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Thomas Wingfold, Curate

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #5976 · 903,143 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Thomas Wingfold, Curate

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5976]
                Most recently updated: August 4, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Charles Aldarondo, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team







THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE.

By George MacDonald, LL.D.

IN THREE VOLUMES.


VOLUME I.




THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE.



CHAPTER I.

HELEN LINGARD.





A swift, gray November wind had taken every chimney of the house for
an organ-pipe, and was roaring in them all at once, quelling the more
distant and varied noises of the woods, which moaned and surged like a
sea. Helen Lingard had not been out all day. The morning, indeed, had
been fine, but she had been writing a long letter to her brother Leopold
at Cambridge, and had put off her walk in the neighbouring park till
after luncheon, and in the meantime the wind had risen, and brought with
it a haze that threatened rain. She was in admirable health, had never
had a day’s illness in her life, was hardly more afraid of getting
wet than a young farmer, and enjoyed wind, especially when she was on
horseback. Yet as she stood looking from her window, across a balcony
where shivered more than one autumnal plant that ought to have been
removed a week ago, out upon the old-fashioned garden and meadows
beyond, where each lonely tree bowed with drifting garments--I was going
to say, like a suppliant, but it was AWAY from its storming enemy--she
did not feel inclined to go out. That she was healthy was no reason why
she should be unimpressible, any more than that good temper should be
a reason for indifference to the behaviour of one’s friend. She always
felt happier in a new dress, when it was made to her mind and fitted
her body; and when the sun shone she was lighter-hearted than when it
rained: I had written MERRIER, but Helen was seldom merry, and had
she been made aware of the fact, and questioned why, would have
answered--Because she so seldom saw reason.

She was what all her friends called a sensible girl; but, as I say,
that was no reason why she should be an insensible girl as well, and
be subject to none of the influences of the weather. She did feel those
influences, and therefore it was that she turned away from the window
with the sense, rather than the conviction, that the fireside in her
own room was rendered even, more attractive by the unfriendly aspect
of things outside and the roar in the chimney, which happily was not
accompanied by a change in the current of the smoke.

The hours between luncheon and tea are confessedly dull, but dulness is
not inimical to a certain kind of comfort, and Helen liked to be that
way comfortable. Nor had she ever yet been aware of self-rebuke because
of the liking. Let us see what kind and degree of comfort she had in the
course of an hour and a half attained. And in discovering this I shall
be able to present her to my reader with a little more circumstance.

She sat before the fire in a rather masculine posture. I would not
willingly be rude, but the fact remains--a posture in which she
would not, I think, have sat for her photograph--leaning back in a
chintz-covered easy-chair, all the lines of direction about her parallel
with the lines of the chair, her arms lying on its arms, and the fingers
of each hand folded down over the end of each arm--square, straight,
right-angled,--gazing into the fire, with something of the look of a
sage, but one who has made no discovery.

She had just finished the novel of the day, and was suffering a mild
reaction--the milder, perhaps, that she was not altogether satisfied
with the consummation. For the heroine had, after much sorrow and
patient endurance, at length married a man whom she could not help
knowing to be not worth having. For the author even knew it, only such
was his reading of life, and such his theory of artistic duty, that what
it was a disappointment to Helen to peruse, it seemed to have been a
comfort to him to write. Indeed, her dissatisfaction went so far that,
although the fire kept burning away in perfect content before her,
enhanced by the bellowing complaint of the wind in the chimney, she yet
came nearer thinking than she had ever been in her life. Now thinking,
especially to one who tries it for the first time, is seldom, or never,
a quite comfortable operation, and hence Helen was very near becoming
actually uncomfortable. She was even on the borders of making the
unpleasant discovery that the business of life--and that not only for
North Pole expeditions, African explorers, pyramid-inspectors, and
such like, but for every man and woman born into the blindness of the
planet--is to discover; after which discovery there is little more
comfort to be had of the sort with which Helen was chiefly conversant.
But she escaped for the time after a very simple and primitive fashion,
although it was indeed a narrow escape.

Let me not be misunderstood, however, and supposed to imply that Helen
was dull in faculty, or that she contributed nothing to the bubbling of
the intellectual pool in the social gatherings at Glaston. Far from it.
When I say that she came near thinking, I say more for her than any
but the few who know what thinking is will understand, for that which
chiefly distinguishes man from those he calls the lower animals is
the faculty he most rarely exercises. True, Helen supposed she could
think--like other people, because the thoughts of other people
had passed through her in tolerable plenty, leaving many a phantom
conclusion behind; but this was THEIR thinking, not hers. She had
thought no more than was necessary now and then to the persuasion that
she saw what a sentence meant, after which, her acceptance or rejection
of what was contained in it, never more than lukewarm, depended solely
upon its relation to what she had somehow or other, she could seldom
have told how, come to regard as the proper style of opinion to hold
upon things in general.

The social matrix which up to this time had ministered to her
development, had some relations with Mayfair, it is true, but scanty
ones indeed with the universe; so that her present condition was like
that of the common bees, every one of which Nature fits for a queen,
but its nurses, prevent from growing one by providing for it a cell
too narrow for the unrolling of royalty, and supplying it with food
not potent enough for the nurture of the ideal--with this difference,
however, that the cramped and stinted thing comes out, if no queen, then
a working bee, and Helen, who might be both, was neither yet. If I were
at liberty to mention the books on her table, it would give a few of
my readers no small help towards the settling of her position in the
“valued file” of the young women of her generation; but there are
reasons against it.

She was the daughter of an officer, who, her mother dying when she
was born, committed her to the care of a widowed aunt, and almost
immediately left for India, where he rose to high rank, and somehow or
other amassed a considerable fortune, partly through his marriage with
a Hindoo lady, by whom he had one child, a boy some three years younger
than Helen. When he died, he left his fortune equally divided between
the two children.

Helen was now three-and-twenty, and her own mistress. Her appearance
suggested Norwegian blood, for she was tall, blue-eyed, and
dark-haired--but fair-skinned, with regular features, and an over
still-some who did not like her said hard--expression of countenance.
No one had ever called her NELLY; yet she had long remained a girl,
lingering on the broken borderland after several of her school
companions had become young matrons. Her drawing-master, a man of
some observation and insight, used to say Miss Lingard would wake up
somewhere about forty.

The cause of her so nearly touching the borders of thought this
afternoon, was, that she became suddenly aware of feeling bored. Now
Helen was even seldomer bored than merry, and this time she saw no
reason for it, neither had any person to lay the blame upon. She might
have said it was the weather, but the weather had never done it before.
Nor could it be want of society, for George Bascombe was to dine with
them. So was the curate, but he did not count for much. Neither was she
weary of herself. That, indeed, might be only a question of time, for
the most complete egotist, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte, must
at length get weary of his paltry self; but Helen, from the slow rate of
her expansion, was not old enough yet. Nor was she in any special sense
wrapt up in herself: it was only that she had never yet broken the
shell which continues to shut in so many human chickens, long after they
imagine themselves citizens of the real world.

Being somewhat bored then, and dimly aware that to be bored was out of
harmony with something or other, Helen was on the verge of thinking,
but, as I have said, escaped the snare in a very direct and simple
fashion: she went fast asleep, and never woke till her maid brought her
the cup of kitchen-tea from which the inmates of some houses derive the
strength to prepare for dinner.






CHAPTER II.

THOMAS WINGFOLD.





The morning, whose afternoon was thus stormy, had been fine, and the
curate went out for a walk. Had it been just as stormy, however, he
would have gone all the same. Not that he was a great walker, or,
indeed, fond of exercise of any sort, and his walking, as an Irishman
might say, was half sitting--on stiles and stones and fallen trees. He
was not in bad health, he was not lazy, or given to self-preservation,
but he had little impulse to activity of any sort. The springs in his
well of life did not seem to flow quite fast enough.

He strolled through Osterfield park, and down the deep descent to the
river, where, chilly as it was, he seated himself upon a large stone
on the bank, and knew that he was there, and that he had to answer
to Thomas Wingfold; but why he was there, and why he was not called
something else, he did not know. On each side of the stream rose a
steeply-sloping bank, on which grew many fern-bushes, now half withered,
and the sunlight upon them, this November morning, seemed as cold as the
wind that blew about their golden and green fronds. Over a rocky bottom
the stream went--talking rather than singing--down the valley towards
the town, where it seemed to linger a moment to embrace the old abbey
church, before it set out on its leisurely slide through the low level
to the sea. Its talk was chilly, and its ripples, which came half from
the obstructions in its channel below, and half from the wind that
ruffled it above, were not smiles, but wrinkles rather--even in the
sunshine. Thomas felt cold himself, but the cold was of the sort that
comes from the look rather than the feel of things. He did not, however,
much care how he felt--not enough, certainly, to have made him put on a
great-coat: he was not deeply interested in himself. With his stick, a
very ordinary bit of oak, he kept knocking pebbles into the water, and
listlessly watching them splash. The wind blew, the sun shone, the water
ran, the ferns waved, the clouds went drifting over his head, but he
never looked up, or took any notice of the doings of Mother Nature at
her house-work: everything seemed to him to be doing only what it had
got to do, because it had got it to do, and not because it cared about
it, or had any end in doing it. For he, like every other man, could read
nature only by his own lamp, and this was very much how he had hitherto
responded to the demands made upon him.

His life had not been a very interesting one, although early passages
in it had been painful. He had done fairly well at Oxford: it had
been expected of him, and he had answered expectation; he had not
distinguished himself, nor cared to do so. He had known from the first
that he was intended for the church, and had not objected, but received
it as his destiny--had even, in dim obedience, kept before his mental
vision the necessity of yielding to the heights and hollows of the mould
into which he was being thrust. But he had taken no great interest in
the matter.

The church was to him an ancient institution of such approved
respectability that it was able to communicate it, possessing
emoluments, and requiring observances. He had entered her service; she
was his mistress, and in return for the narrow shelter, humble fare,
and not quite too shabby garments she allotted him, he would perform her
hests--in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the house for
ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had never dreamed
of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of its unattainable
remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life or his position in
it, taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind of acceptance, and
laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even bare suffering. He had
a certain dull prejudice in favour of honesty, would not have told the
shadow of a lie to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, and yet was so
uninstructed in the things that constitute practical honesty that some
of his opinions would have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked
reading the prayers, for the making of them vocal in the church was
pleasant to him, and he had a not unmusical voice. He visited the
sick--with some repugnance, it is true, but without delay, and spoke to
them such religious commonplaces as occurred to him, depending mainly
on the prayers belonging to their condition for the right performance of
his office. He never thought about being a gentleman, but always behaved
like one.

I suspect that at this time there lay somewhere in his mind, keeping
generally well out of sight however, that is, below the skin of his
consciousness, the unacknowledged feeling that he had been hardly dealt
with. But at no time, even when it rose plainest, would he have dared to
add--by Providence. Had the temptation come, he would have banished it
and the feeling together.

He did not read much, browsed over his newspaper at breakfast with a
polite curiosity, sufficient to season the loneliness of his slice of
fried bacon, and took more interest in some of the naval intelligence
than in anything else. Indeed it would have been difficult for himself
even to say in what he did take a large interest. When leisure awoke a
question as to how he should employ it, he would generally take up his
Horace and read aloud one of his more mournful odes--with such attention
to the rhythm, I must add, as, although plentiful enough among scholars
in respect of the dead letter, is rarely found with them in respect of
the living vocal utterance.

Nor had he now sat long upon his stone, heedless of the world’s
preparations for winter, before he began repeating to himself the poet’s
Æquam memento rebus in arduis, which he had been trying much, but with
small success, to reproduce in similar English cadences, moved thereto
in part by the success of Tennyson in his O mighty-mouthed inventor of
harmonies--a thing as yet alone in the language, so far as I know. It
was perhaps a little strange that the curate should draw the strength of
which he was most conscious from the pages of a poet whose hereafter
was chiefly servicable to him--in virtue of its unsubstantiality
and poverty, the dreamlike thinness of its reality--in enhancing
the pleasures of the world of sun and air, cooling shade and songful
streams, the world of wine and jest, of forms that melted more slowly
from encircling arms, and eyes that did not so swiftly fade and
vanish in the distance. Yet when one reflects but for a moment on the
poverty-stricken expectations of Christians from their hereafter, I
cease to wonder at Wingfold; for human sympathy is lovely and pleasant,
and if a Christian priest and a pagan poet feel much in the same tone
concerning the affairs of a universe, why should they not comfort each
other by sitting down together in the dust?

   “No hair it boots thee whether from Inachus
     Ancient descended, or, of the poorest born,
      Thy being drags, all bare and roofless--
        Victim the same to the heartless Orcus.

     All are on one road driven; for each of us
     The urn is tossed, and, later or earlier,
       The lot will drop and all be sentenced
        Into the boat of eternal exile.”

Having thus far succeeded with these two stanzas, Wingfold rose, a
little pleased with himself, and climbed the bank above him, wading
through mingled sun and wind and ferns--so careless of their shivering
beauty and their coming exile, that a watcher might have said the
prospect of one day leaving behind him the shows of this upper world
could have no part in the curate’s sympathy with Horace.






CHAPTER III.

THE DINERS.





Mrs. Ramshorn, Helen’s aunt, was past the middle age of woman; had been
handsome and pleasing, had long ceased to be either; had but sparingly
recognised the fact, yet had recognised it, and felt aggrieved. Hence
in part it was that her mouth had gathered that peevish and wronged
expression which tends to produce a moral nausea in the beholder. If she
had but known how much uglier in the eyes of her fellow-mortals her own
discontent made her, than the severest operation of the laws of mortal
decay could have done, she might have tried to think less of her wrongs
and more of her privileges. As it was, her own face wronged her own
heart, which was still womanly, and capable of much pity--seldom
exercised. Her husband had been dean of Halystone, a man of insufficient
weight of character to have the right influence in the formation of his
wife’s. He had left her tolerably comfortable as to circumstances, but
childless. She loved Helen, whose even imperturbability had by mere
weight, as it might seem, gained such a power over her that she was
really mistress in the house without either of them knowing it.

Naturally desirous of keeping Helen’s fortune in the family, and having,
as I say, no son of her own, she had yet not far to look to find
a cousin capable, as she might well imagine, of rendering himself
acceptable to the heiress. He was the son of her younger sister,
married, like herself, to a dignitary of the Church, a canon of a
northern cathedral. This youth, therefore, Greorge Bascombe by name,
whose visible calling at present was to eat his way to the bar, she
often invited to Glaston; and on this Friday afternoon he was on his way
from London to spend the Saturday and Sunday with the two ladies. The
cousins liked each other, had not had more of each other’s society than
was favourable to their aunt’s designs, who was far too prudent to have
made as yet any reference to them, and stood altogether in as suitable
a relative position for falling in love with each other as Mrs. Ramshorn
could well have desired. Her chief, almost her only uneasiness, arose
from the important and but too evident fact, that Helen Lingard was not
a girl of the sort to fall readily in love. That, however, was of no
consequence, provided it did not come in the way of marrying her cousin,
who, her aunt felt confident, was better fitted to rouse her dormant
affections than any other youth she had ever seen, or was ever likely
to see. Upon this occasion she had asked Thomas Wingfold to meet him,
partly with the design that he should act as a foil to her nephew,
partly in order to do her duty by the church, to which she felt herself
belong not as a lay member, but in some undefined professional capacity,
in virtue of her departed dean. Wingfold had but lately come to the
parish, and, as he was merely curate, she had not been in haste to
invite him. On the other hand, he was the only clergyman officiating in
the abbey church, which was grand and old, with a miserable living and
a non-resident rector. He, to do him justice, paid nearly the amount
of the tithes in salary to his curate, and spent the rest on the church
material, of which, for certain reasons, he retained the incumbency, the
presentation to which belonged to his own family.

The curate presented himself at the dinner-hour in Mrs. Ramshorn’s
drawing-room, looking like any other gentleman, satisfied with his
share in the administration of things, and affecting nothing of the
professional either in dress, manner, or tone. Helen saw him for the
first time in private life, and, as she had expected, saw nothing
remarkable--a man who looked about thirty, was a little over the middle
height, and well enough constructed as men go, had a good forehead, a
questionable nose, clear grey eyes, long, mobile, sensitive mouth, large
chin, pale complexion, and straight black hair, and might have been a
lawyer just as well as a clergyman. A keener, that is, a more interested
eye than hers, might have discovered traces of suffering in the forms of
the wrinkles which, as he talked, would now and then flit like ripples
over his forehead; but Helen’s eyes seldom did more than slip over the
faces presented to her; and had it been otherwise, who could be expected
to pay much regard to Thomas Wingfold when George Bascombe was present?
There, indeed, stood a man by the corner of the mantelpiece!--tall and
handsome as an Apollo, and strong as the young Hercules, dressed in the
top of the plainest fashion, self-satisfied, but not offensively so,
good-natured, ready to smile, as clean in conscience, apparently, and as
large in sympathy, as his shirt-front. Everybody who knew him, counted
George Bascombe a genuine good fellow, and George himself knew little to
the contrary, while Helen knew nothing.

One who had only chanced to get a glimpse of her in her own room, as in
imagination my reader has done, would hardly have recognised her again
in the drawing-room. For in her own room she was but as she appeared
to herself in her mirror--dull, inanimate; but in the drawing-room her
reflection from living eyes and presences served to stir up what waking
life was in her. When she spoke, her face dawned with a clear, although
not warm light; and although it must be owned that when it was at rest,
the same over-stillness, amounting almost to dulness, the same seeming
immobility, ruled as before, yet, even when she was not speaking, the
rest was often broken by a smile--a genuine one, for although there was
much that was stiff, there was nothing artificial about Helen. Neither
was there much of the artificial about her cousin; for his good-nature,
and his smile, and whatever else appeared upon him, were all genuine
enough--the only thing in this respect not quite satisfactory to the
morally fastidious man being his tone in speaking. Whether he had caught
it at the university, or amongst his father’s clerical friends, or in
the professional society he now frequented, I cannot tell, but it had
been manufactured somewhere--after a large, scrolly kind of pattern,
sounding well-bred and dignified. I wonder how many speak with the
voices that really belong to them.

Plainly, to judge from the one Bascombe used, he was accustomed to lay
down the law, but in gentlemanly fashion, and not as if he cared a bit
about the thing in question himself. By the side of his easy carriage,
his broad chest, and towering Greek-shaped head, Thomas Wingfold
dwindled almost to vanishing--in a word, looked nobody. And besides his
inferiority in size and self-presentment, he had a slight hesitation
of manner, which seemed to anticipate, if not to court, the subordinate
position which most men, and most women too, were ready to assign him.
He said, “Don’t you think?” far oftener than “I think” and was always
more ready to fix his attention upon the strong points of an opponent’s
argument than to re-assert his own in slightly altered phrase like most
men, or even in fresh forms like a few; hence--self-assertion, either
modestly worn like a shirt of fine chain-armour, or gaunt and obtrusive
like plates of steel, being the strength of the ordinary man--what
could the curate appear but defenceless, therefore weak, and therefore
contemptible? The truth is, he had less self-conceit than a mortal’s
usual share, and was not yet possessed of any opinions interesting
enough to himself to seem worth defending with any approach to vivacity.

Bascombe and he bowed in response to their introduction with proper
indifference, after a moment’s solemn pause exchanged a sentence or two
which resembled an exercise in the proper use of a foreign language, and
then gave what attention Englishmen are capable of before dinner to the
two ladies--the elder of whom, I may just mention, was dressed in black
velvet with heavy Venetian lace, and the younger in black silk, with old
Honiton. Neither of them did much towards enlivening the conversation.
Mrs. Ramshorn, whose dinner had as yet gained in interest with her
years, sat peevishly longing for its arrival, but cast every now and
then a look of mild satisfaction upon her nephew, which, however, while
it made her eyes sweeter, did not much alter the expression of her
mouth. Helen improved, as she fancied, the arrangement of a few
green-house flowers in an ugly vase on the table.

At length the butler appeared, the curate took Mrs. Ramshorn, and the
cousins followed--making, in the judgment of the butler as he stood in
the hall, and the housekeeper as she peeped from the baise-covered door
that led to the still-room, as handsome a couple as mortal eyes need
wish to see. They looked nearly of an age, the lady the more stately,
the gentleman the more graceful, or, perhaps rather, ELEGANT, of the
two.






CHAPTER IV.

THEIR TALK.





During dinner, Bascombe had the talk mostly to himself, and rattled
well, occasionally rebuked by his aunt for some remark which might to
a clergyman appear objectionable; nor as a partisan was she altogether
satisfied with the curate that he did not seem inclined to take
clerical exception. He ate his dinner, quietly responding to Bascombe’s
sallies--which had usually more of vivacity than keenness, more of good
spirits than wit--with a curious flickering smile, or a single word of
agreement. It might have seemed that he was humouring a younger man, but
the truth was, the curate had not yet seen cause for opposing him.

How any friend could have come to send Helen poetry I cannot imagine,
but that very morning she had received by post a small volume of verse,
which, although just out, and by an unknown author, had already been
talked of in what are called literary circles. Wingfold had read some
extracts from the book that same morning, and was therefore not quite
unprepared when Helen asked him if he had seen it. He suggested that the
poems, if the few lines he had seen made a fair sample, were rather of
the wailful order.

“If there is one thing I despise more than another,” said Bascombe, “it
is to hear a man, a fellow with legs and arms, pour out his griefs into
the bosom of that most discreet of confidantes, Society, bewailing
his hard fate, and calling upon youths and maidens to fill their
watering-pots with tears, and with him water the sorrowful pansies and
undying rue of the race. I believe I am quoting.”

“I think you must be, George,” said Helen. “I never knew you venture so
near the edge of poetry before.”

“Ah, that is all you know of me, Miss Lingard!” returned Bascombe.
“--And then,” he resumed, turning again to Wingfold, “what is it they
complain of? That some girls preferred a better man perhaps, or that a
penny paper once told the truth of their poetry.”

“Or it may be only that it is their humour to be sad,” said Wingfold.
“But don’t you think,” he continued, “it is hardly worth while to be
indignant with them? Their verses are a relief to them, and do nobody
any harm.”

“They do all the boys and girls harm that read them, and themselves who
write them more harm than anybody, confirming them in tearful habits,
and teaching eyes unused to weep. I quote again, I believe, but from
whom I am innocent. If I ever had a grief, I should have along with it
the decency to keep it to myself.”

“I don’t doubt you would, George,” said his cousin, who seemed more
playfully inclined than usual. “But,” she added, with a smile, “would
your silence be voluntary, or enforced?”

“What!” returned Bascombe, “you think I could not plain my woes to
the moon? Why not I as well as another? I could roar you as ‘twere any
nightingale.”

“You have had your sorrows, then, George?”

“Never anything worse yet than a tailor’s bill, Helen, and I hope you
won’t provide me with any. I am not in love with decay. I remember a
fellow at Trinity, the merriest of all our set at a wine-party, who,
alone with his ink-pot, was for ever enacting the part of the
unheeded poet, complaining of the hard hearts and tuneless ears of his
generation. I went into his room once, and found him with the tears
running down his face, a pot of stout half empty on the table, and
his den all but opaque with tobacco-smoke, reciting, with sobs--I had
repeated the lines so often before they ceased to amuse me, that I can
never forget them--

   ‘Heard’st thou a quiver and clang?
      In thy sleep did it make thee start?
     ‘Twas a chord in twain that sprang--
       But the lyre-shell was my heart.’

He took a pull at the stout, laid his head on the table, and sobbed like
a locomotive.”

“But it’s not very bad--not bad at all, so far as I see,” said Helen,
who had a woman’s weakness for the side attacked, in addition to a human
partiality for fair play.

“No, not bad at all--for absolute nonsense,” said Bascombe.

“He had been reading Heine,” said Wingfold.

“And burlesquing him,” returned Bascombe. “Fancy hearing one of the
fellow’s heart-strings crack, and taking it for a string of his fiddle
in the press! By the way, what are the heart-strings? Have they any
anatomical synonym? But I have no doubt it was good poetry.”

“Do you think poetry and common sense necessarily opposed to each
other?” asked Wingfold.

“I confess a leaning to that opinion,” replied Bascombe, with a
half-conscious smile.

“What do you say of Horace, now?” suggested Wingfold.

“Unfortunately for me, you have mentioned the one poet for whom I have
any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense. He never
cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the bargain. But
common sense would be just as good in prose as in verse.”

“Possibly; but what we have of it in Horace would never have reached
us but for the forms into which he has cast it. How much more enticing
acorns in the cup are! I was watching two children picking them up
to-day.”

“That may be; there have always been more children than grown men,”
 returned Bascombe. “For my part, I would sweep away all illusions, and
get at the heart of the affair.”

“But,” said Wingfold, with the look of one who, as he tries to say it,
is seeing a thing for the first time, “does not the acorn-cup belong to
the acorn? May not some of what you call illusions, be the finer, or at
least more ethereal qualities of the thing itself? You do not object to
music in church, for instance?”

Bascombe was on the point of saying he objected to it nowhere except
in church, but for his aunt’s sake, or rather for his own sake in his
aunt’s eyes, he restrained himself, and uttered his feelings only in a
peculiar smile, of import so mingled, that its meaning was illegible ere
it had quivered along his lip and vanished.

“I am no metaphysician,” he said, and Wingfold accepted the dismissal of
the subject.

Little passed between the two men over their wine; and as neither of
them cared to drink more than a couple of glasses, they soon rejoined
the ladies in the drawing-room.

Mrs. Ramshorn was taking her usual forty winks in her arm-chair, and
their entrance did not disturb her. Helen was turning over some music.

“I am looking for a song for you, George,” she said. “I want Mr.
Wingfold to hear you sing, lest he should take you for a man of stone
and lime.”

“Never mind looking,” returned her cousin. “I will sing one you have
never heard.”

And seating himself at the piano, he sang the following verses. They
were his own, a fact he would probably have allowed to creep out, had
they met with more sympathy. His voice was a full bass one, full of
tone.

   “Each man has his lampful, his lampful of oil;
    He may dull its glimmer with sorrow and toil;
    He may leave it unlit, and let it dry,
    Or wave it aloft, and hold it high:
    For mine, it shall burn with a fearless flame
    In the front of the darkness that has no name.

   “Sunshine and Wind?--are ye there? Ho! ho!
    Are ye comrades or lords, as ye shine and blow?
    I care not, I! I will lift my head
    Till ye shine and blow on my grassy bed.
    See, brother Sun, I am shining too!
    Wind, I am living as well as you!

   “Though the sun go out like a vagrant spark,
    And his daughter planets are left in the dark,
    I care not, I! For why should I care?
    I shall be hurtless, nor here nor there.
    Sun and Wind, let us shine and shout,
    For the day draws nigh when we all go out!”

“I don’t like the song,” said Helen, wrinkling her brows a little. “It
sounds--well, heathenish.”

She would, I fear, have said nothing of the sort, being used to that
kind of sound from her cousin, had not a clergyman been present. Yet
she said it from no hypocrisy, but simple regard to his professional
feelings,

“I sung it for Mr. Wingfold,” returned Bascombe. “It would have been a
song after Horace’s own heart.”

“Don’t you think,” rejoined the curate, “the defiant tone of your song
would have been strange to him? I confess that what I find chiefly
attractive in Horace is his sad submission to the inevitable.”

“Sad?” echoed Bascombe.

“Don’t you think so?”

“No. He makes the best of it, and as merrily as he can.”

“AS HE CAN, I grant you,” said Wingfold.

Here Mrs. Ramshorn woke, and the subject was dropped, leaving Mr.
Wingfold in some perplexity as to this young man and his talk, and what
the phenomenon signified. Was heathenism after all secretly cherished,
and about to become fashionable in English society? He saw little of its
phases, and for what he knew it might be so.

Helen sat down to the piano. Her time was perfect, and she never
blundered a note. She played well and woodenly, and had for her reward a
certain wooden satisfaction in her own performance. The music she chose
was good of its kind, but had more to do with the instrument than
the feelings, and was more dependent upon execution than expression.
Bascombe yawned behind his handkerchief, and Wingfold gazed at the
profile of the player, wondering how, with such fine features and
complexion, with such a fine-shaped and well-set head? her face should
be so far short of interesting. It seemed a face that had no story.






CHAPTER V.

A STAGGERING QUESTION.





It was time the curate should take his leave. Bascombe would go out
with him and have his last cigar. The wind had fallen, and the moon was
shining. A vague sense of contrast came over Wingfold, and as he stepped
on the pavement from the threshold of the high gates of wrought iron, he
turned involuntarily and looked back at the house. It was of red brick,
and flat-faced in the style of Queen Anne’s time, so that the light
could do nothing with it in the way of shadow, and dwelt only on the
dignity of its unpretentiousness. But aloft over its ridge the moon
floated in the softest, loveliest blue, with just a cloud here and there
to show how blue it was, and a sparkle where its blueness took fire in
a star. It was autumn, almost winter, below, and the creepers that clung
to the house waved in the now gentle wind like the straggling tresses of
old age; but above was a sky that might have overhung the last melting
of spring into summer. At the end of the street rose the great square
tower of the church, seeming larger than in the daylight. There was
something in it all that made the curate feel there ought to be more--as
if the night knew something he did not; and he yielded himself to its
invasion.

His companion having carefully lighted his cigar all round its extreme
periphery, took it from his mouth, regarded its glowing end with a smile
of satisfaction, and burst into a laugh. It was not a scornful laugh,
neither was it a merry or a humorous laugh; it was one of satisfaction
and amusement.

“Let me have a share in the fun,” said the curate.

“You have it,” said his companion--rudely, indeed, but not quite
offensively, and put his cigar in his mouth again.

Wingfold was not one to take umbrage easily. He was not important enough
in his own eyes for that, but he did not choose to go farther.

“That’s a fine old church,” he said, pointing to the dark mass invading
the blue--so solid, yet so clear in outline.

“I am glad the mason-work is to your mind,” returned Bascombe, almost
compassionately. “It must be some satisfaction, perhaps consolation to
you.”

Before he had thus concluded the sentence a little scorn had crept into
his tone.

“You make some allusion which I do not quite apprehend,” said the
curate.

“Now, I am going to be honest with you,” said Bascombe abruptly, and
stopping, he turned towards his companion, and took the full-flavoured
Havannah from his lips. “I like you,” he went on, “for you seem
reasonable; and besides, a man ought to speak out what he thinks. So
here goes!--Tell me honestly--do you believe one word of all that!”

And he in his turn pointed in the direction of the great tower.

The curate was taken by surprise and made no answer: it was as if he
had received a sudden blow in the face. Recovering himself presently,
however, he sought room to pass the question without direct encounter.

“How came the thing there?” he said, once more indicating the
church-tower.

“By faith, no doubt,” answered Bascombe, laughing,--“but not your faith;
no, nor the faith of any of the last few generations.”

“There are more churches built now, ten times over, than in any former
period of our history.”

“True; but of what sort? All imitation--never an original amongst them
all!”

“If they had found out the right way, why change it?”

“Good! But it is rather ominous for the claim of a divine origin to your
religion that it should be the only one thing that in these days takes
the crab’s move--backwards. You are indebted to your forefathers for
your would-be belief, as well as for their genuine churches. You hardly
know what your belief is. There is my aunt--as good a specimen as I know
of what you call a Christian!--so accustomed is she to think and speak
too after the forms of what you heard my cousin call heathenism, that
she would never have discovered, had she been as wide awake as she was
sound asleep, that the song I sung was anything but a good Christian
ballad.”

“Pardon me; I think you are wrong there.”

“What! did you never remark how these Christian people, who profess
to believe that their great man has conquered death, and all that
rubbish--did you never observe the way they look if the least allusion
is made to death, or the eternity they say they expect beyond it? Do
they not stare as if you had committed a breach of manners? Religion
itself is the same way: as much as you like about the church, but don’t
mention Christ! At the same time, to do them justice, it is only of
death in the abstract they decline to hear; they will listen to the news
of the death of a great and good man, without any such emotion. Look
at the poetry of death--I mean the way Christian poets write of it! A
dreamless sleep they call it--the bourne from whence, knows no waking.
‘She is gone for ever!’ cries the mother over her daughter. And that is
why such things are not to be mentioned, because in their hearts
they have no hope, and in their minds no courage to face the facts of
existence. We haven’t the pluck of the old fellows, who, that they might
look death himself in the face without dismay, accustomed themselves,
even at their banquets, to the sight of his most loathsome handiwork,
his most significant symbol--and enjoyed their wine the better for
it!--your friend Horace, for instance.”

“But your aunt now would never consent to such an interpretation of her
opinions. Nor do I allow that it is fair.”

“My dear sir, if there is one thing I pride myself upon, it is fair
play, and I grant you at once she would not. But I am speaking, not of
creeds, but of beliefs. And I assert that the forms of common Christian
speech regarding death come nearer those of Horace than your saint, the
old Jew, Saul of Tarsus.”

It did not occur to Wingfold that people generally speak from the
surfaces, not the depths of their minds, even when those depths are
moved; nor yet that possibly Mrs. Ramshorn was not the best type of a
Christian, even in his soft-walking congregation! In fact, nothing came
into his mind with which to meet what Bascombe said--the real force
whereof he could not help feeling--and he answered nothing. His
companion followed his apparent yielding with fresh pressure.

“In truth,” he said, “I do not believe that YOU believe more than an
atom here and there of what you profess. I am confident you have more
good sense by a great deal.”

“I am sorry to find that you place good sense above good faith, Mr.
Bascombe; but I am obliged by your good opinion, which, as I read it,
amounts to this--that I am one of the greatest humbugs you have the
misfortune to be acquainted with.”

“Ha! ha! ha!--No, no; I don’t say that. I know so well how to make
allowance for the prejudices a man has inherited from foolish ancestors,
and which have been instilled into him, as well, with his earliest
nourishment, both bodily and mental. But--come now--I do love open
dealing--I am myself open as the day--did you not take to the church as
a profession, in which you might eat a piece of bread--as somebody says
in your own blessed Bible--dry enough bread it may be, for the old lady
is not over-generous to her younger children--still a gentlemanly sort
of livelihood?”

Wingfold held his peace. It was incontestably with such a view that
he had signed the articles and sought holy orders--and that without a
single question as to truth or reality in either act.

“Your silence is honesty, Mr. Wingfold, and I honour you for it,” said
Bascombe. “It is an easy thing for a man in another profession to speak
his mind, but silence such as yours, casting a shadow backward over your
past, require courage: I honour you, sir.”

As he spoke, he laid his hand on Wingfold’s shoulder with the grasp of
an athlete.

“Can the sherry have anything to do with it?” thought the curate. The
fellow was, or seemed to be, years younger than himself! It was an
assurance unimaginable--yet there it stood--six feet of it good! He
glanced at the church tower. It had not vanished in mist! It still made
its own strong, clear mark on the eternal blue!

“I must not allow you to mistake my silence, Mr. Bascombe,” he answered
the same moment. “It is not easy to reply to such demands all at once.
It is not easy to say in times like these, and at a moment’s notice,
what or how much a man believes. But whatever my answer might be had I
time to consider it, my silence must at least not be interpreted to mean
that I do NOT believe as my profession indicates. That, at all events,
would be untrue.”

“Then I am to understand, Mr. Wingfold, that you neither believe nor
disbelieve the tenets of the church whose bread you eat?” said Bascombe,
with the air of a reprover of sin.

“I decline to place myself between the horns of any such dilemma,”
 returned Wingfold, who was now more than a little annoyed at his
persistency in forcing his way within the precincts of another’s
personality.

“It is but one more proof--more than was necessary--to convince me that
the old system is a lie--a lie of the worst sort, seeing it may prevail
even to the self-deception of a man otherwise remarkable for honesty and
directness. Good night, Mr. Wingfold.”

With lifted hats, but no hand-shaking, the men parted.






CHAPTER VI.

THE CURATE IN THE CHURCHYARD.





Bascombe was chagrined to find that the persuasive eloquence with which
he hoped soon to play upon the convictions of jurymen at his own sweet
will, had not begotten even communicativenes, not to say confidence, in
the mind of a parson who knew himself fooled,--and partly that it
gave him cause to doubt how far it might be safe to urge his attack
in another and to him more important quarter. He had a passion for
convincing people, this Hercules of the new world. He sauntered slowly
back to his aunt’s, husbanding his cigar a little, and looking up at
the moon now and then,--not to admire the marvel of her shining, but to
think yet again what a fit type of an effete superstition she was, in
that she retained her power of fascination even in death.

Wingfold walked slowly away, with his eyes on the ground gliding from
under his footsteps. It was only eleven o’clock, but this the oldest
part of the town seemed already asleep. They had not met a single person
on their way, and hardly seen a lighted window. But he felt unwilling to
go home, which at first he was fain to attribute to his having drunk
a little more wine than was good for him, whence this feverishness and
restlessness so strange to his experience. In the churchyard, on the
other side of which his lodging lay, he turned aside from the flagged
path and sat down upon a gravestone, where he was hardly seated ere he
began to discover that it was something else than the wine which had
made him feel so uncomfortable. What an objectionable young fellow that
Bascombe was!--presuming and arrogant to a degree rare, he hoped, even
in a profession for which insolence was a qualification. What rendered
it worse was that his good nature--and indeed every one of his gifts,
which were all of the popular order--was subservient to an assumption
not only self-satisfied but obtrusive!--And yet--and yet--the
objectionable character of his self-constituted judge being clear as the
moon to the mind of the curate, was there not something in what he
had said? This much remained undeniable at least, that when the very
existence of the church was denounced as a humbug in the hearing of one
who ate her bread, and was her pledged servant, his very honesty had
kept that man from speaking a word in her behalf! Something must be
wrong somewhere: was it in him or in the church? In him assuredly,
whether in her or not. For had he not been unable to utter the simple
assertion that he did believe the things which, as the mouthpiece of
the church, he had been speaking in the name of the truth every
Sunday--would again speak the day after to-morrow? And now the point
was--WHY could he not say he believed them? He had never consciously
questioned them; he did not question them now; and yet, when a forward,
overbearing young infidel of a lawyer put it to him--plump--as if he
were in the witness-box, or rather indeed in the dock--did he believe a
word of what the church had set him to teach?--a strange something--was
it honesty?--if so, how dishonest had he not hitherto been?--was it
diffidence?--if so, how presumptuous his position in that church!--this
nondescript something seemed to raise a “viewless obstruction” in his
throat, and, having thus rendered him the first moment incapable
of speaking out like a man, had taught him the next--had it?--to
quibble--“like a priest” the lawyer-fellow would doubtless have said! He
must go home and study Paley--or perhaps Butler’s Analogy--he owed the
church something, and ought to be able to strike a blow for her. Or
would not Leighton be better? Or a more modern writer--say Neander, or
Coleridge, or perhaps Dr. Liddon? There were thousands able to fit
him out for the silencing of such foolish men as this Bascombe of the
shirt-front!

Wingfold found himself filled with contempt, but the next moment was
not sure whether this Bascombe or one Wingfold were the more legitimate
object of it. One thing was undeniable--his friends HAD put him into the
priest’s office, and he had yielded to go, that he might eat a piece
of bread. He had no love for it except by fits, when the beauty of an
anthem, or the composition of a collect, awoke in him a faint consenting
admiration, or a weak, responsive sympathy. Did he not, indeed,
sometimes despise himself, and that pretty heartily, for earning his
bread by work which any pious old woman could do better than he? True,
he attended to his duties; not merely “did church,” but his endeavour
also that all things should be done decently and in order. All the
same it remained a fact that if Barrister Bascombe were to stand up and
assert in full congregation--as no doubt he was perfectly prepared to
do--that there was no God anywhere in the universe, the Rev. Thomas
Wingfold could not, on the church’s part, prove to anybody that there
was;--dared not, indeed, so certain would he be of discomfiture, advance
a single argument on his side of the question. Was it even HIS side of
the question? Could he say he believed there was a God? Or was not this
all he knew--that there was a church of England, which paid him
for reading public prayers to a God in whom the congregation--and
himself--were supposed by some to believe, by others, Bascombe, for
instance, not?

These reflections were not pleasant, especially with Sunday so near.
For what if there were hundreds, yes, thousands of books, triumphantly
settling every question which an over-seething and ill-instructed brain
might by any chance suggest,--what could it boot?--how was a poor finite
mortal, with much the ordinary faculty and capacity, and but a
very small stock already stored, to set about reading, studying,
understanding, mastering, appropriating the contents of those thousands
of volumes necessary to the arming of him who, without pretending
himself the mighty champion to seek the dragon in his den, might yet
hope not to let the loathly worm swallow him, armour and all, at
one gulp in the highway? Add to this that--thought of all most
dismayful!--he had himself to convince first, the worst dragon of all to
kill, for bare honesty’s sake, in his own field; while, all the time
he was arming and fighting--like the waves of the flowing tide in
a sou’-wester, Sunday came in upon Sunday, roaring on his flat,
defenceless shore, Sunday behind Sunday rose towering, in awful
perspective, away to the verge of an infinite horizon--Sunday after
Sunday of dishonesty and sham--yes, hypocrisy, far worse than any
idolatry. To begin now, and in such circumstances, to study the
evidences of Christianity, were about as reasonable as to send a man,
whose children were crying for their dinner, off to China to make his
fortune!

He laughed the idea to scorn, discovered that a gravestone in a
November midnight was a cold chair for study, rose, stretched himself
disconsolately, almost despairingly, looked long at the persistent
solidity of the dark church and the waving line of its age-slackened
ridge, which, like a mountain-range, shot up suddenly in the tower and
ceased--then turning away left the houses of the dead crowded all about
the house of the resurrection. At the farther gate he turned yet again,
and gazed another moment on the tower. Towards the sky it towered, and
led his gaze upward. There still soared, yet rested, the same quiet
night with its delicate heaps of transparent blue, its cool-glowing
moon, its steely stars, and its something he did not understand. He went
home a little quieter of heart, as if he had heard from afar something
sweet and strange.






CHAPTER VII.

THE COUSINS.





George Bascombe was a peculiar development of the present century,
almost of the present generation. In the last century, beyond a doubt,
the description of such a man would have been incredible. I do not mean
that he was the worse or the better for that. There are types both of
good and of evil which to the past would have been incredible because
unintelligible.

It is very hard sometimes for a tolerably honest man, as we have just
seen in the case of Wingfold, to say what he believes, and it ought
to be yet harder to say what another man does not believe; therefore I
shall presume no farther concerning Bascombe in this respect than to say
that the thing he SEEMED most to believe was that he had a mission to
destroy the beliefs of everybody else. Whence he derived this mission he
would not have thought a reasonable question--would have answered that,
if any man knew any truth unknown to another, understood any truth
better, or could present it more clearly than another, the truth itself
was his commission of apostleship. And his stand was indubitably a firm
one. Only there was the question--whether his presumed commission was
verily truth or no. It must be allowed that a good deal turns upon that.

According to the judgment of some men who thought they knew him,
Bascombe was as yet--I will not say incapable of distinguishing, but
careless of the distinction between--not a fact and a law, perhaps, but
a law and a truth. They said also that he inveighed against the beliefs
of other people, without having ever seen more than a distorted shadow
of those beliefs--some of them he was not capable of seeing, they
said--only capable of denying. Now while he would have been perfectly
justified, they said, in asserting that he saw no truth in the things he
denied, was he justifiable in concluding that his not seeing a thing was
a proof of its non-existence--anything more, in fact, than a presumption
against its existence? or in denouncing every man who said he believed
this or that which Bascombe did not believe, as either a knave or
a fool, if not both in one? He would, they said, judge anybody--a
Shakespeare, a Bacon, a Milton--without a moment’s hesitation or a
quiver of reverence--judge men who, beside him, were as the living
ocean to a rose-diamond. If he was armed in honesty, the rivets were of
self-satisfaction. The suit, they allowed, was adamantine, unpierceable.

That region of a man’s nature which has to do with the unknown was in
Bascombe shut off by a wall without chink or cranny; he was unaware of
its existence. He had come out of the darkness, and was going back
into the darkness; all that lay between, plain and clear, he had to do
with--nothing more. He could not present to himself the idea of a man
who found it impossible to live without some dealings with the supernal.
To him a man’s imagination was of no higher calling than to amuse him
with its vagaries. He did not know, apparently, that Imagination had
been the guide to all the physical discoveries which he worshipped,
therefore could not reason that perhaps she might be able to carry a
glimmering light even into the forest of the supersensible.

How far he was original in the views he propounded, will, to those
who understand the times of which I write, be plain enough. The lively
reception of another man’s doctrine, especially if it comes over water
or across a few ages of semi-oblivion, and has to be gathered with
occasional help from a dictionary, raises many a man, in his own esteem,
to the same rank with its first propounder; after which he will propound
it so heartily himself as to forget the difference, and love it as his
own child.

It may seem strange that the son of a clergyman should take such a part
in the world’s affairs, but one who observes will discover that, at
college at least, the behaviour of sons of clergymen resembles in
general as little as that of any, and less than that of most, the
behaviour enjoined by the doctrines their fathers have to teach.
The cause of this is matter of consideration for those fathers. In
Bascombe’s case, it must be mentioned also that, instead of taking
freedom from prejudice as a portion of the natural accomplishment of a
gentleman, he prided himself upon it, and THEREFORE would often go dead
against the things presumed to be held by THE CLOTH, long before he had
begun to take his position as an iconoclast.

Lest I should, however, tire my reader with the delineations of a
character not of the most interesting, I shall, for the present, only
add that Bascombe had persuaded himself, and without much difficulty,
that he was one of the prophets of a new order of things. At Cambridge
he had been so regarded by a few who had lauded him as a mighty foe to
humbug--and in some true measure he deserved the praise. Since then he
had found a larger circle, and had even radiated of his light, such, as
it was, from the centres of London editorial offices. But all I have to
do with now is the fact that he had grown desirous to add his cousin,
Helen Lingard, to the number of those who believed in him, and over
whom, therefore, he exercised a prophet’s influence.

No doubt it added much to the attractiveness of the intellectual game
that the hunt was on the home grounds of such a proprietress as Helen--a
handsome, a gifted, and, above all, a ladylike young woman. To do
Bascombe justice, the fact that she was an heiress also had very little
weight in the matter. If he had ever had any thought of marrying her,
that thought was not consciously present to him when first he became
aware of his wish to convert her to his views of life. But, although he
was not in love with her, he admired her, and believed he saw in her one
that resembled himself.

As to Helen, although she was no more conscious of cause of
self-dissatisfaction than her cousin, she was not therefore positively
self-satisfied like him. For that her mind was not active enough.

If it seem, as it may, to some of my readers, difficult to believe that
she should have come to her years without encountering any questions,
giving life to any aspirations, or even forming any opinions that could
rightly be called her own, I would remind them that she had always had
good health, and that her intellectual faculties had been kept in full
and healthy exercise, nor had once afforded the suspicion of a tendency
towards artistic utterance in any direction. She was no mere dabbler
in anything: in music, for instance, she had studied thorough bass, and
studied it well; yet her playing was such as I have already described
it. She understood perspective, and could copy an etching, in pen and
ink, to a hair’s-breadth, yet her drawing was hard and mechanical. She
was pretty much at home in Euclid, and thoroughly enjoyed a geometric
relation, but had never yet shown her English master the slightest
pleasure in an analogy, or the smallest sympathy with any poetry higher
than such as very properly delights schoolboys. Ten thousand things
she knew without wondering at one of them. Any attempt to rouse her
admiration, she invariably received with quiet intelligence but no
response. Yet her drawing-master was convinced there lay a large soul
asleep somewhere below the calm grey morning of that wide-awake yet
reposeful intelligence.

As far as she knew--only she had never thought anything about it--she
was in harmony with creation animate and inanimate, and for what might
or might not be above creation, or at the back, or the heart, or the
mere root of it, how could she think about a something the idea of
which had never yet been presented to her by love or philosophy, or even
curiosity? As for any influence from the public offices of religion, a
contented soul may glide through them all for a long life, unstruck to
the last, buoyant and evasive as a bee amongst hailstones. And now her
cousin, unsolicited, was about to assume, if she should permit him, the
unspiritual direction of her being, so that she need never be troubled
from the quarter of the unknown.

Mrs. Ramshorn’s house had formerly been the manor-house, and, although
it now stood in an old street, with only a few yards of ground between
it and the road, it had a large and ancient garden behind it. A large
garden of any sort is valuable, but an ancient garden is invaluable, and
this one had retained a very antique loveliness. The quaint memorials
of its history lived on into the new, changed, unsympathetic time, and
stood there, aged, modest, and unabashed. Yet not one of the family
had ever cared for it on the ground of its old-fashionedness; its
preservation was owing merely to the fact that their gardener was
blessed with a wholesome stupidity rendering him incapable of unlearning
what his father, who had been gardener there before him, had had
marvellous difficulty in teaching him. We do not half appreciate the
benefits to the race that spring from honest dulness. The CLEVER people
are the ruin of everything.

Into this garden, Bascombe walked the next morning, after breakfast,
and Helen, who, next to the smell of a fir-wood fire, honestly liked the
odour of a good cigar, spying him from her balcony, which was the roof
of the veranda, where she was trimming the few remaining chrysanthemums
that stood outside the window of her room, ran down the little wooden
stair that led from it to the garden, and joined him. Nothing could just
at present have been more to his mind.






CHAPTER VIII.

THE GARDEN.





“Take a cigar, Helen?” said George.

“No, thank you,” answered Helen; “I like it diluted.”

“I don’t see why ladies should not have things strong as men.”

“Not if they don’t want them. You can’t enjoy everything--I mean, one
can’t have the strong and the delicate both at once. I don’t believe a
smoker can have the same pleasure in smelling a rose that I have.”

“Isn’t it a pity we never can compare sensations?”

“I don’t think it matters much: everyone would have to keep to his own
after all.”

“That’s good, Helen! If ever man try to humbug you, he will find he
has lost his stirrups. If only there were enough like you left in this
miserable old hulk of a creation!”

It was an odd thing that when in the humour of finding fault, Bascombe
would not unfrequently speak of the cosmos as a creation. He was himself
unaware of the curious fact.

“You seem to have a standing quarrel with the creation, George! Yet one
might think you had as little ground as most people to complain of your
portion in it,” said Helen.

“Well, you know, I don’t complain for myself. I don’t pretend to think
I am specially ill-used. But I am not everybody. And then there’s such a
lot of born-fools in it!”

“If they are born-fools they can’t help it.”

“That may be; only it makes it none the pleasanter for other people;
but, unfortunately, they are not the only or the worst sort of fools.
For one born-fool there are a thousand wilful ones. For one man that
will honestly face an honest argument, there are ten thousand that will
dishonestly shirk it. There’s that curate-fellow now--Wingfold I think
aunt called him--look at him now!”

“I can’t see much in him to rouse indignation,” said Helen. “He seems a
very inoffensive man.”

“I don’t call it inoffensive when a man sells himself to the keeping up
of a system that----”

Here Bascombe checked himself, remembering that a sudden attack upon
what was, at least, the more was the pity, a time-honoured system, might
rouse a woman’s prejudices; and as Helen had already listened to a large
amount of undermining remark without perceiving the direction of his
tunnels, he resolved, before venturing an open assault, to make sure
that those prejudices stood, lightly borne, over an abyss of seething
objection. He had had his experiences as the prophet-pioneer of glad
tidings to the nations, and had before now, although such weakness
he could not anticipate in Helen, seen one whom he considered a most
promising pupil, turned suddenly away in a storm of terror and disgust.

“What a folly is it now,” he instantly resumed, leaving the general and
attacking a particular, “to think to make people good by promises and
threats--promises of a heaven that would bore the dullest among them
to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of which, if only half
conceived, would be enough to paralyse every nerve of healthy action in
the human system!”

“All nations have believed in a future state, either of reward or
punishment,” objected Helen.

“Mere Brocken-spectres of their own approbation or disapprobation of
themselves. And whither has it brought the race?”

“What then would you substitute for it, George?”

“Why substitute anything? Ought not men be good to one another because
they are made up of ones and others? Do you or I need threats and
promises to make us kind? And what right have we to judge others worse
than ourselves? Mutual compassion,” he went on, blowing out a mouthful
of smoke and then swelling his big chest with a huge lungsful of air,
“might be sufficient to teach poor ephemerals kindness and consideration
enough to last their time.”

“But how would you bring such reflections to bear?” asked Helen,
pertinently.

“I would reason thus: You must consider that you are but a part of the
whole, and that whatever you do to hurt the whole, or injure any of its
parts, will return upon you who form one of those parts.”

“How would that influence the man whose favourite amusement is to beat
his wife!”

“Not at all, I grant you. But that man is what he is from being born and
bred under a false and brutal system. Having deluged his delicate brain
with the poisonous fumes of adulterated liquor, and so roused all the
terrors of a phantom-haunted imagination, he sees hostile powers above
watching for his fall, and fiery ruin beneath gaping to receive him, and
in pure despair acts like the madman the priests and the publicans
have made him. Helen,” continued Bascombe with solemnity, regarding her
fixedly, “to deliver the race from the horrors of such falsehoods, which
by no means operate only on the vulgar and brutal, for to how many
of the most refined and delicate of human beings are not their lives
rendered bitter by the evil suggestions of lying systems--I care not
what they are called--philosophy, religion, society, I care not?--to
deliver men, I say, from such ghouls of the human brain, were indeed
to have lived! and in the consciousness of having spent his life in the
slaying of such dragons, a man may well go from the nameless past into
the nameless future rejoicing, careless even if his poor length of days
be shortened by his labours to leave blessing behind him, and, full of
courage even in the moment of final dissolution, cast her mockery back
into the face of mocking Life, and die her enemy, and the friend of
Death!”

George’s language was a little confused. Perhaps he mingled his ideas
a little for Helen’s sake--or rather for obscurity’s sake. Anyhow,
the mournful touch in it was not his own, but taken from the poems of
certain persons whose opinions resembled his, but floated on the surface
of mighty and sad hearts. Tall, stately, comfortable Helen walked
composedly by his side, softly shared his cigar, and thought what a
splendid pleader he would make. Perhaps to her it sounded rather finer
than it was, for its tone of unselfishness, the aroma of self-devotion
that floated about it, pleased and attracted her. Was not here a youth
in the prime of being and the dawn of success, handsome, and smoking
the oldest of Havannahs, who, so far from being enamoured of his own
existence, was anxious and careful about that of less favoured mortals,
for whose welfare indeed he was willing to sacrifice his life?--nothing
less could be what he meant. And how fine he looked as he said it, with
his head erect, and his nostrils quivering like those of a horse! For
his honesty, that was self-evident!

Perhaps, had she been capable of looking into it, the self-evident
honesty might have resolved itself into this--that he thoroughly
believed in himself; that he meant what he said; and that he offered her
nothing he did not prize and cleave to as his own.

To one who had read Darwin, and had chanced to see them as they walked
in their steady, stately young life among the ancient cedars and clipped
yews of the garden, with the rags and tatters of the ruined summer
hanging over and around them, they must have looked as fine an instance
of natural selection as the world had to show. And now in truth for
the first time, with any shadow of purpose, that is, did the thought of
Helen as a wife occur to Bascombe. She listened so well, was so ready
to take what he presented to her, was evidently so willing to become
a pupil, that he began to say to himself that here was the very woman
made--no, not made, that implied a maker--but for him, without the
MADE; that is, if ever he should bring himself by marriage to limit the
freedom to which man, the crown of the world, the blossom of nature,
the cauliflower of the spine, was predestined or doomed, without will in
himself or beyond himself, from an eternity of unthinking matter,
ever producing what was better than itself in the prolific darkness of
non-intent.






CHAPTER IX.

THE PARK.





At the bottom of Mrs. Ramshorn’s garden was a deep sunk fence, which
allowed a large meadow, a fragment of what had once been the manor-park,
to belong, so far as the eye was concerned, to the garden. Nor was this
all, for in the sunk fence was a door with a little tunnel, by which
they could pass at once from the garden to the meadow. So, the day being
wonderfully fine, Bascombe proposed to his cousin a walk in the park,
the close-paling of which, with a small door in it, whereto Mrs.
Ramshorn had the privilege of a key, was visible on the other side of
the meadow. The two keys had but to be fetched from the house, and in a
few minutes they were in the park. The turf was dry, the air was still,
and although the woods were very silent, and looked mournfully bare,
the grass drew nearer to the roots of the trees, and the sunshine filled
them with streaks of gold, blending lovelily with the bright green of
the moss that patched the older stems. Neither horses nor dogs say to
themselves, I suppose, that the sunshine makes them glad, yet both are
happier, after the rules of equine and canine existence, on a bright
day: neither Helen nor George could have understood a poem of Keats--not
to say Wordsworth--(I do not mean they would not have fancied they
did)--and yet the soul of nature that dwelt in these common shows did
not altogether fail of influence upon them.

“I wonder what the birds do with themselves all the winter,” said Helen.

“Eat berries, and make the best of it,” answered George.

“I mean what becomes of them all. We see so few of them.”

“About as many as you see in summer. Because you hear them you fancy you
see them.”

“But there is so little to hide them in winter.”

“Little is wanted to hide our dusky creatures.”

“They must have a hard time of it in frost and snow.”

“Oh! I don’t know,” returned George. “They enjoy life on the whole, I
believe. It ain’t such a very bad sort of a world as some people would
have it. Nature is cruel enough in some of her arrangements, it can’t be
denied. She don’t scruple to carry out her plans. It is nothing to her
that for the life of one great monster of a high-priest, millions upon
millions of submissive little fishes should be sacrificed; and then if
anybody come within the teeth of her machinery, don’t she mangle
him finely--with her fevers and her agues and her convulsions and
consumptions and what not? But still, barring her own necessities, and
the consequences of man’s ignorance and foolhardiness, she is on the
whole rather a good-natured old woman, and scatters a deal of tolerably
fair enjoyment around her.”

“One WOULD think the birds must be happy in summer, at least, to hear
them sing,” corroborated Helen.

“Yes, or to see them stripping a hawthorn bush in winter--always
provided the cat or the hawk don’t get hold of them. With that nature
does not trouble herself. Well, it’s soon over--with all of us,
and that’s a comfort. If men would only get rid of their cats and
hawks,--such as the fancy for instance, that all their suffering comes
of the will of a malignant power! That is the kind of thing that makes
the misery of the world!”

“I don’t quite see----” began Helen.

“We were talking about the birds in winter,” interrupted George, careful
not to swell too suddenly any of the air-bags with which he would float
Helen’s belief. He knew wisely, and he knew how, to leave a hint to work
while it was yet not half understood. By the time it was understood, it
would have grown a little familiar: the supposed pup when it turned out
a cub, would not be so terrible as if it had presented itself at once as
leonate.

And so they wandered across the park, talking easily.

“They’ve got on a good way since I was here last,” said George, as they
came in sight of the new house the new earl was building. “But they
don’t seem much in a hurry with it either.”

“Aunt says it is twenty years since the foundations were laid by the
uncle of the present earl,” said Helen; “and then for some reason or
other the thing was dropped.”

“Was there no house on the place before?”

“Oh! yes--not much of a house, though.”

“And they pulled it down, I suppose.”

“No; it stands there still.”

“Where?”

“Down in the hollow there--over those trees--about the worst place they
could have built in. Surely you have seen it! Poldie and I used to run
all over it.”

“No, I never saw it. Was it empty then?”

“Yes, or almost. I can remember some little attention paid to the
garden, but none to the house. It is just falling slowly to pieces.
Would you like to see it?”

“That I should,” returned Bascombe, who was always ready for any new
impression on his sensorium, and away they went to look at the old
house of Glaston as it was called, after some greatly older and probably
fortified place.

In the hollow all the water of the park gathered to a lake before
finding its way to the river Lythe. This lake was at the bottom of the
old garden, and the house at the top of it. The garden was walled on
the two sides, and the walls ran right down to the lake. There were
wonderful legends current amongst the children of Glaston concerning
that lake, its depth, and the creatures in it; and one terrible story,
which had been made a ballad of, about a lady drowned in a sack, whose
ghost might still be seen when the moon was old, haunting the gardens
and the house. Hence it came that none of them went near it, except
those few whose appetites for adventure now and then grew keen enough
to prevent their imaginations from rousing more fear than supplied the
proper relish of danger. The house itself even those few never dared to
enter.

Not so had it been with Helen and Leopold. The latter had imagination
enough to receive everything offered, but Helen was the leader, and she
had next to none. In her childhood she had heard the tales alluded to
from her nurses, but she had been to school since, and had learned not
to believe them; and certainly she was not one to be frightened at what
she did not believe. So when Leopold came in the holidays, the place
was one of their favoured haunts, and they knew every cubic yard in the
house.

“Here,” said Helen to her cousin, as she opened the door in a little
closet, and showed a dusky room which had no window but a small one high
up in the wall of a back staircase, “here is one room into which I never
could get Poldie without the greatest trouble. I gave it up at last, he
always trembled so till he got out again. I will show you such a curious
place at the other end of it.”

She led the way to a closet similar to that by which they had entered,
and directed Bascombe how to raise a trap which filled all the floor
of it so that it did not show. Under the trap was a sort of well, big
enough to hold three upon emergency.

“If only they could contrive to breathe,” said George. “It looks ugly.
If it had but a brain and a tongue it could tell tales.”

“Come,” said Helen. “I don’t know how it is, but I don’t like the look
of it myself now. Let us get into the open air again.”

Ascending from the hollow, and passing through a deep belt of trees that
surrounded it, they came again to the open park, and by-and-by reached
the road that led from the lodge to the new building, upon which they
presently encountered a strange couple.






CHAPTER X.

THE DWARFS.





The moment they had passed them, George turned to his cousin with a
countenance which bore moral indignation mingled with disgust. The
healthy instincts of the elect of his race were offended by the sight of
such physical failures, such mockeries of humanity as those.

The woman was little if anything over four feet in height. She was
crooked, had a high shoulder, and walked like a crab, one leg being
shorter than the other. Her companion walked quite straight, with a
certain appearance of dignity which he neither assumed nor could have
avoided, and which gave his gait the air of a march. He was not an inch
taller than the woman, had broad, square shoulders, pigeon-breast,
and invisible neck. He was twice her age, and they seemed father and
daughter. They heard his breathing, loud with asthma, as they went by.

“Poor things!” said Helen, with cold kindness.

“It is shameful!” said George, in a tone of righteous anger. “Such
creatures have no right to existence. The horrid manakin!”

“But, George!” said Helen, in expostulation, “the poor wretch can’t help
his deformity.”

“No; but what right had he to marry and perpetuate such odious misery!”

“You are too hasty: the young woman is his niece.”

“She ought to have been strangled the moment she was born--for the sake
of humanity. Monsters ought not to live.”

“Unfortunately they have all got mothers,” said Helen; and something in
her face made him fear he had gone too far.

“Don’t mistake me, dear Helen,” he said. “I would neither starve
nor drown them after they had reached the faculty of resenting such
treatment--of the justice of which,” he added, smiling, “I am afraid it
would be hard to convince them. But such people actually marry--I
have known cases,--and that ought to be provided against by suitable
enactments and penalties.”

“And so,” rejoined Helen, “because they are unhappy already, you would
heap unhappiness upon them?”

“Now, Helen, you must not be unfair to me any more than to your
hunchbacks. It is the good of the many I seek, and surely that is better
than the good of the few.”

“What I object to is, that it should be at the expense of the few--who
are least able to bear it.”

“The expense is trifling,” said Bascombe. “Grant that it would be better
for society that no such--or rather put it this way: grant that it would
be well for each individual that goes to make up society that he were
neither deformed, sickly, nor idiotic, and you mean the same that I do.
A given space of territory under given conditions will always maintain a
certain number of human beings; therefore such a law as I propose would
not mean that the number drawing the breath of heaven should, to take
the instance before us in illustration, be two less, but that a certain
two of them should not be such as he or she who passed now, creatures
whose existence is a burden to them, but such as you and I, Helen,
who may say without presumption that we are no disgrace to Nature’s
handicraft.”

Helen was not sensitive. She neither blushed nor cast down her eyes. But
his tenets, thus expounded, had nothing very repulsive in them so far as
she saw, and she made no further objection to them.

As they walked up the garden again, through the many lingering signs
of a more stately if less luxurious existence than that of their
generation, she was calmly listening to a lecture on the ground of law,
namely, the resignation of certain personal rights for the securing of
other and more important ones: she understood, was mildly interested,
and entirely satisfied.

They seated themselves in the summer-house, a little wooden room
under the down-sloping boughs of a huge cedar, and pursued their
conversation--or rather Bascombe pursued his monologue. A lively girl
would in all probability have been bored to death by him, but Helen
was not a lively girl, and was not bored at all. Ere they went into the
house she had heard, amongst a hundred other things of wisdom, his views
concerning crime and punishment--with which, good and bad, true
and false, I shall not trouble my reader, except in regard to one
point--that of the obligation to punish. Upon this point he was severe.

No person, he said, ought to allow any weakness of pity to prevent him
from bringing to punishment the person who broke the laws upon which the
well-being of the community depended. A man must remember that the good
of the whole, and not the fate of the individual, was to be regarded.

It was altogether a notable sort of tête-à-tête between two such perfect
specimens of the race, and as at length they entered the house, they
professed to each other to have much enjoyed their walk.

Holding the opinions he did, Bascombe was in one thing inconsistent: he
went to “divine service” on the Sunday with his aunt and cousin--not to
humour Helen’s prejudices, but those of Mrs. Ramshorn, who, belonging,
as I have said, to the profession, had strong opinions as to the
wickedness of not going to church. It was of no use, he said to himself,
trying to upset her ideas, for to succeed would only be to make her
miserable, and his design was to make the race happy. In the grand old
Abbey, therefore, they heard together morning prayers, the Litany, and
the Communion, all in one, after a weariful and lazy modern custom not
yet extinct, and then a dull, sensible sermon, short, and tolerably well
read, on the duty of forgiveness of injuries.

I dare say it did most of the people present a little good, undefinable
as the faint influences of starlight, to sit under that “high embowed
roof,” within that vast artistic isolation, through whose mighty
limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to feel the awful
infinitude of the parent space out of which it is scooped. I dare also
say that the tones of the mellow old organ spoke to something in many
of the listeners that lay deeper far than the plummet of their
self-knowledge had ever sounded. I think also that the prayers, the
reading of which, in respect of intelligence, was admirable, were not
only regarded as sacred utterances, but felt to be soothing influences
by not a few of those who made not the slightest effort to follow them
with their hearts; and I trust that on the whole their church-going
tended rather to make them better than to harden them. But as to the
main point, the stirring up of the children of the Highest to lay hold
of the skirts of their Father’s robe, the waking of the individual
conscience to say I WILL ARISE, and the strengthening of the captive
Will to break its bonds and stand free in the name of the eternal
creating Freedom--for nothing of that was there any special provision.
This belonged, in the nature of things, to the sermon, in which, if
anywhere, the voice of the indwelling Spirit might surely be heard--out
of his holy temple, if indeed that be the living soul of man, as St.
Paul believed; but there was no sign that the preacher regarded his
office as having any such end, although in his sermon lingered the
rudimentary tokens that such must have been the original intent of
pulpit-utterance.

On the way home, Bascombe made some objections to the discourse, partly
to show his aunt that he had been attending. He admitted that one might
forgive and forget what did not come within the scope of the law, but,
as he had said to Helen before, a man was bound, he said, to punish the
wrong which through him affected the community.

“George,” said his aunt, “I differ from you there. Nobody ought to go to
the law to punish an injury. I would forgive ever so many before I would
run the risk of the law. But as to FORGETTING an injury--some injuries
at least--no, that I never would!--And I don’t believe, let the young
man say what he will, that that is required of anyone.”

Helen said nothing. She had no enemies to forgive, no wrongs worth
remembering, and was not interested in the question. She thought it a
very good sermon indeed.

When Bascombe left for London in the morning, he carried with him the
lingering rustle of silk, the odour of lavender, and a certain blueness,
not of the sky, which seemed to have something behind it, as never did
the sky to him. He had never met woman so worthy of being his mate,
either as regarded the perfection of her form, or the hidden development
of her brain--evident in her capacity for the reception of truth, as his
own cousin, Helen Lingard. Might not the relationship account for the
fact?

Helen thought nothing to correspond. She considered George a fine
manly fellow. What bold and original ideas he had about everything! Her
brother was a baby to him! But then Leopold was such a love of a boy!
Such eyes and such a smile were not to be seen on this side the world.
Helen liked her cousin, was attached to her aunt, but loved her brother
Leopold, and loved nobody else. His Hindoo mother, high of caste, had
given him her lustrous eyes and pearly smile, which, the first moment
she saw him, won his sister’s heart. He was then but eight years old,
and she but eleven. Since then, he had been brought up by his father’s
elder brother, who had the family estate in Yorkshire, but he had spent
part of all his holidays with her, and they often wrote to each other.
Of late indeed his letters had not been many, and a rumour had reached
her that he was not doing quite satisfactorily at Cambridge, but she
explained it away to the full contentment of her own heart, and went on
building such castles as her poor aerolithic skill could command, with
Leopold ever and always as the sharer of her self-expansion.






CHAPTER XI.

THE CURATE AT HOME.





If we could arrive at the feelings of a fish of the northern ocean
around which the waters suddenly rose to tropical temperature, and
swarmed with strange forms of life, uncouth and threatening, we should
have a fair symbol of the mental condition in which Thomas Wingfold now
found himself. The spiritual fluid in which his being floated had become
all at once more potent, and he was in consequence uncomfortable. A
certain intermittent stinging, as if from the flashes of some moral
electricity, had begun to pass in various directions through the crude
and chaotic mass he called himself, and he felt strangely restless. It
never occurred to him--as how should it?--that he might have commenced
undergoing the most marvellous of all changes,--one so marvellous,
indeed, that for a man to foreknow its result or understand what he was
passing through, would be more strange than that a caterpillar should
recognise in the rainbow-winged butterfly hovering over the flower
at whose leaf he was gnawing, the perfected idea of his own potential
self--I mean the change of being born again. Nor were the symptoms such
as would necessarily have suggested, even to a man experienced in the
natural history of the infinite, that the process had commenced.

A restless night followed his reflections in the churchyard, and he did
not wake at all comfortable. Not that ever he had been in the way of
feeling comfortable. To him life had not been a land flowing with milk
and honey. He had had few smiles, and not many of those grasps of the
hand which let a man know another man is near him in the battle--for had
it not been something of a battle, how could he have come to the age of
six-and-twenty without being worse than he was? He would not have said:
“All these have I kept from my youth up;” but I can say that for several
of them he had shown fight, although only One knew anything of it. This
morning, then, it was not merely that he did not feel comfortable: he
was consciously uncomfortable. Things were getting too hot for him. That
infidel fellow had poked several most awkward questions at him--yes,
into him, and a good many more had in him--self arisen to meet them.
Usually he lay a little while before he came to himself; but this
morning he came to himself at once, and not liking the interview, jumped
out of bed as if he had hoped to leave himself there behind him.

He had always scorned lying, until one day, when still a boy at school,
he suddenly found that he had told a lie, after which he hated it--yet
now, if he was to believe--ah! whom? did not the positive fellow and his
own conscience say the same thing?--his profession, his very life was
a lie! the very bread he ate grew on the rank fields of falsehood!--No,
no; it was absurd! it could not be! What had he done to find himself
damned to such a depth? Yet the thing must be looked to. He batht
himself without remorse and never even shivered, though the water in his
tub was bitterly cold, dressed with more haste than precision, hurried
over his breakfast, neglected his newspaper, and took down a volume
of early church history. But he could not read: the thing was
hopeless--utterly. With the wolves of doubt and the jackals of shame
howling at his heels, how could he start for a thousand-mile race! For
God’s sake give him a weapon to turn and face them with! Evidence! all
of it that was to be had, was but such as one man received, another
man refused; and the popular acceptance was worth no more in respect of
Christianity than of Mahometanism, for how many had given the subject
at all better consideration than himself? And there was Sunday with its
wolves and jackals, and but a hedge between! He did not so much mind
reading the prayers: he was not accountable for what was in them,
although it was bad enough to stand up and read them. Happy thing he was
not a dissenter, for then he would have had to pretend to pray from his
own soul, which would have been too horrible! But there was the sermon!
That at least was supposed to contain, or to be presented as containing,
his own sentiments. Now what were his sentiments? For the life of him
he could not tell. Had he ANY sentiments, any opinions, any beliefs, any
unbeliefs? He had plenty of sermons--old, yellow, respectable sermons,
not lithographed, neither composed by mind nor copied out by hand
unknown, but in the neat writing of his old D.D. uncle, so legible that
he never felt it necessary to read them over beforehand--just saw that
he had the right one. A hundred and fifty-seven such sermons, the odd
one for the year that began on a Sunday, of unquestionable orthodoxy,
had his kind old uncle left him in his will, with the feeling probably
that he was not only setting him up in sermons for life, but giving him
a fair start as well in the race of which a stall in some high cathedral
was the goal. For his own part he had never made a sermon, at least
never one he had judged worth preaching to a congregation. He had rather
a high idea, he thought, of preaching, and these sermons of his uncle
he considered really excellent. Some of them, however, were altogether
doctrinal, some very polemical: of such he must now beware. He would see
of what kind was the next in order; he would read it and make sure it
contained nothing he was not, in some degree at least, prepared to hold
his face to and defend--if he could not absolutely swear he believed it
purely true.

He did as resolved. The first he took up was in defence of the
Athanasian creed! That would not do. He tried another. That was upon the
Inspiration of the Scriptures. He glanced through it--found Moses on a
level with St. Paul, and Jonah with St. John, and doubted greatly. There
might be a sense--but--! No, he would not meddle with it. He tried a
third: that was on the Authority of the Church. It would not do. He had
read each of all these sermons, at least once, to a congregation, with
perfect composure and following indifference, if not peace of mind, but
now he could not come on one with which he was even in sympathy--not
to say one of which he was certain that it was more true than false. At
last he took up the odd one--that which could come into use but once in
a week of years--and this was the sermon Bascombe heard and commented
upon. Having read it over, and found nothing to compromise him with his
conscience, which was like an irritable man trying to find his way in a
windy wood by means of a broken lantern, he laid all the rest aside and
felt a little relieved.

Wingfold had never neglected the private duty of a clergyman in regard
of morning and evening devotions, but was in the habit of dressing and
undressing his soul with the help of certain chosen contents of the
prayer-book--a somewhat circuitous mode of communicating with Him who
was so near him,--that is, if St. Paul was right in saying that he
lived, and moved, and was, IN Him; but that Saturday he knelt by his
bedside at noon, and began to pray or try to pray as he had never
prayed or tried to pray before. The perplexed man cried out within the
clergyman, and pressed for some acknowledgment from God of the being he
had made.

But--was it strange to tell? or if strange, was it not the most natural
result nevertheless?--almost the same moment he began to pray in this
truer fashion, the doubt rushed up in him like a torrent-spring from the
fountains of the great deep--Was there--could there be a God at all? a
real being who might actually hear his prayer? In this crowd of houses
and shops and churches, amidst buying and selling, and ploughing and
praising and backbiting, this endless pursuit of ends and of means to
ends, while yet even the wind that blew where it listed blew under
laws most fixed, and the courses of the stars were known to a
hair’s-breadth,--was there--could there be a silent invisible God
working his own will in it all? Was there a driver to that chariot
whose multitudinous horses seemed tearing away from the pole in all
directions? and was he indeed, although invisible and inaudible, guiding
that chariot, sure as the flight of a comet, straight to its goal? Or
was there a soul to that machine whose myriad wheels went grinding on
and on, grinding the stars into dust, matter into man, and man into
nothingness? Was there--could there be a living heart to the universe
that did positively hear him--poor, misplaced, dishonest, ignorant
Thomas Wingfold, who had presumed to undertake a work he neither could
perform nor had the courage to forsake, when out of the misery of the
grimy little cellar of his consciousness he cried aloud for light and
something to make a man of him? For now that Thomas had begun to doubt
like an honest being, every ugly thing within him began to show itself
to his awakened probity.

But honest and of good parentage as the doubts were, no sooner had
they shown themselves than the wings of the ascending prayers fluttered
feebly and failed. They sank slowly, fell, and lay as dead, while all
the wretchedness of his position rushed back upon him with redoubled
inroad. Here was a man who could not pray, and yet must go and read
prayers and preach in the old attesting church, as if he too were of
those who knew something of the secrets of the Almighty, and could bring
out from his treasury, if not things new and surprising, then things old
and precious! Ought he not to send round the bell-man to cry aloud that
there would be no service? But what right had he to lay his troubles,
the burden of his dishonesty, upon the shoulders of them who faithfully
believed, and who looked to him to break to them their daily bread? And
would not any attempt at a statement of the reasons he had for such an
outrageous breach of all decorum be taken for a denial of those things
concerning which he only desired most earnestly to know that they were
true. For he had received from somewhere, he knew not how or whence, a
genuine prejudice in favour of Christianity, while of those refractions
and distorted reflexes of it which go by its name and rightly disgust
many, he had had few of the tenets thrust upon his acceptance.

Thus into the dark pool of his dull submissive life, the bold words of
the unbeliever had fallen--a dead stone perhaps, but causing a thousand
motions in the living water. Question crowded upon question, and doubt
upon doubt, until he could bear it no longer, and starting from the
floor on which at last he had sunk prostrate, he rushed in all but
involuntary haste from the house, and scarcely knew where he was until,
in a sort, he came to himself some little distance from the town,
wandering hurriedly in field-paths.






CHAPTER XII.

AN INCIDENT.





It was a fair morning of All Hallows’ summer. The trees were nearly
despoiled, but the grass was green, and there was a memory of spring in
the low sad sunshine: even the sunshine, the gladdest thing in creation,
is sad sometimes. There was no wind, nothing to fight with, nothing to
turn his mind from its own miserable perplexities. How endlessly his
position as a clergyman, he thought, added to his miseries! Had he
been a man unpledged, he could have taken his own time to think out the
truths of his relations; as it was, he felt like a man in a coffin:
out he must get, but had not room to make a single vigorous effort for
freedom! It did not occur to him yet that, unpressed from without, his
honesty unstung, he might have taken more time to find out where he was
than would have been either honest or healthful.

He came to a stile where his path joined another that ran both ways,
and there seated himself, just as the same strange couple I have already
described as met by Miss Lingard and Mr. Bascombe approached and went
by. After they had gone a good way, he caught sight of something lying
in the path, and going to pick it up, found it was a small manuscript
volume.

With the pleasurable instinct of service, he hastened after them. They
heard him, and turning waited his approach. He took off his hat, and
presenting the book to the young woman, asked if she had dropped it.
Possibly, had they been ordinary people of the class to which they
seemed to belong, he would not have uncovered to them, for he naturally
shrunk from what might be looked upon as a display of courtesy, but
their deformity rendered it imperative. Her face flushed so at sight
of the book, that, in order to spare her uneasiness, Wingfold could not
help saying with a smile,

“Do not be alarmed: I have not read one word of it.”

She returned his smile with much sweetness, and said--

“I see I need not have been afraid.”

Her companion joined in thanks and apologies for having caused him so
much trouble. Wingfold assured them it had been but a pleasure. It
was far from a scrutinizing look with which he regarded them, but the
interview left him with the feeling that their faces were refined and
intelligent, and their speech was good. Again he lifted his rather
shabby hat, the man responded with equal politeness in removing from a
great grey head one rather better, and they turned from each other and
went their ways, the sight of their malformation arousing in the curate
no such questions as those with which it had agitated the tongue, if not
the heart, of George Bascombe, to widen the scope of his perplexities.
He had heard the loud breathing of the man, and seen the projecting eyes
of the woman, but he never said to himself therefore that they were more
hardly dealt with than he. Had such a thought occurred to him, he would
have comforted the pain of his sympathy with the reflection that at
least neither of them was a curate of the church of England who knew
positively nothing of the foundation upon which that church professed to
stand.

How he got through the Sunday he never could have told. What times a man
may get through--he knows not how! As soon as it was over, it was all
a mist--from which gleamed or gloomed large the face of George Bascombe
with its keen unbelieving eyes and scornful lips. All the time he was
reading the prayers and lessons, all the time he was reading his uncle’s
sermon, he had not only been aware of those eyes, but aware also of what
lay behind them--seeing and reading the reflex of himself in Bascombe’s
brain; but nothing more whatever could he recall.

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

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

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

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

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






CHAPTER XIII.

A REPORT OF PROGRESS.





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

“But truth is truth,” George would have replied.

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

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

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






CHAPTER XIV.

JEREMY TAYLOR.





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

“Respected Sir,

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

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

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

“Your obedient servant and well-wisher,

“Joseph Polwarth.”

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






CHAPTER XV

THE PARK GATE.





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is a long way for you to go to church.”

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

“Your uncle does.”

“Not very often, sir.”

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

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

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

Wingfold rose and held out his hand.

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

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

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






CHAPTER XVI.

THE ATTIC.





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






CHAPTER XVII.

POLWARTH’S PLAN.





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not in the least,” said the curate.

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

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

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

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

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

“What is Christianity, then?”

“God in Christ, and Christ in man.”

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

“None whatever.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Such as he is represented in the New Testament.”

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

Wingfold thought for a while.

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

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






CHAPTER XVIII.

JOSEPH POLWARTH.





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






CHAPTER XIX.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.





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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Polwarth thought a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






CHAPTER XX.

A STRANGE SERMON.





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

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

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

From the manuscript before him he read thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You heard him say he had help,” said Helen.

“No, I don’t remember that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






CHAPTER XXI.

A THUNDERBOLT.





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come in, Poldie, and tell me all about it.”

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

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

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






CHAPTER XXII.

LEOPOLD.





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He dropped on his knees, and clasped hers.

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

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

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

“You won’t give me up, Helen?”

“No. I will not.”

“Swear it, Helen.”

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

“Swear it, Helen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sat down and folded his arms.

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

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

“Don’t leave me!” cried Leopold.

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

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

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

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

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

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






CHAPTER XXIII.

THE REFUGE.





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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s the light coming!” he said, in a dull hollow voice, “--The
morning! always the morning coming again!”

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

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

He was silent. She must get him to sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

Helen shuddered inwardly, but kept her outward composure.

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Poldie,” answered Helen, trembling. “Don’t you remember teaching
me?”

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

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

“Only the knife,” he answered calmly.

“Give it to me,” she said, calmly too.

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, Helen,” he said quietly.

“Pray to God to deliver you, dear,” she said.

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

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

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

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






CHAPTER XXIV.

HELEN WITH A SECRET.





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

A troubled, weary, EXCITED sleep followed. She woke with many a start,
as if she had sinned in sleeping, and instantly for very weariness,
dozed off again. How kind is weariness sometimes! It is like the
Father’s hand laid a little heavy on the heart to make it still. But her
dreams were full of torture, and even when she had no definite dream,
she was haunted by the vague presence of blood. I

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