou, if Thou art indeed so good--if Thou art indeed near, come and
help me," she sobbed; "repair my ruins, and save me."

And for the first time, as she wept and implored, she felt the weight of
her fetters binding hand and foot; and, clasping her chained hands, she
cried more earnestly, "Come and set me free!"

And before the day dawned a voice came softly through the silence--

"I will come."

But with the morning light how bitter was the sight which burst on her
aching eyes! All, indeed, had been as desolate long before; but she had
never seen it as she saw it now:--Noisome beasts, which prowled
fearlessly around her; skulls and ghastly skeletons of their murdered
prey strewn about; on the ground the broken, rusted harp; on her hands
the heavy chain; and, worse than all, the door she had opened to the
Enemy ever open, and inviting his approach!

Too surely he came. He mocked her hope until it appeared baseless as a
dream; and nothing seemed real but the ruin to which he scornfully
directed her gaze, and the chain which now, for the first time without
concealment, he held up triumphantly, dragging her by it to every corner
of the polluted and ruined temple, to show her how complete and hopeless
the ruin was. Then drawing the links tighter than before, so that they
galled and wounded her wrists, he led her to the image of herself, which
he had adorned, and painted, and so often flattered. He dragged off the
tinsel ornaments, and effaced the delusive colouring, and left her, at
last, face to face with the defaced and broken idol, saying,--

"This is the worship you yourself have chosen. Pursue it still. There is
no other for you."

She could not bear to gaze on it; and as he went she fell prostrate on
the altar steps, and hid her face on the stones. Yet still, though with
but a feeble hope, she sobbed out--

"If Thou art good--if Thou canst help me, come--oh, come, and set me
free!"

Weariness at last brought sleep; and in her dreams she saw a lovely
vision of the temple as it once had been. White columns gleamed, sweet
and solemn music sounded, and she herself ministered in white robes at
the altar, before a Radiant Form, on which she could scarcely for a
moment gaze.

The awaking from this dream to the desolation around her was more
terrible than all she had felt before. It must have bereft her of
reason, but for the echo of three cheering words which seemed to have
awakened her--"_I will come._"

The next day, with the light of that radiant vision on her heart, she
dragged her fettered limbs to the altar, and strove with her feeble and
trembling hands to tear that marred image from the shrine. But in vain.
It was too firmly embedded there; and she could only turn her face from
it, and weep, and cry for help. And before the next morning's dawn help
came. In the night a heavenly visitant descended; and with human words,
in a language she had not spoken for years, but every word of which
melted her heart like the accents of her mother-tongue, He touched her
chains, and they fell off; He spoke, and the wild beasts fled, howling;
He touched her broken harp, and it was restrung and tuned; He touched
the dry and choked-up channel of the sacred spring, and it welled forth
pure and fresh from beneath the altar; He touched the idol on the
shrine, and it fell, and in its stead shone that wondrous Radiance which
she had seen in her dream; then He poured on her head the fragrant oil
of consecration, and clothed her in a white vestal priestly garment, and
placed the restrung harp in her hand, and rose again to heaven.

At first her joy knew no measure. She gazed on the sacred shrine, and in
the glory above it at times she perceived the lineaments of the form of
Him who had done all this for her. She touched her harp, and the sweet
strings responded as if they knew her hand; she sang holy songs in that
old, long-forgotten, yet familiar tongue, so heavenly and happy that the
wild beasts would not venture near, and the morning birds were silent to
listen. She bathed in the newly-opened fountain and drank of it; and as
she drank, her strength and her youth came back.

For a time her joy was without cloud or measure; but as the daylight
returned, the desolation of the ruined temple struck sadly on her
heart. It was, indeed, a sacred place once more, and she its consecrated
Priestess; but was this ruin never to be repaired?

She began to cleanse the sacred vessels and to sweep the earth of all
the refuse and dry bones which had been gathered there; and then, with
her renewed strength, she set herself to collect the broken fragments of
the columns, and tried to piece together the shattered tracery and the
delicate carvings of flower and foliage. But it was in vain. She could
indeed bring the shattered fragments together, and see what they had
been, but she could not join them, or replace one prostrate shaft or
capital; and as she sat down mournfully before her shrine, tears dimmed
her eyes, so that she could scarcely see the Radiance there, and,
falling on her harp-strings, would have rusted them and marred their
sweetness; whilst in the silence a voice, too long and bitterly
familiar, was heard at the door. Turning round, she perceived the form
of the Enemy there, whilst behind him glared fierce and hungry eyes; and
in her terror the harp almost fell from her hands.

But she threw herself on her knees before the altar, pressed the harp
convulsively to her heart, and cried, "Will these ruins never be
repaired, these doors never closed against my enemy and Thine?" The
pressure of her trembling fingers drew forth some plaintive strains,
like the wind on Aeolian strings; but low and plaintive as they were, the
Enemy disappeared, and the wild beasts fled howling from them. Then she
began to perceive the power of her harp, and drew from it a song of joy
and triumph; and as she still gazed on the radiant shrine a veil seemed
to be withdrawn from it; and she perceived that it was a window, so that
the light streamed through it, not from it. Wondering she gazed, until,
penetrating further and further through the light, she saw in the depths
of heaven a Temple like her own, only perfect, glorious beyond
comparison, and full--full of worshippers robed and singing like
herself, and full of that wondrous radiance which streamed from the
heavenly form she had seen. She laid her harp upon the shrine, and to
her surprise the strings began to quiver of their own accord! An
electric current united them to the harps in the heavenly temple, and
they vibrated in exquisite harmonies the echo of the harmonies above.

And with the heavenly strains came a voice divine and human, mighty as
the sound of many waters, yet soft and near as a whisper in her ear:--

"Here all ruins are repaired: the Enemy cannot enter here, but here thou
shalt dwell for ever."

And softly floated down these other words:--

"For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were
dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens."




_The Clock-Bell and the Alarm-Bell._


"We have lived a long time here together," said the ponderous Alarm-bell
to the little brisk bell in the clock-tower of the Orphan-house, "and a
useful life yours has been! I have watched carefully, and never once
during these hundred years that we have stood side by side have you
failed to tell the hours and half-hours by day and night. I have plenty
of leisure for thought; but it would be beyond my powers to calculate
how often your voice has been heard in the service of man. I observe,
too, how much attention is paid you by all, and with how much
well-deserved respect you are regarded. Nothing is done in house or
field without your sanction. At your early call this little busy hive
begins to stir in the morning. At your mid-day invitation the boys
gather from the fields where they have been working, and the girls from
the laundries and work-rooms, to the noonday meal. At your evening
summons the doors are closed at night, and not a sound is heard
afterwards in house or field until your steady voice wakens our little
world again. Yours is, indeed, a useful, honoured life; but as for me,
who can tell what I was made for? Since I was placed here first, a
hundred years ago, lifted up with enormous trouble and labour, and
safely roofed in my belfry, not a creature has heard my voice, or been
the better for my existence. I might as well have been lying still a
lump of unsmelted ore in the depths of the mines. I feel so stiff and
rusty, that I sometimes question if they could move me if they tried.
For you, daily, hourly usefulness! for me, a hundred years of silence!
And who can say how many more? I do not complain; but our destinies are
very different. It must be wonderfully happy to be so useful, and to be
looked on by every one with such attention and regard. Of course, I
could not expect to be as serviceable as you--I, with my cumbrous,
ponderous mass of heavy metal, and you, hung so lightly, so graceful in
your shape, so brisk in all your movements, so cheery and pleasant in
your voice. But I should like to be of some use once in my life, even if
it were only to know for what purpose I was made, and set on high."

"Wait!" said the Clock-bell; "there must be some work for you. It would
have taken a hundred such as I am to make one like you. Think of the
trouble there must have been in getting a mould large enough for
you,--of the labour it was to raise you so high. You must be set there
for some end, although we do not yet know what. Wait!" said the
Clock-bell cheerily, and struck nine.

Then there was a sound from within the house, as of many childish voices
singing an evening hymn. A few minutes after, all was still, and ten
o'clock echoed over the silent fields to the sleeping city near at hand.

But that night there was an unusual stir in the Orphan-house. Feet were
heard rushing hither and thither; and from every window poured forth the
cry, "Fire! fire!--the Orphan-house is on fire!" And, through the
darkness, lurid smoke began to rise from an outhouse attached to the
main building. Then came another cry:--"The Alarm-bell!--ring the
Alarm-bell!" And feet were heard on the steps of the belfry-tower; and
hands began pulling vigorously at the ropes, and in a moment, for the
first time, the deep tones of the long-silent bell pealed heavily on the
midnight air. They awoke the city. In a short time fire-engines were on
the way. Streams of water played on the flames, and quenched them; and
the children and the Orphan-house were saved.

The next morning all was silent again, as if nothing had happened; the
outhouse lay in ashes, but the Orphan-house was uninjured. At eight the
Clock-bell called the children to their morning prayer; whilst the
Alarm-bell had relapsed into silence, perhaps for another century.

But the Clock-bell said, "You have done in an hour the service of a
century. Had it not been for you, I should never have struck another
hour."

And the grateful children often looked up as they passed beneath, and
said, "Had it not been for our good Alarm-bell we might all have
perished!"

So the Alarm-bell learned what it was made for, and was content to wait
another hundred years, or more, before its voice was heard again.




_The Black Ship._


They lived at the foot of the Pine Mountains, in the island of the
King's Garden, the mother, with her little son and daughter. The boy's
name was Hope, and the little girl's, May. The children loved each other
dearly, and were never separated. They never had any quarrels, because
Hope was the leader in all their expeditions and plays; and May firmly
believed that everything which Hope planned and did, was better planned
and better done than it would have been by any one else in the world--by
which May meant the island. Hope, on his side, had always a tender
consideration for little May in his schemes, such as kings should have
for their subjects. May would never have dreamed of originating any
scheme herself, or of questioning any which Hope planned. If you had
taken away May from Hope, you would have taken away his kingdom, his
army, his right hand; if you had taken away Hope from May, you would
have robbed her of her leader, her king, her head, her sun. Bereaved of
May, I think Hope would have been driven from his desolate home into the
wide world; bereaved of Hope, I am sure May would never have left her
home, but sat silent there until she pined away. But together, life was
one holiday to them; work was a keener kind of play, and every day was
too narrow for the happy occupations of which each hour was brimful.
Their cottage was at the foot of the mountains, on the sea-shore.
Indeed, every house and cottage in the island stood on the sea-shore,
because the island was so long and narrow, that, from the top of the
mountain-range which divided it, you could see the sea on both sides. If
in any place the coast widened, little creeks ran in among the hills,
and made the sea accessible from all points. The island consisted
entirely of this one mountain-range; the higher peaks sometimes tipped
with snow, with a strip of coast at their feet, sometimes narrowing to a
little shingly beach, sometimes expanding to a fertile plain, where
beautiful cities with fairy bell-towers and marble palaces gleamed like
ivory carvings amidst the palms and thick green leaves.

But Hope and May knew nothing of the island beyond the little bay they
lived in, and no one they had ever seen or heard of had scaled the
mountain-range and looked on the other side; no one, either in the
scattered fishermen's huts around them, or in the white town which
perched like a sea-bird on the crags on the opposite side of the bay.
Indeed, it was only from their mother's words that the children knew
that their country was an island; and ever since they had heard this,
the great subject of Hope's dreams, and the great object of his schemes,
had been to scale the mountains and look on the other side. But this was
quite a secret between Hope and May; the happy secret which formed the
endless interest of their long talks and rambles, but which they could
not speak of to their mother, because she was so tenderly timid about
them, and because it was to be the great surprise which one day was to
enchant her, when Hope was a man. He was to scale the mountains,
penetrate to the wondrous land on the other side, and bring thence
untold treasures and tales of marvels to May and his mother.

The children thought Hope would very soon be old enough to go; and they
had a little cave in the rocks close to the sea where they treasured up
dried fruits, and bits of iron to make tools of with which to chop away
the tangled branches in the forests, and cut steps in the glaciers which
Hope was to traverse. The lower hills the children knew well; and the
ravine which wound up far among the hills they had nearly fixed on as
the commencement of the journey.

So the days passed on with the children, rich in purposes and bright
with happy work. For they were helpful to their mother. From their
mountain expeditions they brought her fire-wood, and forest-honey, and
eggs of wild-fowl, and various sweet wild-berries, and wholesome roots.
They always noticed that their mother encouraged these mountain
expeditions, and seemed much happier when they took that direction than
when they kept by the sea.

Once Hope had said to her--

"Mother, how beautiful our country is! and I think it is so happy always
to be in sight of the sea. How dull those lands must be you tell us of,
which are so large that many people have to live out of hearing of the
waves! I could not bear to live there; it must seem so narrow and close
to be shut in on the land, with nothing beyond. But here we can never
get out of sight of the sea. May and I always find, wherever we roam
among the hills, we never lose the sea. When we wander far back from the
shore, the beautiful blue waters seem to follow us as if they loved us;
and in the inmost recesses of the mountains we always see beneath us
some glimpse of bright water in the creeks which run up among the hills,
or the rivers which come down to meet them. The sea seems to love every
corner of our country, mother, and penetrate everywhere."

A cold shudder passed over the mother's frame, and tears gathered in her
eyes.

"The sea is indeed everywhere, my children," she murmured; and then,
with a burst of irresistible emotion, she clasped them to her heart, and
added bitterly, "Happy the country which that sea cannot approach!"

May and Hope wondered greatly at her words; but there was something in
her manner which awed them into silence. For some time after that, they
often speculated together as to what her words could mean, and a vague
terror seemed to murmur in the ripple of the waves. But gradually the
impression wore off in the happy forgetfulness of childhood, and their
old schemes were resumed with the same zest as before.

One evening, however, as they were busied with their treasures in the
cave, the tide surprised them; and when they set out to return home they
found the rocky point which separated them from their cottage surrounded
with deep water. The sides of the cliff in the little cove where their
cave lay were sheer precipices of smooth rock, too steep to climb, so
that the children had to wait some hours before they could creep round
the point. Eagerly they watched the declining sun and the retreating
tide, until when the waves became only ankle-deep they bounded through
them, and in a few minutes were at the cottage door. It was not yet
dark, and the children were dancing into the cottage full of spirits at
their adventure, when they were startled at the appearance of their
mother. She was leaning, stony and motionless, with fixed eyes and
clasped hands, against the door-post, and for a moment the sight of her
darlings did not seem to rouse her. Then springing up with a cry of joy,
she strained them to her heart, covered them with kisses, laughed a wild
laugh, broken with convulsive sobs, and at last fell fainting on the
floor.

The children knelt beside her, and gradually she revived, and fell into
a sleep. But every now and then she started as if with some terrible
dream, and murmured in her sleep, "The ship--the Black Ship: not now,
not yet: take me, not them; or take us all--take us all!"

The terrified children could not sleep; and all the next day they clung
close to their mother, and scarcely spoke a word. In the evening,
however, she rallied, and tried to speak cheerfully, and account for her
alarm.

"You were late, darlings, and I knew you were by the sea--the terrible
sea."

But the children could not be comforted. They felt the weight of some
vague apprehension; they could not be tempted to leave their mother;
they crept noiselessly about, watching her movements, until at last one
night they whispered together, and resolved to take courage and ask
their mother what made her dread the sea; and then they consulted long
as to the best way of introducing the forbidden subject.

The next evening, as they sat together by the fireside, Hope began, and
forgetting all the speeches they had prepared, fixed his large eyes on
his mother's and said abruptly, "Mother, what is there terrible in the
sea?"

She paused a moment, her face grew deadly pale, and her lips trembled.

"Children, why should you wish to know? You will learn too soon, without
my telling you."

"O mother, tell us," said May. "We can bear anything from you. Do not
let any one else tell us."

A sudden thought seemed to flash across her, and she said, "Children,
you are right."

Then folding one arm around Hope as he stood by her, and taking May on
her knee, she said, "It is not the sea I dread; it is the Black Ship.
That is the terrible secret; and it is, indeed, better you should learn
it from my lips than learn it by losing me, and no one be left to tell
you how. My children," she continued, making a great effort to speak
calmly, "this is the one sorrow of our country. From time to time a
Black Ship, without sails or oars, glides silently to our shores, and
anchors there. A dark, Veiled Figure lands from it, and seizes any one
of our people whom it chooses, without violence, without a sound, but
with irresistible power, and quietly leads the victim away to the Ship,
which immediately glides away again from our coasts as swiftly and
noiselessly as it came; but no one ever sees those who are thus borne
away any more."

"Whence does the Ship come, mother?" asked Hope, after a long silence,
"and whither does it go?"

"No one knows, my child. That is the terrible thing about it. There is
no sound nor voice. The agonized cries of those who are thus bereaved
avail not to bring one word of reply from those lips, or to raise one
fold of that dark veil. If we only knew, we could bear it."

"Have you ever seen it, mother?" asked Hope, determined bravely to
plunge to the bottom of the terrible mystery, while May could only cling
round her mother's neck and cry.

"I have seen it twice," she replied, speaking low and rapidly. "We did
not always live here. Your father was rich, and a man of rank, and,
loving us most dearly, he resolved to do all in his power to keep the
terrible Form away. For this end he built that castle you have often
seen above the white tower. It is far above the sea; the rocks are
perpendicular; it is built of solid stone; the doors were of oak,
studded with iron; the windows barred with iron. No one was ever to be
permitted to cross the moat without being strictly scrutinized. The
gates were always to be closed. When it was finished he made a feast;
and after it, when the guests had left, and every bolt was drawn, we
stood at the window of the room where you slept, and looked down
triumphantly on the sea. A little sister of yours was sleeping in my
arms. Suddenly, close beneath us, in the bay at our feet, we saw moored
the Black Ship! Our eyes seemed fascinated to it, and we could not
speak. We saw the Veiled Figure descend the side, and slowly scale the
precipice beneath us, as if it had been a road made for it to tread. It
walked over the water of the castle moat, which did not seem to wet its
feet. There was no plunge or splash in the waves, no sound of footsteps
on the rock; yet, in a moment, it stood on the balcony outside our
window, and we could not stir. It passed through the iron bars. It laid
its hand on my sleeping babe. Your father's strong arm was around us
both, but before we could utter a cry, our darling had glided like a
shadow from our embrace. The bright face of our baby was hidden from us
under the folds of that impenetrable veil. We watched the terrible Form
noiselessly descend the steep, re-enter the Ship, and not until the
Black Ship was already gliding swiftly out of sight could we overcome
the terrible fascination. Then my cries of agony awoke the
household,--boats were manned in pursuit; but in vain, in vain--we felt
it was in vain. We never saw the babe again." She spoke with the languor
of a sorrow which had been overwhelmed by greater sorrows still.

"But our father?" asked Hope.

"He left the castle the next day," she answered. "We never returned to
it. He said the strong walls only mocked our helplessness; and since
then the castle has been empty. Birds build their nests in our chambers,
wild beasts make their lair in our gardens, the iron bars rust on the
open doors; and if the Veiled Figure enter again, it will find no prey."

"But where did you go?"

"We came here. Your father said he would dare the foe, and, since no
fortification could keep it out, meet it on its own ground. So he built
this cottage close to the sea, and here we have lived ever since. I was
content to remain here because I thought we might avoid seeing any one,
and keep the terrible secret from you.

"And here," she continued with the calmness of despair, "one morning we
saw the Black Ship moored, and your father went to meet it. I wept and
clung to him, to keep him back, but he said, 'It shall speak to me.'

"The Dark Form came up, a black shadow across the sunny beach. Your
father encountered it boldly, and said, 'Where is my child?'

"There was no sound in reply. For a moment there seemed to be a
struggle. I rushed towards them, but the terrible touch was on your
father's hand. There seemed no violence, no chain was on his arm--only
that paralyzing touch. He went from me silent and helpless as the babe.

"'Whither, whither?' I cried; 'only tell me where!'

"He looked back once, but he spoke to me no more. I rushed madly into
the sea, but the Ship was gone in a minute; and your voices, your baby
voices, called me back, and I came."

"Is there no help, mother?" said Hope at last. "Has no one ever tried?
If I were but a man! Oh, surely some help could be found?"

"So thousands have thought, tried, and asked in vain. Fleets have
scoured the seas, but none ever came on the Black Ship's track."

Hope was silenced, and the little family sat up together that night.
They did not dare to separate, even to their beds; yet before long the
children were asleep.

Sleep revived the brother and sister; and by the evening Hope's ardent
heart had found another point to rest on.

"Mother," he said, "if we could only find out whence the Black Ship
comes, we might be comforted. Perhaps it comes from a happy place. Can
no one even guess?"

"There are some who profess to know something of it," she replied; "but
your father never believed them."

"Who are they?" asked Hope.

"The amulet-makers. There is a band of men in the White Town who profess
to know something of the country from which the Black Ship comes, and
who sends it. But they talk very mysteriously, in learned words; and I
do not understand them. Your father said it was all a deception; because
some of them profess to make amulets or charms which keep the Veiled
Form away; and your little sister had one round her neck when she was
taken from us. You have each one, but I cannot trust it; and I never
could find out that the amulet-makers had anything but guesses as to
where the Ship came from; and your father said we could guess as well as
they. There is one thing," she added with a faint smile, "which gives me
more comfort than anything they ever said. When our baby was taken away
from my arms--when she felt that terrible touch--she did not seem to be
at all afraid. She looked up in my face, and then at the Veiled Form,
and stretched out her baby arms from me to it and smiled. At first, I
hated to think of that. It seemed as if some cruel charm was on her to
win even her heart from me; but often in the night, in my dreams, that
smile has come back to me, like a promise; and I have awaked,
comforted--I hardly know why."

"Perhaps they are in a happy place, mother," said little May.

And Hope said, "Mother, I am going to question the amulet-makers in the
White Town." And his mother suffered him to go.

In two days, Hope came back. But his step was spiritless and slow, and
his face very sad.

"Mother," he said, "I think my father was right. I am afraid no one
knows anything about the country from which the Black Ship comes. At
first the amulet-makers promised to tell me a great deal. Some of them
told me they believed it was a great king, an enemy of our race, who
sent the Ship; but that if we kept certain rules, and put on a certain
dress they would sell us, or give them certain treasures to throw into
the sea when the Ship appeared, they would watch for us, and make the
powers beyond the sea favourable to us. But when I came to the
question--how they knew this to be true, or if they had ever had any
message from beyond the sea, or seen any one who came thence, they grew
silent, and sometimes angry, and told me I was a presumptuous child.
There was one old man, however, who was kind to me; and he came and
spoke to me alone, and said, 'My child, be happy to-day!--to be good is
to be happy. What is beyond to-day, or beyond the sea, no one knows, or
ever can know. Go back to your mother, and live as before.' So I came,"
concluded Hope. "But it can never, never be with us again as before we
knew."

From that time the boy seemed to cease to be a child, or to take
interest in any childish schemes. He was gentle and tender as his father
would have been to his mother and to May, and seemed to take it on
himself to watch over and protect them. He never left them out of sight;
until, one day, as they came, in their ramble in search of shell-fish,
on their old cave, and looked once more at their little stores, so
joyously hoarded there, May suddenly exclaimed, "What if they should
know on the other side of the mountains!"

The thought flashed on Hope like a breath of new life; and from that day
his old schemes were resumed, but with an intensity and a purpose which
could not be quenched. He would scale the mountains, to see if any
tidings from beyond the sea had reached the land across the mountains!

His mother's consent was gained; and in a few days, spent in eager
preparations, Hope was to start.

But before those days were ended, one evening a white-haired old man
knocked at the cottage door. He was nearly exhausted with travel, his
clothes were torn, and his feet bleeding.

They led him to the fire, bathed his feet, and set food before him. But
before he would touch anything, the old man said,--

"I have tidings for you--glad tidings."

"Do you come from across the mountains?" exclaimed Hope, starting to his
feet.

The old man bowed in assent.

"I come from across the mountains, and I bring you glad tidings from
beyond the sea."

"Glad tidings!" they all exclaimed.

"Glad tidings, if you will obey them," he replied;--"if not, the saddest
you ever heard. It is not an enemy who sends the Black Ship, but a
Friend."

Not a question, scarcely a breath interrupted him and he continued, in
brief, broken sentences,--

"It is our King. Our island belongs to Him. He gave it to us. But, long
ago, our people rebelled against Him. They were seduced by a wicked
prince, His deadly enemy, and, alas! ours. They sent the King a
defiance; they defaced His statues, which were a type of all beauty;
they broke His laws, which are the unfolding of all goodness. He sent
ambassadors to reclaim them; He, who could have crushed the revolt, and
destroyed our nation with one of His armies in a day, descended from His
dignity, and stooped to entreat our deluded people to return to their
allegiance. But they treated His condescension as weakness. They defied
His ambassadors, and maltreated them, and drove them from the island. He
had warned them against the usurper, and told them the consequences of
revolting; and too surely they have been fulfilled. The Black Ship is
the penalty inflicted by our offended Monarch; but those who return to
His allegiance need not dread it."

"Some, then, have submitted to the King?" asked Hope.

"Every ambassador He sent has persuaded some to recognize the King."

"Why not all?" asked Hope. "If the King is good, and is our King, and
will receive us, why not all return?"

"The usurper seduces them still," replied the old man. "Many hate the
King's good laws; many take pride in what they call their independence;
most will not listen, or will not believe. They mock the King's
messengers, and declare that they are impostors, that their messages
are a delusion; and some even persist in declaring that there is no
King, and no country beyond the sea."

"But the Black Ship is not a delusion!" said Hope; "it must come from
some land. What proof have these ambassadors given? Have they ever been
in the land beyond the sea?"

"They gave many proofs; but I bring you better news than this. A few
years since, the King's Son came Himself. Many of us have seen and
spoken with Him. He stayed many days. He spoke words of such power, and
in tones of such tenderness, as none who heard can ever forget. We could
trace in His features the lineaments of the statues we had defaced. Some
of the worst rebels among us were melted to repentance, and fell at His
feet, and besought His pardon. I was one. He gave us not only His
pardon, but His friendship. But His enemies prevailed. Especially the
amulet-makers organized a conspiracy against Him; they feared for their
trade, and secretly prepared to drive Him from the island. He had come
alone, for He came not to compel, but to win. And He came for another
purpose, which, until He was gone, we could not comprehend. The
conspirators triumphed. One day they came in force and seized Him. Alas!
a base panic seized us who loved Him, and we fled. They bound Him with
thongs, they treated Him with the most barbarous cruelty and the basest
indignity, and drove Him to the sea. We thought a fleet and an army
would have appeared to avenge His insulted majesty and proclaim Him King
with power, or bear Him in pomp away; but to our surprise and dismay
nothing came for Him but the Black Ship, and the Dark Form bore Him from
us, as if He had been a rebel like one of us. He had told us something
of the probability of this before it happened, but we could not
comprehend what He meant. Never were days of such sorrow as those which
passed over us after His being taken from us. His enemies were in full
triumph; they mocked our Prince's claims, they insulted us, they
threatened us; but all they could say or do was nothing in comparison
with the anguish in our hearts. For what could we think? He whom we had
loved and trusted was gone, borne off in triumph by the very foe He came
to deliver us from. We hid ourselves in caves and lonely places by the
sea, and recalled to one another His precious words, and gazed out over
the sea with a vague yearning, which was scarcely hope, and yet kept us
lingering on the shore.

"On the third morning, in the gray light of early dawn, one of us saw
Him on the shore; one who had owed Him everything, and loved Him most
devotedly. She called us to come. One by one we gathered round Him. Some
of us could scarcely believe our senses for joy. But it was Himself; the
solid certainty of that unutterable joy grew stronger. And then He told
us wonders: how He suffered all this for us; had borne this indignity
and captivity in obedience to His Father's will, to set us free; had
gone in the Black Ship itself to the heart of the Enemy's country, and
alone trodden those terrible regions of lawless wickedness to which he
seeks to drag his deluded victims, and alone vanquished him there. He
stayed with us some days, and talked with us familiarly, as of old; but
how glorious His commonest words were, how overpowering His forgiving
looks, how inspiring His firm and tender tones, I can never tell. He
could not remain with us then. He said we must be His messengers, and
win back His rebels to allegiance; we must learn to be brave, to speak
and suffer for Him, and to act as men; and He promised to come again one
day with fleets and armies, and all the pomp of His Father's kingdom.
But, meantime, He said the Black Ship should never more be a terror to
any of us who loved Him; for He Himself would come in it each time. He
would be veiled, so that none could see Him but the one He came for: but
surely as the Black Ship came, instead of the Dark Form, He would come
Himself for every one of us, and bear us home to His Father's house to
abide with Him, and with Him hereafter to return."

There was a breathless silence, broken only by the mother's sobs.

She clasped her hands, and murmured,--

"Then it was He! It was surely He Himself who came and took my babe. No
wonder my darling smiled, and was willing to go."

The mother and the children that very evening received from the stranger
the medal which was worn by all those who returned to their allegiance.
It was a Black Ship, surrounded with rays of glory, and behind it the
towers of a city.

Never were

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