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There & Back

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #8879 · 936,393 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: There & Back

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8879]
                Most recently updated: March 9, 2018

Language: English

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Produced by Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders







THERE & BACK

By George Macdonald



CONTENTS

CHAP.

       I. FATHER, CHILD, AND NURSE
      II. STEPMOTHER AND NURSE
     III. THE FLIGHT
      IV. THE BOOKBINDER AND HIS PUPIL
       V. THE MANSONS
      VI. SIMON ARMOUR
     VII. COMPARISONS
    VIII. A LOST SHOE
      IX. A HOLIDAY
       X. THE LIBRARY
      XI. ALICE
     XII. MORTGRANGE
    XIII. THE BEECH-TREE
     XIV. AGAIN THE LIBRARY
      XV. BARBARA WYLDER
     XVI. BARBARA AND RICHARD
    XVII. BARBARA AND OTHERS
   XVIII. MRS. WYLDER
     XIX. MRS. WYLDER AND BARBARA
      XX. BARBARA AND HER CRITICS
     XXI. THE PARSON'S PARABLE
    XXII. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
   XXIII. A HUMAN GADFLY
    XXIV. RICHARD AND WINGFOLD
     XXV. WINGFOLD AND HIS WIFE
    XXVI. RICHARD AND ALICE
   XXVII. A SISTER
  XXVIII. BARBARA AND LADY ANN
    XXIX. ALICE AND BARBARA
     XXX. BARBARA THINKS
    XXXI. WINGFOLD AND BARBARA
   XXXII. THE SHOEING OF MISS BROWN
  XXXIII. RICHARD AND VIXEN
   XXXIV. BARBARA'S DUTY
    XXXV. THE PARSON'S COUNSEL
   XXXVI. LADY ANN MEDITATES
  XXXVII. LADY ANN AND RICHARD
 XXXVIII. RICHARD AND ARTHUR
   XXXIX. MR., MRS., AND MISS WYLDER
      XL. IN LONDON
     XLI. NATURE AND SUPERNATURE
    XLII. YET A LOWER DEEP
   XLIII. TO BE REDEEMED, ONE MUST REDEEM
    XLIV. A DOOR OPENED IN HEAVEN
     XLV. THE CARRIAGE
    XLVI. RICHARD'S DILEMMA
   XLVII. THE DOORS OF HARMONY AND DEATH
  XLVIII. DEATH THE DELIVERER
    XLIX. THE CAVE IN THE FIRE
       L. DUCK-FISTS
      LI. BARONET AND BLACKSMITH
     LII. UNCLE-FATHER AND AUNT-MOTHER
    LIII. MORNING
     LIV. BARBARA AT HOME
      LV. MISS BROWN
     LVI. WINGFOLD AND BARBARA
    LVII. THE BARONET'S WILL
   LVIII. THE HEIR
     LIX. WINGFOLD AND ARTHUR MANSON
      LX. RICHARD AND HIS FAMILY
     LXI. HEART TO HEART
    LXII. THE QUARREL
   LXIII. BARONET AND BLACKSMITH
    LXIV. THE BARONET'S FUNERAL
     LXV. THE PACKET
    LXVI. BARBARA'S DREAM




_NOTE._

_Some of the readers of this tale will be glad to know that the passage
with which it ends is a real dream; and that, with but three or four
changes almost too slight to require acknowledging, I have given it word
for word as the friend to whom it came set it down for me._




CHAPTER I. _FATHER, CHILD, AND NURSE._

It would be but stirring a muddy pool to inquire--not what motives
induced, but what forces compelled sir Wilton Lestrange to marry a woman
nobody knew. It is enough to say that these forces were mainly ignoble,
as manifested by their intermittent character and final cessation.
The _mésalliance_ occasioned not a little surprise, and quite as much
annoyance, among the county families,--failing, however, to remind any
that certain of their own grandmothers had been no better known to the
small world than lady Lestrange. It caused yet more surprise, though
less annoyance, in the clubs to which sir Wilton had hitherto been
indebted for help to forget his duties: they set him down as a greater
idiot than his friends had hitherto imagined him. For had he not been
dragged to the altar by a woman whose manners and breeding were hardly
on the level of a villa in St. John's Wood? Did any one know whence she
sprang, or even the name which sir Wilton had displaced with his own?
But sir Wilton himself was not proud of his lady; and if the thing had
been any business of theirs, it would have made no difference to him; he
would none the less have let them pine in their ignorance. Did not his
mother, a lady less dignified than eccentric, out of pure curiosity beg
enlightenment concerning her origin, and receive for answer from the
high-minded baronet, “Madam, the woman is my wife!”--after which the
prudent dowager asked no more questions, but treated her daughter-in-law
with neither better nor worse than civility. Sir Wilton, in fact, soon
came to owe his wife a grudge that he had married her, and none the
less that at the time he felt himself of a generosity more than human in
bestowing upon her his name. Creation itself, had he ever thought of it,
would have seemed to him a small thing beside such a gift!

That Robina Armour, after experience of his first advances, should have
at last consented to marry sir Wilton Lestrange, was in no sense in her
favour, although after a fashion she was in love with him--in love, that
is, with the gentleman of her own imagining whom she saw in the baronet;
while the baronet, on his part, was what he called in love with what he
called _the woman_. As he was overcome by her beauty, so was she by
his rank--an idol at whose clay feet is cast many a spiritual
birthright--and as mean a deity as any of man's device. But the
blacksmith's daughter was in many respects, notwithstanding, a woman
of good sense, with much real refinement, and a genuine regard for
rectitude. Although sir Wilton had never loved her with what was best
in him, it was not in spite of what was best in him that he fell in love
with her. Had his better nature been awake, it would have justified the
bond, and been strengthened by it.

Lady Lestrange's father was a good blacksmith, occasionally drunk in
his youth, but persistently sober now in his middle age; a long-headed
fellow, with reach and quality in the prudence which had long ceased to
appear to him the highest of virtues. At one period he had accounted it
the prime duty of existence to take care of oneself; and so much of this
belief had he communicated to his younger daughter, that she deported
herself so that sir Wilton married her--with the result that, when Death
knocked at her door, she welcomed him to her heart. The first cry of her
child, it is true, made her recall the welcome, but she had to go with
him, notwithstanding, when the child was but an hour old.

Not one of her husband's family was in the house when she died. Sir
Wilton himself was in town, and had been for the last six months,
preferring London and his club to Mortgrange and his wife. When a
telegram informed him that she was in danger, he did go home, but when
he arrived, she had been an hour gone, and he congratulated himself that
he had taken the second train.

There had been betwixt them no approach to union. When what sir Wilton
called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire, with a resentful
feeling that the handsome woman--his superior in everything that belongs
to humanity--had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth was, she had
ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her; it lay in the dulled eye
of the swiftly deteriorating man, which grew less and less capable
of seeing things as they were, and transmitted falser and falser
impressions of them. The light that was in him was darkness. The woman
that might have made a man of him, had there been the stuff, passed from
him an unprized gift, a thing to which he made Hades welcome.

It was decent, however, not to parade his relief. He retired to the
library, lit a cigar, and sat down to wish the unpleasant fuss of the
funeral over, and the house rid of a disagreeable presence. Had the
woman died of a disease to which he might himself one day have to
succumb, her death might, as he sat there, have chanced to raise for an
instant the watery ghost of an emotion; but, coming as it did, he had no
sympathetic interest in her death any more than in herself. Lolling in
the easiest of chairs, he revolved the turns of last night's play, until
it occurred to him that he might soon by a second marriage take amends
of his neighbours for their disapprobation of his first. So pleasant was
the thought that, brooding upon it, he fell asleep.

He woke, looked, rubbed his eyes, stared, rubbed them again, and stared.
A woman stood in front of him--one he had surely seen!--no, he had never
seen her anywhere! What an odd, inquiring, searching expression in her
two hideous black eyes! And what was that in her arms--something wrapt
in a blanket?

The message in the telegram recurred to him: there must have been a
child! The bundle must be the child! Confound the creature! What did it
want?

“Go away,” he said; “this is not the nursery!”

“I thought you might like to look at the baby, sir!” the woman replied.

Sir Wilton stared at the blanket.

“It might comfort you, I thought!” she went on, with a look he felt
to be strange. Her eyes were hard and dry, red with recent tears, and
glowing with suppressed fire.

Sir Wilton was courteous to most women, especially such as had no claim
upon him, but cherished respect for none. It was odd therefore that
he should now feel embarrassed. From some cause the machinery of his
self-content had possibly got out of gear; anyhow no answer came ready.
He had not the smallest wish to see the child, but was yet, perhaps,
unwilling to appear brutal. In the meantime, the woman, with gentle,
moth-like touch, was parting and turning back the folds of the
blanket, until from behind it dawned a tiny human face, whose angel was
suppliant, it may be, for the baptism of a father's first gaze.

The woman held out the child to sir Wilton, as if expecting him to take
it. He started to his feet, driving the chair a yard behind him, stuck
his hands in his pockets, and, with a face of disgust, cried--

“Great God! take the creature away.”

But he could not lift his eyes from the face nested in the blanket. It
seemed to fascinate him. The woman's eyes flared, but she did not speak.

“Uglier than sin!” he half hissed, half growled. “--I suppose the animal
is mine, but you needn't bring it so close to me! Take it away--and keep
it away. I will send for it when I want it--which won't be in a hurry!
My God! How hideous a thing may be, and yet human!”

“He is as God made him!” remarked the nurse, quietly for very wrath.

“Or the devil!” suggested his father.

Then the woman looked like a tigress. She opened her mouth, but closed
it again with a snap.

“I may say what I like of my own!” said the father. “Tell me the goblin
is none of mine, and I will be as respectful to him as you please. Prove
it, and I will give you fifty pounds. He's hideous! He's damnably ugly!
Deny it if you can.”

The woman held her peace. She could not, even to herself, call him a
child pleasant to look at. She gazed on him for a moment with pitiful,
protective eyes, then covered his face as if he were dead, but she did
not move.

“Why don't you go?” said the baronet.

Instead of replying, she began, as by a suddenly confirmed resolve,
to remove the coverings at the other end of the bundle, and presently
disclosed the baby's feet. The baronet gazed wondering. To what might
not assurance be about to subject him? She took one of the little feet
in a hard but gentle hand, and spreading out “the pink, five-beaded
baby-toes,” displayed what even the inexperience of the baronet
could not but recognize as remarkable: between every pair of toes was
stretched a thin delicate membrane. She laid the foot down, took up the
other, and showed the same peculiarity. The child was web-footed, as
distinctly as any properly constituted duckling! Then she lifted, one
after the other, the tiny hands, beautiful to any eye that understood,
and showed between the middle and third finger of each, the same sort of
membrane rising half-way to the points of them.

“I see!” said the baronet, with a laugh that was not nice, having in it
no merriment, “the creature is a monster!--Well, if you think I am to
blame, I can only protest you are mistaken. _I_ am not web-footed! The
duckness must come from the other side.”

“I hope you will remember, sir Wilton!”

“Remember? What do you mean? Take the monster away.”

The woman rearranged the coverings of the little crooked legs.

“Won't you look at your lady before they put her in her coffin?” she
said when she had done.

“What good would that do her? She's past caring!--No, I won't: why
should I? Such sights are not pleasant.”

“The coffin's a lonely chamber, sir Wilton; lonely to lie all day and
all night in!”

“No lonelier for one than for another!” he replied, with an involuntary
recoil from his own words. For the one thing a man must believe--yet
hardly believes--is, that he shall one day die. “She'll be better
without me, anyhow!”

“You are heartless, sir Wilton!”

“Mind your own business. If I choose to be heartless, I may have my
reasons. Take the child away.”

Still she did not move. The baby, young as he was, had thrown the
blanket from his face, and the father's eyes were fixed on it: while he
gazed the nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness.
Without absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant
well could be.

“My God!” he said again--for he had a trick of crying out as if he had
a God--“the little brute hates me! Take it away, woman. Take it away
before I strangle it! I can't answer for myself if it keeps on looking
at me!”

With a glance whose mingled anger and scorn the father did not see, the
nurse turned and went.

He kept staring after her till the door shut, then fell back into his
chair, exclaiming once more, “My God!”--What or whom he meant by the
word, it were hard to say.

“Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that the fine woman I
married--for she _was_ a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!--should have
died to present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human!
It's an affront to the family! Ah! the strain _will_ show! They say your
sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I
was! But she bewitched me! I _was_ bewitched!--Curse the little monster!
I shan't breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor?
He ought to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!”

Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident
in him would have been his strong likeness to his father--whose
features were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment, their
expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children,
and the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child
unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and look
back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if to
weigh the peril he had been in.

As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God's children, the woman
bore her charge up staircases, and through corridors and passages, to
the remote nursery, where, in a cradle whose gay furniture contrasted
sadly with the countenance of the child and the fierceness of her
own eyes, she gently laid him down. But long after he was asleep, she
continued to bend over him, as if with difficulty restraining herself
from clasping him again to her bosom.

Jane Tuke had been married four or five years, but had no children, and
the lack seemed to have intensified her maternity. Elder sister to lady
Lestrange, she had gone gladly to receive her child in her arms, and had
watched and waited for it with an expectation far stronger than that of
the mother; for so thorough was lady Lestrange's disappointment in
her husband, that she regarded the advent of his child almost with
indifference. Jane had an absolute passion for children. She had married
a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope. This
divinely inexplicable child-passion is as unintelligible to those
devoid of it, as its absence is marvellous to those possessed by it. Its
presence is its justification, its being its sole explanation, itself
its highest reason. Surely on those who cherish it, the shadow of the
love-creative God must rest more than on some other women! Unpleasing as
was the infant, to know him her own would have made the world a paradise
to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation at the wrongs already
heaped upon him. Hardly born, he was persecuted! Ugly! he was _not_
ugly! Was he not come straight from the fountain of life, from the
Father of children? That such a father as she had left in the library
should repudiate him was well! She loved to think of his rejection.
She brooded with delight, in the midst of her wrath, on every word of
disgust that had fallen from his unfatherly lips. The more her baby was
rejected, the more he was hers! He belonged to her, and her only, for
she only loved him! She could say with _France_ in _King Lear_, “Be
it lawful I take up what's cast away!” To her the despised one was the
essence of all riches. The joy of a miser is less than the joy of a
mother, as gold is less than a live soul, as greed is less than love.
No vision of jewels ever gave such a longing as this woman longed with
after the child of her dead sister.

The body that bore was laid in the earth, the thing born was left upon
it. The mother had but come, exposed her infant on the rough shore
of time, and forsaken him in his nakedness. There he lay, not knowing
whence he came, or whither he was going, urged to live by a hunger
and thirst he had not invented, and did not understand. His mother had
helplessly forsaken him, but the God in another woman had taken him up:
there was a soul to love him, two arms to carry him, and a strong heart
to shelter him.

Sir Wilton returned to London, and there enjoyed himself--not much,
but a little the more that no woman sat at Mortgrange with a right to
complain that he took his pleasure without her. He lived the life of the
human animals frequenting the society of their kind from a gregarious
instinct, and for common yet opposing self-ends. He had begun to assume
the staidness, if not dullness, of the animal whose first youth has
departed, but he was only less frolicsome, not more human. He was
settling down to what he had made himself; no virtue could claim a share
in the diminished rampancy of his vices. What a society is that which
will regard as reformed the man whom assuaging fires have left an
exhausted slag--a thing for which as yet no use is known, who suggests
no promise of change or growth, gives no poorest hint of hope concerning
his fate!

With the first unrecognized sense of approaching age, a certain habit
of his race began to affect him, and the idea of a quieter life, with a
woman whose possession would make him envied, grew mildly attractive. A
brilliant marriage in another county would, besides, avenge him on
the narrow-minded of his own, who had despised his first choice! With
judicial family-eye he surveyed the eligible women of his acquaintance.
It was, no doubt, to his disadvantage that already an heir lay “mewling
and puking in the nurse's arms;” for a woman who might willingly be
mother to the inheritor of such a property as his, might not find
attractive the notion of her first being her husband's second son. But
slips between cups and lips were not always on the wrong side! Such
a moon-calf as Robina's son could not with justice represent the
handsomest man and one of the handsomest women of their time. The heir
that fate had palmed upon him might very well be doomed to go the way so
many infants went!

He spread the report that the boy was sickly. A notion that he was not
likely to live prevailed about Mortgrange, which, however originated,
was nourished doubtless by the fact that he was so seldom seen. In
reality, however, there was not a healthier child in all England than
Richard Lestrange.

Sir Wilton's relations took as little interest in the heir as himself,
and there was no inducement for any of them to visit Mortgrange; the
aunt-mother, therefore, had her own way with him. She was not liked in
the house. The servants said she cared only for the little toad of a
baronet, and would do nothing for her comfort. They had, however, just a
shadow of respect for her: if she encouraged no familiarity, she did not
meddle, and was independent of their aid. Even the milking of the cow
which had been, through her persistence, set apart for the child, she
did herself. She sought no influence in the house, and was nothing loved
and little heeded.

Sir Wilton had not again seen his heir, who was now almost a year old,
when the rumour reached Mortgrange that the baronet was about to be
married.

Naturally, the news was disquieting to Jane. The hope, however, was left
her, that the stepmother might care as little for the child as did the
father, and that so, for some years at least, he might be left to her.
It was a terrible thought to the loving woman that they might be parted;
a more terrible thought that her baby might become a man like his
father. Of all horrors to a decent woman, a bad man must be the worst!
If by her death she could have left the child her hatred of evil, Jane
would have willingly died: she loved her husband, but her sister's boy
was in danger!




CHAPTER II. _STEPMOTHER AND NURSE._

The rumour of sir Wilton's marriage was, as rumour seldom is, correct.
Before the year was out, lady Ann Hardy, sister to the earl of Torpavy,
representing an old family with a drop or two of very bad blood in
it, became lady Ann Lestrange How much love there may have been in the
affair, it is unnecessary to inquire, seeing the baronet was what he
was, and the lady understood the _what_ pretty well. She might have
preferred a husband not so much what sir Wilton was, but she was
nine-and-twenty, and her brother was poor. She said to herself, I
suppose, that she might as well as another undertake his reform: some
one must! and married him. She had not much of a trousseau, but was
gorgeously attired for the wedding. It is true she had to return to the
earl three-fourths of the jewels she wore; but they were family jewels,
and why should she not have some good of them? She started with fifty
pounds of her own in her pocket, and a demeanour in her person equal
to fifty millions. When they arrived at Mortgrange, the moon was indeed
still in the sky, but the honey-pot, to judge by the appearance of the
twain, was empty: twain they were, and twain would be. The man wore a
look of careless all-rightness, tinged with an expression of indifferent
triumph: he had what he wanted; what his lady might think of her side
of the bargain, he neither thought nor cared. As to the woman, let her
reflections be what they might, not a soul would come to the knowledge
of them. Whatever it was to others, her pale, handsome face was never
false to herself, never betrayed what she was thinking, never broke
the shallow surface of its frozen dignity. Will any man ever know how a
woman of ordinary decency feels after selling herself? I find the thing
hardly safe to ponder. No trace, no shadow of disappointment clouded the
countenance of lady Ann that sultry summer afternoon as she drove up the
treeless avenue. The education she had received--and education in
the worst sense it was! for it had brought out the worst in her--had
rendered her less than human. The form of her earthly presence had
been trained to a fashionable perfection; her nature had not been left
unaided in its reversion toward the vague animal type from which it was
developed: in the curve of her thin lips as they prepared to smile,
one could discern the veiled snarl and bite. Her eyes were grey, her
eyebrows dark; her complexion was a clear fair, her nose perfect, except
for a sharp pinch at the end of the bone; her nostrils were thin but
motionless; her chin was defective, and her throat as slender as
her horrible waist; her hands and feet were large even for “her tall
personage.”

After his lady had had a cup of tea, sir Wilton, for something to
do, proposed taking her over the house, which was old, and worthy of
inspection. In their progress they came to a door at the end of a long
and rather tortuous passage. Sir Wilton did not know how the room was
occupied, or he would doubtless have passed it by; but as its windows
gave a fine view of the park, he opened the door, and lady Ann entered.
Sudden displeasure shortened her first step; pride or something worse
lengthened the next, as she bore down on a woman too much occupied with
a child on her knee to look up at the sound of her entrance. When,
a moment after, she did look up, the dreaded stepmother was looking
straight down on her baby. Their eyes encountered. Jane met an icy
stare, and lady Ann a gaze of defiance--an expression by this time
almost fixed on the face of the nurse, for in her spirit she heard every
unspoken remark on her child. Not a word did the lady utter, but to
Jane, her eyes, her very breath seemed to say with scorn, “Is _that_ the
heir?” Sir Wilton did not venture a single look: he was ashamed of his
son, and already a little afraid of his wife, whom he had once seen
close her rather large teeth in a notable way. As she turned toward the
window, however, he stole a glance at his offspring: the creature was
not quite so ugly as before--not quite so repulsive as he had pictured
him! But, good heavens! he was on the lap of the same woman whose
fierceness had upset him almost as much as his child's ugliness! He
walked to the window after his wife. She gazed for a moment, turned with
indifference, and left the room. Her husband followed her. A glance of
fear, dislike, and defiance, went after them from Jane.

Stronger contrast than those two women it would be hard to find. Jane's
countenance was almost coarse, but its rugged outline was almost grand.
Her hair grew low down on her forehead, and she had deep-set eyes. Her
complexion was rough, her nose large and thick. Her mouth was large
also, but, when unaffected by her now almost habitual antagonism, the
curve of her lip was sweet, and occasionally humorous. Her chin was
strong, and the total of her face what we call masculine; but when
she silently regarded her child, it grew beautiful with the radiant
tenderness of protection.

Her visitors left the door open behind them; Jane rose and shut it,
sat down again, and gazed motionless at the infant. Perhaps he vaguely
understood the sorrow and dread of her countenance, for he pulled a long
face of his own, and was about to cry. Jane clasped him to her bosom in
an agony: she felt certain she would not long be permitted to hold him
there. In the silent speech of my lady's mouth, her jealous love saw the
doom of her darling. What precise doom she dared not ask herself; it
was more than enough that she, indubitably his guardian as if sent from
heaven to shield him, must abandon him to his natural enemy, one who
looked upon him as the adversary of her own children. It was a thought
not to be thought, an idea for which there should be no place in her
bosom! Unfathomable as the love between man and woman is the love of
woman to child.

She spent a wakeful night. From the decree of banishment sure to go
forth against her, there was no appeal! Go she must! Yet her heart cried
out that he was her own. In the same lap his mother had lain before him!
She had carried her by day, and at night folded her in the same arms,
herself but six years old--old enough to remember yet the richness
unspeakable of her new possession. Never had come difference betwixt
them until Robina began to give ear to sir Wilton, whom Jane could not
endure. When she responded, as she did at once, to her sister's cry for
her help, she made her promise that no one should understand who she
was, but that she should in the house be taken for and treated as a
hired nurse. Why Jane stipulated thus, it were hard to say, but so
careful were they both, that no one at Mortgrange suspected the nurse
as personally interested in the ugly heir left in her charge! No one
dreamed that the child's aunt had forsaken her husband to nurse him, and
was living _for_ him day and night. She, in her turn, had promised her
sister never to leave him, and this pledge strengthened the bond of
her passion. The only question was _how_ she was to be faithful to her
pledge, _how_ to carry matters when she was turned away. With those
thin, close-pressed lips in her mind's eye, she could not count on
remaining where she was beyond a few days.

She was not only a woman capable of making up her mind, but a woman of
resource, with the advantage of having foreseen and often pondered the
possibility of that which was now imminent. The same night, silent above
the sleep of her darling, she sat at work with needle and scissors far
into the morning, remodelling an old print dress. For nights after, she
was similarly occupied, though not a scrap or sign of the labour was
visible in the morning.

The crisis anticipated came within a fortnight. Lady Ann did not show
herself a second time in the nursery, but sending for Jane, informed her
that an experienced nurse was on her way from London to take charge
of the child, and her services would not be required after the next
morning.

“For, of course,” concluded her ladyship, “I could not expect a woman of
your years to take an under-nurse's place!”

“Please your ladyship, I will gladly,” said Jane, eager to avoid or at
least postpone the necessity forcing itself upon her.

“I intend you to go--and _at once_,” replied her ladyship; “--that is,
the moment Mrs. Thornycroft arrives. The housekeeper will take care that
you have your month's wages in lieu of warning.”

“Very well, my lady!--Please, your ladyship, when may I come and see the
child?”

“Not at all. There is no necessity.”

“Never, my lady?”

“Decidedly.”

“Then at least I may ask why you send me away so suddenly!”

“I told you that I want a properly qualified nurse to take your place.
My wish is to have the child more immediately under my own eye than
would be agreeable if you kept your place. I hope I speak plainly!”

“Quite, my lady.”

“And let me, for your own sake, recommend you to behave more
respectfully when you find another place.”

What she was doing lady Ann was incapable of knowing. A woman
love-brooding over a child is at the gate of heaven; to take her child
from her is to turn her away from more than paradise.

Jane went in silence, seeming to accept the inevitable, too proud to
wipe away the tear whose rising she could not help--a tear not for
herself, nor yet for the child, but for the dead mother in whose place
she left such a woman. She walked slowly back to the nursery, where her
charge was asleep, closed the door, sat down by the cot, and sat for a
while without moving. Then her countenance began to change, and slowly
went on changing, until at last, as through a mist of troubled emotion,
out upon the strong, rugged face broke, with strange suggestion of a
sunset, the glow of resolve and justified desire. A maid more friendly
than the rest brought her some tea, but Jane said nothing of what had
occurred. When the child awoke, she fed him, and played with him a long
time--till he was thoroughly tired, when she undressed him, and laying
him down, set about preparing his evening meal. No one could have
perceived in her any difference, except indeed it were a subdued
excitement in her glowing eyes. When it was ready, she went to her box,
took from it a small bottle, and poured a few dark-coloured drops into
the food.

“God forgive me! it's but this once!” she murmured.

The child seemed not quite to relish his supper, but did not refuse it,
and was presently asleep in her arms. She laid him down, took a book,
and began to read.




CHAPTER III. _THE FLIGHT._

She read until every sound had died in the house, every sound from
garret to cellar, except the ticking of clock, and the tinkling cracks
of sinking fires and cooling grates. In the regnant silence she rose,
laid aside her book, softly opened the door, and stepped as softly into
the narrow passage. A moment or two she listened, then stole on tiptoe
to the main corridor, and again listened. She went next to the head of
the great stair, and once more stood and listened. Then she crept
down to the drawing-room, saw that there was no light in the library,
billiard-room, or smoking-room, and with stealthy feet returned to
the nursery. There she closed the door she had left open, and took the
child. He lay in her arms like one dead. She removed everything he wore,
and dressed him in the garments which for the last fortnight she had
been making for him from clothes of her own. When she had done, he
looked like any cottager's child; there was nothing in his face to
contradict his attire. She regarded the result for a moment with a
triumph of satisfaction, laid him down, and proceeded to put away the
clothes he had worn.

Over the top of the door was a small cupboard in the wall, into which
she had never looked until the day before, when she opened it and found
it empty. She placed a table under it, and a chair on the table, climbed
up, laid in it everything she had taken off the child, locked the door
of it, put the key in her pocket, and got down. Then she took the cloak
and hood he had hitherto worn out of doors, laid them down beside
the wardrobe, and lifting the end of it with a strength worthy of the
blacksmith's daughter, pushed them with her foot into the hollow between
the bottom of the wardrobe and the floor of the room. This done, she
looked at the timepiece on the mantelshelf, saw it was one o'clock,
and sat down to recover her breath. But the next moment she was on her
knees, sobbing. By and by she rose, wiped the hot tears from her eyes,
and went carefully about the room, gathering up this and that, and
putting it into her box. Then having locked it, she stuffed a number of
small pieces of paper into the lock, using a crochet-needle to get them
well among the wards. Lastly, she put on a dress she had never worn at
Mortgrange, took up the child, who was still in a dead sleep, wrapped
him in an old shawl, and stole with him from the room.

Like those of a thief--or murderess rather, her scared eyes looked
on this side and that, as she crept to a narrow stair that led to the
kitchen. She knew every turn and every opening in this part of the
house: for weeks she had been occupied, both intellect and imagination,
with the daring idea she was now carrying into effect.

She reached the one door that might yield a safe exit, unlocked it
noiselessly, and stood in a little paved yard with a pump, whence
another door in an ivy-covered wall opened into the kitchen-garden. The
moon shone large and clear, but the shadow of the house protected her.
It was the month of August, warm and still. If only it had been dark!
Outside the door she was still in the shadow. For the first time in her
life she loved the darkness. Along the wall she stole as if clinging to
it. Yet another door led into a shrubbery surrounding the cottage of the
head-gardener, whence a back-road led to a gate, over which she could
climb, so to reach the highway, along whose honest, unshadowed spaces
she must walk miles and miles before she could even hope herself safe.

She stood at length in the broad moonlight, on the white, far-reaching
road. Her heart beat so fast as almost to stifle her. She dared not look
down at the child, lest some one should see her and look also! The moon
herself had an aspect of suspicion! Why did she keep staring so? For an
instant she wished herself back in the nursery. But she knew it would
only be to do it all over again: it _had_ to be done! Leave the child
of her sister where he was counted in the way! with those who hated him!
where his helpless life was in danger! She could not!

But, while she thought, she did not stand. Softly, with great strides
she went stalking along the road. She knew the country: she was not many
miles from her father's forge, whence at moments she seemed to hear the
ring of his hammer through the still night.

She kept to the road for three or four miles, then turned aside on a
great moor stretching far to the south: daybreak was coming fast; she
must find some cottage or natural shelter, lest the light should betray
her. When the sun had made his round, and yielded his place to the
friendly night, she would start afresh! In her bundle she had enough for
the baby; for herself, she could hold out many hours unfed. A few more
miles from Mortgrange, and no one would know her, neither from any
possible description could they be suspected in the garments they wore!
Her object in hiding their usual attire had been, that it might be taken
for granted they had gone away in it.

She did not slacken her pace till she had walked five miles more. Then
she stood a moment, and gazed about her. The great heath was all around,
solitary as the heaven out of which the solitary moon, with no child
to comfort her, was enviously watching them. But she would not stop to
rest, save for the briefest breathing space! On and on she went until
moorland miles five more, as near as she could judge, were behind her.
Then at length she sat down upon a stone, and a timid flutter of
safety stirred in her bosom, followed by a gush of love victorious. Her
treasure! her treasure! Not once on the long way had she looked at him.
Now she folded back the shawl, and gazed as not even a lover could have
gazed on the sleeping countenance of his rescued bride. The passion of
no other possession could have equalled the intensity of her
conscious _having_. Not one created being had a right to the child but
herself!--yet any moment he might be taken from her by a cold-hearted,
cruel stepmother, and given to a hired woman! She started to her feet,
and hurried on. The boy was no light weight, and she had things to carry
besides, which her love said he could not do without; yet before seven
o'clock she had cleared some sixteen miles, in a line from Mortgrange as
straight as she could keep.

She thought she must now be near a village whose name she knew; but she
dared not show herself lest some advertisement might reach it after
she was gone, and lead to the discovery of the route she had taken.
She turned aside therefore into an old quarry, there to spend the day,
unvisited of human soul. The child was now awake, but still drowsy. She
gave him a little food, and ate the crust she had saved from her tea the
night before. During the long hours she slept a good deal by fits, and
when the evening came, was quite fit to resume her tramp. To her joy it
came cloudy, giving her courage to enter a little shop she saw on the
outskirts of the village, and buy some milk and some bread. From this
point she kept the road: she might now avail herself of help from cart
or wagon. She was not without money, but feared the railway.

It is needless to follow her wanderings, always toward London, where was
her husband, and her home. A weary, but happy, and almost no longer an
anxious woman, she reached at length a certain populous suburb, and was
soon in the arms of her husband.




CHAPTER IV. _THE BOOKBINDER AND HIS PUPIL._

It was the middle of the day before they were missed. Their absence
caused for a time no commotion; the servants said nurse must have taken
the child for his usual walk. But when the nurse from London came,
and, after renewed search and inquiry, nothing was heard of them, their
disappearance could no longer be kept from lady Ann. She sent to inform
her husband.

Sir Wilton asked a question or two of her messenger, said the thing must
be seen to, finished his cigar, threw the stump in the fire, and went to
his wife; when at once they began to discuss, not the steps to be taken
for the recovery of the child, but the woman's motive for stealing him.
The lady insisted it was revenge for having been turned away, and that
she would, as soon as she reached a suitable place, put an end to his
life: she had seen murder in her eyes! The father opined there was
no such danger: he remembered, though he did not mention it, the
peculiarity of the woman's behaviour when first he saw her. There was
no limit, he said, to the unnatural fancies of women; some were
disgustingly fond of children, even other women's children. Plain as the
infant was, he did not doubt she had taken a fancy to him, and therefore
declined to part with him. The element of revenge might, he allowed,
have a share in the deed; but that would be satisfied with leaving them
in doubt of his fate. For his part, he made her welcome to him! To this
lady Ann gave no answer: she was not easily shocked, and could, without
consternation, have regarded his disappearance as final. But something
must at least appear to be done! Unpleasant things might be said, and
uncertainty was full of annoyance!

“You must be careful, sir Wilton,” she remarked. “Nobody thinks you
believe the child your own.”

Sir Wilton laughed.

“I never had a doubt on the subject. I wish I had: he's not to my
credit. If we never hear of him again, the better for the next!”

“That is true!” rejoined lady Ann. “But what if, after we had forgotten
all about him, he were to turn up again?”

“That would be unpleasant--and is indeed a reason why we should look
for him. Better find him than live in doubt! Besides, the world would be
uncharitable enough to hint that you had made away with him: it's what
ought to have been done when first he appeared. I give you my word,
Ann, he was a positive monster! The object was actually
web-footed!--web-footed like any frog!”

“You must let the police know,” said the lady.

“That the child is web-footed? No, I think not!” yawned sir Wilton.

He got up, went out, and ordered a groom to ride hard to the village--as
hard as he could go--and let the police understand what had occurred.
Within the hour a constable appeared, come to inquire when last the
fugitives were seen, and what they wore--the answer to which latter
question set the police looking for persons very different in appearance
from Jane and her nursling. Nothing was heard of them, and the inquiry,
never prosecuted with any vigour, was by degrees dropped entirely.

John Tuke had grumbled greatly at his wife's desertion of him for
grandees who would never thank her; but he gave in to the prolongation
of her absence with a better grace, when he learned how the motherless
baby was regarded by his own people. The humanity of the man rose in
defence of the injured. He felt also that, in espousing the cause of his
wife's nephew, scorned by his baronet father, he was taking the part
of his own down-trodden class. He was greatly perplexed, however, as to
what end the thing was to have. Must he live without his wife till the
boy was sent to school?

He was in bed and fast asleep, when suddenly opening his eyes, he saw
beside him the wife he had not seen for twelve months, with the stolen
child in her arms. When he heard how the stepmother had treated her, and
how the babe was likely to fare among its gentle kin, he was filled with
fresh indignation; but, while thoroughly appreciating and approving his
wife's decision and energy, he saw to what the deed exposed them, and
augured frightful consequences to the discovery that seemed almost
certain. But when he understood the precautions she had taken, and
bethought himself how often the police fail, he had better hopes of
escape. One thing he never dreamed of--and that was, restoring the
child. Often at night he would lie wondering how far, in case of their
being tried for kidnapping, the defence would reach, that his wife was
the child's aunt; and whether the fact that she was none the less a poor
woman standing up against the rich, would not render that or any plea
unavailing. Jane was, and long remained, serenely hopeful.

When she left for Mortgrange, they had agreed that her husband should
say she was gone to her father's; and as nobody where they lived knew
who or where her father was, nobody had the end of any clue. For some
time after her return she did not show herself, leaving it to her
husband to say she had come back with her baby. Then she began to appear
with the child, and so managed her references to her absence, that no
one dreamed of his not being her own, or imagined that she had left
her husband for other reason than to be tended at her old home in her
confinement. After a few years, even the fact of his not having been
born in that house was forgotten; and Richard Lestrange grew up as the
son of John Tuke, the bookbinder. Not in any mind was there a doubt as
to his parentage.

They lived on the very bank of the Thames, in a poor part of a populous,
busy, thriving suburb, far from fashionable, yet not without inhabitants
of refinement. Had not art and literature sent out a few suckers into
it, there would have been no place in it for John Tuke. For, more than
liking his trade, being indeed fond of it, he would not work for the
booksellers, but used his talent to the satisfaction of known customers,
of whom he had now not a few, for his reputation had spread beyond the
near neighbourhood. But while he worked cheaper, quality considered,
than many binders, even carefully superintending that most important yet
most neglected part of the handicraft, the sewing, he never undertook
cheap work. Never, indeed, without persuasion on the part of his
employer and expostulation on his own, did he consent to _half-bind_
a book. Hence it comes to be confessed, that, when _carte blanche_ was
given him, he would not infrequently expend upon a book an amount of
labour and a value of material quite out of proportion to the importance
of the book. Still, being a thoroughly conscientious workman, who never
hurried the forwarding, never cut from a margin a hair's breadth more
than was necessary, and hated finger-marks on the whiteness of a page,
he was well known as such, and had plenty of work--had often, indeed, to
refuse what was offered him, hence was able to decline all such jobs as
would give him no pleasure, and grew more fastidious as he grew older
in regard to the quality of the work he would undertake. He had never
employed a journeyman, and would never take more than two apprentices at
a time.

As Richard Lestrange grew, his chief pleasure was to be in the shop with
his uncle, and watch him at his varying work. I think his knowledge of
books as things led him the sooner to desire them as realities, for to
read he learned with avidity. When he was old enough to go to school,
his adopted father spared nothing he could spend to make him fit for
his future; wisely resolved, however, that he should know nothing of his
rights until he was of an age to understand them--except, indeed, sir
Wilton should die before that age arrived, when his cause would be too
much prejudiced by farther postponement of claim. Heartily they hoped
that their secret might remain a secret until their nephew should be
capable of protecting them from any untoward consequence of their well
intended crime.

Happily there was in the place, and near enough for the boy to attend it
easily, a good day-school upon an old foundation, whose fees were within
his father's means. Richard proved a fair student and became a great
reader. But he took such an intelligent and practical interest in the
work he saw going on at home, that he began, while yet a mere child, to
use paste and paper of his own accord. First he made manuscript-books
for his work at school, and for the copying of such verses as he took
a fancy to in his reading. Then inside the covers of some of these he
would make pockets for papers; and so advanced to small portfolios and
pocket-books, of which he would make presents to his companions, and
sometimes, when more ambitiously successful, to a master. In their
construction he used bits of coloured paper and scraps of leather,
chiefly morocco, which his father willingly made over to him, watching
his progress with an interest quite paternal, and showing a workman's
wisdom in this, that only when he saw him in a real difficulty would he
come to his aid--as, for instance, when first he struggled with a piece
of leather too thick for the bonds of paste, and must be taught how to
pare it to the necessary flexibility and compliance.

To become able to _make_ something is, I think, necessary to thorough
development. I would rather have son of mine a carpenter, a watchmaker,
a wood-carver, a shoemaker, a jeweller, a blacksmith, a bookbinder,
than I would have him earn his bread as a clerk in a counting-house.
Not merely is the cultivation of operant faculty a better education in
faculty, but it brings the man nearer to every thing operant; humanity
unfolds itself to him the readier; its ways and thoughts and modes of
being grow the clearer to both intellect and heart. The poetry of
life, the inner side of that nature which comes from him who, on the
Sabbath-days even, “worketh hitherto,” rises nearer the surface to
meet the eyes of the man who _makes._ What advantage the carpenter of
Nazareth gathered from his bench, is the inheritance of every workman,
in proportion as he does divine, that is, honest work.

Perceiving the faculty of the boy, his father--so let us call John Tuke
for the present--naturally thought it well to make him a gift of his
trade: it would always be a possession! “Whatever turn things may take,”
 he would remark to his wife, “the boy will have his bread in his hands.
And say what they will, the man who can gather his food off his own
bench, or screw it out of his own press, must be a freer man than he who
but for his inheritance would have to beg, steal, or die of hunger. And
who knows how long the world may permit idlers to fare of its best!”

For, after a fashion of his own, Tuke was a philosopher and a
politician. But his politics were those of the philosopher, not of the
politician.

Richard, with his great love of reading, and therefore of books, was
delighted to learn the craft which is their attendant and servitor. When
too young yet to wield the hammer without danger both to himself and the
book under it, he began to sew, and in a few weeks was able to bring
the sheets together entirely to the satisfaction of his father. From the
first he set him to do that essential part of the work in the best way,
that is, to sew every sheet round every cord: it is only when one can
perfectly work after the perfect rule, that he may be trusted with
variations and exceptions.

He went on teaching him until the boy could, he confessed, do almost
everything better than himself--went on until he had taught him every
delicacy, every secret of the craft. Richard developed a positive genius
for the work, seeming almost to learn it by intuition. A pocket-book,
with which he presented his father on his fiftieth birthday, brought out
his unqualified praise.

In the process he gradually revealed a predilection for a rarer use of
his faculty--a use more nice, while less distinguished, and not much
favoured by his father. It had its prime source deeper than the art
of book-binding--in the love of books themselves, not as leaves to be
bound, but as utterances to be heard. Certain dealers in old books
have loved some of them so as to refuse to part with them on any
terms; Richard, unable to possess more than a very few, manifested
his veneration for them in another and nearer fashion, running, as was
natural and healthy, in the lines of his calling.

For many months in diligent attendance at certain of the evening-classes
at King's College, he had developed a true insight into and sympathy
with what is best in our literature--chiefly in that of the sixteenth
century: from this grew an almost peculiar regard for old books. With
three or four shillings weekly at his disposal, he laid himself out to
discover and buy such volumes as, in themselves of value, were in so bad
a condition as to be of little worth from the mere bookseller's point
of view: with these for his first patients he opened a hospital, or
angel-asylum, for the lodging, restorative treatment, and systematic
invigoration of decayed volumes. Love and power combined made him look
on the dilapidated, slow-wasting abodes of human thought and delight
with a healing compassion--almost with a passion of healing. The worse
gnawed of the tooth of insect-time, the farther down any choice book in
the steep decline of years, the more intent was Richard on having
it. More and more skillful he grew, not only in rebinding such whose
clothing was past repair, but in restoring the tone of their very
constitution; and in so mending the ancient and beggarly garments of
others that they reassumed a venerable respectability. Through love,
he passed from an artisan to an artist. His reverence for the inner
reality, the book itself, in itself beyond time and decay, had roused
in him a child-like regard for its body, for its broken inclosure and
default of manifestation. He would espy the beauty of an old binding
through any amount of abrasion and laceration. To his eyes almost any
old binding was better for its book than any new one.

His father came to regard with wonder and admiration the redeeming
faculty of his son, whereby he would reinstate in strength and ripe
dignity a volume which he would have taken to pieces, and redressed like
an age-worn woman in a fashionable gown. So far did his son's superior
taste work upon his, that at length, if he opened a new binding, however
sombre, and saw a time-browned paper and old type within, the sight
would give him the shock of a discord.

But Tuke was in many things no other than a man of this world, and
sorely he doubted if such labour would ever have its counterpoise in
money. It paid better, because it was much easier, to reclothe than to
restore! to destroy and replace than to renew! When he had watched many
times for minutes together his son's delicate manipulation--in which he
patched without pauperizing, and subaided without humiliating--and at
last contemplating the finished result, he concluded him possessed of
a quite original faculty for book-healing.--“But alas,” he thought,
“genius seldom gets beyond board-wages!” It did not occur to him
that genius least requires more than board-wages. He encouraged him,
nevertheless, though mildly, in the pursuit of this neglected branch of
the binding-art.

As the days went on, and their love for their nephew grew with his
deserts, the uncle and aunt shrank more and more from the thought, which
every year compelled them to think the oftener, that the day was drawing
nigh when they must volunteer the confession that he was not their
child.

When he was about seventeen, Richard settled down to work with his
father, occasionally assisting him, but in general occupied with his
own special branch, in which Tuke, through his long connection with
book-lovers possessing small cherished libraries, was able to bring him
almost as many jobs as he could undertake. The fact that a volume could
be so repaired, stimulated the purchase of shabby books; and part of
what was saved on the price of a good copy was laid out on the amendment
of the poor one. But however much the youth delighted in it, he could
not but find the work fidgety and tiring; whence ensued the advantage
that he left it the oftener for a ramble, or a solitary hour on the
river. He had but few companions, his guardians, wisely or not, being
more fastidious about his associates than if he had been their very son.
His uncle, of strong socialistic opinions, and wont to dilate on human
equality--as if the thing that ought to be, and must one day come, could
be furthered by the assertion of its present existence--was, like the
holders of even higher theories, not a little apt to forget the practice
necessarily involved: this son of a baronet, seeing that he was the
son also of his wife's sister, was not to be brought up like one of the
many!

Ugliness in infancy is a promise, though perhaps a doubtful one, of
beauty in manhood; and in Richard's case the promise was fulfilled:
hardly a hint was left of the baby-face which had repelled his father.
He was now a handsome well-grown youth, with dark-brown hair, dark-green
eyes, broad shoulders, and a little stoop which made his aunt uneasy:
she would have had him join a volunteer corps, but he declared he had
not the time. He accepted her encouragement, however, to forsake his
work as often as he felt inclined. He had good health; what was better,
a good temper; and what was better still, a willing heart toward his
neighbour. A certain over-hanging of his brows was--especially when he
contracted them, as, in perplexity or endeavour, he not infrequently
did--called a scowl by such as did not love him; but it was of shallow
insignificance, and probably the trick of some ancestor.

Before long, his thinking began to take form in verse-making. It matters
little to my narrative whether he produced anything of original value or
not; utterance aids growth, which is the prime necessity of human as
of all other life. Not seldom, bent over his work, he would be evolving
some musical fashion of words--with no relaxation, however, of the sharp
attention and delicate handling required by the nature of that work. It
is the privilege of some kinds of labour, that they are compatible with
thoughts of higher things. At the book-keeper's desk, the clerk must
think of nothing but his work; he is chained to it as the galley-slave
to his oar; the shoemaker may be poet or mystic, or both; the ploughman
may turn a good furrow and a good verse together; Richard could at once
use hands and thoughts. It troubled his protectors that they could not
send him to college, but they comforted themselves that it would not be
too late when he returned to his natural position in society. They
had no plan in their minds, no date settled at which to initiate his
restoration. All they had determined was, that he must at least be a
grown man, capable of looking after his own affairs, when the first step
for it was taken.

John Tuke was one of those who acknowledge in some measure the claims of
their neighbour, but assert ignorance of any one who must be worshipped.
And in truth, the God presented to him by his teachers was one with
little claim on human devotion. The religious system brought to bear on
his youth had operated but feebly on his conscience, and not at all
on his affections. It had, however, so wrought upon his apprehensions,
that, when afterward persuaded there was no ground for agonizing
anticipation, he welcomed the conviction as in itself a redemption for
all men; “for, surely,” he argued, “fear is the worst of evils!” The
very approach of such a relief predisposed him to receive whatever
teaching might follow from the same source; and soon he believed
himself satisfied that the notion of religion--of duty toward an unseen
maker--was but an old-wives'-fable; and that, as to the hereafter, a
mere cessation of consciousness was the only reasonable expectation. The
testimony of his senses, although negative, he accepted as stronger
on that side than any amount of what could, he said, be but the purest
assertion on the other. Why should he heed an old book? why one more
than another? The world was around him: some things he must believe;
other things no man could! One thing was clear: every man was bound to
give his neighbour fair-play! He would press nothing upon Richard as to
God or no God! he would not be dogmatic! he only wanted to make a man
of him! And was he not so far successful? argued John. Was not Richard
growing up a diligent, honest fellow, loving books, and leading a good
life; whereas, had he been left to his father, he could not have escaped
being arrogant and unjust, despising the poor of his own flesh, and
caring only to please himself! In the midst of such superior causes
of satisfaction, it also pleased Tuke to reflect that the trade he had
taught his nephew was a clean one, which, while it rendered him superior
to any shrewd trick fortune might play him, would not make his hands
unlike those of a gentleman.

His aunt, however, kept wishing that Richard were better “set up,” and
looked more like his grandfather the blacksmith, whose trade she could
not help regarding as manlier than that of her husband. Hence she
had long cherished the desire that he should spend some time with her
father. But John would not hear of it. He would get working at the
forge, he said, and ruin his hands for the delicate art in which he was
now unapproachable.

For in certain less socialistic moods, John would insist on regarding
bookbinding, in all and any of its branches, not as a trade, but an art.




CHAPTER V. _THE MANSONS._

At school, Richard had been friendly with a boy of gentle nature, not
many years older than himself. The boy had stood his friend in more
than one difficulty, and Richard heartily loved him. But he had suddenly
disappeared from the school, and so from Richard's ken: for years he had
not seen him. One evening, as he was carrying home a book, he met this
Arthur Manson, looking worn and sad. He would have avoided Richard, but
he stopped him, and presently the old friendship was dominant. Arthur
told him his story. He had had to leave school because of the sudden
cessation, from what cause he did not know, of a certain annuity his
mother had till then enjoyed--rendering it imperative that he should
earn his own living, and contribute to her support, for although she
still had a little money, it was not nearly enough. His sister was at
work with a dressmaker, but as yet earning next to nothing. His mother
was a lady, he said, and had never done any work. He was himself in a
counting-house in the City, with a salary of forty pounds. He told him
where they lived, and Richard promised to go and see him, which he did
the next Sunday.

His friend's mother lived in a little house of two floors, one of a long
row lately built. The furniture was much too large, and it was difficult
to move in the tiny drawing-room. It showed a feeble attempt at
decoration, which made it look the poorer. Accustomed to his mother's
care of her things, Richard perceived a difference: these were much
finer but neglected, and looked as if they felt it. At their evening
meal, however, the tea was good, and the bread and butter were of the
best.

The mother was a handsome middle-aged woman--not so old, Richard somehow
imagined, as she looked. She was stout and florid, with plenty of black,
rather coarse hair, and seemed to Richard to have the carriage of a
lady, but not speech equal to her manners. She was polite to him, but
not apparently interested in her son's friend. Yet several times he
found her gazing at him with an expression that puzzled him. He had,
however, too clear a conscience to be troubled by any scrutiny. All
the evening Arthur's face wore the same look of depression, and Richard
wondered what could be amiss. He learned afterward that the mother was
so self-indulgent, and took so little care to make the money go as far
as it could, that he had not merely to toil from morning to night at
uncongenial labour, but could never have the least recreation, and was
always too tired when he came home to understand any book he attempted
to read. Richard learned also that he had no greatcoat, and went to
the City in the winter with only a shabby comforter in addition to the
clothes he had worn all the summer. But it was not Arthur who told him
this.

The girl was a graceful little creature, with the same sad look her
brother had, but not the same depression. She seemed more delicate,
and less capable of labour; yet her hours were longer than his, and her
confinement greater. Alice had to sit the whole day plying her needle,
while Arthur was occasionally sent out to collect money. But her
mistress was a kind-hearted woman, and not having a fashionable
_clientèle_, had not yet become indifferent to the well-being of her
work-women. She even paid a crippled girl a trifle for reading to them,
stipulating only that she should read fast, for she found the rate of
their working greatly influenced by the rate of the reading. Life, if
harder, was therefore not quite so uninteresting to Alice as to Arthur,
and that might be why she seemed to have more vitality. Like her mother
she had a quantity of hair, as dark as hers, but finer; dark eyes, not
without meaning; irregular but very pleasing and delicate features; and
an unusually white rather than pale complexion, with a sort of sallow
glow under the diaphanous skin. There was not a little piquancy in the
expression of her countenance, and Richard felt it strangely attractive.

The youths found they had still tastes in common, although Arthur had
neither time nor strength to follow them. Richard spoke of some book he
had been reading. Arthur was interested, but Alice so much that Richard
offered to lend it her: it was the first time she had heard a book
spoken of in such a tone--one of suppressed feeling, almost veneration.

The mother did not join in their talk, and left them soon--her daughter
said to go to church.

“She always goes by herself,” Alice added. “She sees we are too tired to
go.”

They sat a long time with no light but that of the fire. Arthur seemed
to gather courage, and confessed the hopeless monotony of his life. He
complained of no privation, only of want of interest in his work.

“Do _you_ like your work?” he asked Richard.

“Indeed I do!” Richard answered. “I would sooner handle an old book than
a bunch of bank-notes!”

“I don't doubt it,” returned Arthur. “To me your workshop seems a
paradise.”

“Why don't you take up the trade, then? Come to us and I will teach you.
I do not think my father would object.”

“I learn nothing where I am!” continued Arthur.

“Our boat is not over-manned,” resumed Richard. “Say you will come, and
I will speak to my father.”

“I wish I could! But how are we to live while I am learning?--No; I must
grind away till--”

He stopped short, and gave a sigh.

“Till when, Arty?” asked his sister.

“Till death set me free,” he answered.

“You wouldn't leave me behind, Arty!” said Alice; and rising, she put
her arm round his neck.

“I wouldn't if I could help it,” he replied.

“It's a cowardly thing to want to die,” said Richard.

“I think so sometimes.”

“There's your mother!”

“Yes,” responded Arthur, but without emotion.

“And how should I get on without you, Arty?” said his sister.

“Not very well, Ally. But it wouldn't be for long. We should soon meet.”

“Who told you that?” said Richard almost rudely.

“Don't you think we shall know each other afterwards?” asked Arthur,
with an expression of weary rather than sad surprise.

“I would be a little surer of it before I talked so coolly of leaving a
sister like that! I only wish _I_ had one to care for!”

A faint flush rose on the pale face of the girl, and as swiftly faded.

“Do you think, then, that this life is only a dream?” she said,
looking up at Richard with something in her great eyes that he did not
understand.

“Anyhow,” he answered, “I would bear a good deal rather than run the
risk of going so fast asleep as to stop dreaming it. A man can die any
time,” he continued, “but he can't dream when he pleases! I would wait!
One can't tell when things may take a turn! There are many chances on
the cards!”

“That's true,” replied Arthur; but plainly the very chances were a
weariness to him.

“If Arthur had enough to eat, and time to read, and a little amusement,
he would be as brave as you are, Mr. Tuke!” said Alice. “--But you can't
mean to say there will be no more of anything for us after this world!
To think I should never see Arty again, would make me die before my
time! I should be so miserable I would hardly care to keep him as long
as I might. We must die some day, and what odds whether it be a few days
sooner, or a few days later, if we're never going to meet again?”

“The best way is not to think about it,” returned Richard. “Why should
you? Look at the butterflies! They take what comes, and don't grumble at
their sunshine because there's only one day of it.”

“But when there's no sunshine that day?” suggested Alice.

“Well, when they lie crumpled in the rain, they're none the worse that
they didn't think about it beforehand! We must make the best of what we
have!”

“It's not worth making the best of,” cried Alice indignantly, “if that's
all!”

My reader may well wonder at Richard: how could he be a lover of our
best literature and talk as he did? or rather, talking as he did,
how could he love it? But he had come to love it while yet under the
influence of what his aunt taught him, poor as was her teaching. Then
his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun
to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its
imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the
forces of the brain, sole and supreme.

In matters of conduct, John Tuke and his wife were well agreed;
in matters of opinion, they differed greatly. Jane went to church
regularly, listened without interest, and accepted without question;
had her husband gone, he would have listened with the interest of utter
dissent. When Jane learned that her husband no longer “believed in the
Bible,” she was seized with terror lest he should die without repentance
and be lost. Thereupon followed fear for herself: was not an atheist
a horribly wicked man?--and she could not feel that John was horribly
wicked! She tried her hardest, but could not; and concluded therefore
that his unbelief must be affecting her. She prayed him to say nothing
against the Bible to Richard--at least before he arrived at years
of discretion. This John promised; but subtle effluences are subtle
influences.

John Tuke did right so far as he knew--at least he thought he did--and
refused to believe in any kind of God; Jane did right, she thought, as
far as she knew--and never imagined God cared about her: let him who has
a mind to it, show the value of the difference!

Tuke was a thinking man;--that is, set a going in any direction that
interested him, he could take a few steps forward without assistance.
But he could start in no direction of himself. At a small club to which
he belonged, he had been brought in contact with certain ideas new to
him, and finding himself able to grasp them, felt at once as if they
must be true. Certain other ideas, new to him, coming self-suggested in
their train, he began immediately to imagine himself a thinker, able to
generate notions to which the people around him were unequal. He began
to grow self-confident, and so to despise. Taking courage then to deny
things he had never believed, had only not thought about, and finding
he thereby gave offence, he chose to imagine himself a martyr for the
truth. He did not see that a denial involving no assertion, cannot
witness to any truth; nor did he perceive that denial in his case meant
nothing more than non-acceptance of things asserted. Had he put his
position logically, it would have been this: I never knew such things;
I do not like the notion of them; therefore I deny them: they do not
exist. But no man really denies a thing which he knows only by the
words that stand for it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he
denied only a God that could have no existence.

A man will be judged, however, by his truth toward what he professes to
believe; and John was far truer to his perception of the duty of man to
man than are ninety-nine out of the hundred of so-called Christians to
the things they profess to believe. How many men would be immeasurably
better, if they would but truly believe, that is, act upon, the smallest
part of what they untruly profess to believe, even if they cast aside
all the rest. John cast aside an allegiance to God which had never been
more than a mockery, and set about delivering his race from the fear of
a person who did not exist. For, true enough, there was no God of the
kind John denied; only, what if, in delivering his kind from the tyranny
of a false God, he aided in hiding from them the love of a true God--of
a God that did and ought to exist? There are other passions besides
fear, and precious as fear is hateful. If there be a God and one has
never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that he
could not get proof of his existence. Is a child not to seek his father,
because he cannot prove he is alive?

The aunt continued to take the boy to church, and expose him, for it was
little more she did, to a teaching she could not herself either supply
or supplement. It was the business of the church to teach Christianity!
her part was to accept it, and bring the child where he also might
listen and accept! But what she accepted as Christianity, is another
question; and whether the acceptance of anything makes a Christian, is
another still.

How much of Christianity a child may or may not learn by going to
church, it is impossible to say; but certainly Richard did not learn
anything that drew his heart to Jesus of Nazareth, or caught him in
any heavenly breeze, or even the smallest of celestial whirlwinds! He
learned nothing even that made unwelcome such remarks as his father
would now and then let fall concerning the clergy and the way they
followed their trade; while the grin, full of conscious superiority,
with which he unconsciously accompanied them, found its reflection in
the honourable but not yet humble mind, beginning to be aware of its own
faculty, and not aware that the religion presented in his aunt's
church, a religion neither honourable nor elevating, was but the dullest
travesty of the religion of St. Paul. Richard had, besides, read several
books which, had his uncle been _careful_ of the promise he had given
his wife, he would have intentionally removed instead of unintentionally
leaving about.

In the position Richard had just taken toward his new friends, he was
not a little influenced by the desire to show himself untrammelled by
prevailing notions, and capable of thinking for himself; but this was
far from all that made him speak as he did. Many young fellows are as
ready to deny as Richard, but not many feel as strongly that life rests
upon what we know, that knowledge must pass into action. The denial of
every falsehood under the sun would not generate one throb of life.

Richard told his adoptive parents where he had been, and asked if
he might invite his new friends for the next Sunday. They made no
objection, and when Arthur and Alice came, received them kindly. Richard
took Arthur to the shop, and showed him the job he was engaged upon at
the time, lauding his department as affording more satisfaction than
mere binding.

“For,” he said, “the thing that is not, may continue not to be; but the
thing that is, should be as it was meant to be. Where it is not such,
there is an evil that wants remedy. It may be that the sole remedy is
binding, but that involves destruction, therefore is a poor thing beside
renovation.”

The argument came from a well of human pity in himself, deeper than
Richard knew. But both the pity he felt and the _truth_ in what he said
came from a source eternal of which he yet knew nothing.

“It would be much easier,” continued Richard, “to make that volume
look new, but how much more delightful to send it out with a revived
assertion of its ancient self!”

Some natures have a better chance of disclosing the original in them,
that they have not been to college, and set to think in other people's
grooves, instead of those grooves that were scored in themselves long
before the glacial era.

“For my part,” said Arthur, “I feel like a book that needs to be fresh
printed, not to say fresh bound! I don't feel why I am what I am. I
would part with it all, except just being the same man!”

While the youths were having their talk, Alice was in Jane's bedroom,
undergoing an examination, the end and object of which it was impossible
she should suspect. Caught by a certain look in her sweet face,
reminding her of a look that was anything but sweet, Jane had set
herself to learn from her what she might as to her people and history.

“Is your father alive, my dear?” she asked, with her keen black eyes on
Alice's face.

That grew red, and for a moment the girl did not answer. Jane pursued
her catechizing.

“What was his trade or profession?” she inquired.

The girl said nothing, and the merciless questioner went on.

“Tell me something about him, dear. Do you remember him? Or did he die
when you were quite a child?”

“I do not remember him,” answered Alice. “I do not know if I ever saw
him.”

“Did your mother never tell you what he was like?”

“She told me once he was very handsome--the handsomest man she ever
saw--but cruel--so cruel! she said.--I don't want to talk about him,
please, ma'am!” concluded Alice, the tears running down her cheeks.

“I'm sorry, my dear, to hurt you, but I'm not doing it from curiosity.
You have a look so like a man I once knew,--and your brother has
something of the same!--that in fact I am bound to learn what I can
about you.”

“What sort was the man we put you in mind of?” asked Alice, with a
feeble attempt at a smile. “Not a _very_ bad man, I hope!”

“Well, not very good--as you ask me.--He was what people call a
gentleman!”

“Was that all?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought he was a nobleman!”

“Oh!--well, he wasn't that; he was a baronet.”

Alice gave a little cry.

“Do tell me something about him,” she said. “What do you know about
him?”

“More than I choose to tell. We will forget him now, if you please!”

There was in her voice a tone of displeasure, which Alice took to
be with herself. She was in consequence both troubled and perplexed.
Neither made any more inquiries. Jane took her guest back to the
sitting-room.

The moment her brother came from the workshop, Alice said to him--

“Are you ready, Arthur? We had better be moving!”

Arthur was a gentle creature, and seldom opposed her; he seemed only
surprised a little, and asked if she was ill. But Richard, who had all
the week been looking forward to a talk with Alice, and wanted to show
her his little library, was much disappointed, and begged her to change
her mind. She insisted, however, and he put on his hat to walk with
them.

But his aunt called him, and whispered that she would be particularly
obliged to him if he would go to church with her that evening. He
expostulated, saying he did not care to go to church; but as she
insisted, he yielded, though not with the best grace.

Before another Sunday, there came, doubtless by his aunt's management,
an invitation to spend a few weeks with his grandfather, the blacksmith.

Richard was not altogether pleased, for he did not like leaving his
work; but his aunt again prevailed with him, and he agreed to go. In
this, as in most things, he showed her a deference such as few young men
show their mothers. Her influence came, I presume, through the strong
impression of purpose she had made on him.

His uncle objected to his going, and grumbled a good deal. As the
brewer looks down on the baker, so the bookbinder looked down on the
blacksmith.

He said the people Richard would see about his grandfather, were not
fit company for the heir of Mortgrange! But he knew the necessity of his
going somewhere for a while, and gave in.




CHAPTER VI. _SIMON ARMOUR_.

Simon Armour was past only the agility, not the strength of his youth,
and in his feats of might and skill he cherished pride. Without being
offensively conceited, he regarded himself--and well might--as the
superior of any baronet such as his daughter's husband, and desired of
him no recognition of the relationship. All he looked for from any man,
whether he stood above or beneath his own plane, was proper pay for
good work, and natural human respect. Some of the surrounding gentry,
possibly not uninfluenced, in sentiment at least, by the growing
radicalism of the age, enjoyed the free, jolly, but unpresuming carriage
of the stalwart old man, to whom, if indeed on his head the almond-tree
was already in blossom, the grasshopper was certainly not yet a burden:
he could still ply a sledge-hammer in each hand. “My lord,” came from
his lips in a clear, ringing tone of good-fellowship, which the nobleman
who occasionally stopped at his forge to give him some direction about
the shoeing of this or that horse, liked well to hear, and felt the
friendlier for--though I doubt if he would have welcomed it from a
younger man.

Besides his daughter Jane and her husband, he alone was aware of the
real parentage of the lad who passed as their son; and he knew that, if
he lived long enough, an hour would call him to stand up for the rights
of his grandson. Perhaps it was partly in view of this, that he had
for years been an abstainer from strong drink; but I am inclined to
attribute the fact chiefly to his having found the love of it gaining
upon him. “Damn the drink!” he had been more than once overheard to say,
“it shall know which of us is master!” And when Simon had made up his
mind to a thing, the thing was--not indeed as good, but almost as sure
as done. The smallest of small beer was now his strongest drink.

He was a hard-featured, good-looking, white-haired man of sixty,
with piercing eyes of quite cerulean blue, and a rough voice with an
undertone of music in it. There was music, indeed, all through him.
In the roughest part of his history it was his habit to go to
church--mainly, I may say entirely, for the organ, but his behaviour
was never other than reverent. How much he understood, may be left
a question somewhat dependent on how much there may have been to
understand; but he had a few ideas in religion which were very much his
own, and which, especially some with regard to certain of the lessons
from the Old Testament, would have considerably astonished some parsons,
and considerably pleased others. He was a big, broad-shouldered man,
with the brawniest arms, and eyes so bright and scintillant that one
might fancy they caught and kept for their own use the sparks that flew
from his hammer. His face was red, with a great but short white beard,
suggesting the sun in a clean morning-fog.

A rickety omnibus carried Richard from the railway-station some five
miles to the smithy. When the old man heard it stop, he threw down his
hammer, strode hastily to the door, met his grandson with a gripe that
left a black mark and an ache, and catching up his portmanteau, set it
down inside.

“I'll go with you in a moment, lad!” he said, and seizing with a long
pair of pincers the horse-shoe that lay in process on the anvil, he
thrust it into the fire, blew a great roaring blast from the bellows,
plucked out the shoe glowing white, and fell upon it as if it were a
devil. Having thus cowed it a bit, he grew calm, and more deliberately
shaped it to an invisible idea. His grandson was delighted with the
mingling of determination, intent, and power, with certainty of result,
manifest in every blow. In two minutes he had the shoe on the end of a
long hooked rod, and was hanging it beside others on a row of nails in a
beam. Then he turned and said--

“There, lad! that's off the anvil--and off my mind! Now I'm for you!”

“Grandfather,” said Richard, “I shouldn't like to have you for an
enemy!”

“Why not, you rascal! Do you think I would take unfair advantage of
you?”

“No, that I don't! But you've got awful arms and hands!”

“They've done a job or two in their day, lad!” he answered; “but I'm
getting old now! I can't do what I thought nothing of once. Well, no man
was made to last for ever--no more than a horse-shoe! There'd be no work
for the Maker if he did!”

“I'm glad to see we're of one mind, grandfather!” said Richard.

“Well, why shouldn't we--if so be we're in the right mind!--Yes; we
must be o' one mind if we're o' the right mind! The year or two I may be
ahead o' you in gettin' at it, goes for nothing: I started sooner!--But
what may be the mind you speak of, sonny?”

The look of keen question the old man threw on him, woke a doubt in
Richard whether he might not have misunderstood his grandfather.

“I think,” he answered, “if a man was made to last for ever, the world
would get tired of him. When a horse or a dog has done his work, he's
content--and so is his master.”

“Nay, but I bean't! I bean't content to lose the old horse as I've shod
mayhap for twenty years--no, not if I bean't his master!”

“There's no help for it, though!”

“None as I knows on. I'd be main glad to hear any news on the subjec' as
you can supply!--No, I ain't content; I'm sorry!”

“Why don't the parsons say the old horse'll rise again?”

“'Cause the parsons knows nought about it. How should they?”

“They say we're going to rise again.”

“Why shouldn't they? I guess I'll be up as soon as I may! I don't want
no night to lie longer than rest my bones!”

“I mistook what you meant, grandfather. I thought, when you said you
weren't made to last for ever, that you meant there was an end of you!”

“Well, so you might, and small blame to you! It's a wrong way of
speaking we all have. But you've set me thinking--whether by mistake
or not, where's the matter! I never thought what come o' the old horse,
a'ter all his four shoes takes to shinin' at oncet! For the old smith
when he drops his hammer--I have thought about _him_. Lord!--to think o'
that anvil never ringin' no more to this here fist o' mine!”

While they talked, the blacksmith had put off his thick apron of
hide; and now, catching up Richard's portmanteau as if it had been a
hand-basket, he led the way to a cottage not far from the forge, in
a lane that here turned out of the high road. It was a humble place
enough--one story and a wide attic. The front was almost covered with
jasmine, rising from a little garden filled with cottage flowers. Behind
was a larger garden, full of cabbages and gooseberry-bushes.

A girl came to the door, with a kind, blushing face, and hands as red
as her cheeks--a great-niece of the old smith. He passed her and led the
way into a room half kitchen, half parlour.

“Here you are, lad--_at_ home, I hope! Sech as it is, an' as much as
it's mine, it's yours, an' I hope you'll make it so.”

He deposited the portmanteau, glanced quickly round, saw that Jessie had
not followed them, and said--

“You'll keep your good news till I've turned it over!”

“What good news, grandfather?”

“The good news that them as is close pared, has no call to look out
for the hoof to grow. I'm not saying you're wrong, lad--not _yet_; but
everybody mightn't think your news so good as to be worth a special
messenger! So till you're quite sure of it--”

“I _am_ quite sure of it, grandfather!”

“I'm not; and having charge of the girl there, I'll ha' no dish served
i' my house as I don't think wholesome!”

“You're right there, grandfather! You may trust me!” answered Richard
respectfully.

The blacksmith had spoken with a decision that was imperative. His red
face shone out of his white beard, and his eyes sparkled out of his red
face; his head gave a nod, and his jaws a snap.

They had tea, with bread and butter and marmalade, and much talk about
John and Jane Tuke, in which the old man said oftener, “your aunt,” and
“your uncle,” than “your father” or “your mother;” but Richard put it
down to the confusion that often accompanies age. When the bookbinding
came up, Richard was surprised to discover that the blacksmith was
far from looking upon their trade as superior to his own. It was plain
indeed that he regarded bookbinding as a quite inferior and scarce manly
employment. To the blacksmith, bookbinding and tailoring were much the
same--fit only for women. Richard did not relish this. He endeavoured
to make his grandfather see the dignity of the work, insisting that its
difficulty was the greater because of the less strength required in it:
the strength itself had, he said, in certain of its operations, to be
pared to the requisite fineness, to be modified with extreme accuracy;
while in others, all the strength a man had was necessary, and
especially in a shop like theirs, where everything was done by hand. But
the fine work, he said, tired one much the most.

“Fine work!” echoed the smith with contempt. “There came a gentleman
here to be shod t'other day from the Hall, who was a great traveller;
and he told me he seen in Japan a blacksmith with a sprig of may on the
anvil before him, an' him a-copyin' to the life them blossoms in hard
iron with his one hammer! What say you to that, lad?”

“Wonderful! But that same man couldn't do the heavy work you think
nothing of, grandfather!”

“Nay, for that I don't know. I know I couldn't do his!”

“Then we'll allow that fine work may be a manly thing as well as hard
work. But I do wish I could shoe a horse!”

“What's to hinder you?”

“Will you let me learn, grandfather?”

“Learn! I'll learn you myself. _You'll_ soon learn. It's not as if you
was a bumpkin to teach! The man as can do anything, can do everything.”

“Come along then, grandfather! I want to let you see that though my
hands may catch a blister or two, they're not the less fit for hard work
that they can do fine. I'll be safe to shoe a horse before many days are
over. Only you must have a little patience with me.”

“Nay, lad, I'll have a great patience with you. Before many days are
over, make the shoe you may, and make it well; but to shoe a horse as
the horse ought to be shod, that comes by God's grace.”

They went back to the smithy, and there, the very day of his arrival,
more to Simon's delight than he cared to show, the soft-handed
bookbinder began to wield a hammer, and compel the stubborn iron. So
deft and persevering was he, that, ere they went from the forge that
same night, he could not only bend the iron to a proper curve round the
beak of the anvil, but had punched the holes in half a dozen shoes. At
last he confessed himself weary; and when his grandfather saw the state
of his hands, blistered and swollen so that he could not close them, he
was able no longer to restrain his satisfaction.

“Come!” he cried; “you're a man after all, bookbinder! In six months I
should have you a thorough blacksmith.”

“I wouldn't undertake to make a bookbinder of you, grandfather, in the
time!” returned Richard.

“Tit for tat, sonny, and it's fair!” said Simon. “I should leave the
devil his mark on your white pages.--How much of them do you rend now,
as you stick them together?”

“Not a word as I stick them together. But many are brought me to be
doctored and mended up, and from some of them I take part of my pay in
reading them--books, I mean, that I wouldn't otherwise find it easy to
lay my hands upon--scarce books, you know.”

“You would like to go to Oxford, wouldn't ye, lad--and lay in a stock to
last your life out?”

“You might as well think to lay victuals into you for a lifetime,
grandfather! But I should like to lay in a stock of the tools to be got
at Oxford! It would be grand to be able to pick the lock of any door I
wanted to see the other side of.”

“I'll put you up to pick any lock you ever saw, or are likely to see,”
 returned Armour. “I served my time to a locksmith. We didn't hit it off
always, and so hit one another--as often almost as the anvil. So when I
was out of my time, and couldn't get locksmith's work except in a large
forge, I knew better than take it: for I couldn't help getting into
rows, and was afraid of doing somebody a mischief when my blood was
up. So I started for myself as a general blacksmith-in a small way, of
course. But my right hand 'ain't forgot its cunning in locks! I'll teach
you to pick the cunningest lock in the world--whether made in Italy or
in China.”

“The lock I was thinking of,” said Richard, “was that of the tree of
knowledge.”

“I've heerd,” returned Simon, with more humour than accuracy, “as that
was a raither pecooliar lock. How it was kep' red hot all the time
without coal and bellows, I don't seem to see!”

“Ah!” said Richard, “you mean the flaming sword that turned every way?”

“I reckon I do!”

“You don't say you believe that story, grandfather?”

“I don't say what I believe or what I don't believe. The flamin' iron as
I've had to do with, has both kep' me out o' knowledge, an' led me into
knowledge! I'll turn the tale over again! You see, lad, when I was
a boy, I thought everything my mother said and my father did,
old-fashioned, and a bit ignorant-like; but when I was a man, I saw
that, if I had started right off from where they set me down, I would
ha' been farther ahead. To honour your father an' mother don't mean to
stick by their chimbley-corner all your life, but to start from their
front door and go foret. I went by the back door, like the fool I was,
to get into the front road, and had a long round to make.”

“I shan't do so with my father. He don't read much, but he thinks. He's
got a head, my father!”

“There was fathers afore yours, lad! You needn't scorn yer gran'ther for
your father!”

“Scorn you, grandfather! God forbid!--or, at least,--”

“You don't see what I'm drivin' at, sonny!--When an old tale comes to
me from the far-away time, I don't pitch it into the road, any more'n I
would an old key or an old shoe--a horse-shoe, I mean: it was something
once, and it may be something again! I hang the one up, and turn the
other over. An' if you be strong set on throwin' either away, lad, I
misdoubt me you an' me won't blaze together like _one_ flamin' sword!”

Richard held his peace. The old man had already somehow impressed him.
If he had not, like his father, bid good-bye to superstition, there was
in him a power that was not in his father--a power like that he found in
his favourite books.

“Mind what he says, and do what he tells you, and you'll get on
splendid!” his mother had said as he came away.

“Don't be afraid of him, but speak up: he'll like you the better for
it,” his father had counselled. “I should never have married your mother
if I'd been afraid of him.”

Richard, trying to follow both counsels, got on with his grandfather
better than fairly.




CHAPTER VII. _COMPARISONS._

All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness, which is his
one impoverishment, and draws near to his wealth, which is humanity--not
humanity in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours and
all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed,
is our poverty. John Tuke, being a clever man without a spark of genius,
worshipped _faculty_ as he called it--worshipped it where he was most
familiar with it--that is, in his own mind and its operations, in his
own hands and their handiwork. His natural atmosphere, however, was,
happily, goodwill and kindliness: else the scorn of helplessness which
sprang from his worship, would have supplied the other pole to his
selfishness.

He even cherished unconsciously the feeling that his faculty was a
merit. He took the credit of his individual humanity, as if the good
working of his brain, the thing he most admired, was attributable to his
own will and forethought. The idea had never arisen in that brain, that
he was in the world by no creative intent of his own. Nothing had as yet
suggested to him that, after all, if he was clever, he could not help
it. It had not occurred to him that there was a stage in his history
antecedent to his consciousness--a stage in which his pleasure with
regard to the next could not have been appealed to, or his consent
asked--a stage, for any satisfaction concerning which, his resultant
consciousness must repose on a creative will, answerable to itself
for his existence. A man's patent of manhood is, that he can call upon
God--not the God of any theology, right or wrong, but the God out of
whose heart he came, and in whose heart he is. This is his highest
power--that which constitutes his original likeness to God. Had any one
tried to wake this idea in Tuke, he would have mocked at the sound
of it, never seeing it. The words which represented it he would have
thought he understood, but he would never have laid hold of the idea.
He found himself what he found himself, and was content with the find;
therefore asked no questions as to whence he came--was to himself
consequently as if he had come from nowhere--which made it easy for him
to imagine that he was going nowhither. He had never reflected that
he had not made himself, and that therefore there might be a power
somewhere that had called him into being, and had a word to say to
him on the matter. The region where he began to be, had never, in
speculation or mirage any more than in direct vision, lifted itself
above the horizon-line of his consciousness. An ordinarily well-behaved
man, with a vague narrow regard for his moral nature, and an admiration
of intellectual humanity in the abstract, he thought of himself as
exceptionally worthy, and as having neighbours mostly inferior. In
relation to Richard, he was specially pleased with himself: had he not,
for the sake of the youth, put himself in the danger of the law!

With not much more introspection than his uncle, but with a keener
conscience and quicker observation, Richard had early remarked that,
notwithstanding her assiduity in church-going, his mother did not seem
the happier for her religion: there was a cloud, or seeming cloud, on
her forehead--a something that implied the lack of clear weather within.
Had he known more he might have attributed it to anxiety about his
own future, and the bearing her deed might have upon it. He might have
argued that she dreaded the opposition she foresaw to the claim of
her nephew; and felt that if her act should have despoiled him of his
inheritance, life would be worthless to her. But in truth the cause of
her habitual gloom was much deeper. She had from her mother inherited a
heavy sense of responsibility, but not the confidence in whose strength
her mother had borne it. She had, that is, an oppressive sense of the
claims of a supernal power, but no feeling of the relationship which
gives those claims, no knowledge of the loving help offered with
the presentation of the claims. Where she might have rejoiced in the
correlative claims bestowed upon her, she nourished only complaint. That
God had made her, she could not sometimes help feeling a liberty he had
taken. How could she help it, not knowing him, or the love that gave him
both the power and the right to create! She had no window to let in the
perpendicular light of heaven; all the light she had was the horizontal
light of duty--invaluable, but, ever accompanied by its own shadow of
failure, giving neither joy nor hope nor strength. Her husband's sense
of duty was neither so strong nor so uneasy.

She had not attempted to teach Richard more, in the way of religion,
than the saying of certain prayers, a ceremony of questionable
character; but the boy, dearly loving his mother, and saddened by her
lack of spirits, had put things together--amongst the rest, that she was
always gloomiest on a Sunday--and concluded that religion was the cause
of her misery. This made him ready to welcome the merest hint of its
falsehood. Well might the doctrine be false that made such a good woman
miserable! He had no opportunity of learning what any vital, that is,
_obedient_ believer in the lord of religion, might have to say. Nothing
he did hear would, without the reflex of his mother's unhappiness, have
waked in him interest enough for hate: what was there about the heap of
ashes he heard called the means of grace, to set him searching in it for
seeds of truth! If we consider, then, the dullness of the prophecy, the
evident suffering of his mother, and the equally evident though silent
contempt of his father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in
what seemed to him a conviction that religion was worse than a thing of
nought, was an evil phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm
that had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was
at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature.
It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could not be
entreated, because it did not exist; to believe in what was not, must
be ruinous to the nature that so believed! He would give the lie no
quarter! The best thing to do for his fellow, the first thing to be done
before anything else could be done, was to deliver him from this dragon
called Faith--the more fearful that it had no life, but owed its being
and strength to the falsehood of cowards! Had he known more of the
working of what is falsely called religion, he would have been yet more
eager to destroy it. But he knew something of the tares only; he knew
nothing of the wheat among the tares; knew nothing of the wintry gleams
of comfort shed on thousands of hearts by the most poverty-stricken
belief in the merest and faultiest silhouette of a God. What a mission
it would be, he thought, to deliver human hearts from the vampyre that,
sucking away the very essence of life, kept fanning its unconscious
victims with the promise of a dreary existence beyond the grave, secured
by self-immolation on the desolate altar of an unlovable God, who yet
called himself _Love_! Was it not a high emprise to rescue men from the
incubus of such a misimagined divinity?

From the first dawn of consciousness, the young Lestrange had loved his
kind. He gathered the chief joy of his life from a true relation to the
life around him. Perhaps the cause of the early manifestation of this
bent in him, was the longing of his mother in her loneliness after a
love that grew the move precious as it seemed farther away. She had
parted with those who always loved her, for the love of a man who never
loved her! But left to think and think, she had come at last to see that
her loss was her best gain. For, with the loss of their presence, she
began to know and prize the simplicities of human affection; from lack
of love began to lift up her heart to Love himself, the father of all
our loves.

Richard's love was not such as makes of another the mirror wherein to
realize self; he loved his kind objectively, and was ready to suffer for
it. At school he was the champion of the oppressed. Almost always one
or other of the little boys would be under his protection; and more than
once, for the sake of a weaker he had got severely beaten. But having
set himself to learn the art of self-defence, his favour alone became
shelter; and successful coverture aroused in him yet more the natural
passion of protection. It became his pride as well as delight to be
a saviour to his kind. His championship now sought extension to his
mother, and to all sufferers from usurping creeds.

His grandfather found him, as he said, a chip of the old block; and
rejoiced that Nature had granted his humble blood so potent a part
in this compound of gentle and plebeian; for Richard showed himself a
worthy workman! Simon Armour declared there was nothing the fellow could
not do; and said to himself there never was such a baronet in the old
Hall as his boy Dick would make. If only, he said, all the breeds worn
out with breeding-in, would revert to the old blood of Tubal Cain, they
might recover his lease of life. The day was coming, he said to himself,
when there would be a sight to see at Mortgrange--a baronet that could
shoe a horse better than any smith in the land! If his people then would
not stand up for a landlord able to thrash every man-jack of them, and
win his bread with his own hands, they deserved to become the tenants of
a London grocer or American money-dealer! For his part, the French might
have another try! _He_ would not lift hammer against them!

By right of inheritance, Richard's muscles grew sinewy and hard, and
speedily was he capable of handling a hammer and persuading iron to the
full satisfaction of his teacher. When it came to such heavy work as
required power and skill at once, the difference between the two men was
very evident: where the whole strength is tasked, skill finds itself in
the lurch; but Simon understood what could not be at once, as well as
what would be at length. Neither was he disappointed, for, in far less
than half the time an ordinary apprentice would have taken, Richard
could hold alternate swing with the blacksmith or his man, as, blow
for blow, they pierced a block of metal to form the nave of a wheel. In
ringing a wheel, he soon excelled; and his grandfather's smithy being
the place for all kinds of blacksmith-work, Richard had learned the
trade before he left. For, as his fortnight's holiday drew to an end,
he heard from his parents that, as he was doing so well, they would like
him to stay longer.

One reason for this their wish was, that he might become thoroughly
attached to his grandfather: they desired to secure the prejudice of the
future baronet for his own people. At the same time, by developing
in him the workman, they thought to give him a better chance against
further dishonouring and degrading his race, than his wretched father
had ever had: the breed of Lestranges must, they said, be searched
back for generations to find an honest man in it. A landlord above the
selfishness, and free from the prejudices of his class, would be a new
thing in the county-histories!

At the end of six weeks, Richard could shoe a sound horse as well as his
grandfather himself. The old man had taken pains he would not have spent
on an ordinary apprentice: it was worth doing, he said; and the return
was great. Richard had made, not merely wonderful, but wonderfully
steady progress. Not once had he touched the quick in driving those
perfect nails through the rind of the marvellous hoof. From the first he
disapproved of the mode of shoeing in use, and was certain a better must
one day be discovered--one, namely, that would leave the natural motions
of hoof and leg unimpeded; but in the meantime he shod as did other
blacksmiths, and gave thorough satisfaction.




CHAPTER VIII. _A LOST SHOE._

It was now late in the autumn. Several houses in the neighbourhood were
full of visitors, and parties on horseback frequently passed the door of
the smithy--well known to not a few of the horses.

One evening, as the sun was going down red and large, with a gorgeous
attendance of clouds, for the day had been wet but cleared in the
afternoon, a small mounted company came pretty fast along the lane,
which was deep in mud. They were no sooner upon the hard road by the
smithy, than one of the ladies discovered her mare had lost a hind shoe.

“She couldn't have pulled it off in a more convenient spot!” said a
handsome young fellow, as he dismounted and gave his horse to a groom.
“I'll take you down, Bab! Old Simon will have a shoe on Miss Brown in no
time!”

Richard followed his grandfather to the door. A little girl, as she
seemed to him, was sliding, with her hand on the young man's shoulder,
from the back of the huge mare. She was the daintiest little thing,
as lovely as she was tiny, with clear, pale, regular features, under a
quantity of dark-brown hair. But that she was not a child, he saw the
moment she was down; and he soon discovered that, not her beauty, but
her heavenly vivacity, was the more captivating thing in her. At once
her very soul seemed to go out to meet whatever object claimed her
attention. She must know all about everything, and come into relations
with every live thing! As she stood by the side of the great brown
creature from which she had dismounted--huge indeed, but carrying its
bulk with a grand grace--her head reaching but half-way up the slope of
its shoulder, she laid her cheek against it caressingly. So small and so
bright, the little lady looked a very diamond of life.

A new shoe had to be forged; those already half-made were for
work-horses. Partly from pride in his skill, Simon left the task to his
grandson, and stood talking to the young man. Little thought Richard, as
he turned the shoe on the anvil's beak, that he was his half-brother!
He was a handsome youth, not so tall as Richard, and with more
delicate features. His face was pale, and wore a rather serious, but
self-satisfied look. He talked to the old blacksmith, however, without
the slightest assumption: like others in the neighbourhood, he regarded
him as odd and privileged. There were more ladies and gentlemen, but
Richard, absorbed in his shoe, heeded none of the company.

He was not more absorbed, however, than the girl who stood beside him:
she watched every point in the making of it. Heedless of the flying
sparks, she gazed as if she meant to make the next shoe herself. Had
Richard not been too busy even to glance at her, he might have noticed,
now and then, an involuntary sympathetic motion, imitatively responsive
to one of his, invariably recurrent when he changed the position of the
glowing iron. Her mind seemed working in company with his hands; she was
all the time doing the thing herself; Richard's activity was not merely
reflected, but lived in her. When he carried the half-forged iron, to
apply it for one tentative instant to the mare's hoof, Barbara followed
him. The mare fidgeted. But her little mistress, who, noiseless and
swift as a moth, was already at her head, spoke to her, breathed in her
nostril, and in a moment made her forget what was happening in such a
far-off province of her being as a hind foot. When Richard, back at
the forge, was placing the shoe again in the fire, to his surprise her
little gloved hand alighted beside his own on the lever of the bellows,
powerfully helping him to blow. When once again the shoe was on the
anvil, there again she stood watching--and watched until he had shaped
the shoe to his intent.

Old Simon did not move to interfere: the hoof required no special
attention. Almost every horse-hoof in a large circuit of miles was known
to him--as well, he would remark, as the nail of his own thumb.

When Richard took up the foot, in order to prepare it for the reception
of its new armour, again the mare was fidgety; and again the lady
distracted her attention, comforting and soothing her while Richard
trimmed the hoof a little.

“I say, my man,” cried Mr. Lestrange, “mind what you're about there
with your paring! I don't want that mare lamed.--She's much too good for
'prentice hands to learn upon, Simon!”

“Keep your mind easy, sir,” answered the blacksmith. “That lad's ain't
'prentice hands. He knows what he's about as well as I do myself!”

“He's young!”

“Younger, perhaps, than you think, sir!--but he knows his work.”

It was a pretty picture--the girl peeping round under the neck of the
great creature she was caressing, to see how the smith was getting on,
whose back, alas! hid his hands from her. Just as he finished driving
his second nail, the nervous animal gave her foot a jerk, and the point
of the nail, through the hoof and projecting a little, tore his hand, so
that the blood ran to the ground in a sudden rivulet.

“Hey! that don't look much like proper shoeing!” cried the young man. “I
hope to goodness that's not the mare!”

“She's all right,” answered Richard, rearranging the animal's foot.

But Simon saw the blood, and sprang to his side.

“What the devil are you about, making a fool of me, Dick!” he cried.
“Get out of the way.”

“It was my fault,” said the sweetest voice from under the neck of the
mare, to the top of which a tiny hand was trying to reach. “My feather
must have tickled her nose!”

She caught a glimpse of the blood, and turned white.

“I am so sorry!” she said, almost tearfully. “I hope you're not much
hurt, Richard!”

Nothing seemed to escape her; she had already learned his name!

“It's not worth being sorry about, miss!” returned Richard, with a
laugh. “The mare meant no harm!”

“That I'm sure she didn't--poor Miss Brown!” answered the girl, patting
the mare's neck. “But I wish it had been _my_ hand instead!”

“God forbid!” cried Richard. “That _would_ have been a calamity!”

“It wouldn't have been half so great a one. My hand is--well, not of
_much_ use. Yours can shoe a horse!”

“Yours would have been spoiled; mine will shoe as well as before!” said
Richard.

It did not occur to the lady that the youth spoke better than might have
been expected of a country smith. She was one of the elect few that meet
every one on the common human ground, that never fear and never hurt.
Her childish size and look harmonized with the childlike in her style,
but she affected nothing. She would have spoken in the same way to
prince or poet-laureate, and would have pleased either as much as the
blacksmith. At the same time she did have pleasure in knowing that
her frankness pleased. She could not help being aware that she was a
favourite, and she wanted to be; but she wanted nothing more than to be
a favourite. She desired it with old Betty, sir Wilton's dairymaid, just
as much as with Mr. Lestrange, sir Wilton's heir; and everybody showed
her favour, for she showed everybody grace.

The old smith was finishing the shoeing, and the mare, well used to him,
and with more faith in him, stood perfectly quiet. Richard, a little
annoyed, had withdrawn, and scarce thinking what he did, had taken a
rod of iron, thrust it into the fire, and begun to blow. The little lady
approached him softly.

“I'm _so_ sorry!” she said.

“I shall be sorry too, if you think of it any more, miss!” answered
Richard. “Then there will be two sorry where there needn't be one!”

She looked up at him with a curious, interested, puzzled look, which
seemed to say, “What a nice smith you are!”

The youth's manners had a certain--what shall I call it?--not polish,
but rhythm, which came of, or at least was nourished by his love of
the finer elements in literature. His friendly converse with books, and
through them with certain of the dead who still speak, fell in with yet
deeper influences, helping to set him in right atomic position toward
other human atoms. His breed also contributed something. Happily for
Richard, a man is not born only of his father or his grandfather;
mothers have a share in the form of his being; ancestors innumerable,
men and women, leave their traces in him. But what I have ventured to
call the rhythm of his manner came of his love of verse, and of the true
material of verse.

His hand kept on bleeding, and for a moment he was tempted, by bravado
as well as kindness, to use the cautery so nigh, and prove to the girl
how little he set by what troubled her; but he saw at once it would
shock her, and took, instead, a handkerchief from his pocket to bind it
with. Instantly the little lady was at his service, and he yielded to
her ministration with a pleasure hitherto unknown to him. She took the
handkerchief from his hand, but immediately gave it him again, saying,
“It is too black!” and drawing her own from her pocket, deftly bound up
his wound with it. Speech abandoned Richard. All present looked on in
silence. Certain of the company had seen her the day before tie up
the leg of a wounded dog, and had admired her for it; but this
was different! She was handling the hand of a human being--man--a
workman!--black and hard with labour! There was no necessity: the man
was not in the least danger! It was nothing but a scratch! She was
forgetting what was due to herself--and to them! Thus they thought, but
thus they dared not speak. They knew her, and feared what she might say
in reply. The mare was shod ere the handkerchief was tied to the lady's
mind, and Simon stood, hammer in hand, looking on like the rest in
silence, but with a curious smile.

As she took her hands from his, the young blacksmith looked thankfulness
into her eyes--which sparkled and shone with the pleasure of human
fellowship, and without the least shyness returned his gaze.

“There! Good-bye! I am so sorry! I hope your hand will be well soon!”
 she said, and at once followed her mare, which the smith's man was
leading with caution through the door of the smithy, rather too low for
Miss Brown.

Lestrange helped her to the saddle in silence, and before Richard
realized that she was gone, he heard the merriment of the party mingling
with the clang of their horses' hoofs, as they went swinging down the
road. The fairy had set them all laughing already!

The instant they were gone, Simon showed a strange concern over the
insignificant wound: he had been hasty with Richard, and unfair to him!
Had he driven his nail one hair's-breadth too near the quick, Miss Brown
would have made the smithy tight for them! He seemed anxious to show,
without actual confession, that he knew he had spoken angrily, and
was sorry for it. He could not have shod the mare better himself, he
said--but why the deuce did he let her tear his hand! It was not likely
to gather, though, seeing Richard drank water! He must do nothing for
a day or two! To-morrow being Saturday, they would have a holiday
together, and leave the work to George!




CHAPTER IX. _A HOLIDAY._

Richard was willing enough, and it only remained to settle what they
would do with their holiday. Suppressing a chuckle, Simon proposed that
they should have a walk, and a look at Mortgrange: it was a place well
worth seeing! “And then,” he added, giving his grandson a poke, “we can
ask after the mare, and learn how her new shoe fits.” They had known him
there, he said, the last thirty years, and would let them have the run
of the place, for sir Wilton and his lady were from home. Richard had
never--to his knowledge--heard of Mortgrange, for Simon had hitherto
avoided even mentioning the place; but he was ready to go wherever his
grandfather pleased. Jessie would have company of her own, Simon said,
with a nod and a wink: they need not trouble themselves about her!

So the next day, as soon us they had had their breakfast, they set out
to walk the four or five miles that, by the road, lay between them and
Mortgrange. It was a fine frosty morning. Not a few yellow leaves were
still hanging, and the sun was warm and bright. It was one of those days
near the death of the year, that make us wonder why the heart of man
should revive and feel strong, while nature is falling into her dreary
trance. Richard was dressed in a tradesman's Sunday clothes, but
tradesman as he was, and was proud to be, he did not altogether look
one. He was in high spirits--for no reason but that his spirits were
high. He was happy because he was happy--“like any other body!” he would
have said: where was the wonder such a fine day, with a pleasant walk
before him, and his jolly grandfather for company! That he could not
make one hair white or black, one hour blessed or miserable, did not
occur to him. Yet he believed that joy or sorrow determined whether life
was or was not worth living! He had never said to himself, “Here I am,
and cannot help being, and yet can order nothing! Even to-day I am happy
only because I cannot help it!” He had indeed begun to learn that a man
has his duty to mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he
had not yet been tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How
would he feel then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living
for? He was happy now, and that was enough! The putting forth of their
strength and skill doubtless makes many men feel happy--so long as they
are in health; but how when they come to feel that that health is nowise
in their power? While they have it, it seems a part of their being
inalienable; when they have lost it, a thing irrecoverable. Richard took
the thing that came, asked no questions, returned no thanks. He found
himself here:--whence he came he did not care; whither he went he did
not inquire. The present was enough, for the present was good; when the
present was no longer good, why, then,--!

There are those to whom the present cannot be good save as a mode of
the infinite. In such their divine origin asserts itself. Once known for
what it is, the poorest present is a phial holding the elixir of life.

On their way Simon talked about the place they were going to see, and
said its present owner was an elderly man, not very robust, with a
second wife, who looked as if she had not a drop of warm blood, and yet
as if she might live for ever.

“That was their son that came with the little lady,” he said.

“And the little lady was their daughter, I suppose!” rejoined Richard,
with an odd quiver somewhere near his heart.

“She's an Australian, they say,” answered his grandfather; “--no
relation, I fancy.”

“Is Mortgrange a grand place?” asked Richard.

“It's a fine house and a great estate,” answered Simon. “More might be
made of it, no doubt; and I hope one day more will be made of it.”

“What do you mean by that, grandfather?”

“That I hope the son will make a better landlord than the father.”

They came to a great iron gate, standing open, without any lodge.

“We're in luck!” said the blacksmith. “This will save us a long round!
Somebody must have rode out, and been too lazy to shut it! We'd better
leave it as we find it, though! Or say we bring the two halves together
without snapping the locks! I know the locks; I put 'em both on
myself.--See now what a piece of work that gate is! All done with the
hand! None o' your beastly casting there! Up to _your_ work, that, I'm
thinking, lad!”

“Indeed it is! Those gates are worth reducing, for plates to stamp the
covers of a right precious volume with!”

Simon misunderstood, and was on the point of flaring up, but what
Richard followed with quieted him.

“I could almost give up bookbinding to work a pair of gates like those!”
 he said.

“I believe you, my boy!” returned his grandfather. “Come and live with
me, and you shall!”

“But who would buy them when I had worked them?”

“If nobody had the sense, we'd put 'em up before the cottage!”

“Like a door-lock on a prayer-book!”

“No matter! They would be worth the worth of themselves!”

“You would have to make the wall so high, there would be no light in the
house!” persisted Richard.

“Tut, man! did you never hear of a joke? All I say is, that if you'll
come and work with me--I don't need to slave more than I like; I've got
a few pounds in the bank!--if you'll work, I'll teach you. Leave me
to find a fit place for what comes of it! They do most things at the
foundries now, but there's a market yet for hammer-work--if it be good
enough, and not too dear; for them as knows a good thing when they sees
it, ain't generally got much money to buy things. It's my opinion the
only way to learn the worth of a thing, is to have to go without it.”

“Few people fancy iron gates, I fear.”

“More might fancy them if they were to be had good,” returned the old
man.

The gate had admitted them to a long winding road, with clumps of trees
here and there on the borders of it. The road was apparently not much
used, for it was more than sprinkled with grass all over. A ploughed
field was on one side, and a wild heathy expanse, dotted with fir-trees,
on the other. Suddenly on the side of the field, gradually on that of
the heath, the ground changed to the green sward of a park.

“A grand place for thinking!” said Richard to himself.

But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the
things that came to him; he never said to things, _Come;_ neither, when
they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him
till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get
them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or,
in short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses--not bad
verses, but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had
addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which
he bepraised her until, had she been indeed a woman, she must have been
ashamed: she was the one essential of life! the one glory of existence!
he was no man who would not die for her! But what was the thing he thus
glorified? Liberty to go where you pleased, do what you liked, say what
you chose!--that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental
or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from
jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false
admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy
save that of love and truth--a freedom of which outward freedom is
scarce the shadow--of such liberty, for all the good books he had read,
for all the good poems he had admired, Richard had not yet begun to
dream, not to say _think_. Then again, he would write about love, and he
had never been in love in his life! All he knew of love was the pleasure
of imagining himself the object of a tall, dark-eyed, long-haired,
devoted woman's admiration. He had never even thought whether he was
worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to
whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a
chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living
with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times
better than he what the word _love_ meant: she had a history, he had
none.

I will not describe the house of Mortgrange. It seemed to Richard the
oldest house he had ever seen, and it moved him strangely. He said to
himself the man must be happy who called such a house his own, lived in
it, and did what he liked with it. The road they had taken brought them
to the back of the Hall, as the people on the estate called the house.
The blacksmith went to a side-door, and asked if he and his grandson
might have a look at the place: he had heard the baronet was from home!
The man said he would see; and returning presently, invited them to walk
in.

Knowing his grandson's passion, Simon's main thought in taking him was
to see him in the library, with its ten thousand volumes: it would be
such a joke to watch him pondering, admiring, coveting his own! As soon,
therefore, as they were in the great hall, he asked the servant whether
they might not see the library. The man left them again, once more to
make inquiry.

It was a grand old hall where they stood, fitter for the house of a
great noble than a mere baronet; but then the family was older than any
noble family in the county, and the poor baronetcy, granted to a
foolish ancestor, on carpet considerations, by the needy hand of the
dominie-king, was no great feather in the cap of the Lestranges. The
house itself was older than any baronetcy, for no part of it was later
than the time of Elizabeth. It was of fine stone, and of great size. The
hall was nearly sixty feet in height, with three windows on one side,
and a great one at the end. They were thirty feet from the floor, had
round heads, and looked like church-windows. The other side was blank.
Mid-height along the end opposite the great window ran a gallery.

To the sudden terror of Richard, who stood absorbed in the stateliness
of the place, an organ in the gallery burst out playing. He looked
up trembling, but could see only the tops of the pipes. As the sounds
rolled along the roof, reverberated from the solid walls, and crept
about the corners, it seemed to him that the soul of the place was
throbbing in his ears the words of a poem centuries old, which he had
read a day or two before leaving London:--

“Erthe owte of erthe es wondirly wroghte, Erthe hase getyn one erthe a
dignyte of noghte, Erthe appone erthe hase sett alle his thoghte, How
that erthe appone erthe may be heghe broghte.”

As he listened, his eyes settled upon a suit of armour in position: it
became to him a man benighted, lost, forgotten in the cold; the bones
were all dusted out of him by the wintry winds; only the shell of him
was left.

“Mr. Lestrange is in the library, and will see Mr. Armour,” said the
voice of the servant.

An election was at hand, and at such a time certain persons are more
courteous than usual.




CHAPTER X. _THE LIBRARY_.

Simon and Richard followed the man through a narrow door in the thick
wall, across a wide passage, and then along a narrow one. A door was
thrown open, and they stepped into a sombre room. The floor of the hall
was of great echoing slabs of stone, but now their feet sank in the deep
silence of a soft carpet.

Here a new awe, dwelling, however, in an air of homeliness, awoke in
Richard. Around him, from floor to ceiling, was ranged a whole army of
books, mostly in fine old bindings; in spite of open window and great
fire and huge chimney, the large lofty room was redolent of them. Their
odour, however, was not altogether pleasing to Richard, whose practised
organ detected in it the signs of a blamable degree of decay. The faint
effluvia of decomposing paper, leather, paste, and glue, were to Richard
as the air of an ill-ventilated ward in the nostrils of a physician. He
sniffed and made an involuntary grimace: he had not seen Mr. Lestrange,
who was close to him, half hidden by a bookcase that stood out from the
wall.

“Good morning, Armour!” said Lestrange. “Your young man does not seem to
relish books!”

“In a grand place like this, sir,” remarked Richard, taking answer
upon himself, “such a library as I never saw, except, of course, at
the British Museum, it makes a man sorry to discover indications of
neglect.”

“What do you mean?” returned Lestrange in displeasure.

Richard's remark was the more offensive that his superior style issued
in a comparatively common tone. Neither was there anything in the
appearance of the place to justify it.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, fearing he had been rude, “but I am a
bookbinder!”

“Well?” rejoined Lestrange, taking him now for a sneaking tradesman on
the track of a big job.

“I know at once the condition of an old book by the smell of it,”
 pursued Richard. “The moment I came in, I knew there must be some
here in a bad way--not in their clothes merely, but in their bodies as
well--the paper of them, I mean. Whether a man has what they call a soul
or not, a book certainly has: the paper and print are the body, and
the binding is the clothes. A gentleman I know--but he's a mystic--goes
farther, and says the paper is the body, the print the soul, and the
meaning the spirit.”

A pretty fellow to be an atheist! my reader may well think.

Mr. Lestrange stared. He must be a local preacher, this blacksmith, this
bookbinder, or whatever he was!

“I am sorry you think the books hypocrites,” he said. “They look all
right!” he added, casting his eyes over the shelves before him.

“Would you mind me taking down one or two?” asked Richard. “My hands are
rather black, but the colour is ingrain, as Spenser might say.”

“Do so, by all means,” answered Lestrange, curious to see how far the
fellow could support with proof the accuracy of his scent.

Richard moved three paces, and took down a volume--one of a set,
the original edition in quarto of “The Decline and Fall,” bound in
russia-leather.

“I thought so!” he said; “going!--going!--Look at the joints of
this Gibbon, sir. That's always the way with russia--now-a-days, at
least!--Smell that, grandfather! Isn't it sweet? But there's no stay in
it! Smell that joint! The leather's stone-dead!--It's the rarest thing
to see a volume bound in russia, of which the joints are not broken, or
at least cracking. These joints, you see, are gone to powder! All russia
does--sooner or later, whatever be the cause.--Just put that joint to
your nose, sir! That's part of what you smell so strong in the room.”

He held out the book to him, but Lestrange drew back: it was not fit his
nose should stoop to the request of a tradesman!

Richard replaced the book, and took down one after another of the same
set.

“Every one, you see, sir,” he said, “going the same way! Dust to dust!”

“If they're _all_ going that way,” remarked the young man, “it would
cost every stick on the estate to rebind them!”

“I should be sorry to rebind any of them. An old binding is like an old
picture! Just look at this French binding! It's very dingy, and a good
deal broken, but you never see anything like that nowadays--as mellow
as modest, and as rich as roses! Here's one says the same thing as your
grand hall out there, only in a piping voice.”

Lestrange was not exactly stuck-up; he had feared the fellow was
bumptious, and felt there was no knowing what he might say next, but
by this time had ceased to imagine his dignity in danger. The young
blacksmith's admiration of the books and of the hall pleased him, and he
became more cordial.

“Do you say _all_ russia-leather behaves in the same fashion?” he asked.

“Yes, now. I fancy it did not some years ago. There may be some change
in the preparation of the leather. I don't know. It is a great pity!
Russia is lovely to the eye--and to the nostrils.--May I take a look at
some of the _old_ books, sir?”

“What do you call an _old_ book?”

“One not later, say, than the time of James the First.--Have you a first
folio, sir?”

Lestrange was thinking of his coming baronetcy.

“First folio?” he answered absently. “I dare say you will find a good
many first folios on the shelves!”

“I mean the folio Shakespeare of 1623. There are, of course, many folios
much scarcer! I saw one the other day that the booksellers themselves
gave eight hundred guineas for!”

“What was it?” asked Lestrange carelessly.

“It was a wonderful copy--unique as to condition--of Gower's _Confessio
Amantis;_--not a _very_ interesting book, though I do not doubt
Shakespeare was fond of it. You see Shakespeare could hear the stones
preaching!”

“By Jove, a man may hear the sticks do that any Sunday!”

“True enough, sir, ha-ha!”

“Have you read Gower, then?”

“A good deal of him.”

“Was it that same precious copy you read him in?”

“It was; but I hadn't time for more than about the half. I must finish
on another edition, I fear.”

“How did you get hold of a book of such value?”

“The booksellers who bought it, asked me to take it into my hospital. It
wanted just a little, a very little patching. The copy in the museum is
not to compare to it.”

“You say it was not interesting?”

“Not _very_ interesting, I said, sir.”

“Why did you read so much of it, then?”

“When a book is hard to come at, you are the more ready to read it when
you have the chance.”

“I suppose that's why one borrows his neighbour's books and don't read
his own! I seldom take one down from those shelves.”

Richard felt as if a wall was broken down between them.

All the time they talked, old Simon stood beside, pleased to note how
well his grandson could hold up the ball with the young squire, but
saying nothing. If the matter had been hoof of horse, cow, or ass,
he would not have been silent: he knew hoofs better than Richard knew
books.

Richard took down a small folio, the back of which looked much too soft
and loose. Opening it, he found what he expected--a wreck. It was hardly
fit to be called any more a book. The clothes had forsaken the body, or
rather the body had decayed away from the clothes.

“Now, look here!” he said. “Here is Cowley's Poems--in such a state that
I doubt if anything would ever make a book of it again. I thought by the
back all was wrong inside! See how the leaves have come away singly: the
paper itself is rotten! I doubt if there is any way to make paper so far
gone as this hold together. I know a good deal can be done, and I must
learn what is known. I shan't be master of my trade till I know all that
can be done now to stop such a book from crumbling into dust! Then I may
find out something more!”

“Well, for that one, I don't think it matters: Cowley ain't much!” said
Lestrange, throwing the volume on a table. “I remember once taking down
the book, and trying to read some of it: I could not; it's the dullest
rubbish ever written.”

“It's not so bad as that, sir!” answered Richard, and taking up the book
he turned the leaves with light, practiced hand. “He was counted the
greatest poet of his day, and no age loves dullness! Listen a moment,
sir; I will read only one stanza.”

He had found the “Hymn to the Light,” and read:--

“First born of _Chaos_, who so fair didst come From the old Negro's
darksome womb! Which when it saw the lovely Child, The melancholy Mass
put on kind looks and smil'd.”

“I don't see much in that!” said Lestrange, as Richard closed the book,
and glanced up expectant.

Richard was silent for an instant.

“At any rate,” he returned, “it is necessary to the understanding of our
history, that we should know the kind of thing admired and called good
at any given time of it: so our lecturer at King's used to tell us.”

“At King's!” cried Lestrange.

“King's college, London, I mean,” said Richard. “They have evening
classes there, to which a man can go after his day's work. My father
always took care I should have time for anything I wanted to do. I go
still when I am at home--not always, but when the lecturer takes up any
special subject I want to know more about.”

“You'll be an author yourself some day, I suppose!”

“There's little hope or fear of that, sir! But I can't bear not to know
what's in my very hands. I can't be content with the outsides of the
books I bind. It seems a shame to come so near light and never see it
shine. If I were a tailor, I should learn anatomy. I know one tailor
who is as familiar with the human form as any sculptor in London--more,
perhaps!”

Lestrange began to feel uncomfortable. If he let this prodigy go on
talking and asking questions, he would find out how little he knew about
anything! But Richard was no prodigy. He was only a youth capable of
interest in everything, with the stimulus of not finding the fountains
of knowledge at his very door, and the aid of having to work all day at
some pleasant task, nearly associated with higher things that he loved
better. He did know a good deal for his age, but not so very much for
his opportunity, his advantages being great. Most men who learn would
learn more, I suspect, if they had work to do, and difficulty in the
way of learning. Those counted high among Richard's advantages. He
was, besides, considerably attracted by the mechanics of literature--a
department little cultivated by those who have most need of what grows
in it.

Further talk followed. Lestrange grew interested in the phenomenon of
a blacksmith that bound books and read them. He began to dream of
patronage and responsive devotion. What a thing it would be for him,
in after years, with the cares of property and parliament combining to
curtail his leisure, to have such a man at his beck, able to gather the
information he desired, and to reduce, tabulate, and embody it so as
to render his chief the best-informed man in the House! while at other
times he would manage for him his troublesome tenants, and upon occasion
shoe his wife's favourite horse! He could also depend upon him to
provide, from the rich stores of his memory, suitable quotations when he
wished to make a speech! Lestrange had never thought whether the wish to
_appear_ might not indicate the duty to _be_; had never seen that, until
he _was_, to desire to _appear_ was to cherish the soul of a sneak. He
had no notion of anything but the look; no notion that, having made a
good speech, he would deserve an atom the less praise for it that he
could not have made it without his secretary. Did any one think the less
of clearing a five-barred gate, he would have answered, that it could
not be done without a horse? Where was the difference? A man you paid to
be your secretary, still more a man whose education to be your secretary
you had paid for--was he not yours in a way at least analogous to that
in which a horse was yours? He could break away from you more easily,
no doubt, but a man knew better than a horse on which side his bread was
buttered!

“I think, squire, I'll go and have a pipe with the coachman!” said the
blacksmith at length.

“As you please, Armour,” answered Lestrange. “I will take care of
your--nephew, is he?”

“My grandson, sir--from London.”

“All right! There's good stuff in the breed, Armour!--I will bring him
to you.”

Richard went on taking down book after book, and showing his host how
much they required attention.

“And you could set all right for--?--for how much?” asked Lestrange.

“That no one could say. It would, however, cost little more than time
and skill. The material would not come to much. Only, where the paper
itself is in decay, I do not know about that. I have learned nothing in
that department yet.”

“For generations none of us have cared about books--that must be why
they have gone so to the bad!--the books, I mean,” he added with a
laugh. “There was a bishop, and I think there was a poet, somewhere
in the family; but my father--hm!--I doubt if he would care to lay out
money on the library!”

“Tell him,” suggested Richard, “that it is a very valuable library--at
least so it appears to me from the little I have seen of it; but I am
sure of this, that it is rapidly sinking in value. After another twenty
years of neglect it would not fetch half the price it might easily be
brought up to now.”

“I don't know that that would weigh much with him. So long as he sees
the shelves full, and the book-backs all right, he won't want anything
better. He cares only how things look.”

“But the whole look of the library is growing worse--gradually, it is
true, and in a measure it can't be helped--but faster than you would
think, and faster than it ought. The backs, which, from a library point
of view, are the faces of the books, may, up to a certain moment, look
well, and after that go much more rapidly. I fear damp is getting at
these from somewhere!”

“Would you undertake to set all right, if my father made you a
reasonable offer?”

“I would--provided I found no injury beyond the scope of my experience.”

Richard spoke in book-fashion: he was speaking about books, and to a
social superior! he was not really pompous.

“Well, if my father should come to see the thing as I do, I will let you
know. Then will be the time for a definite understanding!”

“The best way would be that I should come and work for a set time: by
the progress I made, and what I cost, you could judge.”

Lestrange rang the bell, and ordered the attendant to take the young man
to his grandfather.

The two wandered together over the grounds, and Richard saw much to
admire and wonder at, but nothing to approach the hall or the library.

On their way home, Simon, to his grandson's surprise, declared himself
in favour of his working at the Mortgrange library. But the idea
tickled his fancy so much, that Richard wondered at the oddity of his
grandfather's behaviour.




CHAPTER XI. _ALICE._

Soon after his visit to Mortgrange, the young bookbinder went home,
recalled at last by his parents. John Tuke was shocked with the hardness
and blackness of his hands, and called his wife's attention to them.
She, however, perhaps from nearer alliance with the smithy, professed to
regard their condition as by no means a serious matter. She could not,
nevertheless, quite conceal her regret, for she was proud of her boy's
hands.

Richard supposed of course that his father's annoyance came only from
the fear that his touch would be no longer sufficiently delicate for
certain parts of his work; and certainly, when he looked at them, he
thought the points of his fingers were broader than before, and was a
little anxious lest they should have lost something of their cunning.
He did not know that mechanical faculty, for fine work as well as rough,
goes in general with square-pointed fingers. Delicately tapered fingers,
whatever they may indicate in the way of artistic invention, are not
the fingers of the painter or the sculptor. The finest fingers of the
tapering kind I have ever seen, were those of a distinguished chemist of
the last generation. Eager to satisfy both his father and himself, that
the hands of the bookmender had not degenerated more than his skill
could counteract, Richard selected, from a few that were waiting his
return, the book worthiest of his labour, set to work, and by a thorough
success quickly effected his purpose.

He was now, however, anxious, before doing anything else, to learn all
that was known for the restoration and repair of the insides of books.
In this an old-bookseller, a friend of his father, was able to give
him no little help, putting him up to wrinkles not a few. Richard was
surprised to see how, with a penknife, on a bit of glass, he would pare
the edge of a scrap of paper to half the thickness, in order to place
two such edges together, and join them without a scar. He taught him how
to clean letterpress and engravings from ferruginous, fungous, and other
kinds of spots. He made him acquainted with a process which considerably
strengthened paper that had become weak in its cohesion; and when
Richard would make further experiment, he supplied him with valueless
letterpress to work upon. His time was thus more than ever occupied. For
many weeks he scarcely even read.

It was not long, however, before he bethought him that he must see
Arthur. He went the same evening to call on him, but found other people
in the house, who could tell him nothing about the family that had left.
His aunt said she had seen Alice once, and knew they were going, but did
not know where they were gone. Richard would have inquired at the house
in the City where Arthur was employed, but he did not know even the name
of the firm. Once, from the top of an omnibus, he saw him--in the same
shabby old comforter, looking feebler and paler and more depressed than
ever; but when he got down, he had lost sight of him, and though he ran
hither and thither, looking up this street and that, he recovered no
glimpse of him. The selfish mother and the wasting children came back to
him vividly as he walked sadly home.

He had counted Alice the nicest girl he had ever seen, but since going
to the country had not thought much about her; and now, since seeing
the fairy-like lady with the big brown mare, he had a higher idea of
the feminine. But although therefore he would not have thought the pale,
sweet-faced dressmaker quite so pleasing as before, he would, because
of the sad look into which her countenance always settled, have felt her
quite as interesting.

Richard had not yet arrived at any readiness to fall in love. It is well
when this readiness is delayed until the individuality is sufficiently
developed to have its own demands. I venture to think one cause of
unhappiness in marriages is, that each person's peculiar self, was not,
at the time of engagement, sufficiently grown for a natural selection
of the suitable, that is, the _correspondent;_ and that the development
which follows is in most cases the development of what is reciprocally
non-correspondent, and works for separation and not approximation.
The only thing to overcome this or any other disjunctive power, is
development in the highest sense, that is, development of the highest
and deepest in us--which can come only by doing right. The man who is
growing to be one with his own nature, that is, one with God who is
the _naturing_ nature, is coming nearer and nearer to every one of his
fellow-beings. This may seem a long way round to love, but it is the
only road by which we can arrive at true love of any kind; and he who
does not walk in it, will one day find himself on the verge of a gulf of
hate.

Individuality, forestalled by indifference, had no chance of keeping sir
Wilton and lady Ann apart, but certainly had done nothing to bring
them together. Where all is selfishness on both sides, what other
correspondences may exist will hardly come into play. The loss of the
unloved heir had perhaps done a little to approximate them; but they
speedily ceased to hold any communication of ideas on the matter.
As they did nothing to recover him, so they seemed to take almost no
thought as to his existence or non-existence. If he were alive, neither
father nor stepmother had the least desire to discover him. Answering
honestly, each would have chosen that he should remain unheard of. As to
the possibility of his dying in want, or being brought up in wickedness,
that did not trouble either of them. His stepmother did not think
the more tenderly of another woman's child that she cared for her own
children only because they were hers. If you could have got the idea
into the pinched soul of lady Ann, that the human race is one family,
it would but have enhanced her general dislike, her feeble enmity to
humanity. When she did or said anything to displease him, sir Wilton
would sometimes hint at a new advertisement, but she did not much heed
the threat. On the whole, however, they had got on better than might
have been expected, partly in virtue of her sharp tongue and her thick
skin, which combination of the offensive and defensive put sir Wilton
at a disadvantage: however sharp his retort might be, she never felt it,
but went on; and harping does not always mean such pleasant music,
that you want to keep the harper awake. She had brought him four
children--Arthur, the one whose acquaintance Richard had made, a younger
brother who promised foully, and two girls--the elder common in feature
and slow in wits, but with eyes and a heart; the younger clever and
malicious.

One stormy winter night, as Richard was returning from a house in Park
Crescent, to which he had carried home a valuable book restored to
strength and some degree of aged beauty, from one of the narrow openings
on the east side of Regent Street, came a girl, fighting with the
wind and a weak-ribbed umbrella, and ran buffeted against him,
notwithstanding his endeavour to leave her room. The collision was very
slight, but she looked up and begged his pardon. It was Alice. Before he
could speak, she gave a cry, and went from him in blind haste as fast
as she could go; but with the fierce wind, her perturbation, and the
unruliness of the umbrella, which she was vainly trying to close that
she might run the better, she struck full against a lamp-post, and stood
like one stunned and on the point of falling. Richard, however, was
close behind her, and put an arm round her. She did not resist; she was
indeed but half-conscious. The same moment he saw a cab and hailed it.
The man heard and came. Richard lifted her into it, and got in after
her. But Alice came to herself, got up, and leaning out of the cab on
the street side, tried to open the door. Richard caught her, drew her
back, and made her sit down again.

“Richard! Richard!” she cried, as she yielded to his superior strength,
and burst into tears, “where are you taking me?”

“Wherever you like, Alice. You shall tell the cabman yourself. What is
the matter with you? Don't be angry with me. It is not my fault that
I have not been to see you and Arthur. You went away, and nobody could
tell me where to find you! Give the cabman your address, Alice.”

“I'm not going home,” sobbed Alice.

“Where are you going, then? I will go with you. You're not fit to go
anywhere alone! I'm afraid you're badly hurt!”

“No, no! Do let me out. Indeed, indeed, you must!”

“Well, then, I won't! You'll drop down and be left to the police! It's
horrible to think of you out in such a night! Come home with me. If you
are in any trouble, my mother will help you.”

Here Alice, who had yielded to the pressure with which Richard held her,
broke from him, and pushed him away. Richard put his other arm across,
and laid hold of the door of the cab, telling the man to get up on his
box, and have a little patience. He obeyed, and Richard turned again to
Alice.

“Richard,” she said, “your mother would kill me!”

“Nonsense!” he rejoined; “what a fancy! My mother!”

“I've seen her since you went. She made me promise--”

But there Alice stopped, and Richard could get from her nothing but
entreaties to be let out.

“If you don't,” she said at last, growing desperate, “I will scream.”

“Let me take you at least, then, a little nearer where you want to go,”
 pleaded Richard.

“No! no I set me down.”

“Tell me where you live.”

“I daren't.”

“I must see my old friend, Arthur! and why shouldn't I see his sister?
My father and mother ain't tyrants! They know what that would make of
me! They let me go where I please, or give a good reason why I should
not.”

“Oh, they'll do that fast enough!” returned Alice, in a tone of mingled
despair and scorn. “But,” she added immediately, “the worst of it is,
they'll be in the right. Let me out, Richard, or I shall hate you!”

But with the word she dropped her head on his shoulder, and sobbed as if
her heart would sob its last.

He made repeated attempts to soothe her, but, as he made them, he felt
them foolish, for he saw that nothing would alter her determination to
be set down.

“Must I leave you, then, on this very spot?” he said.

“Yes, yes! here--here!” she answered, and rose with apparent eagerness
to get away from him.

He got out, and turned to her, but she did not accept his offered help.

“Won't you shake hands with me?” he said. “I did not mean to offend
you!”

She answered nothing, but hurried away a step or two, then turned and
lifted her arms as if to embrace him, but turned again instantly, and
fled away among the shadows of the wildly flickering lamps. By the time
he had paid the cabman, he saw it would be useless to follow, for she
was out of sight.

The wide street was almost deserted; its lamps shuddered flaring and
streaming and darkening in the fierce gusts of the wind. A vague army of
evil things seemed to start up and come crowding between him and Alice.
He turned homeward, with a sense of loss and a great sadness at his
heart, unable even to speculate as to the cause of Alice's behaviour.
All he knew was, that his mother had something to do with it. For the
first time since childhood, he felt angry with his mother.

“She fancies,” he said to himself, “that I am in love with the girl,
and she thinks her not good enough for me! I'm not in love with her;
but _any_ good girl I cared for, I should count good enough! When my
mother's turn comes, off she goes to the rest of the social tyrants that
look down on a brother because he can do twenty things they can't!
If the world went out of gear, would _they_ make it go! I'll be fair
whatever I be! It'll be my mother's own fault if I fall in love with
Alice! She has made me pity her with all my heart--the poor, white
thing!--so thin and pinched, and such big eyes! It would be just bliss
to have a creature like that to trust you, so that you could comfort
her! What can my mother have said to her? She has made her awfully
miserable, anyhow! Perhaps her mother drinks!--What if she do! Alice
don't!”

He was determined to have some explanation from his mother. But she
foiled him. The moment she saw what he meant, she turned away, listened
in silence, and spoke with a decision that savoured of anger.

“They're not people your father and I will have you know,” she said,
without looking at him.

“But why, mother?” asked Richard.

“We're not bound to explain everything to you, Richard. It ought to be
enough that we _have_ a good reason.”

“If it be a good reason, why shouldn't I know it, mother?” he persisted.
“Good things don't require to be hidden.”

“That's very true; they do not.”

“Then why hide this one?”

“Because it is not good.”

“You said it was a good reason!”

“So it is.”

“Good and not good! How can that be?” said Richard, with a great lack of
logic. By this time he ought to have been able to see that the worst of
facts may be the best of reasons.

His mother held her peace, knowing she was right, but not knowing how to
answer what she thought his cleverness.

“I mean to go and see them, mother,” he said.

“You'll repent it, Richard. The woman is not respectable!”

“She won't bite me!”

“There's worse than biting!”

“I allow,” pursued Richard, “she may take a drop too much; her nose does
look a little suspicious! But if she ain't what she should be, it's hard
lines Arthur and Alice should suffer for the sins of their mother.”

“The Bible says the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.”

“The Bible! If the Bible says what ain't right, are we to do it?”

“Richard, I'll have no such word spoken again in my house!” exclaimed
his mother.

“Are you going to turn me out, mother, because I say we should not do
what is wrong, whoever tells us to?”

“No, Richard! You said the Bible said what was wrong; and that's
blasphemy!”

“Didn't you say, mother, that the Bible said we ought to visit the sins
of the fathers on the children?”

“God forbid!” cried the poor woman, driven almost to distraction; “I
said nothing of the kind! That would be awful! What the Bible says is,
that God does so.”

“Well, if God chooses, we must leave him to do as he chooses--not do
likewise!”

“Surely, surely, Richard! If _he_ does it, he knows what he's about, and
we don't.”

“All right, mother! Then tell me where Arthur and Alice are gone. I want
to go and see them.”

“I don't know. In fact, I took care not to know, that I mightn't be able
to tell you.”

“But why?”

“Never mind why. I don't know where they are, and couldn't tell you if I
would.”

Richard turned angrily away, and went to his room, weary and annoyed. In
the morning his mother said to him--

“Richard, I can't bear there should be any misunderstanding between you
and me! The moment you are one and twenty, ask me and I will tell you
why I would not have you knowing those people. Believe me, I was right
to stop it, for fear of what might follow.”

“If you are afraid of my falling in love with a girl you don't think
good enough for me, you have taken the wrong way to keep me from
thinking about her, mother. You remember the costermonger whose family
quarrelled with him for marrying beneath him? If a girl be a good girl,
she is good for me, whether she be the daughter of the cats'-meat-man
or of a royal duke! I know that's not the way people who call themselves
Christians think! They want, of course, to keep up the selfishness of
the breed!”

It was horribly rude, and Jane burst into tears. Richard's heart
softened. It is well our hearts are sometimes in advance of our
consciences--we are so slow to recognize injustice in defence of the
right! Richard's wrong to his mother was a lack of faith in her. Where
he did not understand and she would not explain, he did not even give
her the benefit of the doubt. He treated her just as many of us, calling
ourselves Christians, treat the Father--not in words, perhaps, or even
in definite thoughts, but in feelings and actions.

“You will be sorry for this one day, Richard!” she sobbed. “Whatever I
do is from care over you!”

“To wrong another for my sake, never can be any good to me. If money
wrong-got be a curse, so is any good wrong-got.”

“You won't trust me, Richard! My own father is a blacksmith: why should
I look down upon a dressmaker?”

“That's just what I think, mother!--Why?”

“I don't!” returned Mrs. Tuke--and there she paused: another step might
bring her to the edge of the gulf!

Richard looked at her moodily for a moment, then turned away to the
workshop; where, after his ill success with his mother, he was hardly
less disinclined to challenge his father than before, for he knew him
inexpugnable.




CHAPTER XII. _MORTGRANGE._

In the spring came a letter from young Lestrange, through Simon Armour,
asking Richard upon what terms he would undertake the work wanted in the
library.

He handed the letter to his father, and they held a consultation.

“There's this to be considered,” said the bookbinder, “that, if you go
there, you lose your connection here--in a measure, at least. Therefore
you cannot do the work at the same rate as in your own shop.”

“On the other hand, I should have my keep.”

“That is true, and of course is something; but I think it may fairly
be held to do no more than make up for the advantages of living in
London--your classes, for instance.”

“Anyhow I must be paid so much a month, and do what I can in the time. I
couldn't charge by the individual job in a man's own house!--The thing
I am afraid of is, that, not knowing the niceties of the work, they may
fancy I don't do enough.”

“In the other way they would fancy you charged too much, and that would
come to the same thing!--But they will at least discover that you keep
to your hours and stick to your work!--We must calculate by what the
best hands in the trade get a week!”

The terms they concluded to ask appeared to Lestrange reasonable. He
proposed then that Richard should bind himself for not less than a year,
while Lestrange reserved the right of giving him a month's notice; and
these points being willingly assented to by Richard, an agreement was
drawn up and signed--much to the satisfaction of Simon Armour, whose
first thought was that the work would not be too hard for Richard to
want a little exercise at the forge after hours. Richard, however, well
as he liked the anvil, was not so sure about this: there might be books
to read after he had done his day's duty by their garments! He had half
laid out for himself a plan of study in his leisure time, he said.

It was a lovely evening when he arrived at Mortgrange from his
grandfather's. He was shown to his new quarters in the old mansion by
the housekeeper, an elderly, worthy creature, with the air of a hostess.
She liked the young man; the honest friendliness of his carriage pleased
her. He was handsome too, though not strikingly so, and his expression
was better than any handsomeness, inspiring the honest with confidence,
and giving little hope to the designing. His brave outlook, not bold
so much as fearless, and his ready smile, seemed those of a man more
prepared than eager to do his part in the world. He was well set up,
and of good figure, for the slight roundness of his shoulders had almost
disappeared. The poise of his head, and the proportions of his limbs,
left nothing to be desired. His foster-parents had encouraged him in
every manly exercise, for they were wise enough to have regard to the
impression he must make at first sight: they would have it easy to
believe that he might be what they were about to swear he was. Nor had
his sojourn with his grandfather been the least factor in the result
that he sat down to his work as lightly as a gentleman to his dinner,
turned from it as if he had been playing a game instead of earning his
bread, and altogether gave the impression of being a painter or sculptor
rather than a tradesman. There was that in his bearing which suggested a
will rather than necessity to labour.

“Here is your room, young man,” said Mrs. Locke.

It was a large, rather neglected chamber, at the end of a long passage
on the second floor--the very room out of which one midnight he had been
borne in terror, twenty years before, by the woman he called his mother.

“And I hope you will find yourself comfortable,” continued the old lady,
in a tone that implied--“You ought to be!”--“If you want anything, or
have anything to complain of, let me know,” she added. “--I thought it
better not to put you in the servant's quarters!”

“Thank you, ma'am,” said Richard. “This is a beautiful room for me! Do
you know, ma'am, where I'm to work?”

“I have not been informed,” she answered, as she left the room. “Mr.
Lestrange will see to that.”

Richard went to the window. Before him spread an extensive but somewhat
bare park, for the trees in it were rather few. Some of them, however,
were grand ones: many had been cut down, but a few of the finest left.
A sea of grass lay in every direction, with islands of clumps and
thickets, and vague shores of hedge and wood and ploughed field. On the
grass were cattle and sheep and fallow deer. On this side, nothing came
between the park and the house.

The day was late in the spring; summer was close at hand. There had been
rain all the morning and afternoon, but the clouds were clearing away as
now the sun went down. Everything was wet, but the undried tears of
the day flashed in the sunset. Nature looked a child whose gladness had
come, but who could not stop crying: so heartily had she gone in for
sorrow, that her mind was shaped to weeping. Most of the clouds, late
so dark and sullen, were putting on garments of light, as if resolved to
forgive and forget, and leave no doubt of it. But the sun did not look
satisfied with his day's work. Slant across the world to Richard's
window came the last of his vanishing rays, blinding him as he brooded,
and obliterating all between them in a throbbing splendour; yet somehow
the sun seemed sad, as if atonement had come too late. The edge extreme
of the glory vanished; a moment's cloud followed; and then, when the
radiance of him who was gone grew rosy and golden above his grave,
Richard began to see much that his presence had been hiding. But the
revelation did not linger long. The clouds closed on the twilight, the
world grew almost dismal, and the sadness crept into Richard; or was it
not rather that his own hidden sadness rose up to meet the sadness
of the world? Yet, even as he became aware of it, something in him
recognised it as a thing foreign to the human heart: “We were not made
for this!” he said. “--We are not here, I mean,” he corrected himself,
“--we have not sprung into being in order to be sad! There is no reason
in sadness! There is cause enough, man at least knows, but essential
reason at the heart of its existence there is none!--Whence, then, comes
this mistake, this sadness?” he went on with himself. “Why should there
be so much of it in the world? Is it that, as for all other good things,
a man must put forth his will for joy? It is plain a man must assert
what is highest in him, else he cannot lay hold of the best: must a man
will to be glad, else deserve to be sorrowful?” He began to whistle.
“I will be glad!” he said, “even in the midst of a world of rain!--Yet
again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me
to assert joy and resist sadness?--After all, what is there to be merry
about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but
if I don't like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out
with smiles, and applaud at the end?--I don't see what there is to make
me miserable, and I don't see what there is to make me glad!”

Would it have cast any light either on Richard's gloom or his
perplexity, had he been told that, in the place where he stood staring
out on the gray, formless twilight, his mother had often sought refuge,
and tasted the comfort of an assuagement of splendour. She had not
appropriated the room, and it was some time before the household knew
that she was in the way of going there: it was awkwardly situated in a
remote part of the house and rarely used--which made its attraction for
lady Lestrange. But the faithful sister did not forget where she had
once found her on her knees weeping, and chose it for herself and her
charge when she was gone.

In a few minutes Richard arrived at the conclusion that he would be all
right as soon as he got among the wine-bins of the library. He did not
reflect how little of a man is he whose sense of well-being is at the
mercy of a Scotch mist or a cloudy twilight. Neither did he put to
himself the question whether the mending of the old leather bottles
in which lie stored the varied wines of the human spirit, ought to
be labour and gladness enough for the soul of a man. It is a poor
substitute for food that helps us to forget the want of it. But how can
we wonder when he would have no father, and claimed the black Negation,
the grandmother of Chaos, as his mother! Yet was it the presence all the
time of that father he refused that made it possible for him to drink
the water of any poorest little well of salvation that sprang in the
field of his life; and such a well was his work among books.




CHAPTER XIII. _THE BEECH-TREE_.

He went to bed, and after a dreamless night, rose to find the world
overflowed with bliss. The sun was at his best, and every water-drop on
the grass was shining all the colours of the rainbow. Surely the gems
that are dug from the earth have their prototype in the dew-drops that
lie on its surface. One might in a moment of sweet maundering imagine
Nature hiding those sunless dew-drops of the mines in the darkness of a
sweet sorrow that the youth of the morning must be so evanescent.

The whole world lay before Richard his inheritance. The sunlight gave it
him, a gift from the height of his heaven. What was it to Richard that
the park, its trees, its grass, its dew-drops, its cattle, its shadows,
belonged to sir Wilton! He never even thought of the fact! He felt them
his own! Was the soft, clear, fresh, damp air, with all the unreachable
soul of it, not his, because it was sir Wilton's?

The highest property, as Dante tells us, increases to each by the
sharing of it with others. But the common mind does not care for such
property. Was not the blue, uplifted, hoping sky, that spoke to the sky
inside Richard--was not that sir Wilton's? Yes, indeed; for were it not
sir Wilton's, it could not be Richard's. But sir Wilton did not claim
it, because he did not care for it, heard no sound of the speech it
uttered. Happy would it have been for sir Wilton, that anything he
called his, was his as it was Richard's! He could not prevent Richard
from possessing Mortgrange in a way he himself did not and would not
possess it. But neither yet were they Richard's in the full eternal way.
Nature was a noble lady whose long visit made him glad; she was not yet
at her own home in his house. There were things in the world that might
come in and drive her out. Say rather, there was yet no chamber in that
house in which she could take up her dwelling all night.

The setting sun had made Richard sad; his resurrection made him blessed!
He dressed in haste, and went to find his way from the house.

Arrived in the park, and walking in cool delight on the wet grass, he
began to think about the men and the races whom the greed of other men
and races had pinched and shouldered and squeezed from the world. He
thought of the men who, by preventing others and refusing to let them
share, imagine to increase the length and breadth and depth of their own
possessing; and thus by degrees he fell into a retributive mood. What
should, what could, what would be done with such men?

“As they refuse their neighbours ground to stand upon,” he said to
himself, “as the very cubic space they cannot disrobe them of they
begrudge them because it measures from what they count their land, I
should like to know how high their possession goes! Is there any law
that lays that down? To what point above him can the landowner complain
of trespass in the gliding or hovering balloon? When hawking comes in
again, as it will one day, by the law of revival, at what height will
another man's falcon be an intruder on him who stands gazing up from
his corn? Were I a power in the universe, I would cram the air over
the heads of such incarnate greeds with clouds of souls! The sun should
reach them only through the vapours of other life than theirs, inimical
to them because of their selfishness. I would set the dead burrowing
beneath them, so that the land they boast should heave under their feet
with the writhing of the bodies they drove from the surface into the
deeps. They should have but a carpet, wallowing in the waves of a
continuous live earthquake. I know I am thinking like a fool; but surely
at least there ought to be some set season for Truth and Justice to
return to the forsaken earth! Are we for ever to bear without hope the
presence of the cruel, the vulgar self-souled, the neighbour-crushing
rich? Are the wicked the favourites of Nature, that they flourish like
a green bay-tree? Doubtless it is right to forgive--but how to be able?
Nobody has ever done me any harm yet; I have nothing to complain of;
it cannot be revenge in me that longs for something, call it God, or
Nature, or Justice, that will repay!--God it cannot be; but something
sure there must be to which vengeance belongs!”

He might have gone further in his thinking, and perhaps come to ask what
satisfaction there could be in any vengeance, so long as the evil-doer
remained unhumbled by the perception and the shame of his doing, was
neither sorry for it nor turned away from it--in a word, did not repent;
but there came an interruption.

He was walking slowly along, unheeding where he went, when he heard
a sound that made him look up. Then he saw that he was under a great
beech, and the sound seemed to come from somewhere in the top of
it--a sound like the pleased cooing of a dove. He looked hard into the
branches and their wilderness of fresh leaves, but could descry nothing.
Then came a little laugh, and with a preparatory rustling and rustling
in its passage, a book--a small folio--fell plump at his feet.

“Will you please put it in the library!” said a voice he had heard
before--long before, it seemed--but had not forgotten.

“I will bring it to you--at least I would, if I could see where you
are!” answered Richard, gazing with yet keener search into the thick
mass of leaf-cloud over his head.

“No, no; I don't want more of it. I can't see you, and don't know who
you are; but please take the book, and lay it on the middle table in the
library. It may be hurt, and I don't want to come down just yet.”

“Very well, miss!” answered Richard; “I will.--The fall from such a
height, and through all those branches, must have done it quite enough
harm already!”

“Oh!--I never thought of that!” said the voice.

Richard took up the book, and walked away with it, pondering.

“Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that the little lady, whose
big mare I shod last year, is up there in that tree? It must be her
voice!--I cannot, surely, be mistaken!--But how on earth, or rather how
in heaven, did she get up? Yet why shouldn't she climb as well as any
other? It must be as easy as riding that huge mare. And then she's not
like other ladies! She's not of the ordinary breed of this planet! Which
of them would have spoken to a blacksmith-lad as she spoke to me! Who
but herself would have tied up a scratch in a working man's hand!”

He was right so far: she could climb as no other in that county, no
other, perhaps, in England, man or boy or girl, could climb. She was
like a squirrel at climbing; and for the last few mornings, the weather
having grown decidedly summery, had gone before breakfast to say her
prayers in that tree.

Richard carried the book to the house--it was Pope's Letters--found his
way to the library, and laid it where she said, hoping she would come
to seek it, and that he might then be present. Would she recognize the
fellow that shod her mare? he wondered.

He could do nothing till he knew where he was to work, and therefore,
after breakfast in the servants' hall, he asked one of the men to let
him know when Mr. Lestrange would see him, and went to his room.

Richard had not yet become aware of any moral pressure. The duty of
aspiration or self-conquest, had never in any shape been forced upon
him, and his conscience had not made him acquainted with it. What is
called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble
when it ought to bark loudest; but Richard's was not of that sort, and
yet was very much at ease. I may say for him that he had done nothing he
knew to be bad at the moment; and very little that he had to be ashamed
of afterwards, either at school or since he left it. Partly through the
care of his parents, he had never got into what is called bad company,
had formed no undesirable intimacies. He had a natural cleanliness, a
natural sense of the becoming, which did much to keep him from evil: he
could not consent to regard himself with disgust, and he would have been
easily disgusted with himself. If he did not, as I have indicated,
set himself with any conscious effort to rise above himself, he did do
something against sinking below himself. The books he chose were almost
all of the better sort. He had instinctively laid aside some in which he
recognized a degrading influence.

But here let me remark that it depends partly on the degree of a man's
moral development, whether this or that book will be to him degrading
or otherwise. A book which one man ought to scorn, may be of elevating
tendency to another, because it is a little above his present moral
condition. A book which to enjoy would harm a more delicate mind, may
_perhaps_ benefit the nature that would have chosen a coarser book
still. We cannot determine the operation of energies, when we do not
know on what moral level they are at work. The dead may be left to bury
their dead; it would be sad to see an angel haunting a charnel-house.

I have been led into this digression through the desire to give
an approximate idea of the good, rather vacant, unselfish, and yet
self-contented, if not self-satisfied condition of Richard's being.

He got out a manuscript-book in which he was in the habit of setting
down whatever came to him, and wrote for some time, happily making more
than one spot of ink on the toilet-cover, which served to open the eyes
of Mrs. Locke to her mistake in thinking a workman would not want a
writing-table; so that before the next evening he found in his chamber
everything comfortable for writing, as well as for sleeping and
dressing.

He was interrupted by the entrance of a servant with the message that
Mr. Lestrange was in the morning-room, and wished to see him.

He followed the man and found Lestrange at the breakfast-table, with
a tall young woman, very ordinary-looking, except for her large, soft,
dark eyes, and the little lady whose mare he had shod, and whose voice
he had that morning heard from the tree-top.

He advanced half-way to the table, and stood.

“Ah, there you are!” said Lestrange, glancing up, and immediately
reverting to his plate. “We've got to set to work, haven't we?”

He had, I presume, found the ladies not uninterested in the restoration
that was about to be initiated, and had therefore sent for Richard while
breakfast was going on.

The fledgling baronet, except for his too favourable opinion of himself,
in which he was unlike only a very few, and an amount of assumption not
small toward his supposed inferiors, was not a disagreeable human, and
now spoke pleasantly.

“Yes, sir,” answered Richard. “Shall I wait outside until you have done
breakfast?”

He feared the servant might have made a mistake.

“I sent for you,” replied Lestrange curtly.

“Very well, sir. I have not yet learned whether the tools I sent on
have been delivered, but there will be plenty to do in the way of
preparation.--May I ask if you have settled where I am to work, sir?”

“Ah! I had not thought of that!”

“It seems to me, sir, that the library itself would suit best; that is,
if I might have a good-sized kitchen-table in it, and roll up half the
carpet. When I had to beat a book I could take it into the passage, or
just outside the window. Nothing else would make any dust.”

Lestrange had been thinking how to have the binder under his eye, and
yet not seem to watch a fellow so much above his notion of a working
man; the family made very little use of the library, and Richard's
proposal seemed just the thing. He would be sure to stick to his work
where some one might any moment be coming in!

“I don't see any difficulty,” he answered.

“I should want a little fire for my glue-pot and polishing-iron. There
will be gilding and lettering too, though I hope not much--title-pieces
to replace, and a touch here and there to give to the tooling! No man
with any reverence in him would meddle much with such delicate, lovely
old things as many of these gildings! He would not dare more than just
touch them!”

The little lady sat eating her toast, but losing no word that was said.
She knew from his voice the young man was the same to whom she had
called out of the beech-tree; but now she seemed to recognize him as the
blacksmith whose hand she had bound up: what could a blacksmith do in a
library? She was puzzled.

Richard noted that she was dressed in some green stuff, which perhaps
was the cause of his having been unable to discover her in the tree! Her
great eyes--they were bigger than those of the tall lady--every now and
then looked up at him with a renewed question, to which they seemed to
find no answer. They were big blue eyes--very dark for blue, and rather
too round for perfection; but their roundness was at one with the
prevailing expression of her face, which was innocent daring, inquiry,
and confidence. The paleness of it was a healthy paleness, with just
an inclination to freckle. Her dark, half-scorched-looking hair was so
abundant and rebellious, that it had to be all over compelled with gold
pins. Its manipulation had neither beginning, middle, nor end. She ate
daintily enough, but as if she meant to have a breakfast that should
last her till luncheon--when plainly the active little furnace of her
life would want fresh fuel. But it was of another kind of fuel she was
thinking now. In the man who stood there, so independent, yet so free
from self-assertion, she saw a prospect of learning something. She was
hungry after knowing, but, though fond of reading, was very ignorant of
books. She thought like a poet, but had never read a real poem. She was
full of imagination, but very imperfectly knew what the word meant.
She had never in her life read a work of genuine imagination--not even
_Undine_, not even _The Ugly Duckling_.




CHAPTER XIV. _THE LIBRARY_.

After some talk, it was settled that Richard should work in the large
oriel of the library. Mrs. Locke was called, and the necessary orders
were given. Employer and workman were both anxious, the one to see, the
other to make a commencement. In a few minutes Richard had looked out as
many of the books in most need of attention as would keep him, turning
from the one to the other, as each required time in the press or to dry,
thoroughly employed.

“There is a volume here I should like to know your mind about, sir,”
 he said, after looking at one of them a moment or two, “--the first
collected edition of Spenser's works, actually bound up with Sir John
Harrington's translation of Ariosto! If it were a good, or even an old
binding, I should have said nothing.”

“It don't seem in a bad way.”

“No, but the one book is so unworthy of the other!”

“What would you propose?”

“I would separate them; put the Spenser in plain calf, and make the
present cover, with a new back, do for Sir John; it is a good enough
coat for him.”

“Very well. Do as you think best.”

“I should like to send them both to my father.”

“But you have undertaken everything!”

“I am quite ready, sir; but in that case these must wait. My faculty is
best laid out on mending, and I must do some good work in that first.
I don't know that I'm quite up to my father in binding. I mentioned him
because if he were to help me with those that must be bound, I should
have the more time for what often takes longer. You may trust my father,
sir; he does not want to make a fortune.”

“I will try him then,” answered the cautious heir. “At least I will send
him the books, and learn what he would charge.”

He had more of the ordinary tradesman in him than Richard and his uncle
put together.

“I will put the prices on them, and engage that my father will charge no
more,” said Richard.

Lestrange was content on hearing them, and Richard set to work with the
other volumes.

The bookbinder, always busy, soon began to be respected in the house,
and before long had gained several indulgences--among the rest, to have
a table for himself in the library, at which, when work-hours were over,
he might read or write when he pleased. As his labours went on, the
_bookscape_ began to revive, and continued slowly putting on an
autumnal radiance of light and colour. Dingy and broken backs gradually
disappeared. Pamphlets and magazines, such as, from knowledge or
inquiry, Richard thought worth the expense, were sent off to his father
to be bound. But I must continue my narrative from a point long before
his work began to make much of a show.

A few valuable books, much injured by time and rough usage,--among
the rest a quarto of _The Merry Wives_--he had pulled apart, and was
treating with certain solutions, in preparation for binding them, when
Lestrange came in one morning, accompanied by the curate of the parish.
His eyes fell on a loose title-page which he happened to know.

“What on earth are you doing?” he cried. “You will destroy that book! By
Jove!--You little know what you're about!”

“I do know what I am about, sir. I shall do the book nothing but good,”
 answered Richard. “It could not have lasted many years without what I am
doing.”

“Leave it alone,” said Lestrange. “I must ask some one. The treatment is
too dangerous.”

“Excuse me, sir; the treatment is by no means dangerous. After this
bath, I shall take it through one of thin size, to help the paper to
hold together. The book has suffered much, both from damp and insects.”

“No matter!” answered Lestrange imperiously. “I will not have you meddle
further with that volume.--Would you believe it, Hardy,” he went
on, turning to the curate, “it is that translation of Ovid he is
experimenting upon!”

“I beg your pardon, I am not experimenting,” said Richard.

“I hardly think it is such a very rare book!” replied the curate. “I
believe it _could_ be replaced!”

“Ah, you don't know, I see! I thought I had shown you!” returned
Lestrange excitedly. “Look there!”

He pointed to the title-page, which was lying on the table.

“I see!” said Hardy. “It is a first edition--in black letter--of Arthur
Golding's Ovid!”

“But you don't look! Why don't you look? Have you no eyes for that faded
ink just under the title?”

“Why! What's this? _Gul. Shaksper!_--Is it possible!”

“You find it hard to believe your eyes, and well you may!--There, Tuke!
I told you you didn't know what you were doing!”

“I always examine the title-page of a book,” answered Richard. “You must
allow me to do as I see fit, Mr. Lestrange, or I give up the job.”

“You undertook to work for a year, if required!”

“I did not undertake to receive orders as to my mode of working. I care
for books far too much for that. Besides, I have my character to see to!
I warn you that if I do not go on with that volume, it will be ruined.”

“You don't consider the money you risk!--That name makes the book worth
hundreds at least.”

“It is the greatest of names! Only that name was not written by him who
owned it!”

“What do you know about it!” said Lestrange rudely.

“Are you an expert?” asked the curate.

“By no means,” answered Richard; “but I have been a good deal with
old books, and my impression is you have got there one of the Ireland
forgeries!”

“I believe it to be quite genuine!” said Lestrange.

“If it be, there is the more reason in what I am doing, sir.”

Lestrange turned abruptly to the curate, saying--“Come along, Hardy! I
can't bear to see the butchery!”

“Depend on it,” returned the curate laughing, “the surgeon knows his
knife!--You _know_ what you're about, don't you, Mr. Tuke?”

“If I did not, sir, I wouldn't meddle with a book like that, forgery or
no forgery! You should see the quantities of old print I've destroyed
in learning how to save such books!--This is no vile body to experiment
upon!”

“Mr. Lestrange, you may trust that man!” said the curate.




CHAPTER XV. _BARBARA WYLDER._

It was the height of the season, and sir Wilton and lady Ann were in
London--I cannot say _enjoying themselves_, for I doubt if either of
them ever enjoyed self, or anything else. Their daughters were at home,
in the care of the governess. Theodora had been out a year or two, but
preferred Mortgrange to London. She was one of the few girls--perhaps
not very few--who imagine themselves uglier than they are. Miss
Malliver, the governess, was a lady of uncertain age, for whom lady
Ann had an uncertain liking. The younger girl, her pupil, was named
Victoria, but commonly called Vic, and not uncommonly Vixen. The younger
boy was at school, where they were constantly threatening to send him
home. He had been already dismissed from Eton.

In their elder son, Arthur, his parents had as perfect a confidence as
such parents could have in any son.

The little lady that rode the great mare, and sat in the beech-tree,
was at present their guest--as she often was, in a fluctuating or
intermittent fashion. She lived in the neighbourhood, but was more
at Mortgrange than at home; one consequence of which was, that, as
would-be-clever Miss Malliver phrased it, the house was very much B.
Wyldered. Nor was that the first house the little lady had bewildered,
for she was indeed an importation from a new colony rather startling
to sedate old England. Her father, a younger son, had unexpectedly
succeeded to the family-property, a few miles from Mortgrange. He was
supposed to have made a fortune in New Zealand, where Barbara was born
and brought up. They had been home nearly two years, and she was almost
eighteen. Absurd rumours were abroad concerning their wealth, but there
were no great signs of wealth about the place. Wylder Hall was kept up,
and its life went on in good style, it is true, but mainly because the
old servants perpetuated the customs of the house.

The squire was said to have shared in some of the roughest phases of
colonial life. Whether he was better or worse for falling in love with
the money of an older colonist, and marrying his daughter, it is certain
that, for a time at least, he grew a shade or two more respectable.
Far from being a woman of refinement, she had more character and more
strength than he, and brought him, not indeed into the highways of
wisdom, but into certain by-paths of prudence.

Upon his return to his native country, they were everywhere received;
but had it not been for their reported wealth, I doubt if the ladies of
the county, after some experience of her manners and speech, which were
at times very rough, would have continued to call on Mrs. Wylder.

But everybody liked Barbara; and nobody could think how such a flower
should have come of two such plants. She seemed to regard every one as
of her own family. People were her property--hers to love! And her brain
was as active as her heart, and constantly with it. She wanted to know
what people thought and felt and imagined; what everything was; how a
thing was done, and how it ought to be done. She seemed to understand
what the animals were thinking, and what the flowers were feeling. She
had from infancy spent the greater part of her life, both night and day,
in the open air; and, having no companion, had sought the acquaintance
of every live thing she saw--often to the disgust of her mother, and
occasionally to the annoyance of her father. She was a child of the
whole world, as the naiad is the child of the river, and the oread
of the mountain. She could sit a horse's bare back even better than a
saddle, could guide him almost as well with a halter as with a bridle,
and in general control him without either, though she had ridden more
than one horse with terrible bit and spurs. She did not remember the
time when she could not swim, and she tried her own running against
every new horse, to find what he could do. Some highland girl might
perhaps have beaten her, up hill, but I doubt it. She was so small that
she looked fragile, but she had nerves such as few men can boast,
and muscles like steel. It never occurred to her not to say what she
thought, believed, or felt; she would show favour or dislike with equal
readiness; and give the reason for anything she did as willingly as do
the thing. She was a special favourite at Mortgrange. Not only did she
bewitch the _blasé_ man of the world, sir Wilton, but the cold eye of
his lady would gleam a faint gleam at the thought of her dowry. Her
father “prospected” a little for something higher than a mere baronetcy,
but he had in no way interfered. Of herself, divine little savage, she
would never have thought of love until she fell in love: a flower cannot
know its own blossom until it comes. It did not yet interest her,
and until it did, certainly marriage never would. Thus was she
healthier-minded than any one born of society-parents, and brought up
under the influences of nurse-morality, can well be. When she came to
England, it was hard to teach her the ways of the so-called civilized.
Servants would sometimes be out searching for her after midnight,
perhaps to find her strayed beyond the park, out upon the solitary
heath. She knew most of the stars, not by their astronomical names
indeed, but by names she had herself given them. She had tales of her
own, fashioned in part from the wild myths of the aborigines, to account
for the special relations of such as made a group. She would weave the
travels of the planets into the steady history of the motionless stars.
Waning and waxing moons had a special and strange influence upon her.
She would dart out of doors the moment she saw the new moon, and give
a wild cry of joy if the old moon was in her arms. Any moon in a gusty
night, with a scud of torn clouds, would wake in her an ecstasy. Her old
nurse, who had come with her--a strange creature, of what mingled blood
no one knew--told of her that she was sometimes seized with such a
longing for the ocean, that she would lie for hours ere she went to
sleep, moaning with the very moan of its pebble-margined waves. When “in
the bush,” she would upon occasion wander about from morning to night.
No trouble able to keep her still had ever yet laid hold of her. But
she had grown neither coarse nor unfeeling through lack of human
intercourse. Nature was to her what she was to Wordsworth's Lucy, and
made her a lady of her own.

As to what is commonly called education, she had not had the best. Since
coming to England, she had had governesses, but none fit for the office.
Not merely had no one of them that rare gift, the teaching genius--the
faculty of waking hunger and thirst; that would have mattered little,
for Barbara needed no such rousing; she was eager to know, and yet more
eager to understand; but not one of those teachers knew enough to answer
a quarter of Barbara's questions, or was even capable of perceiving that
those she could not answer, pointed to anything worth knowing.

Among fashionable girls, affecting a free and easy, or even rough style,
Barbara was notable for a sweet, unconscious, graceful daring, never for
even a playful rudeness. Nothing she ever did or said or attempted could
be called rough, while yet she would say things to make a vulgar duchess
stare. Had she been affected, she would have drawn fools and repelled
men; real, she charmed alike men and fools.

She had read few books worth reading--had read a few which one would
not have chosen she should read, for she grasped at anything a passer-by
might have left. Of books properly so called, she knew nothing,
therefore had not a notion which to read now she might choose. She
imagined them all attractive--but at the first assay turned from
the burlesque with a kind of loathing. This made some of her new
acquaintance, not refined enough to understand the peculiarity, as it
seemed to them, set her down as stupid.

As to religion, she had never been taught any. But from before her
earliest recollection she had had the feeling of a Presence. For this
feeling she never thought of attempting to account, neither would have
recognized it as what I have called it. The sky over her head brought
it; a sweep of the earth away from her feet would bring it; any horizon
far or near called it up, perhaps most keenly of all. In England she
often sorely missed her horizon, and in cities was even unhappy for lack
of one. If she could have crystallized, and then formulated her feeling,
she would have said she felt lonely, that something or somebody had
gone away. Had she been a pagan, it would have been her gods that had
forsaken her. Without a horizon she felt as if the wind had forgotten
her, the sky did not know her. Often indeed even the farthest horizon
could not prevent her from feeling that she had come to a dead country;
that things here did not mean anything; that the life was out of them.
Was the world so crowded with men and their works as to shut out from
her the Presence? When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing
came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she
supposed, that ought to be done--something she had no inclination to
dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God,
required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention
of going to church; therefore she went sometimes. She had no idea of
ever having done wrong, no feeling that God was pleased or displeased
with her, or had any occasion to be either. She did not know that it was
God that came near her in her horse, in her dog, in the people about
her who so often disappointed her. He came nearer in a thunderstorm,
a moonlit night, a sweet wind--anything that woke the sense of the old
freedom of her childhood. She felt the presence then, but never knew it
a presence.

Neither did she know that there was a place where the very essence, of
that whose loss made her sad was always waiting her--a place called in
a certain old book “thy closet.” She did not know that there opened the
one horizon--infinitely far, yet near as her own heart. But He is there
for them that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Till they
do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him. Barbara had not
begun to seek him. She did not know there was anybody to seek: she
only missed him without knowing what she missed. The blind, almost
meaningless reverence for the name of God, which somehow she learned at
church, had not led her in any way to associate him with her sense of
loss and need.

Her father's desire was to see her so married as to raise his influence
in the county. He was proud of her--selfishly proud. Was she not his?
Was he not “the author of her being”? If he did not quite imagine he had
created her, he certainly never thought of any one but himself as having
to do with her existence. All the credit in it was his! He forgot even
what share her mother might claim; not to mention what in her might
belong to the Sum of Things, the insensate Pan. A self-glorious man is
the biggest fool in the world.

Her mother, too, was proud of her--loved her indeed after a careless
fashion--was even in a sort obliged to her for having come to her. But
she did not care for her enough to interfere with her. Notwithstanding
the mother's coarseness, her outbursts of temper, her intolerance of
opposition, she and her daughter had never yet come into collision. The
reason did not entirely lie in the sweetness of the daughter, but partly
in the fact that the mother had two children besides, one of whom she
loved far more, and the other far less.

Barbara had no pride. She spoke in the same tone to lord and tradesman.
She had been the champion of the blacks in her own country, and in
England looked lovingly on the gypsies in their little tents on the
windy downs.




CHAPTER XVI. _BARBARA AND RICHARD_.

Hardly had Lestrange left the room, when Barbara entered, noiseless as
a moth, which creature she somehow resembled at times: one observant
friend came to see that she resembled all swift, gay, and gentle
creatures in turn. She was in the same green dress which

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