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The Seaboard Parish Volume 2

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #8552 · 299,124 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Seaboard Parish Volume 2

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8552]
                Most recently updated: March 29, 2014

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEABOARD PARISH VOLUME 2 ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al
Haines.










THE SEABOARD PARISH

BY GEORGE MAC DONALD, LL.D.

VOL. II.






CONTENTS OF VOL. II.


    I. ANOTHER SUNDAY EVENING
   II. NICEBOOTS
  III. THE BLACKSMITH
   IV. THE LIFE-BOAT
    V. MR. PERCIVALE
   VI. THE SHADOW OF DEATH
  VII. AT THE FARM
 VIII. THE KEEVE
   IX. THE WALK TO CHURCH
    X. THE OLD CASTLE
   XI. JOE AND HIS TROUBLE
  XII. A SMALL ADVENTURE
 XIII. THE HARVEST




CHAPTER I.

ANOTHER SUNDAY EVENING.


In the evening we met in Connie's room, as usual, to have our talk. And
this is what came out of it.

The window was open. The sun was in the west. We sat a little aside out
of the course of his radiance, and let him look full into the room.
Only Wynnie sat back in a dark corner, as if she would get out of his
way. Below him the sea lay bluer than you could believe even when you
saw it--blue with a delicate yet deep silky blue, the exquisiteness of
which was thrown up by the brilliant white lines of its lapping on the
high coast, to the northward. We had just sat down, when Dora broke out
with--

"I saw Niceboots at church. He did stare at you, papa, as if he had
never heard a sermon before."

"I daresay he never heard such a sermon before!" said Connie, with the
perfect confidence of inexperience and partiality--not to say
ignorance, seeing she had not heard the sermon herself.

Here Wynnie spoke from her dark corner, apparently forcing herself to
speak, and thereby giving what seemed an unpleasant tone to what she
said.

"Well, papa, I don't know what to think. You are always telling us to
trust in Him; but how can we, if we are not good?"

"The first good thing you can do is to look up to him. That is the
beginning of trust in him, and the most sensible thing that it is
possible for us to do. That is faith."

"But it's no use sometimes."

"How do you know that?"

"Because you--I mean I--can't feel good, or care about it at all."

"But is that any ground for saying that it is no use--that he does not
heed you? that he disregards the look cast up to him? that, till the
heart goes with the will, he who made himself strong to be the helper
of the weak, who pities most those who are most destitute--and who so
destitute as those who do not love what they want to love--except,
indeed, those who don't want to love?--that, till you are well on
towards all right by earnestly seeking it, he won't help you? You are
to judge him from yourself, are you?--forgetting that all the misery in
you is just because you have not got his grand presence with you?"

I spoke so earnestly as to be somewhat incoherent in words. But my
reader will understand. Wynnie was silent. Connie, as if partly to help
her sister, followed on the same side.

"I don't know exactly how to say what I mean, papa, but I wish I could
get this lovely afternoon, all full of sunshine and blue, into unity
with all that you teach us about Jesus Christ. I wish this beautiful
day came in with my thought of him, like the frame--gold and red and
blue--that you have to that picture of him at home. Why doesn't it?"

"Just because you have not enough of faith in him, my dear. You do not
know him well enough yet. You do not yet believe that he means you all
gladness, heartily, honestly, thoroughly."

"And no suffering, papa?"

"I did not say that, my dear. There you are on your couch and can't
move. But he does mean you such gladness, such a full sunny air and
blue sea of blessedness that this suffering shall count for little in
it; nay more, shall be taken in for part, and, like the rocks that
interfere with the roll of the sea, flash out the white that glorifies
and intensifies the whole--to pass away by and by, I trust, none the
less. What a chance you have, my Connie, of believing in him, of
offering upon his altar!"

"But," said my wife, "are not these feelings in a great measure
dependent upon the state of one's health? I find it so different when
the sunshine is inside me as well as outside me."

"Not a doubt of it, my dear. But that is only the more reason for
rising above all that. From the way some people speak of physical
difficulties--I don't mean you, wife--you would think that they were
not merely the inevitable which they are, but the insurmountable which
they are not. That they are physical and not spiritual is not only a
great consolation, but a strong argument for overcoming them. For all
that is physical is put, or is in the process of being put, under the
feet of the spiritual. Do not mistake me. I do not say you can make
yourself feel merry or happy when you are in a physical condition which
is contrary to such mental condition. But you can withdraw from it--not
all at once; but by practice and effort you can learn to withdraw from
it, refusing to allow your judgments and actions to be ruled by it. You
can climb up out of the fogs, and sit quiet in the sunlight on the
hillside of faith. You cannot be merry down below in the fog, for there
is the fog; but you can every now and then fly with the dove-wings of
the soul up into the clear, to remind yourself that all this passes
away, is but an accident, and that the sun shines always, although it
may not at any given moment be shining on you. 'What does that matter?'
you will learn to say. 'It is enough for me to know that the sun does
shine, and that this is only a weary fog that is round about me for the
moment. I shall come out into the light beyond presently.' This is
faith--faith in God, who is the light, and is all in all. I believe
that the most glorious instances of calmness in suffering are thus
achieved; that the sufferers really do not suffer what one of us would
if thrown into their physical condition without the refuge of their
spiritual condition as well; for they have taken refuge in the inner
chamber. Out of the spring of their life a power goes forth that
quenches the flames of the furnace of their suffering, so far at least
that it does not touch the deep life, cannot make them miserable, does
not drive them from the possession of their soul in patience, which is
the divine citadel of the suffering. Do you understand me, Connie?"

"I do, papa. I think perfectly."

"Still less, then, is the fact that the difficulty is physical to be
used as an excuse for giving way to ill-temper, and, in fact, leaving
ourselves to be tossed and shaken by every tremble of our nerves. That
is as if a man should give himself into the hands and will and caprice
of an organ-grinder, to work upon him, not with the music of the
spheres, but with the wretched growling of the streets."

"But," said Wynnie, "I have heard you yourself, papa, make excuse for
people's ill-temper on this very ground, that they were out of health.
Indeed," she went on, half-crying, "I have heard you do so for myself,
when you did not know that I was within hearing."

"Yes, my dear, most assuredly. It is no fiction, but a real difference
that lies between excusing ourselves and excusing other people. No
doubt the same excuse is just for ourselves that is just for other
people. But we can do something to put ourselves right upon a higher
principle, and therefore we should not waste our time in excusing, or
even in condemning ourselves, but make haste up the hill. Where we
cannot work--that is, in the life of another--we have time to make all
the excuse we can. Nay more; it is only justice there. We are not bound
to insist on our own rights, even of excuse; the wisest thing often is
to forego them. But we are bound by heaven, earth, and hell to give
them to other people. And, besides, what a comfort to ourselves to be
able to say, 'It is true So-and-so was cross to-day. But it wasn't in
the least that he wasn't friendly, or didn't like me; it was only that
he had eaten something that hadn't agreed with him. I could see it in
his eye. He had one of his headaches.' Thus, you see, justice to our
neighbour, and comfort to ourselves, is one and the same thing. But it
would be a sad thing to have to think that when we found ourselves in
the same ungracious condition, from whatever cause, we had only to
submit to it, saying, 'It is a law of nature,' as even those who talk
most about laws will not do, when those laws come between them and
their own comfort. They are ready enough then to call in the aid of
higher laws, which, so far from being contradictory, overrule the lower
to get things into something like habitable, endurable condition. It
may be a law of nature; but what has the Law of the Spirit of Life to
_propound anent_ it? as the Scotch lawyers would say."

A little pause followed, during which I hope some of us were thinking.
That Wynnie, at least, was, her next question made evident.

"What you say about a law of nature and a law of the Spirit makes me
think again how that walking on the water has always been a puzzle to
me."

"It could hardly be other, seeing that we cannot possibly understand
it," I answered.

"But I find it so hard to believe. Can't you say something, papa, to
help me to believe it?"

"I think if you admit what goes before, you will find there is nothing
against reason in the story."

"Tell me, please, what you mean."

"If all things were made by Jesus, the Word of God, would it be
reasonable that the water that he had created should be able to drown
him?"

"It might drown his body."

"It would if he had not the power over it still, to prevent it from
laying hold of him. But just think for a moment. God is a Spirit.
Spirit is greater than matter. Spirit makes matter. Think what it was
for a human body to have such a divine creative power dwelling in it as
that which dwelt in the human form of Jesus! What power, and influence,
and utter rule that spirit must have over the body in which it dwells!
We cannot imagine how much; but if we have so much power over our
bodies, how much more must the pure, divine Jesus, have had over his! I
suspect this miracle was wrought, not through anything done to the
water, but through the power of the spirit over the body of Jesus,
which was all obedient thereto. I am not explaining the miracle, for
that I cannot do. One day I think it will be plain common sense to us.
But now I am only showing you what seems to me to bring us a step
nearer to the essential region of the miracle, and so far make it
easier to believe. If we look at the history of our Lord, we shall find
that, true real human body as his was, it was yet used by his spirit
after a fashion in which we cannot yet use our bodies. And this is only
reasonable. Let me give you an instance. You remember how, on the Mount
of Transfiguration, that body shone so that the light of it illuminated
all his garments. You do not surely suppose that this shine was
external--physical light, as we say, _merely?_ No doubt it was physical
light, for how else would their eyes have seen it? But where did it
come from? What was its source? I think it was a natural outburst of
glory from the mind of Jesus, filled with the perfect life of communion
with his Father--the light of his divine blessedness taking form in
physical radiance that permeated and glorified all that surrounded him.
As the body is the expression of the soul, as the face of Jesus himself
was the expression of the being, the thought, the love of Jesus in like
manner this radiance was the natural expression of his gladness, even
in the face of that of which they had been talking--Moses, Elias, and
he--namely, the decease that he should accomplish at Jerusalem. Again,
after his resurrection, he convinced the hands, as well as eyes, of
doubting Thomas, that he was indeed there in the body; and yet that
body could appear and disappear as the Lord willed. All this is full of
marvel, I grant you; but probably far more intelligible to us in a
further state of existence than some of the most simple facts with
regard to our own bodies are to us now, only that we are so used to
them that we never think how unintelligible they really are."

"But then about Peter, papa? What you have been saying will not apply
to Peter's body, you know."

"I confess there is more difficulty there. But if you can suppose that
such power were indwelling in Jesus, you cannot limit the sphere of its
action. As he is the head of the body, his church, in all spiritual
things, so I firmly believe, however little we can understand about it,
is he in all natural things as well. Peter's faith in him brought even
Peter's body within the sphere of the outgoing power of the Master. Do
you suppose that because Peter ceased to be brave and trusting,
therefore Jesus withdrew from him some sustaining power, and allowed
him to sink? I do not believe it. I believe Peter's sinking followed
naturally upon his loss of confidence. Thus he fell away from the life
of the Master; was no longer, in that way I mean, connected with the
Head, was instantly under the dominion of the natural law of
gravitation, as we call it, and began to sink. Therefore the Lord must
take other means to save him. He must draw nigh to him in a bodily
manner. The pride of Peter had withdrawn him from the immediate
spiritual influence of Christ, conquering his matter; and therefore the
Lord must come over the stormy space between, come nearer to him in the
body, and from his own height of safety above the sphere of the natural
law, stretch out to him the arm of physical aid, lift him up, lead him
to the boat. The whole salvation of the human race is figured in this
story. It is all Christ, my love.--Does this help you to believe at
all?"

"I think it does, papa. But it wants thinking over a good deal. I
always find as I think, that lighter bits shine out here and there in a
thing I have no hope of understanding altogether. That always helps me
to believe that the rest might be understood too, if I were only clever
enough."

"Simple enough, not clever enough, my dear."

"But there's one thing," said my wife, "that is more interesting to me
than what you have been talking about. It is the other instances in the
life of St. Peter in which you said he failed in a similar manner from
pride or self-satisfaction."

"One, at least, seems to me very clear. You have often remarked to me,
Ethel, how little praise servants can stand; how almost invariably
after you have commended the diligence or skill of any of your
household, as you felt bound to do, one of the first visible results
was either a falling away in the performance by which she had gained
the praise, or a more or less violent access, according to the nature
of the individual, of self-conceit, soon breaking out in bad temper or
impertinence. Now you will see precisely the same kind of thing in
Peter."

Here I opened my New Testament, and read fragmentarily, "'But whom say
ye that I am?... Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God....
Blessed art thou, Simon.... My Father hath revealed that unto thee. I
will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.... I must suffer
many things, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.... Be it
far from thee, Lord. This shall not be unto thee.... Get thee behind
me, Satan. Thou art an offence unto me.' Just contemplate the change
here in the words of our Lord. 'Blessed art thou.' 'Thou art an offence
unto me.' Think what change has passed on Peter's mood before the
second of these words could be addressed to him to whom the first had
just been spoken. The Lord had praised him. Peter grew self-sufficient,
even to the rebuking of him whose praise had so uplifted him. But it is
ever so. A man will gain a great moral victory: glad first, then
uplifted, he will fall before a paltry temptation. I have sometimes
wondered, too, whether his denial of our Lord had anything to do with
his satisfaction with himself for making that onslaught upon the high
priest's servant. It was a brave thing and a faithful to draw a single
sword against a multitude. In his fiery eagerness and inexperience, the
blow, well meant to cleave Malchus's head, missed, and only cut off his
ear; but Peter had herein justified his confident saying that he would
not deny him. He was not one to deny his Lord who had been the first to
confess him! Yet ere the cock had crowed, ere the morning had dawned,
the vulgar grandeur of the palace of the high priest (for let it be art
itself, it was vulgar grandeur beside that grandeur which it caused
Peter to deny), and the accusing tone of a maid-servant, were enough to
make him quail whom the crowd with lanterns, and torches, and weapons,
had only roused to fight. True, he was excited then, and now he was
cold in the middle of the night, with Jesus gone from his sight a
prisoner, and for the faces of friends that had there surrounded him
and strengthened him with their sympathy, now only the faces of those
who were, or whom at least Peter thought to be on the other side,
looking at him curiously, as a strange intruder into their domains.
Alas, that the courage which led him to follow the Lord should have
thus led him, not to deny him, but into the denial of him! Yet why
should I say _alas?_ If the denial of our Lord lay in his heart a
possible thing, only prevented by his being kept in favourable
circumstances for confessing him, it was a thousand times better that
he should deny him, and thus know what a poor weak thing that heart of
his was, trust it no more, and give it up to the Master to make it
strong, and pure, and grand. For such an end the Lord was willing to
bear all the pain of Peter's denial. O, the love of that Son of Man,
who in the midst of all the wretched weaknesses of those who surrounded
him, loved the best in them, and looked forward to his own victory for
them that they might become all that they were meant to be--like him;
that the lovely glimmerings of truth and love that were in them
now--the breakings forth of the light that lighteneth every man--might
grow into the perfect human day; loving them even the more that they
were so helpless, so oppressed, so far from that ideal which was their
life, and which all their dim desires were reaching after!"

Here I ceased, and a little overcome with the great picture in my soul
to which I had been able only to give the poorest expression, rose, and
retired to my own room. There I could only fall on my knees and pray
that the Lord Christ, who had died for me, might have his own way with
me--that it might be worth his while to have done what he did and what
he was doing now for me. To my Elder Brother, my Lord, and my God, I
gave myself yet again, confidently, because he cared to have me, and my
very breath was his. I _would_ be what he wanted, who knew all about
it, and had done everything that I might be a son of God--a living
glory of gladness.




CHAPTER II.

NICEBOOTS.


The next morning the captain of the lost vessel called upon me early to
thank me for himself and his men. He was a fine honest-looking burly
fellow, dressed in blue from head to heel. He might have sat for a
portrait of Chaucer's shipman, as far as his hue and the first look of
him went. It was clear that "in many a tempest had his beard be shake,"
and certainly "the hote somer had made his hew all broun;" but farther
the likeness would hardly go, for the "good fellow" which Chaucer
applies with such irony to the shipman of his time, who would filch
wine, and drown all the captives he made in a sea-fight, was clearly
applicable in good earnest to this shipman. Still, I thought I had
something to bring against him, and therefore before we parted I said
to him--

"They tell me, captain, that your vessel was not seaworthy, and that
you could not but have known that."

"She was my own craft, sir, and I judged her fit for several voyages
more. If she had been A 1 she couldn't have been mine; and a man must
do what he can for his family."

"But you were risking your life, you know."

"A few chances more or less don't much signify to a sailor, sir. There
ain't nothing to be done without risk. You'll find an old tub go voyage
after voyage, and she beyond bail, and a clipper fresh off the stocks
go down in the harbour. It's all in the luck, sir, I assure you."

"Well, if it were your own life I should have nothing to say, seeing
you have a family to look after; but what about the poor fellows who
made the voyage with you? Did they know what kind of a vessel they were
embarking in?"

"Wherever the captain's ready to go he'll always find men ready to
follow him. Bless you, sir, they never asks no questions. If a sailor
was always to be thinking of the chances, he'd never set his foot off
shore."

"Still, I don't think it's right they shouldn't know."

"I daresay they knowed all about the old brig as well as I did myself.
You gets to know all about a craft just as you do about her captain.
She's got a character of her own, and she can't hide it long, any more
than you can hide yours, sir, begging your pardon."

"I daresay that's all correct, but still I shouldn't like anyone to say
to me, 'You ought to have told me, captain.' Therefore, you see, I'm
telling you, captain, and now I'm clear.--Have a glass of wine before
you go," I concluded, ringing the bell.

"Thank you, sir. I'll turn over what you've been saying, and anyhow I
take it kind of you."

So we parted. I have never seen him since, and shall not, most likely,
in this world. But he looked like a man that could understand why and
wherefore I spoke as I did. And I had the advantage of having had a
chance of doing something for him first of all. Let no man who wants to
do anything for the soul of a man lose a chance of doing something for
his body. He ought to be willing, and ready, which is more than
willing, to do that whether or not; but there are those who need this
reminder. Of many a soul Jesus laid hold by healing the suffering the
body brought upon it. No one but himself can tell how much the nucleus
of the church was composed of and by those who had received health from
his hands, loving-kindness from the word of his mouth. My own opinion
is that herein lay the very germ of the kernel of what is now the
ancient, was then the infant church; that from them, next to the
disciples themselves, went forth the chief power of life in love, for
they too had seen the Lord, and in their own humble way could preach
and teach concerning him. What memories of him theirs must have been!

Things went on very quietly, that is, as I mean now, from the
view-point of a historian, without much to record bearing notably upon
after events, for the greater part of the next week. I wandered about
my parish, making acquaintance with different people in an outside sort
of way, only now and then finding an opportunity of seeing into their
souls except by conclusion. But I enjoyed endlessly the aspects of the
country. It was not picturesque except in parts. There was little wood
and there were no hills, only undulations, though many of them were
steep enough even from a pedestrian's point of view. Neither, however,
were there any plains except high moorland tracts. But the impression
of the whole country was large, airy, sunshiny, and it was clasped in
the arms of the infinite, awful, yet how bountiful sea--if one will
look at the ocean in its world-wide, not to say its eternal aspects,
and not out of the fears of a hidebound love of life! The sea and the
sky, I must confess, dwarfed the earth, made it of small account beside
them; but who could complain of such an influence? At least, not I.

My children bathed in this sea every day, and gathered strength and
knowledge from it. It was, as I have indicated, a dangerous coast to
bathe upon. The sweep of the tides varied with the varying sands that
were cast up. There was now in one place, now in another, a strong
_undertow_, as they called it--a reflux, that is, of the inflowing
waters, which was quite sufficient to carry those who could not swim
out into the great deep, and rendered much exertion necessary, even in
those who could, to regain the shore. But there was a fine strong
Cornish woman to take charge of the ladies and the little boys, and
she, watching the ways of the wild monster, knew the when and the
where, and all about it.

Connie got out upon the downs every day. She improved in health
certainly, and we thought a little even in her powers of motion. The
weather continued superb. What rain there was fell at night, just
enough for Nature to wash her face with and so look quite fresh in the
morning. We contrived a dinner on the sands on the other side of the
bay, for the Friday of this same week.

The morning rose gloriously. Harry and Charlie were turning the house
upside down, to judge by their noise, long before I was in the humour
to get up, for I had been reading late the night before. I never made
much objection to mere noise, knowing that I could stop it the moment I
pleased, and knowing, which was of more consequence, that so far from
there being anything wrong in making a noise, the sea would make noise
enough in our ears before we left Kilkhaven. The moment, however, that
I heard a thread of whining or a burst of anger in the noise, I would
interfere at once--treating these just as things that must be dismissed
at once. Harry and Charlie were, I say, to use their own form of
speech, making such a row that morning, however, that I was afraid of
some injury to the house or furniture, which were not our own. So I
opened my door and called out--

"Harry! Charlie! What on earth are you about?"

"Nothing, papa," answered Charlie. "Only it's so jolly!"

"What is jolly, my boy?" I asked.

"O, I don't know, papa! It's _so_ jolly!"

"Is it the sunshine?" thought I; "and the wind? God's world all over?
The God of gladness in the hearts of the lads? Is it that? No wonder,
then, that they cannot tell yet what it is!"

I withdrew into my room; and so far from seeking to put an end to the
noise--I knew Connie did not mind it--listened to it with a kind of
reverence, as the outcome of a gladness which the God of joy had
kindled in their hearts. Soon after, however, I heard certain dim
growls of expostulation from Harry, and having, from experience, ground
for believing that the elder was tyrannising over the younger, I
stopped that and the noise together, sending Charlie to find out where
the tide would be between one and two o'clock, and Harry to run to the
top of the hill, and find out the direction of the wind. Before I was
dressed, Charlie was knocking at my door with the news that it would be
half-tide about one; and Harry speedily followed with the discovery
that the wind was north-east by south-west, which of course determined
that the sun would shine all day.

As the dinner-hour drew near, the servants went over, with Walter at
their head, to choose a rock convenient for a table, under the shelter
of the rocks on the sands across the bay. Thither, when Walter
returned, we bore our Connie, carrying her litter close by the edge of
the retreating tide, which sometimes broke in a ripple of music under
her, wetting our feet with innocuous rush. The child's delight was
extreme, as she thus skimmed the edge of the ocean, with the little
ones gambolling about her, and her mamma and Wynnie walking quietly on
the landward side, for she wished to have no one between her and the
sea.

After scrambling with difficulty over some rocky ledges, and stopping
at Connie's request, to let her look into a deep pool in the sand,
which somehow or other retained the water after the rest had retreated,
we set her down near the mouth of a cave, in the shadow of a rock. And
there was our dinner nicely laid for us on a flat rock in front of the
cave. The cliffs rose behind us, with curiously curved and variously
angled strata. The sun in his full splendour threw dark shadows on the
brilliant yellow sand, more and more of which appeared as the bright
blue water withdrew itself, now rippling over it as if it meant to hide
it all up again, now uncovering more as it withdrew for another rush.
Before we had finished our dinner, the foremost wavelets appeared so
far away over the plain of the sand, that it seemed a long walk to the
edge that had been almost at our feet a little while ago. Between us
and it lay a lovely desert of glittering sand.

When even Charlie and Harry had arrived at the conclusion that it was
time to stop eating, we left the shadow and went out into the sun,
carrying Connie and laying her down in the midst of "the ribbed
sea-sand," which was very ribby to-day. On a shawl a little way off
from her lay her baby, crowing and kicking with the same jollity that
had possessed the boys ever since the morning. I wandered about with
Wynnie on the sands, picking up amongst other things strange creatures
in thin shells ending in vegetable-like tufts, if I remember rightly.
My wife sat on the end of Connie's litter, and Dora and the boys, a
little way off, were trying how far the full force of three wooden
spades could, in digging a hole, keep ahead of the water which was ever
tumbling in the sand from the sides of the same. Behind, the servants
were busy washing the plates in a pool, and burying the fragments of
the feast; for I made it a rule wherever we went that the fair face of
nature was not to be defiled. I have always taken the part of
excursionists in these latter days of running to and fro, against those
who complain that the loveliest places are being destroyed by their
inroads. But there is one most offensive, even disgusting habit amongst
them--that of leaving bones, fragments of meat pies, and worse than
all, pieces of greasy paper about the place, which I cannot excuse, or
at least defend. Even the surface of Cumberland and Westmoreland lakes
will be defiled with these floating abominations--not abominations at
all if they are decently burned or buried when done with, but certainly
abominations when left to be cast hither and thither in the wind, over
the grass, or on the eddy and ripple of the pure water, for days after
those who have thus left their shame behind them have returned to their
shops or factories. I forgive them for trampling down the grass and the
ferns. That cannot be helped, and in comparison of the good they get,
is not to be considered at all. But why should they leave such a savage
trail behind them as this, forgetting too that though they have done
with the spot, there are others coming after them to whom these
remnants must be an offence?

At length in our roaming, Wynnie and I approached a long low ridge of
rock, rising towards the sea into which it ran. Crossing this, we came
suddenly upon the painter whom Dora had called Niceboots, sitting with
a small easel before him. We were right above him ere we knew. He had
his back towards us, so that we saw at once what he was painting.

"O, papa!" cried Wynnie involuntarily, and the painter looked round.

"I beg your pardon," I said. "We came over from the other side, and did
not see you before. I hope we have not disturbed you much."

"Not in the least," he answered courteously, and rose as he spoke.

I saw that the subject on his easel suggested that of which Wynnie had
been making a sketch at the same time, on the day when Connie first lay
on the top of the opposite cliff. But he was not even looking in the
same direction now.

"Do you mind having your work seen before it is finished?"

"Not in the least, if the spectators will do me the favour to remember
that most processes have to go through a seemingly chaotic stage," he
answered.

I was struck with the mode and tone of the remark.

"Here is no common man," I said to myself, and responded to him in
something of a similar style.

"I wish we could always keep that in mind with regard to human beings
themselves, as well as their works," I said aloud.

The painter looked at me, and I looked at him.

"We speak each from the experience of his own profession, I presume,"
he said.

"But," I returned, glancing at the little picture in oils upon his
easel, "your work here, though my knowledge of painting is next to
nothing--perhaps I ought to say nothing at all--this picture must have
long ago passed the chaotic stage."

"It is nearly as much finished as I care to make it," he returned. "I
hardly count this work at all. I am chiefly amusing, or rather
pleasing, my own fancy at present."

"Apparently," I remarked, "you had the conical rock outside the hay for
your model, and now you are finishing it with your back turned towards
it. How is that?"

"I will soon explain," he answered. "The moment I saw this rock, it
reminded me of Dante's Purgatory."

"Ah, you are a reader of Dante?" I said. "In the original, I hope."

"Yes. A friend of mine, a brother painter, an Italian, set me going
with that, and once going with Dante, nobody could well stop. I never
knew what intensity _per se_ was till I began to read Dante."

"That is quite my own feeling. Now, to return to your picture."

"Without departing at all from natural forms, I thought to make it
suggest the Purgatorio to anyone who remembered the description given
of the place _ab extra_ by Ulysses, in the end of the twenty-sixth
canto of the Inferno. Of course, that thing there is a mere rock, yet
it has certain mountain forms about it. I have put it at a much greater
distance, you see, and have sought to make it look a solitary mountain
in the midst of a great water. You will discover even now that the
circles of the Purgatory are suggested without any approach, I think,
to artificial structure; and there are occasional hints at figures,
which you cannot definitely detach from the rocks--which, by the way,
you must remember, were in one part full of sculptures. I have kept the
mountain near enough, however, to indicate the great expanse of wild
flowers on the top, which Matilda was so busy gathering. I want to
indicate too the wind up there in the terrestrial paradise, ever and
always blowing one way. You remember, Mr. Walton?"--for the young man,
getting animated, began to talk as if we had known each other for some
time--and here he repeated the purport of Dante's words in English:

  "An air of sweetness, changeless in its flow,
  With no more strength than in a soft wind lies,
  Smote peacefully against me on the brow.
  By which the leaves all trembling, level-wise,
  Did every one bend thitherward to where
  The high mount throws its shadow at sunrise."

"I thought you said you did not use translations?"

"I thought it possible that--Miss Walton (?)" interrogatively
this--"might not follow the Italian so easily, and I feared to seem
pedantic."

"She won't lag far behind, I flatter myself," I returned. "Whose
translation do you quote?"

He hesitated a moment; then said carelessly:

"I have cobbled a few passages after that fashion myself."

"It has the merit of being near the original at least," I returned;
"and that seems to me one of the chief merits a translation can
possess."

"Then," the painter resumed, rather hastily, as if to avoid any further
remark upon his verses, "you see those white things in the air above?"
Here he turned to Wynnie. "Miss Walton will remember--I think she was
making a drawing of the rock at the same time I was--how the seagulls,
or some such birds--only two or three of them--kept flitting about the
top of it?"

"I remember quite well," answered Wynnie, with a look of appeal to me.

"Yes," I interposed; "my daughter, in describing what she had been
attempting to draw, spoke especially of the birds over the rock. For
she said the white lapping of the waves looked like spirits trying to
get loose, and the white birds like foam that had broken its chains,
and risen in triumph into the air."

Here Mr. Niceboots, for as yet I did not know what else to call him,
looked at Wynnie almost with a start.

"How wonderfully that falls in with my fancy about the rock!" he said.
"Purgatory indeed! with imprisoned souls lapping at its foot, and the
free souls winging their way aloft in ether. Well, this world is a kind
of purgatory anyhow--is it not, Mr. Walton?"

"Certainly it is. We are here tried as by fire, to see what our work
is--whether wood, hay, and stubble, or gold and silver and precious
stones."

"You see," resumed the painter, "if anybody only glanced at my little
picture, he would take those for sea-birds; but if he looked into it,
and began to suspect me, he would find out that they were Dante and
Beatrice on their way to the sphere of the moon."

"In one respect at least, then, your picture has the merit of
corresponding to fact; for what thing is there in the world, or what
group of things, in which the natural man will not see merely the
things of nature, but the spiritual man the things of the spirit?"

"I am no theologian," said the painter, turning away, I thought
somewhat coldly.

But I could see that Wynnie was greatly interested in him. Perhaps she
thought that here was some enlightenment of the riddle of the world for
her, if she could but get at what he was thinking. She was used to my
way of it: here might be something new.

"If I can be of any service to Miss Walton with her drawing, I shall be
happy," he said, turning again towards me.

But his last gesture had made me a little distrustful of him, and I
received his advances on this point with a coldness which I did not
wish to make more marked than his own towards my last observation.

"You are very kind," I said; "but Miss Walton does not presume to be an
artist."

I saw a slight shade pass over Wynnie's countenance. When I turned to
Mr. Niceboots, a shade of a different sort was on his. Surely I had
said something wrong to cast a gloom on two young faces. I made haste
to make amends.

"We are just going to have some coffee," I said, "for my servants, I
see, have managed to kindle a fire. Will you come and allow me to
introduce you to Mrs. Walton?"

"With much pleasure," he answered, rising from the rock whereon, as he
spoke about his picture, he had again seated himself. He was a
fine-built, black-bearded, sunburnt fellow, with clear gray eyes
notwithstanding, a rather Roman nose, and good features generally. But
there was an air of suppression, if not of sadness, about him, however,
did not in the least interfere with the manliness of his countenance,
or of its expression.

"But," I said, "how am I to effect an introduction, seeing I do not yet
know your name."

I had had to keep a sharp look-out on myself lest I should call him Mr.
Niceboots. He smiled very graciously and replied,

"My name is Percivale--Charles Percivale."

"A descendant of Sir Percivale of King Arthur's Round Table?"

"I cannot count quite so far back," he answered, "as that--not quite to
the Conquest," he added, with a slight deepening of his sunburnt hue.
"I do come of a fighting race, but I cannot claim Sir Percivale."

We were now walking along the edge of the still retreating waves
towards the group upon the sands, Mr. Percivale and I foremost, and
Wynnie lingering behind.

"O, do look here papa!" she cried, from some little distance.

We turned and saw her gazing at something on the sand at her feet.
Hastening back, we found it to be a little narrow line of foam-bubbles,
which the water had left behind it on the sand, slowly breaking and
passing out of sight. Why there should be foam-bubbles there then, and
not always, I do not know. But there they were--and such colours! deep
rose and grassy green and ultramarine blue; and, above all, one dark,
yet brilliant and intensely-burnished, metallic gold. All of them were
of a solid-looking burnished colour, like opaque body-colour laid on
behind translucent crystal. Those little ocean bubbles were well worth
turning to see; and so I said to Wynnie. But, as we gazed, they went on
vanishing, one by one. Every moment a heavenly glory of hue burst, and
was nowhere.

We walked away again towards the rest of our party.

"Don't you think those bubbles more beautiful than any precious stones
you ever saw, papa?"

"Yes, my love, I think they are, except it be the opal. In the opal,
God seems to have fixed the evanescent and made the vanishing eternal."

"And flowers are more beautiful things than jewels?' she said
interrogatively.

"Many--perhaps most flowers are," I granted. "And did you ever see such
curves and delicate textures anywhere else as in the clouds, papa?"

"I think not--in the cirrhous clouds at least--the frozen ones. But
what are you putting me to my catechism for in this way, my child?"

"O, papa, I could go on a long time with that catechism; but I will end
with one question more, which you will perhaps find a little harder to
answer. Only I daresay you have had an answer ready for years lest one
of us should ask you some day."

"No, my love. I never got an answer ready for anything lest one of my
children should ask me. But it is not surprising either that children
should be puzzled about the things that have puzzled their father, or
that by the time they are able to put the questions, he should have
found out some sort of an answer to most of them. Go on with your
catechism, Wynnie. Now for your puzzle!"

"It's not a funny question, papa; it's a very serious one. I can't
think why the unchanging God should have made all the most beautiful
things wither and grow ugly, or burst and vanish, or die somehow and be
no more. Mamma is not so beautiful as she once was, is she?"

"In one way, no; but in another and better way, much more so. But we
will not talk about her kind of beauty just now; we will keep to the
more material loveliness of which you have been speaking--though, in
truth, no loveliness can be only material. Well, then, for my answer;
it is, I think, because God loves the beauty so much that he makes all
beautiful things vanish quickly."

"I do not understand you, papa."

"I daresay not, my dear. But I will explain to you a little, if Mr.
Percivale will excuse me."

"On the contrary, I am greatly interested, both in the question and the
answer."

"Well, then, Wynnie; everything has a soul and a body, or something
like them. By the body we know the soul. But we are always ready to
love the body instead of the soul. Therefore, God makes the body die
continually, that we may learn to love the soul indeed. The world is
full of beautiful things, but God has saved many men from loving the
mere bodies of them, by making them poor; and more still by reminding
them that if they be as rich as Croesus all their lives, they will be
as poor as Diogenes--poorer, without even a tub--when this world, with
all its pictures, scenery, books, and--alas for some
Christians!--bibles even, shall have vanished away."

"Why do you say _alas_, papa--if they are Christians especially?"

"I say _alas_ only from their point of view, not from mine. I mean such
as are always talking and arguing from the Bible, and never giving
themselves any trouble to do what it tells them. They insist on the
anise and cummin, and forget the judgment, mercy, and faith. These
worship the body of the truth, and forget the soul of it. If the
flowers were not perishable, we should cease to contemplate their
beauty, either blinded by the passion for hoarding the bodies of them,
or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant presence
of them would occasion. To compare great things with small, the flowers
wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very
same holy reason, in the degree of its application to them, for which
the Lord withdrew from his disciples and ascended again to his
Father--that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things,
might come to them and abide with them, and so the Son return, and the
Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its
loveliness we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy
children, who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets, from a
mere desire of acquisition, excusable enough in them, but the same in
kind, however harmless in mode, and degree, and object, as the avarice
of the miser. Therefore God, that we may always have them, and ever
learn to love their beauty, and yet more their truth, sends the
beneficent winter that we may think about what we have lost, and
welcome them when they come again with greater tenderness and love,
with clearer eyes to see, and purer hearts to understand, the spirit
that dwells in them. We cannot do without the 'winter of our
discontent.' Shakspere surely saw that when he makes Titania say, in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_:

  'The human mortals want their winter here'--

namely, to set things right; and none of those editors who would alter
the line seem to have been capable of understanding its import."

"I think I understand you a little," answered Wynnie. Then, changing
her tone, "I told you, papa, you would have an answer ready; didn't I?"

"Yes, my child; but with this difference--I found the answer to meet my
own necessities, not yours."

"And so you had it ready for me when I wanted it."

"Just so. That is the only certainty you have in regard to what you
give away. No one who has not tasted it and found it good has a right
to offer any spiritual dish to his neighbour."

Mr. Percivale took no part in our conversation. The moment I had
presented him to Mrs. Walton and Connie, and he had paid his respects
by a somewhat stately old-world obeisance, he merged the salutation
into a farewell, and, either forgetting my offer of coffee, or having
changed his mind, withdrew, a little to my disappointment, for,
notwithstanding his lack of response where some things he said would
have led me to expect it, I had begun to feel much interested in him.

He was scarcely beyond hearing, when Dora came up to me from her
digging, with an eager look on her sunny face.

"Hasn't he got nice boots, papa?"

"Indeed, my dear, I am unable to support you in that assertion, for I
never saw his boots."

"I did, then," returned the child; "and I never saw such nice boots."

"I accept the statement willingly," I replied; and we heard no more of
the boots, for his name was now substituted for his nickname. Nor did I
see himself again for some days--not in fact till next Sunday--though
why he should come to church at all was something of a puzzle to me,
especially when I knew him better.




CHAPTER III.

THE BLACKSMITH.


The next day I set out after breakfast to inquire about a blacksmith.
It was not every or any blacksmith that would do. I must not fix on the
first to do my work because he was the first. There was one in the
village, I soon learned; but I found him an ordinary man, who, I have
no doubt, could shoe a horse and avoid the quick, but from whom any
greater delicacy of touch was not to be expected. Inquiring further, I
heard of a young smith who had lately settled in a hamlet a couple of
miles distant, but still within the parish. In the afternoon I set out
to find him. To my surprise, he was a pale-faced, thoughtful-looking
man, with a huge frame, which appeared worn rather than naturally thin,
and large eyes that looked at the anvil as if it was the horizon of the
world. He had got a horse-shoe in his tongs when I entered.
Notwithstanding the fire that glowed on the hearth, and the sparks that
flew like a nimbus in eruption from about his person, the place looked
very dark to me entering from the glorious blaze of the almost noontide
sun, and felt cool after the deep lane through which I had come, and
which had seemed a very reservoir of sunbeams. I could see the smith by
the glow of his horse-shoe; but all between me and the shoe was dark.

"Good-morning," I said. "It is a good thing to find a man by his work.
I heard you half a mile off or so, and now I see you, but only by the
glow of your work. It is a grand thing to work in fire."

He lifted his hammered hand to his forehead courteously, and as lightly
as if the hammer had been the butt-end of a whip.

"I don't know if you would say the same if you had to work at it in
weather like this," he answered.

"If I did not," I returned, "that would be the fault of my weakness,
and would not affect the assertion I have just made, that it is a fine
thing to work in fire."

"Well, you may be right," he rejoined with a sigh, as, throwing the
horse-shoe he had been fashioning from the tongs on the ground, he next
let the hammer drop beside the anvil, and leaning against it held his
head for a moment between his hands, and regarded the floor. "It does
not much matter to me," he went on, "if I only get through my work and
have done with it. No man shall say I shirked what I'd got to do. And
then when it's over there won't be a word to say agen me, or--"

He did not finish the sentence. And now I could see the sunlight lying
in a somewhat dreary patch, if the word _dreary_ can be truly used with
respect to any manifestation of sunlight, on the dark clay floor.

"I hope you are not ill," I said.

He made no answer, but taking up his tongs caught with it from a beam
one of a number of roughly-finished horse-shoes which hung there, and
put it on the fire to be fashioned to a certain fit. While he turned it
in the fire, and blew the bellows, I stood regarding him. "This man
will do for my work," I said to myself; "though I should not wonder
from the look of him if it was the last piece of work he ever did under
the New Jerusalem." The smith's words broke in on my meditations.

"When I was a little boy," he said, "I once wanted to stay at home from
school. I had, I believe, a little headache, but nothing worth minding.
I told my mother that I had a headache, and she kept me, and I helped
her at her spinning, which was what I liked best of anything. But in
the afternoon the Methodist preacher came in to see my mother, and he
asked me what was the matter with me, and my mother answered for me
that I had a bad head, and he looked at me; and as my head was quite
well by this time, I could not help feeling guilty. And he saw my look,
I suppose, sir, for I can't account for what he said any other way; and
he turned to me, and he said to me, solemn-like, 'Is your head bad
enough to send you to the Lord Jesus to make you whole?' I could not
speak a word, partly from bashfulness, I suppose, for I was but ten
years old. So he followed it up, as they say: 'Then you ought to be at
school,' says he. I said nothing, because I couldn't. But never since
then have I given in as long as I could stand. And I can stand now, and
lift my hammer, too," he said, as he took the horse-shoe from the
forge, laid it on the anvil, and again made a nimbus of coruscating
iron.

"You are just the man I want," I said. "I've got a job for you, down to
Kilkhaven, as you say in these parts."

"What is it, sir? Something about the church? I should ha' thought the
church was all spick and span by this time."

"I see you know who I am," I said.

"Of course I do," he answered. "I don't go to church myself, being
brought up a Methodist; but anything that happens in the parish is
known the next day all over it."

"You won't mind doing my job though you are a Methodist, will you?" I
asked.

"Not I, sir. If I've read right, it's the fault of the Church that we
don't pull all alongside. You turned us out, sir; we didn't go out of
ourselves. At least, if all they say is true, which I can't be sure of,
you know, in this world."

"You are quite right there though," I answered. "And in doing so, the
Church had the worst of it--as all that judge and punish their
neighbours have. But you have been the worse for it, too: all of which
is to be laid to the charge of the Church. For there is not one
clergyman I know--mind, I say, that I know--who would have made such a
cruel speech to a boy as that the Methodist parson made to you."

"But it did me good, sir?"

"Are you sure of that? I am not. Are you sure, first of all, it did not
make you proud? Are you sure it has not made you work beyond your
strength--I don't mean your strength of arm, for clearly that is all
that could be wished, but of your chest, your lungs? Is there not some
danger of your leaving someone who is dependent on you too soon
unprovided for? Is there not some danger of your having worked as if
God were a hard master?--of your having worked fiercely, indignantly,
as if he wronged you by not caring for you, not understanding you?"

He returned me no answer, but hammered momently on his anvil. Whether
he felt what I meant, or was offended at my remark, I could not then
tell. I thought it best to conclude the interview with business.

"I have a delicate little job that wants nice handling, and I fancy you
are just the man to do it to my mind," I said.

"What is it, sir?" he asked, in a friendly manner enough.

"If you will excuse me, I would rather show it to you than talk about
it," I returned.

"As you please, sir. When do you want me?"

"The first hour you can come."

"To-morrow morning?"

"If you feel inclined."

"For that matter, I'd rather go to bed."

"Come to me instead: it's light work."

"I will, sir--at ten o'clock."

"If you please."

And so it was arranged.




CHAPTER IV.

THE LIFE-BOAT.


The next day rose glorious. Indeed, early as the sun rose, I saw him
rise--saw him, from the down above the house, over the land to the east
and north, ascend triumphant into his own light, which had prepared the
way for him; while the clouds that hung over the sea glowed out with a
faint flush, as anticipating the hour when the west should clasp the
declining glory in a richer though less dazzling splendour, and shine
out the bride of the bridegroom east, which behold each other from afar
across the intervening world, and never mingle but in the sight of the
eyes. The clear pure light of the morning made me long for the truth in
my heart, which alone could make me pure and clear as the morning, tune
me up to the concert-pitch of the nature around me. And the wind that
blew from the sunrise made me hope in the God who had first breathed
into my nostrils the breath of life, that he would at length so fill me
with his breath, his wind, his spirit, that I should think only his
thoughts and live his life, finding therein my own life, only glorified
infinitely.

After breakfast and prayers, I would go to the church to await the
arrival of my new acquaintance the smith. In order to obtain entrance,
I had, however, to go to the cottage of the sexton. This was not my
first visit there, so that I may now venture to take my reader with me.
To reach the door, I had to cross a hollow by a bridge, built, for the
sake of the road, over what had once been the course of a rivulet from
the heights above. Now it was a kind of little glen, or what would in
Scotland be called a den, I think, grown with grass and wild flowers
and ferns, some of them, rare and fine. The roof of the cottage came
down to the road, and, until you came quite near, you could not but
wonder where the body that supported this head could be. But you soon
saw that the ground fell suddenly away, leaving a bank against which
the cottage was built. Crossing a garden of the smallest, the principal
flowers of which were the stonecrop on its walls, by a flag-paved path,
you entered the building, and, to your surprise, found yourself, not in
a little cottage kitchen, as you expected, but in a waste-looking
space, that seemed to have forgotten the use for which it had been
built. There was a sort of loft along one side of it, and it was heaped
with indescribable lumber-looking stuff with here and there a hint at
possible machinery. The place had been a mill for grinding corn, and
its wheel had been driven by the stream which had run for ages in the
hollow of which I have already spoken. But when the canal came to be
constructed, the stream had to be turned aside from its former course,
and indeed was now employed upon occasion to feed the canal; so that
the mill of necessity had fallen into disuse and decay. Crossing this
floor, you entered another door, and turning sharp to the left, went
down a few steps of a ladder-sort of stair, and after knocking your hat
against a beam, emerged in the comfortable quaint little cottage
kitchen you had expected earlier. A cheerful though small fire burns in
the grate--for even here the hearth-fire has vanished from the records
of cottage-life--and is pleasant here even in the height of summer,
though it is counted needful only for cooking purposes. The ceiling,
which consists only of the joists and the boards that floor the bedroom
above, is so low, that necessity, if not politeness, would compel you
to take off your already-bruised hat. Some of these joists, you will
find, are made further useful by supporting each a shelf, before which
hangs a little curtain of printed cotton, concealing the few stores and
postponed eatables of the house--forming, in fact, both store-room and
larder of the family. On the walls hang several coloured prints, and
within a deep glazed frame the figure of a ship in full dress, carved
in rather high relief in sycamore.

As I now entered, Mrs. Coombes rose from a high-backed settle near the
fire, and bade me good-morning with a courtesy.

"What a lovely day it is, Mrs. Coombes! It is so bright over the sea,"
I said, going to the one little window which looked out on the great
Atlantic, "that one almost expects a great merchant navy to come
sailing into Kilkhaven--sunk to the water's edge with silks, and ivory,
and spices, and apes, and peacocks, like the ships of Solomon that we
read about--just as the sun gets up to the noonstead."

Before I record her answer, I turn to my reader, who in the spirit
accompanies me, and have a little talk with him. I always make it a
rule to speak freely with the less as with the more educated of my
friends. I never _talk down_ to them, except I be expressly explaining
something to them. The law of the world is as the law of the family.
Those children grow much the faster who hear all that is going on in
the house. Reaching ever above themselves, they arrive at an
understanding at fifteen, which, in the usual way of things, they would
not reach before five-and-twenty or thirty; and this in a natural way,
and without any necessary priggishness, except such as may belong to
their parents. Therefore I always spoke to the poor and uneducated as
to my own people,--freely, not much caring whether I should be quite
understood or not; for I believed in influences not to be measured by
the measure of the understanding.

But what was the old woman's answer? It was this:

"I know, sir. And when I was as young as you"--I was not so very young,
my reader may well think--"I thought like that about the sea myself.
Everything come from the sea. For my boy Willie he du bring me home the
beautifullest parrot and the talkingest you ever see, and the red shawl
all worked over with flowers: I'll show it to you some day, sir, when
you have time. He made that ship you see in the frame there, sir, all
with his own knife, out on a bit o' wood that he got at the Marishes,
as they calls it, sir--a bit of an island somewheres in the great sea.
But the parrot's gone dead like the rest of them, sir.--Where am I? and
what am I talking about?" she added, looking down at her knitting as if
she had dropped a stitch, or rather as if she had forgotten what she
was making, and therefore what was to come next.

"You were telling me how you used to think of the sea--"

"When I was as young as you. I remember, sir. Well, that lasted a long
time--lasted till my third boy fell asleep in the wide water; for it du
call it falling asleep, don't it, sir?"

"The Bible certainly does," I answered.

"It's the Bible I be meaning, of course," she returned. "Well, after
that, but I don't know what began it, only I did begin to think about
the sea as something that took away things and didn't bring them no
more. And somehow or other she never look so blue after that, and she
give me the shivers. But now, sir, she always looks to me like one o'
the shining ones that come to fetch the pilgrims. You've heard tell of
the _Pilgrim's Progress_, I daresay, sir, among the poor people; for
they du say it was written by a tinker, though there be a power o' good
things in it that I think the gentlefolk would like if they knowed it."

"I do know the book--nearly as well as I know the Bible," I answered;
"and the shining ones are very beautiful in it. I am glad you can think
of the sea that way."

"It's looking in at the window all day as I go about the house," she
answered, "and all night too when I'm asleep; and if I hadn't learned
to think of it that way, it would have driven me mad, I du believe. I
was forced to think that way about it, or not think at all. And that
wouldn't be easy, with the sound of it in your ears the last thing at
night and the first thing in the morning."

"The truth of things is indeed the only refuge from the look of
things," I replied. "But now I want the key of the church, if you will
trust me with it, for I have something to do there this morning; and
the key of the tower as well, if you please."

With her old smile, ripened only by age, she reached the ponderous keys
from the nail where they hung, and gave them into my hand. I left her
in the shadow of her dwelling, and stepped forth into the sunlight. The
first thing I observed was the blacksmith waiting for me at the church
door.

Now that I saw him in the full light of day, and now that he wore his
morning face upon which the blackness of labour had not yet gathered, I
could see more plainly how far he was from well. There was a flush on
his thin cheek by which the less used exercise of walking revealed his
inward weakness, and the light in his eyes had something of the
far-country in them--"the light that never was on sea or shore." But
his speech was cheerful, for he had been walking in the light of this
world, and that had done something to make the light within him shine a
little more freely.

"How do you find yourself to-day?" I asked.

"Quite well, sir, I thank you," he answered. "A day like this does a
man good. But," he added, and his countenance fell, "the heart knoweth
its own bitterness."

"It may know it too much," I returned, "just because it refuses to let
a stranger intermeddle therewith."

He made no reply. I turned the key in the great lock, and the
iron-studded oak opened and let us into the solemn gloom.

It did not require many minutes to make the man understand what I
wanted of him.

"We must begin at the bells and work down," he said.

So we went up into the tower, where, with the help of a candle I
fetched for him from the cottage, he made a good many minute
measurements; found that carpenter's work was necessary for the
adjustment of the hammers and cranks and the leading of the rods,
undertook the management of the whole, and in the course of an hour and
a half went home to do what had to be done before any fixing could be
commenced, assuring me that he had no doubt of bringing the job to a
satisfactory conclusion, although the force of the blow on the bell
would doubtless have to be regulated afterwards by repeated trials.

"In a fortnight, I hope you will be able to play a tune to the parish,
sir," he added, as he took his leave.

I resolved, if possible, to know more of the man, and find out his
trouble, if haply I might be able to give him any comfort, for I was
all but certain that there was a deeper cause for his gloom than the
state of his health.

When he was gone I stood with the key of the church in my hand, and
looked about me. Nature at least was in glorious health--sunshine in
her eyes, light fantastic cloud-images passing through her brain, her
breath coming and going in soft breezes perfumed with the scents of
meadows and wild flowers, and her green robe shining in the motions of
her gladness. I turned to lock the church door, though in my heart I
greatly disapproved of locking the doors of churches, and only did so
now because it was not my church, and I had no business to force my
opinions upon other customs. But when I turned I received a kind of
questioning shock. There was the fallen world, as men call it, shining
in glory and gladness, because God was there; here was the way into the
lost Paradise, yea, the door into an infinitely higher Eden than that
ever had or ever could have been, iron-clamped and riveted, gloomy and
low-browed like the entrance to a sepulchre, and surrounded with the
grim heads of grotesque monsters of the deep. What did it mean? Here
was contrast enough to require harmonising, or if that might not be,
then accounting for. Perhaps it was enough to say that although God
made both the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace, yet the
symbol of the latter was the work of man, and might not altogether
correspond to God's idea of the matter. I turned away thoughtful, and
went through the churchyard with my eye on the graves.

As I left the churchyard, still looking to the earth, the sound of
voices reached my ear. I looked up. There, down below me, at the foot
of the high bank on which I stood, lay a gorgeous shining thing upon
the bosom of the canal, full of men, and surrounded by men, women, and
children, delighting in its beauty. I had never seen such a thing
before, but I knew at once, as by instinct, which of course it could
not have been, that it was the life-boat. But in its gorgeous colours,
red and white and green, it looked more like the galley that bore
Cleopatra to Actium. Nor, floating so light on the top of the water,
and broad in the beam withal, curved upward and ornamented at stern and
stem, did it look at all like a creature formed to battle with the
fierce elements. A pleasure-boat for floating between river banks it
seemed, drawn by swans mayhap, and regarded in its course by fair eyes
from green terrace-walks, or oriel windows of ancient houses on verdant
lawns. Ten men sat on the thwarts, and one in the stern by the yet
useless rudder, while men and boys drew the showy thing by a rope
downward to the lock-gates. The men in the boat, wore blue jerseys, but
you could see little of the colour for strange unshapely things that
they wore above them, like an armour cut out of a row of organ pipes.
They were their cork-jackets; for every man had to be made into a
life-boat himself. I descended the bank, and stood on the edge of the
canal as it drew near. Then I saw that every oar was loosely but firmly
fastened to the rowlock, so that it could be dropped and caught again
in a moment; and that the gay sides of the unwieldy-looking creature
were festooned with ropes from the gunwale, for the men to lay hold of
when she capsized, for the earlier custom of fastening the men to their
seats had been quite given up, because their weight under the water
might prevent the boat from righting itself again, and the men could
not come to the surface. Now they had a better chance in their freedom,
though why they should not be loosely attached to the boat, I do not
quite see.

They towed the shining thing through the upper gate of the lock, and
slowly she sank from my sight, and for some moments was no more to be
seen, for I had remained standing where first she passed me. All at
once there she was beyond the covert of the lock-head, abroad and free,
fleeting from the strokes of ten swift oars over the still waters of
the bay towards the waves that roared further out where the
ground-swell was broken by the rise of the sandy coast. There was no
vessel in danger now, as the talk of the spectators informed me; it was
only for exercise and show that they went out. It seemed all child's
play for a time; but when they got among the broken waves, then it
looked quite another thing. The motion of the waters laid hold upon
her, and soon tossed her fearfully, now revealing the whole of her
capacity on the near side of one of their slopes, now hiding her whole
bulk in one of their hollows beyond. She, careless as a child in the
troubles of the world, floated about amongst them with what appeared
too much buoyancy for the promise of a safe return. Again and again she
was driven from her course towards the low rocks on the other side of
the bay, and again and again, returned to disport herself, like a
sea-animal, as it seemed, upon the backs of the wild, rolling, and
bursting billows.

"Can she go no further?" I asked of the captain of the coastguard, whom
I found standing by my side.

"Not without some danger," he answered.

"What, then, must it be in a storm!" I remarked.

"Then of course," he returned, "they must take their chance. But there
is no good in running risks for nothing. That swell is quite enough for
exercise."

"But is it enough to accustom them to face the danger that will come?"
I asked.

"With danger comes courage," said the old sailor.

"Were you ever afraid?"

"No, sir. I don't think I ever was afraid. Yes, I believe I was once
for one moment, no more, when I fell from the maintop-gallant yard, and
felt myself falling. But it was soon over, for I only fell into the
maintop. I was expecting the smash on deck when I was brought up there.
But," he resumed, "I don't care much about the life-boat. My rockets
are worth a good deal more, as you may see, sir, before the winter is
over; for seldom does a winter pass without at least two or three
wrecks close by here on this coast. The full force of the Atlantic
breaks here, sir. I _have_ seen a life-boat--not that one--_she's_ done
nothing yet--pitched stern over stem; not capsized, you know, sir, in
the ordinary way, but struck by a wave behind while she was just
hanging in the balance on the knife-edge of a wave, and flung a
somerset, as I say, stern over stem, and four of her men lost."

While we spoke I saw on the pier-head the tall figure of the painter
looking earnestly at the boat. I thought he was regarding it chiefly
from an artistic point of view, but I became aware before long that
that would not have been consistent with the character of Charles
Percivale. He had been, I learned afterwards, a crack oarsman at
Oxford, and had belonged to the University boat, so that he had some
almost class-sympathy with the doings of the crew.

In a little while the boat sped swiftly back, entered the lock, was
lifted above the level of the storm-heaved ocean, and floated up the
smooth canal calmly as if she had never known what trouble was. Away up
to the pretty little Tudor-fashioned house in which she lay--one could
almost fancy dreaming of storms to come--she went, as softly as if
moved only by her "own sweet will," in the calm consolation for her
imprisonment of having tried her strength, and found therein good hope
of success for the time when she should rush to the rescue of men from
that to which, as a monster that begets monsters, she a watching
Perseis, lay ready to offer battle. The poor little boat lying in her
little house watching the ocean, was something signified in my eyes,
and not less so after what came in the course of changing seasons and
gathered storms.

All this time I had the keys in my hand, and now went back to the
cottage to restore them to their place upon the wall. When I entered
there was a young woman of a sweet interesting countenance talking to
Mrs. Coombes. Now as it happened, I had never yet seen the daughter who
lived with her, and thought this was she.

"I've found your daughter at last then?" I said, approaching them.

"Not yet, sir. She goes out to work, and her hands be pretty full at
present. But this be almost my daughter, sir," she added. "This is my
next daughter, Mary Trehern, from the south. She's got a place near by,
to be near her mother that is to be, that's me."

Mary was hanging her head and blushing, as the old woman spoke.

"I understand," I said. "And when are you going to get your new mother,
Mary? Soon I hope."

But she gave me no reply--only hung her head lower and blushed deeper.

Mrs. Coombes spoke for her.

"She's shy, you see, sir. But if she was to speak her mind, she would
ask you whether you wouldn't marry her and Willie when he comes home
from his next voyage."

Mary's hands were trembling now, and she turned half away.

"With all my heart," I said.

The girl tried to turn towards me, but could not. I looked at her face
a little more closely. Through all its tremor, there was a look of
constancy that greatly pleased me. I tried to make her speak.

"When do you expect Willie home?" I said.

She made a little gasp and murmur, but no articulate words came.

"Don't be frightened, Mary," said her mother, as I found she always
called her. "The gentleman won't be sharp with you."

She lifted a pair of soft brown eyes with one glance and a smile, and
then sank them again.

"He'll be home in about a month, we think," answered the mother. "She's
a good ship he's aboard of, and makes good voyages."

"It is time to think about the bans, then," I said.

"If you please, sir," said the mother.

"Just come to me about it, and I will attend to it--when you think
proper."

I thought I could hear a murmured "Thank you, sir," from the girl, but
I could not be certain that she spoke. I shook hands with them, and
went for a stroll on the other side of the bay.




CHAPTER V.

MR. PERCIVALE.


When I reached home I found that Connie was already on her watch-tower.
For while I was away, they had carried her out that she might see the
life-boat. I followed her, and found the whole family about her couch,
and with them Mr. Percivale, who was showing her some sketches that he
had made in the neighbourhood. Connie knew nothing of drawing; but she
seemed to me always to catch the feeling of a thing. Her remarks
therefore were generally worth listening to, and Mr. Percivale was
evidently interested in them. Wynnie stood behind Connie, looking over
her shoulder at the drawing in her hand.

"How do you get that shade of green?" I heard her ask as I came up.

And then Mr. Percivale proceeded to tell her; from which beginning they
went on to other things, till Mr. Percivale said--

"But it is hardly fair, Miss Walton; to criticise my work while you
keep your own under cover."

"I wasn't criticising, Mr. Percivale; was I, Connie?"

"I didn't hear her make a single remark, Mr. Percivale," said Connie,
taking her sister's side.

To my surprise they were talking away with the young man as if they had
known him for years, and my wife was seated at the foot of the couch,
apparently taking no exception to the suddenness of the intimacy. I am
afraid, when I think of it, that a good many springs would be missing
from the world's history if they might not flow till the papas gave
their wise consideration to everything about the course they were to
take.

"I think, though," added Connie, "it is only fair that Mr. Percivale
_should_ see your work, Wynnie."

"Then I will fetch my portfolio, if Mr. Percivale will promise to
remember that I have no opinion of it. At the same time, if I could do
what I wanted to do, I think I should not be ashamed of showing my
drawings even to him."

And now I was surprised to find how like grown women my daughters could
talk. To me they always spoke like the children they were; but when I
heard them now it seemed as if they had started all at once into ladies
experienced in the ways of society. There they were chatting lightly,
airily, and yet decidedly, a slight tone of badinage interwoven, with a
young man of grace and dignity, whom they had only seen once before,
and who had advanced no farther, with Connie at least, than a stately
bow. They had, however, been a whole hour together before I arrived,
and their mother had been with them all the while, which gives great
courage to good girls, while, I am told, it shuts the mouths of those
who are sly. But then it must be remembered that there are as great
differences in mothers as in girls. And besides, I believe wise girls
have an instinct about men that all the experience of other men cannot
overtake. But yet again, there are many girls foolish enough to mistake
a mere impulse for instinct, and vanity for insight.

As Wynnie spoke, she turned and went back to the house to fetch some of
her work. Now, had she been going a message for me, she would have gone
like the wind; but on this occasion she stepped along in a stately
manner, far from devoid of grace, but equally free from frolic or
eagerness. And I could not help noting as well that Mr. Percivale's
eyes followed her. What I felt or fancied is of no consequence to
anybody. I do not think, even if I were writing an autobiography, I
should be forced to tell _all_ about myself. But an autobiography is
further from my fancy, however much I may have trenched upon its
limits, than any other form of literature with which I am acquainted.

She was not long in returning, however, though she came back with the
same dignified motion.

"There is nothing really worth either showing or concealing," she said
to Mr. Percivale, as she handed him the portfolio, to help himself, as
it were. She then turned away, as if a little feeling of shyness had
come over her, and began to look for something to do about Connie. I
could see that, although she had hitherto been almost indifferent about
the merit of her drawings, she had a new-born wish that they might not
appear altogether contemptible in the eyes of Mr. Percivale. And I saw,
too, that Connie's wide eyes were taking in everything. It was
wonderful how Connie's deprivations had made her keen in observing. Now
she hastened to her sister's rescue even from such a slight
inconvenience as the shadow of embarrassment in which she found
herself--perhaps from having seen some unusual expression in my face,
of which I was unconscious, though conscious enough of what might have
occasioned such.

"Give me your hand, Wynnie," said Connie, "and help me to move one inch
further on my side.--I may move just that much on my side, mayn't I,
papa?"

"I think you had better not, my dear, if you can do without it," I
answered; for the doctor's injunctions had been strong.

"Very well, papa; but I feel as if it would do me good."

"Mr. Turner will be here next week, you know; and you must try to stick
to his rules till he comes to see you. Perhaps he will let you relax a
little."

Connie smiled very sweetly and lay still, while Wynnie stood holding
her hand.

Meantime Mr. Percivale, having received the drawings, had walked away
with them towards what they called the storm tower--a little building
standing square to the points of the compass, from little windows, in
which the coastguard could see with their telescopes along the coast on
both sides and far out to sea. This tower stood on the very edge of the
cliff, but behind it there was a steep descent, to reach which
apparently he went round the tower and disappeared. He evidently wanted
to make a leisurely examination of the drawings--somewhat formidable
for Wynnie, I thought. At the same time, it impressed me favourably
with regard to the young man that he was not inclined to pay a set of
stupid and untrue compliments the instant the portfolio was opened,
but, on the contrary, in order to speak what was real about them, would
take the trouble to make himself in some adequate measure acquainted
with them. I therefore, to Wynnie's relief, I fear, strolled after him,
seeing no harm in taking a peep at his person, while he was taking a
peep at my daughter's mind. I went round the tower to the other side,
and there saw him at a little distance below me, but further out on a
great rock that overhung the sea, connected with the cliff by a long
narrow isthmus, a few yards lower than the cliff itself, only just
broad enough to admit of a footpath along its top, and on one side
going sheer down with a smooth hard rock-face to the sands below. The
other side was less steep, and had some grass upon it. But the path was
too narrow, and the precipice too steep, for me to trust my head with
the business of guiding my feet along it. So I stood and saw him from
the mainland--saw his head at least bent over the drawings; saw how
slowly he turned from one to the other; saw how, after having gone over
them once, he turned to the beginning and went over them again, even
more slowly than before; saw how he turned the third time to the first.
Then, getting tired, I went back to the group on the down; caught sight
of Charlie and Harry turning heels over head down the slope toward the
house; found that my wife had gone home--in fact, that only Connie and
Wynnie were left. The sun had disappeared under a cloud, and the sea
had turned a little slaty; the yellow flowers in the short down-grass
no longer caught the eye with their gold, and the wind that bent their
tops had just the suspicion of an edge in it. And Wynnie's face looked
a little cloudy too, I thought, and I feared that it was my fault. I
fancied there was just a tinge of beseeching in Connie's eye, as I
looked at her, thinking there might be danger for her in the
sunlessness of the wind. But I do not know that all this, even the
clouding of the sun, may not have come out of my own mind, the result
of my not being quite satisfied with myself because of the mood I had
been in. My feeling had altered considerably in the mean time.

"Run, Wynnie, and ask Mr. Percivale, with my compliments, to come and
lunch with us," I said--more to let her see I was not displeased,
however I might have looked, than for any other reason. She
went--sedately as before.

Almost as soon as she was gone, I saw that I had put her in a
difficulty. For I had discovered, very soon after coming into these
parts, that her head was no more steady than my own on high places, for
she up had never been used to such in our own level country, except,
indeed, on the stair that led down to the old quarry and the well,
where, I can remember now, she always laid her hand on the balustrade
with some degree of tremor, although she had been in the way of going
up and down from childhood. But if she could not cross that narrow and
really dangerous isthmus, still less could she call to a man she had
never seen but once, across the intervening chasm. I therefore set off
after her, leaving Connie lying there in loneliness, between the sea
and the sky. But when I got to the other side of the little tower,
instead of finding her standing hesitating on the brink of action,
there she was on the rock beyond. Mr. Percivale had risen, and was
evidently giving an answer to my invitation; at least, the next moment
she turned to come back, and he followed. I stood trembling almost to
see her cross the knife-back of that ledge. If I had not been almost
fascinated, I should have turned and left them to come together, lest
the evil fancy should cross her mind that I was watching them, for it
was one thing to watch him with her drawings, and quite another to
watch him with herself. But I stood and stared as she crossed. In the
middle of the path, however--up to which point she had been walking
with perfect steadiness and composure--she lifted her eyes--by what
influence I cannot tell--saw me, looked as if she saw ghost, half
lifted her arms, swayed as if she would fall, and, indeed, was falling
over the precipice when Percivale, who was close behind her caught her
in his arms, almost too late for both of them. So nearly down was she
already, that her weight bent him over the rocky side, till it seemed
as if he must yield, or his body snap. For he bent from the waist, and
looked as if his feet only kept a hold on the ground. It was all over
in a moment, but in that moment it made a sun-picture on my brain,
which returns, ever and again, with such vivid agony that I cannot hope
to get rid of it till I get rid of the brain itself in which lies the
impress. In another moment they were at my side--she with a wan,
terrified smile, he in a ruddy alarm. I was unable to speak, and could
only, with trembling steps, lead the way from the dreadful spot. I
reproached myself afterwards for my want of faith in God; but I had not
had time to correct myself yet. Without a word on their side either,
they followed me. Before we reached Connie, I recovered myself
sufficiently to say, "Not a word to Connie," and they understood me. I
told Wynnie to run to the house, and send Walter to help me to carry
Connie home. She went, and, until Walter came, I talked to Mr.
Percivale as if nothing had happened. And what made me feel yet more
friendly towards him was, that he did not do as some young men wishing
to ingratiate themselves would have done: he did not offer to help me
to carry Connie home. I saw that the offer rose in his mind, and that
he repressed it. He understood that I must consider such a permission
as a privilege not to be accorded to the acquaintance of a day; that I
must know him better before I could allow the weight of my child to
rest on his strength. I was even grateful to him for this knowledge of
human nature. But he responded cordially to my invitation to lunch with
us, and walked by my side as Walter and I bore the precious burden home.

During our meal, he made himself quite agreeable; talked well on the
topics of the day, not altogether as a man who had made up his mind,
but not the less, rather the more, as a man who had thought about them,
and one who did not find it so easy to come to a conclusion as most
people do--or possibly as not feeling the necessity of coming to a
conclusion, and therefore preferring to allow the conclusion to grow
instead of constructing one for immediate use. This I rather liked than
otherwise. His behaviour, I need hardly say, after what I have told of
him already, was entirely that of a gentleman; and his education was
good. But what I did not like was, that as often as the conversation
made a bend in the direction of religious matters, he was sure to bend
it away in some other direction as soon as ever he laid his next hold
upon it. This, however, might have various reasons to account for it,
and I would wait.

After lunch, as we rose from the table, he took Wynnie's portfolio from
the side-table where he had laid it, and with no more than a bow and
thanks returned it to her. She, I thought, looked a little
disappointed, though she said as lightly as she could:

"I am afraid you have not found anything worthy of criticism in my poor
attempts, Mr. Percivale?"

"On the contrary, I shall be most happy to tell you what I think of
them if you would like to hear the impression they have made upon me,"
he replied, holding out his hand to take the portfolio again.

"I shall be greatly obliged to you," she said, returning it, "for I
have had no one to help me since I left school, except a book called
_Modern Painters_, which I think has the most beautiful things in it I
ever read, but which I lay down every now and then with a kind of
despair, as if I never could do anything worth doing. How long the next
volume is in coming! Do you know the author, Mr. Percivale?"

"I wish I did. He has given me much help. I do not say I can agree with
everything he writes; but when I do not, I have such a respect for him
that I always feel as if he must be right whether he seems to me to be
right or not. And if he is severe, it is with the severity of love that
will speak only the truth."

This last speech fell on my ear like the tone of a church bell. "That
will do, my friend," thought I. But I said nothing to interrupt.

By this time he had laid the portfolio open on the side-table, and
placed a chair in front of it for my daughter. Then seating himself by
her side, but without the least approach to familiarity, he began to
talk to her about her drawings, praising, in general, the feeling, but
finding fault with the want of nicety in the execution--at least so it
appeared to me from what I could understand of the conversation.

"But," said my daughter, "it seems to me that if you get the feeling
right, that is the main thing."

"No doubt," returned Mr. Percivale; "so much the main thing that any
imperfection or coarseness or untruth which interferes with it becomes
of the greatest consequence."

"But can it really interfere with the feeling?"

"Perhaps not with most people, simply because most people observe so
badly that their recollections of nature are all blurred and blotted
and indistinct, and therefore the imperfections we are speaking of do
not affect them. But with the more cultivated it is otherwise. It is
for them you ought to work, for you do not thereby lose the others.
Besides, the feeling is always intensified by the finish, for that
belongs to the feeling too, and must, I should think, have some
influence even where it is not noted."

"But is it not a hopeless thing to attempt the finish of nature?"

"Not at all; to the degree, that is, in which you can represent
anything else of nature. But in this drawing now you have no
representative of, nothing to hint at or recall the feeling of the
exquisiteness of nature's finish. Why should you not at least have
drawn a true horizon-line there? Has the absolute truth of the meeting
of sea and sky nothing to do with the feeling which such a landscape
produces? I should have thought you would have learned that, if
anything, from Mr. Ruskin."

Mr. Percivale spoke earnestly. Wynnie, either from disappointment or
despair, probably from a mixture of both, apparently fancied that, or
rather felt as if, he was scolding her, and got cross. This was
anything but dignified, especially with a stranger, and one who was
doing his best to help her. And yet, somehow, I must with shame confess
I was not altogether sorry to see it. In fact, my reader, I must just
uncover my sin, and say that I felt a little jealous of Mr. Percivale.
The negative reason was that I had not yet learned to love him. The
only cure for jealousy is love. But I was ashamed too of Wynnie's
behaving so childishly. Her face flushed, the tears came in her eyes,
and she rose, saying, with a little choke in her voice--

"I see it's no use trying. I won't intrude any more into things I am
incapable of. I am much obliged to you, Mr. Percivale, for showing me
how presumptuous I have been."

The painter rose as she rose, looking greatly concerned. But he did not
attempt to answer her. Indeed she gave him no time. He could only
spring after her to open the door for her. A more than respectful bow
as she left the room was his only adieu. But when he turned his face
again towards me, it expressed even a degree of consternation.

"I fear," he said, approaching me with an almost military step, much at
variance with the shadow upon his countenance, "I fear I have been rude
to Miss Walton, but nothing was farther--"

"You mistake entirely, Mr. Percivale. I heard all you were saying, and
you were not in the least rude. On the contrary, I consider you were
very kind to take the trouble with her you did. Allow me to make the
apology for my daughter which I am sure she will wish made when she
recovers from the disappointment of finding more obstacles in the way
of her favourite pursuit than she had previously supposed. She is only
too ready to lose heart, and she paid too little attention to your
approbation and too much--in proportion, I mean--to your--criticism.
She felt discouraged and lost her temper, but more with herself and her
poor attempts, I venture to assure you, than with your remarks upon
them. She is too much given to despising her own efforts."

"But I must have been to blame if I caused any such feeling with regard
to those drawings, for I assure you they contain great promise."

"I am glad you think so. That I should myself be of the same opinion
can be of no consequence."

"Miss Walton at least sees what ought to be represented. All she needs
is greater severity in the quality of representation. And that would
have grown without any remark from onlookers. Only a friendly criticism
is sometimes a great help. It opens the eyes a little sooner than they
would have opened of themselves. And time," he added, with a half sigh
and with an appeal in his tone, as if he would justify himself to my
conscience, "is half the battle in this world. It is over so soon."

"No sooner than it ought to be," I rejoined.

"So it may appear to you," he returned; "for you, I presume to
conjecture, have worked hard and done much. I may or may not have
worked hard--sometimes I think I have, sometimes I think I have
not--but I certainly have done little. Here I am nearly thirty, and
have made no mark on the world yet."

"I don't know that that is of so much consequence," I said. "I have
never hoped for more than to rub out a few of the marks already made."

"Perhaps you are right," he returned. "Every man has something he can
do, and more, I suppose, that he can't do. But I have no right to turn
a visit into a visitation. Will you please tell Miss Walton that I am
very sorry I presumed on the privileges of a drawing-master, and gave
her pain. It was so far from my intention that it will be a lesson to
me for the future."

With these words he took his leave, and I could not help being greatly
pleased both with them and with his bearing. He was clearly anything
but a common man.




CHAPTER VI.

THE SHADOW OP DEATH.


When Wynnie appeared at dinner she looked ashamed of herself, and her
face betrayed that she had been crying. But I said nothing, for I had
confidence that all she needed was time to come to herself, that the
voice that speaks louder than any thunder might make its stillness
heard. And when I came home from my walk the next morning I found Mr.
Percivale once more in the group about Connie, and evidently on the
best possible terms with all. The same afternoon Wynnie went out
sketching with Dora. I had no doubt that she had made some sort of
apology to Mr. Percivale; but I did not make the slightest attempt to
discover what had passed between them, for though it is of all things
desirable that children should be quite open with their parents, I was
most anxious to lay upon them no burden of obligation. For such burden
lies against the door of utterance, and makes it the more difficult to
open. It paralyses the speech of the soul. What I desired was that they
should trust me so that faith should overcome all difficulty that might
lie in the way of their being open with me. That end is not to be
gained by any urging of admonition. Against such, growing years at
least, if nothing else, will bring a strong reaction. Nor even, if so
gained would the gain be at all of the right sort. The openness would
not be faith. Besides, a parent must respect the spiritual person of
his child, and approach it with reverence, for that too looks the
Father in the face, and has an audience with him into which no earthly
parent can enter even if he dared to desire it. Therefore I trusted my
child. And when I saw that she looked at me a little shyly when we next
met, I only sought to show her the more tenderness and confidence,
telling her all about my plans with the bells, and my talks with the
smith and Mrs. Coombes. She listened with just such interest as I had
always been accustomed to see in her, asking such questions, and making
such remarks as I might have expected, but I still felt that there was
the thread of a little uneasiness through the web of our
intercourse,--such a thread of a false colour as one may sometimes find
wandering through the labour of the loom, and seek with pains to draw
from the woven stuff. But it was for Wynnie to take it out, not for me.
And she did not leave it long. For as she bade me good-night in my
study, she said suddenly, yet with hesitating openness,

"Papa, I told Mr. Percivale that I was sorry I had behaved so badly
about the drawings."

"You did right, my child," I replied. At the same moment a pang of
anxiety passed through me lest under the influence of her repentance
she should have said anything more than becoming. But I banished the
doubt instantly as faithlessness in the womanly instincts of my child.
For we men are always so ready and anxious to keep women right, like
the wretched creature, Laertes, in _Hamlet_, who reads his sister such
a lesson on her maidenly duties, but declines almost with contempt to
listen to a word from her as to any co-relative obligation on his side!

And here I may remark in regard to one of the vexed questions of the
day--the rights of women--that what women demand it is not for men to
withhold. It is not their business to lay the law for women. That women
must lay down for themselves. I confess that, although I must herein
seem to many of my readers old-fashioned and conservative, I should not
like to see any woman I cared much for either in parliament or in an
anatomical class-room; but on the other hand I feel that women must be
left free to settle that matter. If it is not good, good women will
find it out and recoil from it. If it is good then God give them good
speed. One thing they _have_ a right to--a far wider and more valuable
education than they have been in the way of receiving. When the mothers
are well taught the generations will grow in knowledge at a fourfold
rate. But still the teaching of life is better than all the schools,
and common sense than all learning. This common sense is a rare gift,
scantier in none than in those who lay claim to it on the ground of
following commonplace, worldly, and prudential maxims. But I must
return to my Wynnie.

"And what did Mr. Percivale say?" I resumed, for she was silent.

"He took the blame all on himself, papa."

"Like a gentleman," I said.

"But I could not leave it so, you know, papa, because that was not the
truth."

"Well?"

"I told him that I had lost my temper from disappointment; that I had
thought I did not care for my drawings because I was so far from
satisfied with them, but when he made me feel that they were worth
nothing, then I found from the vexation I felt that I had cared for
them. But I do think, papa, I was more ashamed of having shown them,
and vexed with myself, than cross with him. But I was very silly."

"Well, and what did he say?"

"He began to praise them then. But you know I could not take much of
that, for what could he do?"

"You might give him credit for a little honesty, at least."

"Yes; but things may be true in a way, you know, and not mean much."

"He seems to have succeeded in reconciling you to the prosecution of
your efforts, however; for I saw you go out with your sketching
apparatus this afternoon."

"Yes," she answered shyly. "He was so kind that somehow I got heart to
try again. He's very nice, isn't he?"

My answer was not quite ready.

"Don't you like him, papa?"

"Well--I like him--yes. But we must not be in haste with our judgments,
you know. I have had very little opportunity of seeing into him. There
is much in him that I like, but--"

"But what? please, papa."

"To tell the truth then, Wynnie, for I can speak my mind to you, my
child, there is a certain shyness of approaching the subject of
religion; so that I have my fears lest he should belong to any of these
new schools of a fragmentary philosophy which acknowledge no source of
truth but the testimony of the senses and the deductions made therefrom
by the intellect."

"But is not that a hasty conclusion, papa?"

"That is a hasty question, my dear. I have come to no conclusion. I was
only speaking confidentially about my fears."

"Perhaps, papa, it's only that he's not sure enough, and is afraid of
appearing to profess more than he believes. I'm sure, if that's it, I
have the greatest sympathy with him."

I looked at her, and saw the tears gathering fast in her eyes.

"Pray to God on the chance of his hearing you, my darling, and go to
sleep," I said. "I will not think hardly of you because you cannot be
so sure as I am. How could you be? You have not had my experience.
Perhaps you are right about Mr. Percivale too. But it would be an
awkward thing to get intimate with him, you know, and then find out
that we did not like him after all. You couldn't like a man much, could
you, who did not believe in anything greater than himself, anything
marvellous, grand, beyond our understanding--who thought that he had
come out of the dirt and was going back to the dirt?"

"I could, papa, if he tried to do his duty notwithstanding--for I'm
sure I couldn't. I should cry myself to death."

"You are right, my child. I should honour him too. But I should be very
sorry for him. For he would be so disappointed in himself."

I do not know whether this was the best answer to make, but I had
little time to think.

"But you don't know that he's like that."

"I do not, my dear. And more, I will not associate the idea with him
till I know for certain. We will leave it to ignorant old ladies who
lay claim to an instinct for theology to jump at conclusions, and
reserve ours--as even such a man as we have been supposing might well
teach us--till we have sufficient facts from which to draw them. Now go
to bed, my child."

"Good-night then, dear papa," she said, and left me with a kiss.

I was not altogether comfortable after this conversation. I had tried
to be fair to the young man both in word and thought, but I could not
relish the idea of my daughter falling in love with him, which looked
likely enough, before I knew more about him, and found that _more_ good
and hope-giving. There was but one rational thing left to do, and that
was to cast my care on him that careth for us--on the Father who loved
my child more than even I could love her--and loved the young man too,
and regarded my anxiety, and would take its cause upon himself. After I
had lifted up my heart to him I was at ease, read a canto of Dante's
_Paradise_, and then went to bed. The prematurity of a conversation
with my wife, in which I found that she was very favourably impressed
with Mr. Percivale, must be pardoned to the forecasting hearts of
fathers and mothers.

As I went out for my walk the next morning, I caught sight of the
sexton, with whom as yet I had had but little communication, busily
trimming some of the newer graves in the churchyard. I turned in
through the nearer gate, which was fashioned like a lych-gate, with
seats on the sides and a stone table in the centre, but had no roof.
The one on the other side of the church was roofed, but probably they
had found that here no roof could resist the sea-blasts in winter. The
top of the wall where the roof should have rested, was simply covered
with flat slates to protect it from the rain.

"Good-morning, Coombes," I said.

He turned up a wizened, humorous old face, the very type of a
gravedigger's, and with one hand leaning on the edge of the green
mound, upon which he had been cropping with a pair of shears the too
long and too thin grass, touched his cap with the other, and bade me a
cheerful good-morning in return.

"You're making things tidy," I said.

"It take time to make them all comfortable, you see, sir," he returned,
taking up his shears again and clipping away at the top and sides of
the mound.

"You mean the dead, Coombes?"

"Yes, sir; to be sure, sir."

"You don't think it makes much difference to their comfort, do you,
whether the grass is one length or another upon their graves?"

"Well no, sir. I don't suppose it makes _much_ difference to them. But
it look more comfortable, you know. And I like things to look
comfortable. Don't you, sir?"

"To be sure I do, Coombes. And you are quite right. The resting-place
of the body, although the person it belonged to be far away, should be
respected."

"That's what I think, though I don't get no credit for it. I du believe
the people hereabouts thinks me only a single hair better than a Jack
Ketch. But I'm sure I du my best to make the poor things comfortable."

He seemed unable to rid his mind of the idea that the comfort of the
departed was dependent upon his ministrations.

"The trouble I have with them sometimes! There's now this same one as
lies here, old Jonathan Giles. He have the gout so bad! and just as I
come within a couple o' inches o' the right depth, out come the edge of
a great stone in the near corner at the foot of the bed. Thinks I,
he'll never lie comfortable with that same under his gouty toe. But the
trouble I had to get out that stone! I du assure you, sir, it took me
nigh half the day.--But this be one of the nicest places to lie in all
up and down the coast--a nice gravelly soil, you see, sir; dry, and
warm, and comfortable. Them poor things as comes out of the sea must
quite enjoy the change, sir."

There was something grotesque in the man's persistence in regarding the
objects of his interest from this point of view. It was a curious way
for the humanity that was in him to find expression; but I did not like
to let him go on thus. It was so much opposed to all that I believed
and felt about the change from this world to the next!

"But, Coombes," I said, "why will you go on talking as if it made an
atom of difference to the dead bodies where they were buried? They care
no more about it than your old coat would care where it was thrown
after you had done with it."

He turned and regarded his coat where it hung beside him on the
headstone of the same grave at which he was working, shook his head
with a smile that seemed to hint a doubt whether the said old coat
would be altogether so indifferent to its treatment when, it was past
use as I had implied. Then he turned again to his work, and after a
moment's silence began to approach me from another side. I confess he
had the better of me before I was aware of what he was about.

"The church of Boscastle stands high on the cliff. You've been to
Boscastle, sir?"

I told him I had not yet, but hoped to go before the summer was over.

"Ah, you should see Boscastle, sir. It's a wonderful place. That's
where I was born, sir. When I was a by that church was haunted, sir.
It's a damp place, and the wind in it awful. I du believe it stand
higher than any church in the country, and have got more wind in it of
a stormy night than any church whatsomever. Well, they said it was
haunted; and sure enough every now and then there was a knocking heard
down below. And this always took place of a stormy night, as if there
was some poor thing down in the low wouts (_vaults_), and he wasn't
comfortable and wanted to get out. Well, one night it was so plain and
so fearful it was that the sexton he went and took the blacksmith and a
ship's carpenter down to the harbour, and they go up together, and they
hearken all over the floor, and they open one of the old family wouts
that belongs to the Penhaligans, and they go down with a light. Now the
wind it was a-blowing all as usual, only worse than common. And there
to be sure what do they see but the wout half-full of sea-water, and
nows and thens a great spout coming in through a hole in the rock; for
it was high-water and a wind off the sea, as I tell you. And there was
a coffin afloat on the water, and every time the spout come through, it
set it knocking agen the side o' the wout, and that was the ghost."

"What a horrible idea!" I said, with a half-shudder at the unrest of
the dead.

The old man uttered a queer long-drawn sound,--neither a chuckle, a
crow, nor a laugh, but a mixture of all three,--and turned himself yet
again to the work which, as he approached the end of his narration, he
had suspended, that he might make his story _tell_, I suppose, by
looking me in the face. And as he turned he said, "I thought you would
like to be comfortable then as well as other people, sir."

I could not help laughing to see how the cunning old fellow had caught
me. I have not yet been able to find out how much of truth there was in
his story. From the twinkle of his eye I cannot help suspecting that if
he did not invent the tale, he embellished it, at least, in order to
produce the effect which he certainly did produce. Humour was clearly
his predominant disposition, the reflex of which was to be seen, after
a mild lunar fashion, on the countenance of his wife. Neither could I
help thinking with pleasure, as I turned away, how the merry little old
man would enjoy telling his companions how he had posed the new parson.
Very welcome was he to his laugh for my part. Yet I gladly left the
churchyard, with its sunshine above and its darkness below. Indeed I
had to look up to the glittering vanes on the four pinnacles of the
church-tower, dwelling aloft in the clean sunny air, to get the feeling
of the dark vault, and the floating coffin, and the knocking heard in
the windy church, out of my brain. But the thing that did free me was
the reflection with what supreme disregard the disincarcerated spirit
would look upon any possible vicissitudes of its abandoned vault. For
in proportion as the body of man's revelation ceases to be in harmony
with the spirit that dwells therein, it becomes a vault, a prison, from
which it must be freedom to escape at length. The house we like best
would be a prison of awful sort if doors and windows were built up.
Man's abode, as age begins to draw nigh, fares thus. Age is in fact the
mason that builds up the doors and the windows, and death is the angel
that breaks the prison-house and lets the captives free. Thus I got
something out of the sexton's horrible story.

But before the week was over, death came near indeed--in far other
fashion than any funereal tale could have brought it.

One day, after lunch, I had retired to my study, and was dozing in my
chair, for the day was hot, when I was waked by Charlie rushing into
the room with the cry, "Papa, papa, there's a man drowning."

I started up, and hurried down to the drawing-room, which looked out
over the bay. I could see nothing but people running about on the edge
of the quiet waves. No sign of human being was on--the water. But the
one boat belonging to the pilot was coming out from the shelter of the
lock of the canal where it usually lay, and my friend of the coastguard
was running down from the tower on the cliff with ropes in his hand. He
would not stop the boat even for the moment it would need to take him
on board, but threw them in and urged to haste. I stood at the window
and watched. Every now and then I fancied I saw something white heaved
up on the swell of a wave, and as often was satisfied that I had but
fancied it. The boat seemed to be floating about lazily, if not idly.
The eagerness to help made it appear as if nothing was going on. Could
it, after all, have been a false alarm? Was there, after all, no
insensible form swinging about in the sweep of those waves, with life
gradually oozing away? Long, long as it seemed to me, I watched, and
still the boat kept moving from place to place, so far out that I could
see nothing distinctly of the motions of its crew. At length I saw
something. Yes; a long white thing rose from the water slowly, and was
drawn into the boat. It rowed swiftly to the shore. There was but one
place fit to land upon,--a little patch of sand, nearly covered at
high-water, but now lying yellow in the sun, under the window at which
I stood, and immediately under our garden-wall. Thither the boat shot
along; and there my friend of the coastguard, earnest and sad, was
waiting to use, though without hope, every appliance so well known to
him from the frequent occurrence of such necessity in the course of his
watchful duties along miles and miles of stormy coast.

I will not linger over the sad details of vain endeavour. The honoured
head of a family, he had departed and left a good name behind him. But
even in the midst of my poor attentions to the quiet, speechless,
pale-faced wife, who sat at the head of the corpse, I could not help
feeling anxious about the effect on my Connie. It was impossible to
keep the matter concealed from her. The undoubted concern on the faces
of the two boys was enough to reveal that something serious and painful
had occurred; while my wife and Wynnie, and indeed the whole household,
were busy in attending to every remotest suggestion of aid that reached
them from the little crowd gathered about the body. At length it was
concluded, on the verdict of the medical man who had been sent for,
that all further effort was useless. The body was borne away, and I led
the poor lady to her lodging, and remained there with her till I found
that, as she lay on the sofa, the sleep that so often dogs the steps of
sorrow had at length thrown its veil over her consciousness, and put
her for the time to rest. There is a gentle consolation in the firmness
of the grasp of the inevitable, known but to those who are led through
the valley of the shadow. I left her with her son and daughter, and
returned to my own family. They too were of course in the skirts of the
cloud. Had they only heard of the occurrence, it would have had little
effect; but death had appeared to them. Everyone but Connie had seen
the dead lying there; and before the day was over, I wished that she
too had seen the dead. For I found from what she said at intervals, and
from the shudder that now and then passed through her, that her
imagination was at work, showing but the horrors that belong to death;
for the enfolding peace that accompanies it can be known but by sight
of the dead. When I spoke to her, she seemed, and I suppose for the
time felt tolerably quiet and comfortable; but I could see that the
words she had heard fall in the going and coming, and the
communications of Charlie and Harry to each other, had made as it were
an excoriation on her fancy, to which her consciousness was ever
returning. And now I became more grateful than I had yet been for the
gift of that gipsy-child. For I felt no anxiety about Connie so long as
she was with her. The presence even of her mother could not relieve
her, for she and Wynnie were both clouded with the same awe, and its
reflex in Connie was distorted by her fancy. But the sweet ignorance of
the baby, which rightly considered is more than a type or symbol of
faith, operated most healingly; for she appeared in her sweet merry
ways--no baby was ever more filled with the mere gladness of life than
Connie's baby--to the mood in which they all were, like a little sunny
window in a cathedral crypt, telling of a whole universe of sunshine
and motion beyond those oppressed pillars and low-groined arches. And
why should not the baby know best? I believe the babies do know best. I
therefore favoured her having the child more than I might otherwise
have thought good for her, being anxious to get the dreary, unhealthy
impression healed as soon as possible, lest it should, in the delicate
physical condition in which she was, turn to a sore.

But my wife suffered for a time nearly as much as Connie. As long as
she was going about the house or attending to the wants of her family,
she was free; but no sooner did she lay her head on the pillow than in
rushed the cry of the sea, fierce, unkind, craving like a wild beast.
Again and again she spoke of it to me, for it came to her mingled with
the voice of the tempter, saying, "_Cruel chance_," over and over
again. For although the two words contradict each other when put
together thus, each in its turn would assert itself.

A great part of the doubt in the world comes from the fact that there
are in it so many more of the impressible as compared with the
originating minds. Where the openness to impression is balanced by the
power of production, the painful questions of the world are speedily
met by their answers; where such is not the case, there are often long
periods of suffering till the child-answer of truth is brought to the
birth. Hence the need for every impressible mind to be, by reading or
speech, held in living association with an original mind able to combat
those suggestions of doubt and even unbelief, which the look of things
must often occasion--a look which comes from our inability to gain
other than fragmentary visions of the work that the Father worketh
hitherto. When the kingdom of heaven is at hand, one sign thereof will
be that all clergymen will be more or less of the latter sort, and mere
receptive goodness, no more than education and moral character, will be
considered sufficient reason for a man's occupying the high position of
an instructor of his fellows. But even now this possession of original
power is not by any means to be limited to those who make public show
of the same. In many a humble parish priest it shows itself at the
bedside of the suffering, or in the admonition of the closet, although
as yet there are many of the clergy who, so far from being able to
console wisely, are incapable of understanding the condition of those
that need consolation.

"It is all a fancy, my dear," I said to her. "There is nothing more
terrible in this than in any other death. On the contrary, I can hardly
imagine a less fearful one. A big wave falls on the man's head and
stuns him, and without further suffering he floats gently out on the
sea of the unknown."

"But it is so terrible for those left behind!"

"Had you seen the face of his widow, so gentle, so loving, so resigned
in its pallor, you would not have thought it so _terrible_."

But though she always seemed satisfied, and no doubt felt nearly so,
after any conversation of the sort, yet every night she would call out
once and again, "O, that sea, out there!" I was very glad indeed when
Mr. Turner, who had arranged to spend a short holiday with us, arrived.

He was concerned at the news I gave him of the shock both Connie and
her mother had received, and counselled an immediate change, that time
might, in the absence of surrounding associations, obliterate something
of the impression that had been made. The consequence was, that we
resolved to remove our household, for a short time, to some place not
too far off to permit of my attending to my duties at Kilkhaven, but
out of the sight and sound of the sea. It was Thursday when Mr. Turner
arrived, and he spent the next two days in inquiring and looking about
for a suitable spot to which we might repair as early in the week as
possible.

On the Saturday the blacksmith was busy in the church-tower, and I went
in to see how he was getting on.

"You had a sad business here the last week, sir," he said, after we had
done talking about the repairs.

"A very sad business indeed," I answered.

"It was a warning to us all," he said.

"We may well take it so," I returned. "But it seems to me that we are
too ready to think of such remarkable things only by themselves,
instead of being roused by them to regard everything, common and
uncommon, as ordered by the same care and wisdom."

"One of our local preachers made a grand use of it."

I made no reply. He resumed.

"They tell me you took no notice of it last Sunday, sir."

"I made no immediate allusion to it, certainly. But I preached under
the influence of it. And I thought it better that those who could
reflect on the matter should be thus led to think for themselves than
that they should be subjected to the reception of my thoughts and
feelings about it; for in the main it is life and not death that we
have to preach."

"I don't quite understand you, sir. But then you don't care much for
preaching in your church."

"I confess," I answered, "that there has been much indifference on that
point. I could, however, mention to you many and grand exceptions.
Still there is, even in some of the best in the church, a great amount
of disbelief in the efficacy of preaching. And I allow that a great
deal of what is called preaching, partakes of its nature only in the
remotest degree. But, while I hold a strong opinion of its value--that
is, where it is genuine--I venture just to suggest that the nature of
the preaching to which the body you belong to has resorted, has had
something to do, by way of a reaction, in driving the church to the
other extreme."

"How do you mean that, sir?"

"You try to work upon people's feelings without reference to their
judgment. Anyone who can preach what you call rousing sermons is
considered a grand preacher amongst you, and there is a great danger of
his being led thereby to talk more nonsense than sense. And then when
the excitement goes off, there is no seed left in the soil to grow in
peace, and they are always craving after more excitement."

"Well, there is the preacher to rouse them up again."

"And the consequence is that they continue like children--the good
ones, I mean--and have hardly a chance of making a calm, deliberate
choice of that which is good; while those who have been only excited
and nothing more, are hardened and seared by the recurrence of such
feeling as is neither aroused by truth nor followed by action."

"You daren't talk like that if you knew the kind of people in this
country that the Methodists, as you call them, have got a hold of. They
tell me it was like hell itself down in those mines before Wesley come
among them."

"I should be a fool or a bigot to doubt that the Wesleyans have done
incalculable good in the country. And that not alone to the people who
never went to church. The whole Church of England is under obligations
to Methodism such as no words can overstate."

"I wonder you can say such things against them, then."

"Now there you show the evil of thinking too much about the party you
belong to. It makes a man touchy; and then he fancies when another is
merely, it may be, analysing a difference, or insisting strongly on
some great truth, that he is talking against his party."

"But you said, sir, that our clergy don't care about moving our
judgments, only our feelings. Now I know preachers amongst us of whom
that would be anything but true."

"Of course there must be. But there is what I say--your party-feeling
makes you touchy. A man can't always be saying in the press of
utterance, '_Of course there are exceptions_.' That is understood. I
confess I do not know much about your clergy, for I have not had the
opportunity. But I do know this, that some of the best and most liberal
people I have ever known have belonged to your community."

"They do gather a deal of money for good purposes."

"Yes. But that was not what I meant by _liberal_. It is far easier to
give money than to be generous in judgment. I meant by _liberal_, able
to see the good and true in people that differ from you--glad to be
roused to the reception of truth in God's name from whatever quarter it
may come, and not readily finding offence where a remark may have
chanced to be too sweeping or unguarded. But I see that I ought to be
more careful, for I have made you, who certainly are not one of the
quarrelsome people I have been speaking of, misunderstand me."

"I beg your pardon, sir. I was hasty. But I do think I am more ready to
lose my temper since--"

Here he stopped. A fit of coughing came on, and, to my concern, was
followed by what I saw plainly could be the result only of a rupture in
the lungs. I insisted on his dropping his work and coming home with me,
where I made him rest the remainder of the day and all Sunday, sending
word to his mother that I could not let him go home. When we left on
the Monday morning, we took him with us in the carriage hired for the
journey, and set him down at his mother's, apparently no worse than
usual.




CHAPTER VII.

AT THE FARM.


Leaving the younger members of the family at home with the servants, we
set out for a farmhouse, some twenty miles off, which Turner had
discovered for us. Connie had stood the journey down so well, and was
now so much stronger, that we had no anxiety about her so far as
regarded the travelling. Through deep lanes with many cottages, and
here and there a very ugly little chapel, over steep hills, up which
Turner and Wynnie and I walked, and along sterile moors we drove,
stopping at roadside inns, and often besides to raise Connie and let
her look about upon the extended prospect, so that it was drawing
towards evening before we arrived at our destination. On the way Turner
had warned us that we were not to expect a beautiful country, although
the place was within reach of much that was remarkable. Therefore we
were not surprised when we drew up at the door of a bare-looking,
shelterless house, with scarcely a tree in sight, and a stretch of
undulating fields on every side.

"A dreary place in winter, Turner," I said, after we had seen Connie
comfortably deposited in the nice white-curtained parlour, smelling of
dried roses even in the height of the fresh ones, and had strolled out
while our tea--dinner was being got ready for us.

"Not a doubt of it; but just the place I wanted for Miss Connie," he
replied. "We are high above the sea, and the air is very bracing, and
not, at this season, too cold. A month later I should not on any
account have brought her here."

"I think even now there is a certain freshness in the wind that calls
up a kind of will in the nerves to meet it."

"That is precisely what I wanted for you all. You observe there is no
rasp in its touch, however. There are regions in this island of ours
where even in the hottest day in summer you would frequently discover a
certain unfriendly edge in the air, that would set you wondering
whether the seasons had not changed since you were a boy, and used to
lie on the grass half the idle day."

"I often do wonder whether it may not be so, but I always come to the
conclusion that even this is but an example of the involuntary tendency
of the mind of man towards the ideal. He forgets all that comes between
and divides the hints of perfection scattered here and there along the
scope of his experience. I especially remember one summer day in my
childhood, which has coloured all my ideas of summer and bliss and
fulfilment of content. It is made up of only mossy grass, and the scent
of the earth and wild flowers, and hot sun, and perfect sky--deep and
blue, and traversed by blinding white clouds. I could not have been
more than five or six, I think, from the kind of dress I wore, the very
pearl buttons of which, encircled on their face with a ring of
half-spherical hollows, have their undeniable relation in my memory to
the heavens and the earth, to the march of the glorious clouds, and the
tender scent of the rooted flowers; and, indeed, when I think of it,
must, by the delight they gave me, have opened my mind the more to the
enjoyment of the eternal paradise around me. What a thing it is to
please a child!"

"I know what you mean perfectly," answered Turner. "It is as I get
older that I understand what Wordsworth says about childhood. It is
indeed a mercy that we were not born grown men, with what we consider
our wits about us. They are blinding things those wits we gather. I
fancy that the single thread by which God sometimes keeps hold of a man
is such an impression of his childhood as that of which you have been
speaking."

"I do not doubt it; for conscience is so near in all those memories to
which you refer. The whole surrounding of them is so at variance with
sin! A sense of purity, not in himself, for the child is not feeling
that he is pure, is all about him; and when afterwards the condition
returns upon him,--returns when he is conscious of so much that is evil
and so much that is unsatisfied in him,--it brings with it a longing
after the high clear air of moral well-being."

"Do you think, then, that it is only by association that nature thus
impresses us? that she has no power of meaning these things?"

"Not at all. No doubt there is something in the recollection of the
associations of childhood to strengthen the power of nature upon us;
but the power is in nature herself, else it would be but a poor weak
thing to what it is. There _is_ purity and state in that sky. There
_is_ a peace now in this wide still earth--not so very beautiful, you
own--and in that overhanging blue, which my heart cries out that it
needs and cannot be well till it gains--gains in the truth, gains in
God, who is the power of truth, the living and causing truth. There is
indeed a rest that remaineth, a rest pictured out even here this night,
to rouse my dull heart to desire it and follow after it, a rest that
consists in thinking the thoughts of Him who is the Peace because the
Unity, in being filled with that spirit which now pictures itself forth
in this repose of the heavens and the earth."

"True," said Turner, after a pause. "I must think more about such
things. The science the present day is going wild about will not give
us that rest."

"No; but that rest will do much to give you that science. A man with
this repose in his heart will do more by far, other capabilities being
equal, to find out the laws that govern things. For all law is living
rest."

"What you have been saying," resumed Turner, after another pause,
"reminds me much of one of Wordsworth's poems. I do not mean the famous
ode."

"You mean the 'Ninth Evening Voluntary,' I know--one of his finest and
truest and deepest poems. It begins, 'Had this effulgence disappeared.'"

"Yes, that is the one I mean. I shall read it again when I go home. But
you don't agree with Wordsworth, do you, about our having had an
existence previous to this?"

He gave a little laugh as he asked the question.

"Not in the least. But an opinion held by such men as Plato, Origen,
and Wordsworth, is not to be laughed at, Mr. Turner. It cannot be in
its nature absurd. I might have mentioned Shelley as holding it, too,
had his opinion been worth anything."

"Then you don't think much of Shelley?"

"I think his _feeling_ most valuable; his _opinion_ nearly worthless."

"Well, perhaps I had no business to laugh, at it; but--"

"Do not suppose for a moment that I even lean to it. I dislike it. It
would make me unhappy to think there was the least of sound argument
for it. But I respect the men who have held it, and know there must be
_something_ good in it, else they could not have held it."

"Are you able then to sympathise with that ode of Wordsworth's? Does it
not depend for all its worth on the admission of this theory?"

"Not in the least. Is it necessary to admit that we must have had a
conscious life before this life to find meaning in the words,--

  'But trailing clouds of glory do we come
  From God who is our home'?

Is not all the good in us his image? Imperfect and sinful as we are, is
not all the foundation of our being his image? Is not the sin all ours,
and the life in us all God's? We cannot be the creatures of God without
partaking of his nature. Every motion of our conscience, every
admiration of what is pure and noble, is a sign and a result of this.
Is not every self-accusation a proof of the presence of his spirit?
That comes not of ourselves--that is not without him. These are the
clouds of glory we come trailing from him. All feelings of beauty and
peace and loveliness and right and goodness, we trail with us from our
home. God is the only home of the human soul. To interpret in this
manner what Wordsworth says, will enable us to enter into perfect
sympathy with all that grandest of his poems. I do not say this is what
he meant; but I think it includes what he meant by being greater and
wider than what he meant. Nor am I guilty of presumption in saying so,
for surely the idea that we are born of God is a greater idea than that
we have lived with him a life before this life. But Wordsworth is not
the first among our religious poets to give us at least what is
valuable in the notion. I came upon a volume amongst my friend
Shepherd's books, with which I had made no acquaintance before--Henry
Vaughan's poems. I brought it with me, for it has finer lines, I almost
think, than any in George Herbert, though not so fine poems by any
means as his best. When we go into the house I will read one of them to
you."

"Thank you," said Turner. "I wish I could have such talk once a week.
The shades of the prison-house, you know, Mr. Walton, are always trying
to close about us, and shut out the vision of the glories we have come
from, as Wordsworth says."

"A man," I answered, "who ministers to the miserable necessities of his
fellows has even more need than another to believe in the light and the
gladness--else a poor Job's comforter will he be. _I_ don't want to be
treated like a musical snuff-box."

The doctor laughed.

"No man can _prove_," he said, "that there is not a being inside the
snuff-box, existing in virtue of the harmony of its parts, comfortable
when they go well, sick when they go badly, and dying when it is
dismembered, or even when it stops."

"No," I answered. "No man can prove it. But no man can convince a human
being of it. And just as little can anyone convince me that my
conscience, making me do sometimes what I _don't_ like, comes from a
harmonious action of the particles of my brain. But it is time we went
in, for by the law of things in general, I being ready for my dinner,
my dinner ought to be ready for me."

"A law with more exceptions than instances, I fear," said Turner.

"I doubt that," I answered. "The readiness is everything, and that we
constantly blunder in. But we had better see whether we are really
ready for it, by trying whether it is ready for us."

Connie went to bed early, as indeed we all did, and she was rather
better than worse the next morning. My wife, for the first time for
many nights, said nothing about the crying of the sea. The following
day Turner and I set out to explore the neighbourhood. The rest
remained quietly at home.

It was, as I have said, a high bare country. The fields lay side by
side, parted from each other chiefly, as so often in Scotland, by stone
walls; and these stones being of a laminated nature, the walls were not
unfrequently built by laying thin plates on their edges, which gave a
neatness to them not found in other parts of the country as far as I am
aware. In the middle of the fields came here and there patches of yet
unreclaimed moorland.

Now in a region like this, beauty must be looked for below the surface.
There is a probability of finding hollows of repose, sunken spots of
loveliness, hidden away altogether from the general aspect of
sternness, or perhaps sterility, that meets the eye in glancing over
the outspread landscape; just as in the natures of stern men you may
expect to find, if opportunity should be afforded you, sunny spots of
tender verdure, kept ever green by that very sternness which is turned
towards the common gaze--thus existent because they are below the
surface, and not laid bare to the sweep of the cold winds that roam the
world. How often have not men started with amaze at the discovery of
some feminine sweetness, some grace of protection in the man whom they
had judged cold and hard and rugged, inaccessible to the more genial
influences of humanity! It may be that such men are only fighting
against the wind, and keep their hearts open to the sun.

I knew this; and when Turner and I set out that morning to explore, I
expected to light upon some instance of it--some mine or other in which
nature had hidden away rare jewels; but I was not prepared to find such
as I did find. With our hearts full of a glad secret we returned home,
but we said nothing about it, in order that Ethelwyn and Wynnie might
enjoy the discovery even as we had enjoyed it.

There was another grand fact with regard to the neighbourhood about
which we judged it better to be silent for a few days, that the inland
influences might be free to work. We were considerably nearer the ocean
than my wife and daughters supposed, for we had made a great round in
order to arrive from the land-side. We were, however, out of the sound
of its waves, which broke all along the shore, in this part, at the
foot of tremendous cliffs. What cliffs they were we shall soon find.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE KEEVE.


"Now, my dear! now, Wynnie!" I said, after prayers the next morning,
"you must come out for a walk as soon as ever you can get your bonnets
on."

"But we can't leave Connie, papa," objected Wynnie.

"O, yes, you can, quite well. There's nursie to look after her. What do
you say, Connie?"

For, for some time now, Connie had been able to get up so early, that
it was no unusual thing to have prayers in her room.

"I am entirely independent of help from my family," returned Connie
grandiloquently. "I am a woman of independent means," she added. "If
you say another word, I will rise and leave the room."

And she made a movement as if she would actually do as she had said.
Seized with an involuntary terror, I rushed towards her, and the
impertinent girl burst out laughing in my face--threw herself back on
her pillows, and laughed delightedly.

"Take care, papa," she said. "I carry a terrible club for rebellious
people." Then, her mood changing, she added, as if to suppress the
tears gathering in her eyes, "I am the queen--of luxury and
self-will--and I won't have anybody come near me till dinner-time. I
mean to enjoy myself."

So the matter was settled, and we went out for our walk. Ethelwyn was
not such a good walker as she had been; but even if she had retained
the strength of her youth, we should not have got on much the better
for it--so often did she and Wynnie stop to grub ferns out of the
chinks and roots of the stone-walls. Now, I admire ferns as much as
anybody--that is, not, I fear, so much as my wife and daughter, but
quite enough notwithstanding--but I do not quite enjoy being pulled up
like a fern at every turn.

"Now, my dear, what is the use of stopping to torture that harmless
vegetable?" I say, but say in vain. "It is much more beautiful where it
is than it will be anywhere where you can put it. Besides, you know
they never come to anything with you. They _always_ die."

Thereupon my wife reminds me of this fern and that fern, gathered in
such and such places, and now in such and such corners of the garden or
the greenhouse, or under glass-shades in this or that room, of the very
existence of which I am ignorant, whether from original inattention, or
merely from forgetfulness, I do not know. Certainly, out of their own
place I do not care much for them.

At length, partly by the inducement I held out to them of a much
greater variety of ferns where we were bound, I succeeded in getting
them over the two miles in little more than two hours. After passing
from the lanes into the fields, our way led downwards till we reached a
very steep large slope, with a delightful southern exposure, and
covered with the sweetest down-grasses. It was just the place to lie
in, as on the edge of the earth, and look abroad upon the universe of
air and floating worlds.

"Let us have a rest here, Ethel," I said. "I am sure this is much more
delightful than uprooting ferns. What an awful thing to think that here
we are on this great round tumbling ball of a world, held by the feet,
and lifting up the head into infinite space--without choice or wish of
our own--compelled to think and to be, whether we will or not! Just God
must know it to be very good, or he would not have taken it in his
hands to make individual lives without a possible will of theirs. He
must be our Father, or we are wretched creatures--the slaves of a fatal
necessity! Did it ever strike you, Turner, that each one of us stands
on the apex of the world? With a sphere, you know, it must be so. And
thus is typified, as it seems to me, that each one of us must look up
for himself to find God, and then look abroad to find his fellows."

"I think I know what you mean," was all Turner's reply.

"No doubt," I resumed, "the apprehension of this truth has, in
otherwise ill-ordered minds, given rise to all sorts of fierce and
grotesque fanaticism. But the minds which have thus conceived the
truth, would have been immeasurably worse without it; nay, this truth
affords at last the only possible door out of the miseries of their own
chaos, whether inherited or the result of their own misconduct."

"What's that in the grass?" cried Wynnie, in a tone of alarm.

I looked where she indicated, and saw a slow-worm, or blind-worm, lying
basking in the sun. I rose and went towards it.

"Here's your stick," said Turner.

"What for?" I asked. "Why should I kill it? It is perfectly harmless,
and, to my mind, beautiful."

I took it in my hands, and brought it to my wife. She gave an
involuntary shudder as it came near her.

"I assure you it is harmless," I said, "though it has a forked tongue."
And I opened its mouth as I spoke. "I do not think the serpent form is
essentially ugly."

"It makes me feel ugly," said Wynnie.

"I allow I do not quite understand the mystery of it," I said. "But you
never saw lovelier ornamentation than these silvery scales, with all
the neatness of what you ladies call a set pattern, and none of the
stiffness, for there are not two of them the same in form. And you
never saw lovelier curves than this little patient creature, which does
not even try to get away from me, makes with the queer long thin body
of him."

"I wonder how it can look after its tail, it is so far off," said
Wynnie.

"It does though--better than you ladies look after your long dresses. I
wonder whether it is descended from creatures that once had feet, and
did not make a good use of them. Perhaps they had wings even, and would
not use them at all, and so lost them. Its ancestors may have had
poison-fangs; it is innocent enough. But it is a terrible thing to be
all feet, is it not? There is an awful significance in the condemnation
of the serpent--'On thy belly shalt thou go, and eat dust.' But it is
better to talk of beautiful things. _My_ soul at least has dropped from
its world apex. Let us go on. Come, wife. Come, Turner."

They did not seem willing to rise. But the glen drew me. I rose, and my
wife followed my example with the help of my hand. She returned to the
subject, however, as we descended the slope.

"Is it possible that in the course of ever so many ages wings and feet
should be both lost?" she said.

"The most presumptuous thing in the world is to pronounce on the
possible and the impossible. I do not know what is possible and what is
impossible. I can only tell a little of what is true and what is
untrue. But I do say this, that between the condition of many decent
members of society and that for the sake of which God made them, there
is a gulf quite as vast as that between a serpent and a bird. I get
peeps now and then into the condition of my own heart, which, for the
moment, make it seem impossible that I should ever rise into a true
state of nature--that is, into the simplicity of God's will concerning
me. The only hope for ourselves and for others lies in him--in the
power the creating spirit has over the spirits he has made."

By this time the descent on the grass was getting too steep and
slippery to admit of our continuing to advance in that direction. We
turned, therefore, down the valley in the direction of the sea. It was
but a narrow cleft, and narrowed much towards a deeper cleft, in which
we now saw the tops of trees, and from which we heard the rush of
water. Nor had we gone far in this direction before we came upon a gate
in a stone wall, which led into what seemed a neglected garden. We
entered, and found a path turning and winding, among small trees, and
luxuriant ferns, and great stones, and fragments of ruins down towards
the bottom of the chasm. The noise of falling water increased as we
went on, and at length, after some scrambling and several sharp turns,
we found ourselves with a nearly precipitous wall on each side, clothed
with shrubs and ivy, and creeping things of the vegetable world. Up
this cleft there was no advance. The head of it was a precipice down
which shot the stream from the vale above, pouring out of a deep slit
it had itself cut in the rock as with a knife. Halfway down, it tumbled
into a great basin of hollowed stone, and flowing from a chasm in its
side, which left part of the lip of the basin standing like the arch of
a vanished bridge, it fell into a black pool below, whence it crept as
if half-stunned or weary down the gentle decline of the ravine. It was
a perfect little picture. I, for my part, had never seen such a
picturesque fall. It was a little gem of nature, complete in effect.
The ladies were full of pleasure. Wynnie, forgetting her usual reserve,
broke out in frantic exclamations of delight.

We stood for a while regarding the ceaseless pour of the water down the
precipice, here shot slanting in a little trough of the rock, full of
force and purpose, here falling in great curls of green and gray, with
an expression of absolute helplessness and conscious perdition, as if
sheer to the centre, but rejoicing the next moment to find itself
brought up boiling and bubbling in the basin, to issue in the gathered
hope of experience. Then we turned down the stream a little way,
crossed it by a plank, and stood again to regard it from the opposite
side. Small as the whole affair was--not more than about a hundred and
fifty feet in height--it was so full of variety that I saw it was all
my memory could do, if it carried away anything like a correct picture
of its aspect. I was contemplating it fixedly, when a little stifled
cry from Wynnie made me start and look round. Her face was flushed, yet
she was trying to look unconcerned.

"I thought we were quite alone, papa," she said; "but I see a gentleman
sketching."

I looked whither she indicated. A little way down, the bed of the
ravine widened considerably, and was no doubt filled with water in
rainy weather. Now it was swampy--full of reeds and willow bushes. But
on the opposite side of the stream, with a little canal from it going
all around it, lay a great flat rectangular stone, not more than a foot
above the level of the water, and upon a camp-stool in the centre of
this stone sat a gentleman sketching. I had no doubt that Wynnie had
recognised him at once. And I was annoyed, and indeed angry, to think
that Mr. Percivale had followed us here. But while I regarded him, he
looked up, rose very quietly, and, with his pencil in his hand, came
towards us. With no nearer approach to familiarity than a bow, and no
expression of either much pleasure or any surprise, he said--

"I have seen your party for some time, Mr. Walton--since you crossed
the stream; but I would not break in upon your enjoyment with the
surprise which my presence here must cause you."

I suppose I answered with a bow of some sort; for I could not say with
truth that I was glad to see him. He resumed, doubtless penetrating my
suspicion--

"I have been here almost a week. I certainly had no expectation of the
pleasure of seeing you."

This he said lightly, though no doubt with the object of clearing
himself. And I was, if not reassured, yet disarmed, by his statement;
for I could not believe, from what I knew of him, that he would be
guilty of such a white lie as many a gentleman would have thought
justifiable on the occasion. Still, I suppose he found me a little
stiff, for presently he said--

"If you will excuse me, I will return to my work."

Then I felt as if I must say something, for I had shown him no courtesy
during the interview.

"It must be a great pleasure to carry away such talismans with
you--capable of bringing the place back to your mental vision at any
moment."

"To tell the truth," he answered, "I am a little ashamed of being found
sketching here. Such bits of scenery are not of my favourite studies.
But it is a change."

"It is very beautiful here," I said, in a tone of contravention.

"It is very pretty," he answered--"very lovely, if you will--not very
beautiful, I think. I would keep that word for things of larger regard.
Beauty requires width, and here is none. I had almost said this place
was fanciful--the work of imagination in her play-hours, not in her
large serious moods. It affects me like the face of a woman only
pretty, about which boys and guardsmen will rave--to me not very
interesting, save for its single lines."

"Why, then, do you sketch the place?"

"A very fair question," he returned, with a smile. "Just because it is
soothing from the very absence of beauty. I would far rather, however,
if I were only following my taste, take the barest bit of the moor
above, with a streak of the cold sky over it. That gives room."

"You would like to put a skylark in it, wouldn't you?"

"That I would if I knew how. I see you know what I mean. But the mere
romantic I never had much taste for; though if you saw the kind of
pictures I try to paint, you would not wonder that I take sketches of
places like this, while in my heart of hearts I do not care much for
them. They are so different, and just _therefore_ they are good for me.
I am not working now; I am only playing."

"With a view to working better afterwards, I have no doubt," I answered.

"You are right there, I hope," was his quiet reply, as he turned and
walked back to the island.

He had not made a step towards joining us. He had only taken his hat
off to the ladies. He was gaining ground upon me rapidly.

"Have you quarrelled with our new friend, Harry?" said my wife, as I
came up to her.

She was sitting on a stone. Turner and Wynnie were farther off towards
the foot of the fall.

"Not in the least," I answered, slightly outraged--I did not at first
know why--by the question. "He is only gone to his work, which is a
duty belonging both to the first and second tables of the law."

"I hope you have asked him to come home to our early dinner, then," she
rejoined.

"I have not. That remains for you to do. Come, I will take you to him."

Ethelwyn rose at once, put her hand in mine, and with a little help
soon reached the table-rock. When Percivale saw that she was really on
a visit to him on his island-perch, he rose, and when she came near
enough, held out his hand. It was but a step, and she was beside him in
a moment. After the usual greetings, which on her part, although very
quiet, like every motion and word of hers, were yet indubitably cordial
and kind, she said, "When you get back to London, Mr. Percivale, might
I ask you to allow some friends of mine to call at your studio, and see
your paintings?"

"With all my heart," answered Percivale. "I must warn you, however,
that I have not much they will care to see. They will perhaps go away
less happy than they entered. Not many people care to see my pictures
twice."

"I would not send you anyone I thought unworthy of the honour,"
answered my wife.

Percivale bowed--one of his stately, old-world bows, which I greatly
liked.

"Any friend of yours--that is guarantee sufficient," he answered.

There was this peculiarity about any compliment that Percivale paid,
that you had not a doubt of its being genuine.

"Will you come and take an early dinner with us?" said my wife. "My
invalid daughter will be very pleased to see you."

"I will with pleasure," he answered, but in a tone of some hesitation,
as he glanced from Ethelwyn to me.

"My wife speaks for us all," I said. "It will give us all pleasure."

"I am only afraid it will break in upon your morning's work," remarked
Ethelwyn.

"O, that is not of the least consequence," he rejoined. "In fact, as I
have just been saying to Mr. Walton, I am not working at all at
present. This is pure recreation."

As he spoke he turned towards his easel, and began hastily to bundle up
his things.

"We're not quite ready to go yet," said my wife, loath to leave the
lovely spot. "What a curious flat stone this is!" she added.

"It is," said Percivale. "The man to whom the place belongs, a worthy
yeoman of the old school, says that this wider part of the channel must
have been the fish-pond, and that the portly monks stood on this stone
and fished in the pond."

"Then was there a monastery here?" I asked.

"Certainly. The ruins of the chapel, one of the smallest, are on the
top, just above the fall--rather a fearful place to look down from. I
wonder you did not observe them as you came. They say it had a silver
bell in the days of its glory, which now lies in a deep hole under the
basin, half-way between the top and bottom of the fall. But the old man
says that nothing will make him look, or let anyone else lift the huge
stone; for he is much better pleased to believe that it may be there,
than he would be to know it was not there; for certainly, if it were
found, it would not be left there long."

As he spoke Percivale had continued packing his gear. He now led our
party up to the chapel, and thence down a few yards to the edge of the
chasm, where the water fell headlong. I turned away with that fear of
high places which is one of my many weaknesses; and when I turned again
towards the spot, there was Wynnie on the very edge, looking over into
the flash and tumult of the water below, but with a nervous grasp of
the hand of Percivale, who stood a little farther back.

In going home, the painter led us by an easier way out of the valley,
left his little easel and other things at a cottage, and then walked on
in front between my wife and daughter, while Turner and I followed. He
seemed quite at his ease with them, and plenty of talk and laughter
rose on the way. I, however, was chiefly occupied with finding out
Turner's impression of Connie's condition.

"She is certainly better," he said. "I wonder you do not see it as
plainly as I do. The pain is nearly gone from her spine, and she can
move herself a good deal more, I am certain, than she could when she
left. She asked me yesterday if she might not turn upon one side. 'Do
you think you could?' I asked.--'I think so,' she answered. 'At any
rate, I have often a great inclination to try; only papa said I had
better wait till you came.' I do think she might be allowed a little
more change of posture now."

"Then you have really some hope of her final recovery?"

"I have _hope_ most certainly. But what is hope in me, you must not
allow to become certainty in you. I am nearly sure, though, that she
can never be other than an invalid; that is, if I am to judge by what I
know of such cases."

"I am thankful for the hope," I answered. "You need not be afraid of my
turning upon you, should the hope never pass into sight. I should do so
only if I found that you had been treating me irrationally--inspiring
me with hope which you knew to be false. The element of uncertainty is
essential to hope, and for all true hope, even as hope, man has to be
unspeakably thankful."




CHAPTER IX.

THE WALK TO CHURCH.


I was glad to be able to arrange with a young clergyman who was on a
visit to Kilkhaven, that he should take my duty for me the next Sunday,
for that was the only one Turner could spend with us. He and I and
Wynnie walked together two miles to church. It was a lovely morning,
with just a tint of autumn in the air. But even that tint, though all
else was of the summer, brought a shadow, I could see, on Wynnie's face.

"You said you would show me a poem of--Vaughan, I think you said, was
the name of the writer. I am too ignorant of our older literature,"
said Turner.

"I have only just made acquaintance with him," I answered. "But I think
I can repeat the poem. You shall judge whether it is not like
Wordsworth's Ode.

  'Happy those early days, when I
  Shined in my angel infancy;
  Before I understood the place
  Appointed for my second race,
  Or taught my soul to fancy ought
  But a white, celestial thought;
  When yet I had not walked above
  A mile or two from my first love,
  And looking back, at that short space,
  Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
  When on some gilded cloud or flower
  My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
  And in those weaker glories spy
  Some shadows of eternity;
  Before I taught my tongue to wound
  My conscience with a sinful sound,
  But felt through all this fleshly dress
  Bright shoots of everlastingness.
  O how I long to travel back----'"

But here I broke down, for I could not remember the rest with even
approximate accuracy.

"When did this Vaughan live?" asked Turner.

"He was born, I find, in 1621--five years, that is, after Shakspere's
death, and when Milton was about thirteen years old. He lived to the
age of seventy-three, but seems to have been little known. In politics
he was on the Cavalier side. By the way, he was a medical man, like
you, Turner--an M.D. We'll have a glance at the little book when we go
back. Don't let me forget to show it you. A good many of your
profession have distinguished themselves in literature, and as profound
believers too."

"I should have thought the profession had been chiefly remarkable for
such as believe only in the evidence of the senses."

"As if having searched into the innermost recesses of the body, and not
having found a soul, they considered themselves justified in declaring
there was none."

"Just so."

"Well, that is true of the commonplace amongst them, I do believe. You
will find the exceptions have been men of fine minds and
characters--not such as he of whom Chaucer says,

  'His study was but little on the Bible;'

for if you look at the rest of the description of the man, you will
find that he was in alliance with his apothecary for their mutual
advantage, that he was a money-loving man, and that some of Chaucer's
keenest irony is spent on him in an off-hand, quiet manner. Compare the
tone in which he writes of the doctor of physic, with the profound
reverence wherewith he bows himself before the poor country-parson."

Here Wynnie spoke, though with some tremor in her voice.

"I never know, papa, what people mean by talking about childhood in
that way. I never seem to have been a bit younger and more innocent
than I am."

"Don't you remember a time, Wynnie, when the things about you--the sky
and the earth, say--seemed to you much grander than they seem now? You
are old enough to have lost something."

She thought for a little while before she answered.

"My dreams were, I know. I cannot say so of anything else."

I in my turn had to be silent, for I did not see the true answer,
though I was sure there was one somewhere, if I could only find it. All
I could reply, however, even after I had meditated a good while,
was--and perhaps, after all, it was the best thing I could have said:

"Then you must make a good use of your dreams, my child."

"Why, papa?"

"Because they are the only memorials of childhood you have left."

"How am I to make a good use of them? I don't know what to do with my
silly old dreams."

But she gave a sigh as she spoke that testified her silly old dreams
had a charm for her still.

"If your dreams, my child, have ever testified to you of a condition of
things beyond that which you see around you, if they have been to you
the hints of a wonder and glory beyond what visits you now, you must
not call them silly, for they are just what the scents of Paradise
borne on the air were to Adam and Eve as they delved and spun,
reminding them that they must aspire yet again through labour into that
childhood of obedience which is the only paradise of humanity--into
that oneness with the will of the Father, which our race, our
individual selves, need just as much as if we had personally fallen
with Adam, and from which we fall every time we are disobedient to the
voice of the Father within our souls--to the conscience which is his
making and his witness. If you have had no childhood, my Wynnie, yet
permit your old father to say that everything I see in you indicates
more strongly in you than in most people that it is this childhood
after which you are blindly longing, without which you find that life
is hardly to be endured. Thank God for your dreams, my child. In him
you will find that the essence of those dreams is fulfilled. We are
saved by hope, Turner. Never man hoped too much, or repented that he
had hoped. The plague is that we don't hope in God half enough. The
very fact that hope is strength, and strength the outcome, the body of
life, shows that hope is at one with life, with the very essence of
what says 'I am'--yea, of what doubts and says 'Am I?' and therefore is
reasonable to creatures who cannot even doubt save in that they live."

By this time, for I have, of course, only given the outlines, or rather
salient points, of our conversation, we had reached the church, where,
if I found the sermon neither healing nor inspiring, I found the
prayers full of hope and consolation. They at least are safe beyond
human caprice, conceit, or incapacity. Upon them, too, the man who is
distressed at the thought of how little of the needful food he had been
able to provide for his people, may fall back for comfort, in the
thought that there at least was what ought to have done them good, what
it was well worth their while to go to church for. But I did think they
were too long for any individual Christian soul, to sympathise with
from beginning to end, that is, to respond to, like organ-tube to the
fingered key, in every touch of the utterance of the general Christian
soul. For my reader must remember that it is one thing to read prayers
and another to respond; and that I had had very few opportunities of
being in the position of the latter duty. I had had suspicions before,
and now they were confirmed--that the present crowding of services was
most inexpedient. And as I pondered on the matter, instead of trying to
go on praying after I had already uttered my soul, which is but a
heathenish attempt after much speaking, I thought how our Lord had
given us such a short prayer to pray, and I began to wonder when or how
the services came to be so heaped the one on the back of the other as
they now were. No doubt many people defended them; no doubt many people
could sit them out; but how many people could pray from beginning to
end of them I On this point we had some talk as we went home. Wynnie
was opposed to any change of the present use on the ground that we
should only have the longer sermons.

"Still," I said, "I do not think even that so great an evil. A
sensitive conscience will not reproach itself so much for not listening
to the whole of a sermon, as for kneeling in prayer and not praying. I
think myself, however, that after the prayers are over, everyone should
be at liberty to go out and leave the sermon unheard, if he pleases. I
think the result would be in the end a good one both for parson and
people. It would break through the deadness of this custom, this use
and wont. Many a young mind is turned for life against the influences
of church-going--one of the most sacred influences when _pure_, that
is, un-mingled with non-essentials--just by the feeling that he _must_
do so and so, that he must go through a certain round of duty. It is a
willing service that the Lord wants; no forced devotions are either
acceptable to him, or other than injurious to the worshipper, if such
he can be called."

After an early dinner, I said to Turner--"Come out with me, and we will
read that poem of Vaughan's in which I broke down today."

"O, papa!" said Connie, in a tone of injury, from the sofa.

"What is it, my dear?" I asked.

"Wouldn't it be as good for us as for Mr. Turner?"

"Quite, my dear. Well, I will keep it for the evening, and meantime Mr.
Turner and I will go and see if we can find out anything about the
change in the church-service."

For I had thrown into my bag as I left the rectory a copy of _The
Clergyman's Vade Mecum_--a treatise occupied with the externals of the
churchman's relations--in which I soon came upon the following passage:

"So then it appears that the common practice of reading all three
together, is an innovation, and if an ancient or infirm clergyman do
read them at two or three several times, he is more strictly
conformable; however, this is much better than to omit any part of the
liturgy, or to read all three offices into one, as is now commonly
done, without any pause or distinction."

"On the part of the clergyman, you see, Turner," I said, when I had
finished reading the whole passage to him. "There is no care taken of
the delicate women of the congregation, but only of the ancient or
infirm clergyman. And the logic, to say the least, is rather queer: is
it only in virtue of his antiquity and infirmity that he is to be
upheld in being more strictly conformable? The writer's honesty has its
heels trodden upon by the fear of giving offence. Nevertheless there
should perhaps be a certain slowness to admit change, even back to a
more ancient form."

"I don't know that I can quite agree with you there," said Turner. "If
the form is better, no one should hesitate to advocate the change. If
it is worse, then slowness is not sufficient--utter obstinacy is the
right condition."

"You are right, Turner. For the right must be the rule, and where _the
right_ is beyond our understanding or our reach, then _the better_, as
indeed not only right compared with the other, but the sole ascent
towards the right."

In the evening I took Henry Vaughan's poems into the common
sitting-room, and to Connie's great delight read the whole of the
lovely, though unequal little poem, called "The Retreat," in recalling
which I had failed in the morning. She was especially delighted with
the "white celestial thought," and the "bright shoots of
everlastingness." Then I gave a few lines from another yet more unequal
poem, worthy in themselves of the best of the other. I quote the first
strophe entire:

  CHILDHOOD.

  "I cannot reach it; and my striving eye
  Dazzles at it, as at eternity.
  Were now that chronicle alive,
  Those white designs which children drive,
  And the thoughts of each harmless hour,
  With their content too in my power,
  Quickly would I make my path even,
  And by mere playing go to heaven.

  *     *     *     *     *

  And yet the practice worldlings call
  Business and weighty action all,
  Checking the poor child for his play,
  But gravely cast themselves away.

  *     *     *     *     *

  An age of mysteries! which he
  Must live twice that would God's face see;
  Which angels guard, and with it play,
  Angels! which foul men drive away.
  How do I study now, and scan
  Thee more than ere I studied man,
  And only see through a long night
  Thy edges and thy bordering light I
  O for thy centre and midday!
  For sure that is the _narrow way!_"

"For of such is the kingdom of heaven." said my wife softly, as I
closed the book.

"May I have the book, papa?" said Connie, holding out her thin white
cloud of a hand to take it.

"Certainly, my child. And if Wynnie would read it with you, she will
feel more of the truth of what Mr. Percivale was saying to her about
finish. Here are the finest, grandest thoughts, set forth sometimes
with such carelessness, at least such lack of neatness, that, instead
of their falling on the mind with all their power of loveliness, they
are like a beautiful face disfigured with patches, and, what is worse,
they put the mind out of the right, quiet, unquestioning, open mood,
which is the only fit one for the reception of such true things as are
embodied in the poems. But they are too beautiful after all to be more
than a little spoiled by such a lack of the finish with which Art ends
off all her labours. A gentleman, however, thinks it of no little
importance to have his nails nice as well as his face and his shirt."




CHAPTER X.

THE OLD CASTLE.


The place Turner had chosen suited us all so well, that after attending
to my duties on the two following Sundays at Kilkhaven, I returned on
the Monday or Tuesday to the farmhouse. But Turner left us in the
middle of the second week, for he could not be longer absent from his
charge at home, and we missed him much. It was some days before Connie
was quite as cheerful again as usual. I do not mean that she was in the
least gloomy--that she never was; she was only a little less merry. But
whether it was that Turner had opened our eyes, or that she had visibly
improved since he allowed her to make a little change in her
posture--certainly she appeared to us to have made considerable
progress, and every now and then we were discovering some little proof
of the fact. One evening, while we were still at the farm, she startled
us by calling out suddenly,--

"Papa, papa! I moved my big toe! I did indeed."

We were all about her in a moment. But I saw that she was excited, and
fearing a reaction I sought to calm her.

"But, my dear," I said, as quietly as I could, "you are probably still
aware that you are possessed of two big toes: which of them are we to
congratulate on this first stride in the march of improvement?"

She broke out in the merriest laugh. A pause followed in which her face
wore a puzzled expression. Then she said all at once, "Papa, it is very
odd, but I can't tell which of them," and burst into tears. I was
afraid that I had done more harm than good.

"It is not of the slightest consequence, my child," I said. "You have
had so little communication with the twins of late, that it is no
wonder you should not be able to tell the one from the other."

She smiled again through her sobs, but was silent, with shining face,
for the rest of the evening. Our hopes took a fresh start, but we heard
no more from her of her power over her big toe. As often as I inquired
she said she was afraid she had made a mistake, for she had not had
another hint of its existence. Still I thought it could not have been a
fancy, and I would cleave to my belief in the good sign.

Percivale called to see us several times, but always appeared anxious
not to intrude more of his society upon us than might be agreeable. He
grew in my regard, however; and at length I asked him if he would
assist me in another surprise which I meditated for my companions, and
this time for Connie as well, and which I hoped would prevent the
painful influences of the sight of the sea from returning upon them
when they went back to Kilkhaven: they must see the sea from a quite
different shore first. In a word I would take them to Tintagel, of the
near position of which they were not aware, although in some of our
walks we had seen the ocean in the distance. An early day was fixed for
carrying out our project, and I proceeded to get everything ready. The
only difficulty was to find a carriage in the neighbourhood suitable
for receiving Connie's litter. In this, however, I at length succeeded,
and on the morning of a glorious day of blue and gold, we set out for
the little village of Trevenna, now far better known than at the time
of which I write. Connie had been out every day since she came, now in
one part of the fields, now in another, enjoying the expanse of earth
and sky, but she had had no drive, and consequently had seen no variety
of scenery. Therefore, believing she was now thoroughly able to bear
it, I quite reckoned of the good she would get from the inevitable
excitement. We resolved, however, after finding how much she enjoyed
the few miles' drive, that we would not demand more, of her strength
that day, and therefore put up at the little inn, where, after ordering
dinner, Percivale and I left the ladies, and sallied forth to
reconnoitre.

We walked through the village and down the valley beyond, sloping
steeply between hills towards the sea, the opening closed at the end by
the blue of the ocean below and the more ethereal blue of the sky
above. But when we reached the mouth of the valley we found that we
were not yet on the shore, for a precipice lay between us and the
little beach below. On the left a great peninsula of rock stood out
into the sea, upon which rose the ruins of the keep of Tintagel, while
behind on the mainland stood the ruins of the castle itself, connected
with the other only by a narrow isthmus. We had read that this
peninsula had once been an island, and that the two parts of the castle
were formerly connected by a drawbridge. Looking up at the great gap
which now divided the two portions, it seemed at first impossible to
believe that they had ever been thus united; but a little reflection
cleared up the mystery.

The fact was that the isthmus, of half the height of the two parts
connected by it, had been formed entirely by the fall of portions of
the rock and soil on each side into the narrow dividing space, through
which the waters of the Atlantic had been wont to sweep. And now the
fragments of walls stood on the very verge of the precipice, and showed
that large portions of the castle itself had fallen into the gulf
between. We turned to the left along the edge of the rock, and so by a
narrow path reached and crossed to the other side of the isthmus. We
then found that the path led to the foot of the rock, formerly island,
of the keep, and thence in a zigzag up the face of it to the top. We
followed it, and after a great climb reached a door in a modern
battlement. Entering, we found ourselves amidst grass, and ruins
haggard with age. We turned and surveyed the path by which we had come.
It was steep and somewhat difficult. But the outlook was glorious. It
was indeed one of God's mounts of vision upon which we stood. The
thought, "O that Connie could see this!" was swelling in my heart, when
Percivale broke the silence--not with any remark on the glory around
us, but with the commonplace question--

"You haven't got your man with you, I think, Mr. Walton?"

"No," I answered; "we thought it better to leave him to look after the
boys."

He was silent for a few minutes, while I gazed in delight.

"Don't you think," he said, "it would be possible to bring Miss
Constance up here?"

I almost started at the idea, and had not replied before he resumed:

"It would be something for her to recur to with delight all the rest of
her life."

"It would indeed. But it is impossible."

"I do not think so--if you would allow me the honour to assist you. I
think we could do it perfectly between us."

I was again silent for a while. Looking down on the way we had come, it
seemed an almost dreadful undertaking. Percivale spoke again.

"As we shall come here to-morrow, we need not explore the place now.
Shall we go down at once and observe the whole path, with a view to the
practicability of carrying her up?"

"There can be no objection to that," I answered, as a little hope, and
courage with it, began to dawn in my heart. "But you must allow it does
not look very practicable."

"Perhaps it would seem more so to you, if you had come up with the idea
in your head all the way, as I did. Any path seems more difficult in
looking back than at the time when the difficulties themselves have to
be met and overcome."

"Yes, but then you must remember that we have to take the way back
whether we will or no, if we once take the way forward."

"True; and now I will go down with the descent in my head as well as
under my feet."

"Well, there can be no harm in reconnoitring it at least. Let us go."

"You know we can rest almost as often as we please," said Percivale,
and turned to lead the way.

It certainly was steep, and required care even in our own descent; but
for a man who had climbed mountains, as I had done in my youth, it
could hardly be called difficult even in middle age. By the time we had
got again into the valley road I was all but convinced of the
practicability of the proposal. I was a little vexed, however, I must
confess, that a stranger should have thought of giving such a pleasure
to Connie, when the bare wish that she might have enjoyed it had alone
arisen in my mind. I comforted myself with the reflection that this was
one of the ways in which we were to be weaned from the world and knit
the faster to our fellows. For even the middle-aged, in the decay of
their daring, must look for the fresh thought and the fresh impulse to
the youth which follows at their heels in the march of life. Their part
is to _will_ the relation and the obligation, and so, by love to and
faith in the young, keep themselves in the line along which the
electric current flows, till at length they too shall once more be
young and daring in the strength of the Lord. A man must always seek to
rise above his moods and feelings, to let them move within him, but not
allow them to storm or gloom around him. By the time we reached home we
had agreed to make the attempt, and to judge by the path to the foot of
the rock, which was difficult in parts, whether we should be likely to
succeed, without danger, in attempting the rest of the way and the
following descent. As soon as we had arrived at this conclusion, I felt
so happy in the prospect that I grew quite merry, especially after we
had further agreed that, both for the sake of her nerves and for the
sake of the lordly surprise, we should bind Connie's eyes so that she
should see nothing till we had placed her in a certain position,
concerning the preferableness of which we were not of two minds.

"What mischief have you two been about?" said my wife, as we entered
our room in the inn, where the cloth was already laid for dinner. "You
look just like two schoolboys that have been laying some plot, and can
hardly hold their tongues about it."

"We have been enjoying our little walk amazingly," I answered. "So much
so, that we mean to set out for another the moment dinner is over."

"I hope you will take Wynnie with you then."

"Or you, my love," I returned.

"No; I will stay with Connie."

"Very well. You, and Connie too, shall go out to-morrow, for we have
found a place we want to take you to. And, indeed, I believe it was our
anticipation of the pleasure you and she would have in the view that
made us so merry when you accused us of plotting mischief."

My wife replied only with a loving look, and dinner appearing at this
moment, we sat down a happy party.

When that was over--and a very good dinner it was, just what I like,
homely in material but admirable in cooking--Wynnie and Percivale and I
set out again. For as Percivale and I came back in the morning we had
seen the church standing far aloft and aloof on the other side of the
little valley, and we wanted to go to it. It was rather a steep climb,
and Wynnie accepted Percivale's offered arm. I led the way, therefore,
and left them to follow--not so far in the rear, however, but that I
could take a share in the conversation. It was some little time before
any arose, and it was Wynnie who led the way into it.

"What kind of things do you like best to paint, Mr. Percivale?" she
asked.

He hesitated for several seconds, which between a question and an
answer look so long, that most people would call them minutes.

"I would rather you should see some of my pictures--I should prefer
that to answering your question," he said, at length.

"But I have seen some of your pictures," she returned.

"Pardon me. Indeed you have not, Miss Walton."

"At least I have seen some of your sketches and studies."

"Some of my sketches--none of my studies."

"But you make use of your sketches for your pictures, do you not?"

"Never of such as you have seen. They are only a slight antidote to my
pictures."

"I cannot understand you."

"I do not wonder at that. But I would rather, I repeat, say nothing
about my pictures till you see some of them."

"But how am I to have that pleasure, then?"

"You go to London sometimes, do you not?"

"Very rarely. More rarely still when the Royal Academy is open."

"That does not matter much. My pictures are seldom to be found there."

"Do you not care to send them there?"

"I send one, at least, every year. But they are rarely accepted."

"Why?"

This was a very improper question, I thought; but if Wynnie had thought
so she would not have put it. He hesitated a little before he replied--

"It is hardly for me to say why," he answered; "but I cannot wonder
much at it, considering the subjects I choose.--But I daresay," he
added, in a lighter tone, "after all, that has little to do with it,
and there is something about the things themselves that precludes a
favourable judgment. I avoid thinking about it. A man ought to try to
look at his own work as if it were none of his, but not as with the
eyes of other people. That is an impossibility, and the attempt a
bewilderment. It is with his own eyes he must look, with his own
judgment he must judge. The only effort is to get it set far away
enough from him to be able to use his own eyes and his own judgment
upon it."

"I think I see what you mean. A man has but his own eyes and his own
judgment. To look with those of other people is but a fancy."

"Quite so. You understand me quite."

He said no more in explanation of his rejection by the Academy. Till we
reached the church, nothing more of significance passed between them.

What a waste, bare churchyard that was! It had two or three lych-gates,
but they had no roofs. They were just small enclosures, with the low
stone tables, to rest the living from the weight of the dead, while the
clergyman, as the keeper of heaven's wardrobe, came forth to receive
the garment they restored--to be laid aside as having ended its work,
as having been worn done in the winds, and rains, and labours of the
world. Not a tree stood in that churchyard. Hank grass was the sole
covering of the soil heaved up with the dead beneath. What blasts from
the awful space of the sea must rush athwart the undefended garden! The
ancient church stood in the midst, with its low, strong, square tower,
and its long, narrow nave, the ridge bowed with age, like the back of a
horse worn out in the service of man, and its little homely chancel,
like a small cottage that had leaned up against its end for shelter
from the western blasts. It was locked, and we could not enter. But of
all world-worn, sad-looking churches, that one--sad, even in the
sunset--was the dreariest I had ever beheld. Surely, it needed the
gospel of the resurrection fervently preached therein, to keep it from
sinking to the dust with dismay and weariness. Such a soul alone could
keep it from vanishing utterly of dismal old age. Near it was one huge
mound of grass-grown rubbish, looking like the grave where some former
church of the dead had been buried, when it could stand erect no longer
before the onsets of Atlantic winds. I walked round and round it,
gathering its architecture, and peeping in at every window I could
reach. Suddenly I was aware that I was alone. Returning to the other
side, I found that Percivale was seated on the churchyard wall, next
the sea--it would have been less dismal had it stood immediately on the
cliffs, but they were at some little distance beyond bare downs and
rough stone walls; he was sketching the place, and Wynnie stood beside
him, looking over his shoulder. I did not interrupt him, but walked
among the graves, reading the poor memorials of the dead, and wondering
how many of the words of laudation that were inscribed on their tombs
were spoken of them while they were yet alive. Yet, surely, in the
lives of those to whom they applied the least, there had been moments
when the true nature, the nature God had given them, broke forth in
faith and tenderness, and would have justified the words inscribed on
their gravestones! I was yet wandering and reading, and stumbling over
the mounds, when my companions joined me, and, without a word, we
walked out of the churchyard. We were nearly home before one of us
spoke.

"That church is oppressive," said Percivale. "It looks like a great
sepulchre, a place built only for the dead--the church of the dead."

"It is only that it partakes with the living," I returned; "suffers
with them the buffetings of life, outlasts them, but shows, like the
shield of the Red-Cross Knight, the 'old dints of deep wounds.'"

"Still, is it not a dreary place to choose for a church to stand in?"

"The church must stand everywhere. There is no region into which it
must not, ought not to enter. If it refuses any earthly spot, it is
shrinking from its calling. Here this one stands for the sea as for the
land, high-uplifted, looking out over the waters as a sign of the haven
from all storms, the rest in God. And down beneath in its storehouse
lie the bodies of men--you saw the grave of some of them on the other
side--flung ashore from the gulfing sea. It may be a weakness, but one
would rather have the bones of his friend laid in the still Sabbath of
the churchyard earth, than sweeping and swaying about as Milton
imagines the bones of his friend Edward King, in that wonderful
'Lycidas.'" Then I told them the conversation I had had with the sexton
at Kilkhaven. "But," I went on, "these fancies are only the ghostly
mists that hang about the eastern hills before the sun rises. We shall
look down on all that with a smile by and by; for the Lord tells us
that if we believe in him we shall never die."

By this time we were back once more at the inn. We gave Connie a
description of what we had seen.

"What a brave old church!" said Connie.

The next day I awoke very early, full of the anticipated attempt. I got
up at once, found the weather most promising, and proceeded first of
all to have a look at Connie's litter, and see that it was quite sound.
Satisfied of this, I rejoiced in the contemplation of its lightness and
strength.

After breakfast I went to Connie's room, and told her that Mr.
Percivale and I had devised a treat for her. Her face shone at once.

"But we want to do it our own way."

"Of course, papa," she answered.

"Will you let us tie your eyes up?"

"Yes; and my ears and my hands too. It would be no good tying my feet,
when I don't know one big toe from the other."

And she laughed merrily.

"We'll try to keep up the talk all the way, so that you sha'n't weary
of the journey."

"You're going to carry me somewhere with my eyes tied up. O! how jolly!
And then I shall see something all at once! Jolly! jolly!--Getting
tired!" she repeated. "Even the wind on my face would be pleasure
enough for half a day. I sha'n't get tired so soon as you will--you
dear, kind papa! I am afraid I shall be dreadfully heavy. But I sha'n't
jerk your arms much. I will lie so still!"

"And you won't mind letting Mr. Percivale help me to carry you?"

"No. Why should I, if he doesn't mind it? He looks strong enough; and I
am sure he is nice, and won't think me heavier than I am."

"Very well, then. I will send mamma and Wynnie to dress you at once;
and we shall set out as soon as you are ready."

She clapped her hands with delight, then caught me round the neck and
gave me one of my own kisses as she called the best she had, and began
to call as loud as she could on her mamma and Wynnie to come and dress
her.

It was indeed a glorious morning. The wind came in little wafts, like
veins of cool white silver amid the great, warm, yellow gold of the
sunshine. The sea lay before us a mound of blue closing up the end of
the valley, as if overpowered into quietness by the lordliness of the
sun overhead; and the hills between which we went lay like great sheep,
with green wool, basking in the blissful heat. The gleam from the
waters came up the pass; the grand castle crowned the left-hand steep,
seeming to warm its old bones, like the ruins of some awful megatherium
in the lighted air; one white sail sped like a glad thought across the
spandrel of the sea; the shadows of the rocks lay over our path, like
transient, cool, benignant deaths, through which we had to pass again
and again to yet higher glory beyond; and one lark was somewhere in
whose little breast the whole world was reflected as in the convex
mirror of a dewdrop, where it swelled so that he could not hold it, but
let it out again through his throat, metamorphosed into music, which he
poured forth over all as the libation on the outspread altar of worship.

And of all this we talked to Connie as we went; and every now and then
she would clap her hands gently in the fulness of her delight, although
she beheld the splendour only as with her ears, or from the kisses of
the wind on her cheeks. But she seemed, since her accident, to have
approached that condition which Milton represents Samson as longing for
in his blindness, wherein the sight should be

  "through all parts diffused,
  That she might look at will through every pore."

I had, however, arranged with the rest of the company, that the moment
we reached the cliff over the shore, and turned to the left to cross
the isthmus, the conversation should no longer be about the things
around us; and especially I warned my wife and Wynnie that no
exclamation of surprise or delight should break from them before
Connie's eyes were uncovered. I had said nothing to either of them
about the difficulties of the way, that, seeing us take them as
ordinary things, they might take them so too, and not be uneasy.

We never stopped till we reached the foot of the peninsula, _née_
island, upon which the keep of Tintagel stands. There we set Connie
down, to take breath and ease our arms before we began the arduous way.

"Now, now!" said Connie eagerly, lifting her hands in the belief that
we were on the point of undoing the bandage from her eyes.

"No, no, my love, not yet," I said, and she lay still again, only she
looked more eager than before.

"I am afraid I have tired out you and Mr. Percivale, papa," she said.

Percivale laughed so amusedly, that she rejoined roguishly--

"O yes! I know every gentleman is a Hercules--at least, he chooses to
be considered one! But, notwithstanding my firm faith in the fact, I
have a little womanly conscience left that is hard to hoodwink."

There was a speech for my wee Connie to make! The best answer and the
best revenge was to lift her and go on. This we did, trying as well as
we might to prevent the difference of level between us from tilting the
litter too much for her comfort.

"Where _are_ you going, papa?" she said once, but without a sign of
fear in her voice, as a little slip I made lowered my end of the litter
suddenly. "You must be going up a steep place. Don't hurt yourself,
dear papa."

We had changed our positions, and were now carrying her, head foremost,
up the hill. Percivale led, and I followed. Now I could see every
change on her lovely face, and it made me strong to endure; for I did
find it hard work, I confess, to get to the top. It lay like a little
sunny pool, on which all the cloudy thoughts that moved in some unseen
heaven cast exquisitely delicate changes of light and shade as they
floated over it. Percivale strode on as if he bore a feather behind
him. I did wish we were at the top, for my arms began to feel like
iron-cables, stiff and stark--only I was afraid of my fingers giving
way. My heart was beating uncomfortably too. But Percivale, I felt
almost inclined to quarrel with him before it was over, he strode on so
unconcernedly, turning every corner of the zigzag where I expected him
to propose a halt, and striding on again, as if there could be no
pretence for any change of procedure. But I held out, strengthened by
the play on my daughter's face, delicate as the play on an opal--one
that inclines more to the milk than the fire.

When at length we turned in through the gothic door in the battlemented
wall, and set our lovely burden down upon the grass--

"Percivale," I said, forgetting the proprieties in the affected humour
of being angry with him, so glad was I that we had her at length on the
mount of glory, "why did you go on walking like a castle, and pay no
heed to me?"

"You didn't speak, did you, Mr. Walton," he returned, with just a
shadow of solicitude in the question.

"No. Of course not," I rejoined.

"O, then," he returned, in a tone of relief, "how could I? You were my
captain: how could I give in so long as you were holding on?"

I am afraid the _Percivale_, without the _Mister_, came again and again
after this, though I pulled myself up for it as often as I caught
myself.

"Now, papa!" said Connie from the grass.

"Not yet, my dear. Wait till your mamma and Wynnie come. Let us go and
meet them, Mr. Percivale."

"O yes, do, papa. Leave me alone here without knowing where I am or
what kind of a place I am in. I should like to know how it feels. I
have never been alone in all my life."

"Very well, my dear," I said; and Percivale and I left her alone in the
ruins.

We found Ethelwyn toiling up with Wynnie helping her all she could.

"Dear Harry," she said, "how could you think of bringing Connie up such
an awful place? I wonder you dared to do it."

"It's done you see, wife," I answered, "thanks to Mr. Percivale, who
has nearly torn the breath out of me. But now we must get you up, and
you will say that to see Connie's delight, not to mention your own, is
quite wages for the labour."

"Isn't she afraid to find herself so high up?"

"She knows nothing about it yet."

"You do not mean you have left the child there with her eyes tied up."

"To be sure. We could not uncover them before you came. It would spoil
half the pleasure."

"Do let us make haste then. It is surely dangerous to leave her so."

"Not in the least; but she must be getting tired of the darkness. Take
my arm now."

"Don't you think Mrs. Walton had better take my arm," said Percivale,
"and then you can put your hand on her back, and help her a little that
way."

We tried the plan, found it a good one, and soon reached the top. The
moment our eyes fell upon Connie, we could see that she had found the
place neither fearful nor lonely. The sweetest ghost of a smile hovered
on her pale face, which shone in the shadow of the old gateway of the
keep, with light from within her own sunny soul. She lay in such still
expectation, that you would have thought she had just fallen asleep
after receiving an answer to a prayer, reminding me of a little-known
sonnet of Wordsworth's, in which he describes as the type of Death--

  "the face of one
  Sleeping alone within a mossy cave
  With her face up to heaven; that seemed to have
  Pleasing remembrance of a thought foregone;
  A lovely beauty in a summer grave."

[Footnote: _Miscellaneous Sonnets_, part i.28.]

But she heard our steps, and her face awoke.

"Is mamma come?"

"Yes, my darling. I am here," said her mother. "How do you feel?"

"Perfectly well, mamma, thank you. Now, papa!"

"One moment more, my love. Now, Percivale."

We carried her to the spot we had agreed upon, and while we held her a
little inclined that she might see the better, her mother undid the
bandage from her head.

"Hold your hands over her eyes, a little way from them," I said to her
as she untied the handkerchief, "that the light may reach them by
degrees, and not blind her."

Ethelwyn did so for a few moments, then removed them. Still for a
moment or two more, it was plain from her look of utter bewilderment,
that all was a confused mass of light and colour. Then she gave a
little cry, and to my astonishment, almost fear, half rose to a sitting
posture. One moment more and she laid herself gently back, and wept and
sobbed.

And now I may admit my reader to a share, though at best but a dim
reflex in my poor words, of the glory that made her weep.

Through the gothic-arched door in the battlemented wall, which stood on
the very edge of the precipitous descent, so that nothing of the
descent was seen, and the door was as a framework to the picture,
Connie saw a great gulf at her feet, full to the brim of a splendour of
light and colour. Before her rose the great ruins of rock and castle,
the ruin of rock with castle; rough stone below, clear green happy
grass above, even to the verge of the abrupt and awful precipice; over
it the summer sky so clear that it must have been clarified by sorrow
and thought; at the foot of the rocks, hundreds of feet below, the blue
waters breaking in white upon the dark gray sands; all full of the
gladness of the sun overflowing in speechless delight, and reflected in
fresh gladness from stone and water and flower, like new springs of
light rippling forth from the earth itself to swell the universal tide
of glory--all this seen through the narrow gothic archway of a door in
a wall--up--down--on either hand. But the main marvel was the look
sheer below into the abyss full of light and air and colour, its sides
lined with rock and grass, and its bottom lined with blue ripples and
sand. Was it any wonder that my Connie should cry aloud when the vision
dawned upon her, and then weep to ease a heart ready to burst with
delight? "O Lord God," I said, almost involuntarily, "thou art very
rich. Thou art the one poet, the one maker. We worship thee. Make but
our souls as full of glory in thy sight as this chasm is to our eyes
glorious with the forms which thou hast cloven and carved out of
nothingness, and we shall be worthy to worship thee, O Lord, our God."
For I was carried beyond myself with delight, and with sympathy with
Connie's delight and with the calm worship of gladness in my wife's
countenance. But when my eye fell on Wynnie, I saw a trouble mingled
with her admiration, a self-accusation, I think, that she did not and
could not enjoy it more; and when I turned from her, there were the
eyes of Percivale fixed on me in wonderment; and for the moment I felt
as David must have felt when, in his dance of undignified delight that
he had got the ark home again, he saw the contemptuous eyes of Michal
fixed on him from the window. But I could not leave it so. I said to
him--coldly I daresay:

"Excuse me, Mr. Percivale; I forgot for the moment that I was not
amongst my own family."

Percivale took his hat off.

"Forgive my seeming rudeness, Mr. Walton. I was half-envying and
half-wondering. You would not be surprised at my unconscious behaviour
if you had seen as much of the wrong side of the stuff as I have seen
in London."

I had some idea of what he meant; but this was no time to enter upon a
discussion. I could only say--

"My heart was full, Mr. Percivale, and I let it overflow."

"Let me at least share in its overflow," he rejoined, and nothing more
passed on the subject.

For the next ten minutes we stood in absolute silence. We had set
Connie down on the grass again, but propped up so that she could see
through the doorway. And she lay in still ecstasy. But there was more
to be seen ere we descended. There was the rest of the little islet
with its crop of down-grass, on which the horses of all the knights of
King Arthur's round table might have fed for a week--yes, for a
fortnight, without, by any means, encountering the short commons of
war. There were the ruins of the castle so built of plates of the
laminated stone of the rocks on which they stood, and so woven in or
more properly incorporated with the outstanding rocks themselves, that
in some parts I found it impossible to tell which was building and
which was rock--the walls themselves seeming like a growth out of the
island itself, so perfectly were they in harmony with, and in kind the
same as, the natural ground upon which and of which they had been
constructed. And this would seem to me to be the perfection of
architecture. The work of man's hands should be so in harmony with the
place where it stands that it must look as if it had grown out of the
soil. But the walls were in some parts so thin that one wonde

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