The Flight of the Shadow
by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #8902 · 363,584 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Flight of the Shadow
Author: George MacDonald
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8902]
Most recently updated: March 9, 2018
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLIGHT OF THE SHADOW ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan and Distributed Proofreaders
THE FLIGHT OF THE SHADOW
By George MacDonald
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. MRS. DAY BEGINS THE STORY
CHAPTER II. MISS MARTHA MOON
CHAPTER III. MY UNCLE
CHAPTER IV. MY UNCLE'S ROOM, AND MY UNCLE IN IT
CHAPTER V. MY FIRST SECRET
CHAPTER VI. I LOSE MYSELF
CHAPTER VII. THE MIRROR
CHAPTER VIII. THANATOS AND ZOE
CHAPTER IX. THE GARDEN
CHAPTER X. ONCE MORE A SECRET
CHAPTER XI. THE MOLE BURROWS
CHAPTER XII. A LETTER
CHAPTER XIII. OLD LOVE AND NEW
CHAPTER XIV. MOTHER AND UNCLE
CHAPTER XV. THE TIME BETWEEN
CHAPTER XVI. FAULT AND NO FAULT
CHAPTER XVII. THE SUMMONS
CHAPTER XVIII. JOHN SEES SOMETHING
CHAPTER XIX. JOHN IS TAKEN ILL
CHAPTER XX. A STRANGE VISIT
CHAPTER XXI. A FOILED ATTEMPT
CHAPTER XXII. JOHN RECALLS AND REMEMBERS
CHAPTER XXIII. LETTER AND ANSWER
CHAPTER XXIV. HAND TO HAND
CHAPTER XXV. A VERY STRANGE THING
CHAPTER XXVI. THE EVIL DRAWS NIGHER
CHAPTER XXVII. AN ENCOUNTER
CHAPTER XXVIII. ANOTHER VISION
CHAPTER XXIX. MOTHER AND SON
CHAPTER XXX. ONCE MORE, AND YET AGAIN
CHAPTER XXXI. MY UNCLE COMES HOME
CHAPTER XXXII. TWICE TWO IS ONE
CHAPTER XXXIII. HALF ONE IS ONE
CHAPTER XXXIV. THE STORY OF MY TWIN UNCLES
CHAPTER XXXV. UNCLE EDMUND'S APPENDIX
CHAPTER XXXVI. THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME
THE FLIGHT OF THE SHADOW.
CHAPTER I.
MRS. DAY BEGINS THE STORY.
I am old, else, I think, I should not have the courage to tell the story
I am going to tell. All those concerned in it about whose feelings I am
careful, are gone where, thank God, there are no secrets! If they know
what I am doing, I know they do not mind. If they were alive to read as I
record, they might perhaps now and again look a little paler and wish the
leaf turned, but to see the things set down would not make them unhappy:
they do not love secrecy. Half the misery in the world comes from trying
to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not. I would that not God
only but all good men and women might see me through and through. They
would not be pleased with everything they saw, but then neither am I, and
I would have no coals of fire in my soul's pockets! But my very nature
would shudder at the thought of letting one person that loved a secret
see into it. Such a one never sees things as they are--would not indeed
see what was there, but something shaped and coloured after his own
likeness. No one who loves and chooses a secret can be of the pure in
heart that shall see God.
Yet how shall I tell even who I am? Which of us is other than a secret to
all but God! Which of us can tell, with poorest approximation, what he or
she is! Not to touch the mystery of life--that one who is not myself has
made me able to say _I_, how little can any of us tell about even those
ancestors whose names we know, while yet the nature, and still more the
character, of hundreds of them, have shared in determining what _I_ means
every time one of us utters the word! For myself, I remember neither
father nor mother, nor one of their fathers or mothers: how little then
can I say as to what I am! But I will tell as much as most of my readers,
if ever I have any, will care to know.
I come of a long yeoman-line of the name of Whichcote. In Scotland the
Whichcotes would have been called _lairds_; in England they were not
called _squires_. Repeatedly had younger sons of it risen to rank and
honour, and in several generations would his property have entitled the
head of the family to rank as a squire, but at the time when I began to
be aware of existence, the family possessions had dwindled to one large
farm, on which I found myself. Naturally, while some of the family had
risen, others had sunk in the social scale; and of the latter was Miss
Martha Moon, far more to my life than can appear in my story. I should
imagine there are few families in England covering a larger range of
social difference than ours. But I begin to think the chief difficulty in
writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.
I may mention, however, my conviction, that I owe many special delights
to the gradual development of my race in certain special relations to the
natural ways of the world. That I was myself brought up in such
relations, appears not enough to account for the intensity of my pleasure
in things belonging to simplest life--in everything of the open air, in
animals of all kinds, in the economy of field and meadow and moor. I can
no more understand my delight in the sweet breath of a cow, than I can
explain the process by which, that day in the garden--but I must not
forestall, and will say rather--than I can account for the tears which,
now I am an old woman, fill my eyes just as they used when I was a child,
at sight of the year's first primrose. A harebell, much as I have always
loved harebells, never moved me that way! Some will say the cause,
whatever it be, lies in my nature, not in my ancestry; that, anyhow, it
must have come first to some one--and why not to me? I answer, Everything
lies in everyone of us, but has to be brought to the surface. It grows a
little in one, more in that one's child, more in that child's child, and
so on and on--with curious breaks as of a river which every now and then
takes to an underground course. One thing I am sure of--that, however any
good thing came, I did not make it; I can only be glad and thankful that
in me it came to the surface, to tell me how beautiful must he be who
thought of it, and made it in me. Then surely one is nearer, if not to
God himself, yet to the things God loves, in the country than amid ugly
houses--things that could not have been invented by God, though he made
the man that made them. It is not the fashionable only that love the
town and not the country; the men and women who live in dirt and
squalor--their counterparts in this and worse things far more than they
think--are afraid of loneliness, and hate God's lovely dark.
CHAPTER II.
MISS MARTHA MOON.
Let me look back and see what first things I first remember!
All about my uncle first; but I keep him to the last. Next, all about
Rover, the dog--though for roving, I hardly remember him away from my
side! Alas, he did not live to come into the story, but I must mention
him here, for I shall not write another book, and, in the briefest
summary of my childhood, to make no allusion to him would be disloyalty.
I almost believe that at one period, had I been set to say who I was, I
should have included Rover as an essential part of myself. His tail was
my tail; his legs were my legs; his tongue was my tongue!--so much more
did I, as we gambolled together, seem conscious of his joy than of my
own! Surely, among other and greater mercies, I shall find him again! The
next person I see busy about the place, now here now there in the house,
and seldom outside it, is Miss Martha Moon. The house is large, built at
a time when the family was one of consequence, and there was always much
to be done in it. The largest room in it is now called the kitchen, but
was doubtless called the hall when first it was built. This was Miss
Martha Moon's headquarters.
She was my uncle's second cousin, and as he always called her Martha, so
did I, without rebuke: every one else about the place called her Miss
Martha.
Of much greater worth and much more genuine refinement than tens of
thousands the world calls ladies, she never claimed the distinction.
Indeed she strongly objected to it. If you had said or implied she was
a lady, she would have shrunk as from a covert reflection on the quality
of her work. Had she known certain of such as nowadays call themselves
lady-helps, I could have understood her objection. I think, however, it
came from a stern adherence to the factness--if I may coin the word--of
things. She never called a lie a fib.
When she was angry, she always held her tongue; she feared being unfair.
She had indeed a rare power of silence. To this day I do not _know_, but
am nevertheless sure that, by an instinct of understanding, she saw into
my uncle's trouble, and descried, more or less plainly, the secret of it,
while yet she never even alluded to the existence of such a trouble. She
had a regard for woman's dignity as profound as silent. She was not of
those that prate or rave about their rights, forget their duties, and
care only for what they count their victories.
She declared herself dead against marriage. One day, while yet hardly
more than a child, I said to her thoughtfully,
“I wonder why you hate gentlemen, Martha!”
“Hate 'em! What on earth makes you say such a wicked thing, Orbie?” she
answered. “Hate 'em, the poor dears! I love 'em! What did you ever see to
make you think I hated your uncle now?”
“Oh! of course! uncle!” I returned; for my uncle was all the world to me.
“Nobody could hate uncle!”
“She'd be a bad woman, anyhow, that did!” rejoined Martha. “But did
anybody ever hate the person that couldn't do without her, Orbie?”
My name--suggested by my uncle because my mother died at my birth--was a
curious one; I believe he made it himself. _Belorba_ it was, and it means
_Fair Orphan_.
“I don't know, Martha,” I replied.
“Well, you watch and see!” she returned. “Do you think I would stay here
and work from morning to night if I hadn't some reason for it?--Oh, I
like work!” she went on; “I don't deny that. I should be miserable if I
didn't work. But I'm not bound to this sort of work. I have money of my
own, and I'm no beggar for house-room. But rather than leave your uncle,
poor man! I would do the work of a ploughman for him.”
“Then why don't you marry him, Martha?” I said, with innocent
impertinence.
“Marry him! I wouldn't marry him for ten thousand pounds, child!”
“Why not, if you love him so much? I'm sure he wouldn't mind!”
“Marry him!” repeated Miss Martha, and stood looking at me as if here at
last was a creature she could _not_ understand; “marry the poor dear man,
and make him miserable! I could love any man better than that! Just you
open your eyes, my dear, and see what goes on about you. Do you see so
many men made happy by their wives? I don't say it's all the wives'
fault, poor things! But the fact's the same: there's the poor husbands
all the time trying hard to bear it! What with the babies, and the
headaches, and the rest of it, that's what it comes to--the husbands are
not happy! No, no! A woman can do better for a man than marry him!”
“But mayn't it be the husband's fault--sometimes, Martha?”
“It may; but what better is it for that? What better is the wife for
knowing it, or how much happier the husband for not knowing it? As soon
as you come to weighing who's in fault, and counting how much, it's all
up with the marriage. There's no more comfort in life for either of them!
Women are sent into the world to make men happy. I was sent to your
uncle, and I'm trying to do my duty. It's nothing to me what other women
think; I'm here to serve your uncle. What comes of me, I don't care, so
long as I do my work, and don't keep him waiting that made me for it. You
may think it a small thing to make a man happy! I don't. God thought him
worth making, and he wouldn't be if he was miserable. I've seen one woman
make ten men unhappy! I know my calling, Orbie. Nothing would make me
marry one of them, poor things!”
“But if they all said as you do, Martha?”
“No doubt the world would come to an end, but it would go out singing,
not crying. I don't see that would matter. There would be enough to make
each other happy in heaven, and the Lord could make more as they were
wanted.”
“Uncle says it takes God a long time to make a man!” I ventured to
remark.
Miss Martha was silent for a moment. She did not see how my remark bore
on the matter in hand, but she had such respect for anything my uncle
said, that when she did not grasp it she held her peace.
“Anyhow there's no fear of it for the present!” she answered. “You heard
the screed of banns last Sunday!”
I thought you would have a better idea of Miss Martha Moon from hearing
her talk, than from any talk about her. To hear one talk is better than
to see one. But I would not have you think she often spoke at such
length. She was in truth a woman of few words, never troubled or
troubling with any verbal catarrh. Especially silent she was when any one
she loved was in distress. I have seen her stand moveless for moments,
with a look that was the incarnation of essential motherhood--as if her
eyes were swallowing up sorrow; as if her soul was ready to be the
sacrifice for sin. Then she would turn away with a droop of the eye-lids
that seemed to say she saw what it was, but saw also how little she could
do for it. Oh the depth of the love-trouble in those eyes of hers!
Martha never set herself to teach me anything, but I could not know
Martha without learning something of the genuine human heart. I gathered
from her by unconscious assimilation. Possibly, a spiritual action
analogous to exosmose and endosmose, takes place between certain souls.
CHAPTER III.
MY UNCLE.
Now I must tell you what my uncle was like.
The first thing that struck you about him would have been, how tall and
thin he was. The next thing would have been, how he stooped; and the
next, how sad he looked. It scarcely seemed that Martha Moon had been
able to do much for him. Yet doubtless she had done, and was doing, more
than either he or she knew. He had rather a small head on the top of his
long body; and when he stood straight up, which was not very often, it
seemed so far away, that some one said he took him for Zacchaeus looking
down from the sycomore. _I_ never thought of analyzing his appearance,
never thought of comparing him with any one else. To me he was the best
and most beautiful of men--the first man in all the world. Nor did I
change my mind about him ever--I only came to want another to think of
him as I did.
His features were in fine proportion, though perhaps too delicate.
Perhaps they were a little too small to be properly beautiful. When first
I saw a likeness of the poet Shelley, I called out “My uncle!” and
immediately began to see differences. He wore a small but long moustache,
brushed away from his mouth; and over it his eyes looked large. They were
of a clear gray, and very gentle. I know from the testimony of others,
that I was right in imagining him a really learned man. That small head
of his contained more and better than many a larger head of greater note.
He was constantly reading--that is, when not thinking, or giving me the
lessons which make me now thank him for half my conscious soul.
Reading or writing or thinking, he made me always welcome to share his
room with him; but he seldom took me out walking. He was by no means
regular in his habits--regarded neither times nor seasons--went and came
like a bird. His hour for going out was unknown to himself, was seldom
two days together the same. He would rise up suddenly, even in the middle
of a lesson--he always called it “a lesson together”--and without a word
walk from the room and the house. I had soon observed that in gloomy
weather he went out often, in the sunshine seldom.
The house had a large garden, of a very old-fashioned sort, such a place
for the charm of both glory and gloom as I have never seen elsewhere. I
have had other eyes opened within me to deeper beauties than I saw in
that garden then; my remembrance of it is none the less of an enchanted
ground. But my uncle never walked in it. When he walked, it was always
out on the moor he went, and what time he would return no one ever knew.
His meals were uninteresting to him--no concern to any one but Martha,
who never uttered a word of impatience, and seldom a word of anxiety. At
whatever hour of the day he went, it was almost always night when he came
home, often late night. In the house he much preferred his own room to
any other.
This room, not so large as the kitchen-hall, but quite as long, seems to
me, when I look back, my earliest surrounding. It was the centre from
which my roving fancies issued as from their source, and the end of their
journey to which as to their home they returned. It was a curious place.
Were you to see first the inside of the house and then the outside, you
would find yourself at a loss to conjecture where within it could be
situated such a room. It was not, however, contained in what, to a
cursory glance, passed for the habitable house, and a stranger would not
easily have found the entrance to it.
Both its nature and situation were in keeping with certain peculiarities
of my uncle's mental being. He was given to curious inquiries. He would
set out to solve now one now another historical point as odd as
uninteresting to any but a mind capable of starting such a question. To
determine it, he would search book after book, as if it were a live
thing, in whose memory must remain, darkly stored, thousands of facts,
requiring only to be recollected: amongst them might nestle the thing he
sought, and he would dig for it as in a mine that went branching through
the hardened dust of ages. I fancy he read any old book whatever of
English history with the haunting sense that next moment he might come
upon the trace of certain of his own ancestors of whom he specially
desired to enlarge his knowledge. Whether he started any new thing in
mathematics I cannot tell, but he would sit absorbed, every day and all
day long, for weeks, over his slate, suddenly throw it down, walk out for
the rest of the day, and leave his calculus, or whatever it was, for
months. He read Shakespeare as with a microscope, propounding and
answering the most curious little questions. It seemed to me sometimes, I
confess, that he missed a plain point from his eyes being so sharp that
they looked through it without seeing it, having focused themselves
beyond it.
A specimen of the kind of question he would ask and answer himself,
occurs to me as I write, for he put it to me once as we read together.
“Why,” he said, “did Margaret, in _Much ado about Nothing_, try to
persuade Hero to wear her other rabato?”
And the answer was,
“Because she feared her mistress would find out that she had been wearing
it--namely, the night before, when she personated her.”
And here I may put down a remark I heard him make in reference to a
theory which itself must seem nothing less than idiotic to any one who
knows Shakespeare as my uncle knew him. The remark was this--that whoever
sought to enhance the fame of lord St. Alban's--he was careful to use the
real title--by attributing to him the works of Shakespeare, must either
be a man of weak intellect, of great ignorance, or of low moral
perception; for he cast on the memory of a man already more to be pitied
than any, a weight of obloquy such as it were hard to believe anyone
capable of deserving. A being with Shakespeare's love of human nature,
and Bacon's insight into essential truth, guilty of the moral and social
atrocities into which his lordship's eagerness after money for scientific
research betrayed him, would be a monster as grotesque as abominable.
I record the remark the rather that it shows my uncle could look at
things in a large way as well as hunt with a knife-edge. At the same
time, devoutly as I honour him, I cannot but count him intended for
thinkings of larger scope than such as then seemed characteristic of him.
I imagine his early history had affected his faculties, and influenced
the mode of their working. How indeed could it have been otherwise!
CHAPTER IV.
MY UNCLE'S ROOM, AND MY UNCLE IN IT.
At right angles to the long, black and white house, stood a building
behind it, of possibly earlier date, but uncertain intent. It had been
used for many things before my uncle's time--once as part of a small
brewery. My uncle was positive that, whether built for the purpose or
not, it had been used as a chapel, and that the house was originally the
out-lying cell of some convent. The signs on which he founded this
conclusion, I was never able to appreciate: to me, as containing my
uncle's study, the wonder-house of my childhood, it was far more
interesting than any history could have made it. It had very thick walls,
two low stories, and a high roof. Entering it from the court behind the
house, every portion of it would seem to an ordinary beholder quite
accounted for; but it might have suggested itself to a more comprehending
observer, that a considerable space must lie between the roof and the low
ceiling of the first floor, which was taken up with the servants' rooms.
Of the ground floor, part was used as a dairy, part as a woodhouse, part
for certain vegetables, while part stored the turf dug for fuel from the
neighbouring moor.
Between this building and the house was a smaller and lower erection, a
mere out-house. It also was strongly built, however, and the roof, in
perfect condition, seemed newer than the walls: it had been raised and
strengthened when used by my uncle to contain a passage leading from the
house to the roof of the building just described, in which he was
fashioning for himself the retreat which he rightly called his study, for
few must be the rooms more continuously thought and read in during one
lifetime than this.
I have now to tell how it was reached from the house. You could hardly
have found the way to it, even had you set yourself seriously to the
task, without having in you a good share of the constructive faculty. The
whole was my uncle's contrivance, but might well have been supposed to
belong to the troubled times when a good hiding-place would have added to
the value of any home.
There was a large recess in the kitchen, of which the hearth, raised a
foot or so above the flagged floor, had filled the whole--a huge chimney
in fact, built out from the wall. At some later time an oblong space had
been cut out of the hearth to a level with the floor, and in it an iron
grate constructed for the more convenient burning of coal. Hence the
remnant of the raised hearth looked like wide hobs to the grate. The
recess as a chimney-corner was thereby spoiled, for coal makes a very
different kind of smoke from the aromatic product of wood or peat.
Right and left within the recess, were two common, unpainted doors, with
latches. If you opened either, you found an ordinary shallow cupboard,
that on the right filled with shelves and crockery, that on the left with
brooms and other household implements.
But if, in the frame of the door to the left, you pressed what looked
like the head of a large nail, not its door only but the whole cupboard
turned inward on unseen hinges, and revealed an ascending stair, which
was the approach to my uncle's room. At the head of the stair you went
through the wall of the house to the passage under the roof of the
out-house, at the end of which a few more steps led up to the door of the
study. By that door you entered the roof of the more ancient building.
Lighted almost entirely from above, there was no indication outside of
the existence of this floor, except one tiny window, with vaguely pointed
arch, almost in the very top of the gable. Here lay my nest; this was the
bower of my bliss.
Its walls rose but about three feet from the floor ere the slope of the
roof began, so that there was a considerable portion of the room in which
my tall uncle could not stand upright. There was width enough
notwithstanding, in which four as tall as he might have walked abreast up
and down a length of at least five and thirty feet.
Not merely the low walls, but the slopes of the roof were filled with
books as high as the narrow level portion of the ceiling. On the slopes
the bookshelves had of course to be peculiar. My uncle had contrived, and
partly himself made them, with the assistance of a carpenter he had known
all his life. They were individually fixed to the rafters, each
projecting over that beneath it. To get at the highest, he had to stand
on a few steps; to reach the lowest, he had to stoop at a right angle.
The place was almost a tunnel of books.
By setting a chair on an ancient chest that stood against the gable, and
a footstool on the chair, I could mount high enough to get into the deep
embrasure of the little window, whence alone to gain a glimpse of the
lower world, while from the floor I could see heaven through six
skylights, deep framed in books. As far back as I can remember, it was my
care to see that the inside of their glass was always bright, so that sun
and moon and stars might look in.
The books were mostly in old and dingy bindings, but there were a few to
attract the eyes of a child--especially some annuals, in red skil, or
embossed leather, or, most bewitching of all, in paper, protected by a
tight case of the same, from which, with the help of a ribbon, you drew
out the precious little green volume, with its gilt edges and lovely
engravings--one of which in particular I remember--a castle in the
distance, a wood, a ghastly man at the head of a rearing horse, and a
white, mist-like, fleeting ghost, the cause of the consternation. These
books had a large share in the witchery of the chamber.
At the end of the room, near the gable-window, but under one of the
skylights, was a table of white deal, without cover, at which my uncle
generally sat, sometimes writing, oftener leaning over a book.
Occasionally, however, he would occupy a large old-fashioned easy chair,
under the slope of the roof, in the same end of the room, sitting silent,
neither writing nor reading, his eyes fixed straight before him, but
plainly upon nothing. They looked as if sights were going out of them
rather than coming in at them. When he sat thus, I would sit gazing at
him. Oh how I loved him--loved every line of his gentle, troubled
countenance! I do not remember the time when I did not know that his face
was troubled. It gave the last finishing tenderness to my love for him.
It was from no meddlesome curiosity that I sat watching him, from no
longing to learn what he was thinking about, or what pictures were going
and coming before the eyes of his mind, but from such a longing to
comfort him as amounted to pain. I think it was the desire to be near
him--in spirit, I mean, for I could be near him in the body any time
except when he was out on one of his lonely walks or rides--that made me
attend so closely to my studies. He taught me everything, and I yearned
to please him, but without this other half-conscious yearning I do not
believe I should ever have made the progress he praised. I took indeed a
true delight in learning, but I would not so often have shut the book I
was enjoying to the full and taken up another, but for the sight or the
thought of my uncle's countenance.
I think he never once sat down in the chair I have mentioned without
sooner or later rising hurriedly, and going out on one of his solitary
rambles.
When we were having our lessons together, as he phrased it, we sat at the
table side by side, and he taught me as if we were two children finding
out together what it all meant. Those lessons had, I think, the largest
share in the charm of the place; yet when, as not unfrequently, my uncle
would, in the middle of one of them, rise abruptly and leave me without a
word, to go, I knew, far away from the house, I was neither dismayed nor
uneasy: I had got used to the thing before I could wonder what it meant.
I would just go back to the book I had been reading, or to any other that
attracted me: he never required the preparation of any lessons. It was of
no use to climb to the window in the hope of catching sight of him, for
thence was nothing to be seen immediately below but the tops of high
trees and a corner of the yard into which the cow-houses opened, and my
uncle was never there. He neither understood nor cared about farming. His
elder brother, my father, had been bred to carry on the yeoman-line of
the family, and my uncle was trained to the medical profession. My father
dying rather suddenly, my uncle, who was abroad at the time, and had not
begun to practise, returned to take his place, but never paid practical
attention to the farming any more than to his profession. He gave the
land in charge to a bailiff, and at once settled down, Martha told me,
into what we now saw him. She seemed to imply that grief at my father's
death was the cause of his depression, but I soon came to the conclusion
that it lasted too long to be so accounted for. Gradually I grew
aware--so gradually that at length I seemed to have known it from the
first--that the soul of my uncle was harassed with an undying trouble,
that some worm lay among the very roots of his life. What change could
ever dispel such a sadness as I often saw in that chair! Now and then he
would sit there for hours, an open book in his hand perhaps, at which he
cast never a glance, all unaware of the eyes of the small maiden fixed
upon him, with a whole world of sympathy behind them. I suspect, however,
as I believe I have said, that Martha Moon, in her silence, had pierced
the heart of the mystery, though she _knew_ nothing.
One practical lesson given me now and then in varying form by my uncle, I
at length, one day, suddenly and involuntarily associated with the
darkness that haunted him. In substance it was this: “Never, my little
one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that
makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once
it will begin to eat a hole in it.” He would so often say the kind of
thing, that I seemed to know when it was coming. But I had heard it as a
thing of course, never realizing its truth, and listening to it only
because he whom I loved said it.
I see with my mind's eye the fine small head and large eyes so far above
me, as we sit beside each other at the deal table. He looked down on me
like a bird of prey. His hair--gray, Martha told me, before he was
thirty--was tufted out a little, like ruffled feathers, on each side. But
the eyes were not those of an eagle; they were a dove's eyes.
“A secret, little one, is a mole that burrows,” said my uncle.
The moment of insight was come. A voice seemed suddenly to say within me,
“He has a secret; it is biting his heart!” My affection, my devotion, my
sacred concern for him, as suddenly swelled to twice their size. It was
as if a God were in pain, and I could not help him. I had no desire to
learn his secret; I only yearned heart and soul to comfort him. Before
long, I had a secret myself for half a day: ever after, I shared so in
the trouble of his secret, that I seemed myself to possess or rather to
be possessed by one--such a secret that I did not myself know it.
But in truth I had a secret then; for the moment I knew that he had a
secret, his secret--the outward fact of its existence, I mean--was my
secret. And besides this secret of his, I had then a secret of my own.
For I knew that my uncle had a secret, and he did not know that I knew.
Therewith came, of course, the question--Ought I to tell him? At once, by
the instinct of love, I saw that to tell him would put him in a great
difficulty. He might wish me never to let any one else know of it, and
how could he say so when he had been constantly warning me to let nothing
grow to a secret in my heart? As to telling Martha Moon, much as I loved
her, much as I knew she loved my uncle, and sure as I was that anything
concerning him was as sacred to her as to me, I dared not commit such a
breach of confidence as even to think in her presence that my uncle had a
secret. From that hour I had recurrent fits of a morbid terror at the
very idea of a secret--as if a secret were in itself a treacherous,
poisonous guest, that ate away the life of its host.
But to return, my half-day-secret came in this wise.
CHAPTER V.
MY FIRST SECRET.
I was one morning with my uncle in his room. Lessons were over, and I was
reading a marvellous story in one of my favourite annuals: my uncle had
so taught me from infancy the right handling of books, that he would have
trusted me with the most valuable in his possession. I do not know how
old I was, but that is no matter; man or woman is aged according to the
development of the conscience. Looking up, I saw him stooping over an
open drawer in a cabinet behind the door. I sat on the great chest under
the gable-window, and was away from him the whole length of the room. He
had never told me not to look at him, had never seemed to object to the
presence of my eyes on anything he did, and as a matter of course I sat
observing him, partly because I had never seen any portion of that
cabinet open. He turned towards the sky-light near him, and held up
between him and it a small something, of which I could just see that it
was red, and shone in the light. Then he turned hurriedly, threw it in
the drawer, and went straight out, leaving the drawer open. I knew I had
lost his company for the day.
The moment he was gone, the phantasm of the pretty thing he had been
looking at so intently, came back to me. Somehow I seemed to understand
that I had no right to know what it was, seeing my uncle had not shown it
me! At the same time I had no law to guide me. He had never said I was
not to look at this or that in the room. If he had, even if the cabinet
had not been mentioned, I do not think I should have offended; but that
does not make the fault less. For which is the more guilty--the man who
knows there is a law against doing a certain thing and does it, or the
man who feels an authority in the depth of his nature forbidding the
thing, and yet does it? Surely the latter is greatly the more guilty.
I rose, and went to the cabinet. But when the contents of the drawer
began to show themselves as I drew near, “I closed my lids, and kept them
close,” until I had seated myself on the floor, with my back to the
cabinet, and the drawer projecting over my head like the shelf of a
bracket over its supporting figure. I could touch it with the top of my
head by straightening my back. How long I sat there motionless, I cannot
say, but it seems in retrospect at least a week, such a multitude of
thinkings went through my mind. The logical discussion of a thing that
has to be done, a thing awaiting action and not decision--the experiment,
that is, whether the duty or the temptation has the more to say for
itself, is one of the straight roads to the pit. Similarly, there are
multitudes who lose their lives pondering what they ought to believe,
while something lies at their door waiting to be done, and rendering it
impossible for him who makes it wait, ever to know what to believe. Only
a pure heart can understand, and a pure heart is one that sends out ready
hands. I knew perfectly well what I ought to do--namely, to shut that
drawer with the back of my head, then get up and do something, and forget
the shining stone I had seen betwixt my uncle's finger and thumb; yet
there I sat debating whether I was not at liberty to do in my uncle's
room what he had not told me not to do.
I will not weary my reader with any further description of the evil path
by which I arrived at the evil act. To myself it is pain even now to tell
that I got on my feet, saw a blaze of shining things, banged-to the
drawer, and knew that Eve had eaten the apple. The eyes of my
consciousness were opened to the evil in me, through the evil done by me.
Evil seemed now a part of myself, so that nevermore should I get rid of
it. It may be easy for one regarding it from afar, through the telescope
only of a book, to exclaim, “Such a little thing!” but it was I who did
it, and not another! it was I, and only I, who could know what I had
done, and it was not a little thing! That peep into my uncle's drawer
lies in my soul the type of sin. Never have I done anything wrong with
such a clear assurance that I was doing wrong, as when I did the thing I
had taken most pains to reason out as right.
Like one stunned by an electric shock, I had neither feeling nor care
left for anything. I walked to the end of the long room, as far as I
could go from the scene of my crime, and sat down on the great chest,
with my coffin, the cabinet, facing me in the distance. The first thing,
I think, that I grew conscious of, was dreariness. There was nothing
interesting anywhere. What should I do? There was nothing to do, nothing
to think about, not a book worth reading. Story was suddenly dried up at
its fountain. Life was a plain without water-brooks. If the sky was not
“a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” it was nothing better
than a canopy of gray and blue. By degrees my thought settled on what I
had done, and in a moment I realized it as it was--a vile thing, and I
had lost my life for it! This is the nearest I can come to the expression
of what I felt. I was simply in despair. I had done wrong, and the world
had closed in upon me; the sky had come down and was crushing me! The lid
of my coffin was closed! I should come no more out!
But deliverance came speedily--and in how lovely a way! Into my thought,
not into the room, came my uncle! Present to my deepest consciousness, he
stood tall, loving, beautiful, sad. I read no rebuke in his countenance,
only sorrow that I had sinned, and sympathy with my suffering because of
my sin. Then first I knew that I had _wronged_ him in looking into his
drawer; then first I saw it was his being that made the thing I had done
an evil thing. If the drawer had been nobody's, there would have been no
wrong in looking into it! And what made it so very bad was that my uncle
was so good to me!
With the discovery came a rush of gladsome relief. Strange to say, with
the clearer perception of the greatness of the wrong I had done, came the
gladness of redemption. It was almost a pure joy to find that it was
against my uncle, my own uncle, that I had sinned! That joy was the first
gleam through a darkness that had seemed settled on my soul for ever. But
a brighter followed; for thus spake the truth within me: “The thing is in
your uncle's hands; he is the lord of the wrong you have done; it is to
him it makes you a debtor:--he loves you, and will forgive you. Of course
he will! He cannot make undone what is done, but he will comfort you, and
find some way of setting things right. There must be some way! I cannot
be doomed to be a contemptible child to all eternity! It is so easy to go
wrong, and so hard to get right! He must help me!”
I sat the rest of the day alone in that solitary room, away from Martha
and Rover and everybody. I would that even now in my old age I waited for
God as then I waited for my uncle! If only he would come, that I might
pour out the story of my fall, for I had sinned after the similitude of
Adam's transgression!--only I was worse, for neither serpent nor wife had
tempted me!
At tea-time Martha came to find me. I would not go with her. She would
bring me my tea, she said. I would not have any tea. With a look like
that she sometimes cast on my uncle, she left me. Dear Martha! she had
the lovely gift of leaving alone. That evening there was no tea in the
house; Martha did not have any.
With the conceit peculiar to repentance and humiliation, I took a curious
satisfaction in being hard on myself. I could have taken my meal
tolerably well: with the new hope in my uncle as my saviour, came comfort
enough for the natural process of getting hungry, and desiring food; but
with common, indeed vulgar foolishness, my own righteousness in taking
vengeance on my fault was a satisfaction to me. I did not then see the
presumption of the sinner's taking vengeance on her own fault, did not
see that I had no right to do that. For how should a thing defiled
punish? With all my great joy in the discovery that the fault was against
my uncle, I forgot that therefore I was in his jurisdiction, that he only
had to deal with it, he alone could punish, as he alone could forgive it.
It was the end of August, and the night stole swiftly upon the day. It
began to grow very dusk, but I would not stir. I and the cabinet kept
each other dismal company while the gloom deepened into night. Nor did
the night part us, for I and the cabinet filled all the darkness. Had my
uncle remained the whole night away, I believe I should have sat till he
came. But, happily both for my mental suffering and my bodily endurance,
he returned sooner than many a time. I heard the house-door open. I knew
he would come to the study before going to his bedroom, and my heart gave
a bound of awe-filled eagerness. I knew also that Martha never spoke to
him when he returned from one of his late rambles, and that he would not
know I was there: long before she died Martha knew how grateful he was
for her delicate consideration. Martha Moon was not one of this world's
ladies; but there is a country where the social question is not, “Is she
a lady?” but, “How much of a woman is she?” Martha's name must, I think,
stand well up in the book of life.
My uncle, then, approached his room without knowing there was a live
kernel to the dark that filled it. I hearkened to every nearer step as he
came up the stair, along the corridor, and up the short final ascent to
the door of the study. I had crept from my place to the middle of the
room, and, without a thought of consequences, stood waiting the arrival
through the dark, of my deliverer from the dark. I did not know that many
a man who would face a battery calmly, will spring a yard aside if a
yelping cur dart at him.
My uncle opened the door, and closed it behind him. His lamp and matches
stood ready on his table: it was my part to see they were there. With a
sigh, which seemed to seek me in the darkness and find me, he came
forward through it. I caught him round the legs, and clung to him. He
gave a great gasp and a smothered cry, staggered, and nearly fell.
“My God!” he murmured.
“Uncle! uncle!” I cried, in greater terror than he; “it's only Orbie!
It's only your little one!”
“Oh! it's only my little one, is it?” he rejoined, at once recovering his
equanimity, and not for a moment losing the temper so ready, like nervous
cat, to spring from most of us when startled.
He caught me up in his arms, and held me to his heart. I could feel it
beat against my little person.
“Uncle! uncle!” I cried again. “Don't! Don't!”
“Did I hurt you, my little one?” he said, and relaxing his embrace, held
me more gently, but did not set me down.
“No, no!” I answered. “But I've got a secret, and you mustn't kiss me
till it is gone. I wish there was a swine to send it into!”
“Give it to me, little one. I will treat it better than a swine would.”
“But it mustn't be treated, uncle! It might come again!”
“There is no fear of that, my child! As soon as a secret is told, it is
dead. It is a secret no longer.”
“Will it be dead, uncle?” I returned. “--But it will be there, all the
same, when it is dead--an ugly thing. It will only put off its cloak, and
show itself!”
“All secrets are not ugly things when their cloaks are off. The cloak may
be the ugly thing, and nothing else.”
He stood in the dark, holding me in his arms. But the clouds had cleared
off a little, and though there was no moon, I could see the dim blue of
the sky-lights, and a little shine from the gray of his hair.
“But mine is an ugly thing,” I said, “and I hate it. Please let me put it
out of my mouth. Perhaps then it will go dead.”
“Out with it, little one.”
“Put me down, please,” I returned.
He walked to the old chest under the gable-window, seated himself on it,
and set me down beside him. I slipped from the chest, and knelt on the
floor at his feet, a little way in front of him. I did not touch him, and
all was again quite dark about us.
I told him my story from beginning to end, along with a great part of my
meditations while hesitating to do the deed. I felt very choky, but
forced my way through, talking with a throat that did not seem my own,
and sending out a voice I seemed never to have heard before. The moment I
ceased, a sound like a sob came out of the darkness. Was it possible my
big uncle was crying? Then indeed there was no hope for me! He was
horrified at my wickedness, and very sorry to have to give me up! I
howled like a wild beast.
“Please, uncle, will you kill me!” I cried, through a riot of sobs that
came from me like potatoes from a sack.
“Yes, yes, I will kill you, my darling!” he answered, “--this way! this
way!” and stretching out his arms he found me in the dark, drew me to
him, and covered my face with kisses.
“Now,” he resumed, “I've killed you alive again, and the ugly secret is
dead, and will never come to life any more. And I think, besides, we have
killed the hen that lays the egg-secrets!”
He rose with me in his arms, set me down on the chest, lighted his lamp,
and carried it to the cabinet. Then he returned, and taking me by the
hand, led me to it, opened wide the drawer of offence, lifted me, and
held me so that I could see well into it. The light flashed in a hundred
glories of colour from a multitude of cut but unset stones that lay loose
in it. I soon learned that most of them were of small money-value, but
their beauty was none the less entrancing. There were stones of price
among them, however, and these were the first he taught me, because they
were the most beautiful. My fault had opened a new source of delight: my
stone-lesson was now one of the great pleasures of the week. In after
years I saw in it the richness of God not content with setting right what
is wrong, but making from it a gain: he will not have his children the
worse for the wrong they have done! We shall lose nothing by it: he is
our father! For the hurting sand-grain, he gives his oyster a pearl.
“There,” said my uncle, “you may look at them as often as you please;
only mind you put every one back as soon as you have satisfied your eyes
with it. You must not put one in your pocket, or carry it about in your
hand.”
Then he set me down, saying,
“Now you must go to bed, and dream about the pretty things. I will tell
you a lot of stories about them afterward.”
We had a way of calling any kind of statement _a story_.
I never cared to ask how it was that, seeing all the same I had done the
wrong thing, the whole weight of it was gone from me. So utterly was it
gone, that I did not even inquire whether I ought so to let it pass from
me. It was nowhere. In the fire of my uncle's love to me and mine to him,
the thing vanished. It was annihilated. Should I not be a creature
unworthy of life, if, now in my old age, I, who had such an uncle in my
childhood, did not with my very life believe in God?
I have wondered whether, if my father had lived to bring me up instead of
my uncle, I should have been very different; but the useless speculation
has only driven me to believe that the relations on the surface of life
are but the symbols of far deeper ties, which may exist without those
correspondent external ones. At the same time, now that, being old, I
naturally think of the coming change, I feel that, when I see my father,
I shall have a different feeling for him just because he is my father,
although my uncle did all the fatherly toward me. But we need not trouble
ourselves about our hearts, and all their varying hues and shades of
feeling. Truth is at the root of all existence, therefore everything must
come right if only we are obedient to the truth; and right is the deepest
satisfaction of every creature as well as of God. I wait in confidence.
If things be not as we think, they will both arouse and satisfy a better
_think_, making us glad they are not as we expected.
CHAPTER VI.
I LOSE MYSELF.
I have one incident more to relate ere my narrative begins to flow from a
quite clear memory.
I was by no means a small bookworm, neither spent all my time in the
enchanted ground of my uncle's study. It is true I loved the house, and
often felt like a burrowing animal that would rather not leave its hole;
but occasionally even at such times would suddenly wake the passion for
the open air: I must get into it or die! I was well known in the
farmyard, not to the men only, but to the animals also. In the absence of
human playfellows, they did much to keep me from selfishness. But far
beyond it I took no unfrequent flight--always alone. Neither Martha nor
my uncle ever seemed to think I needed looking after; and I am not aware
that I should have gained anything by it. I speak for myself; I have no
theories about the bringing up of children. I went where and when I
pleased, as little challenged as my uncle himself. Like him, I took now
and then a long ramble over the moor, fearing nothing, and knowing
nothing to fear. I went sometimes where it seemed as if human foot could
never have trod before, so wild and waste was the prospect, so unknown it
somehow looked. The house was built on the more sloping side of a high
hollow just within the moor, which stretched wide away from the very edge
of the farm. If you climbed the slope, following a certain rough country
road, at the top of it you saw on the one side the farm, in all the
colours and shades of its outspread, well tilled fields; on the other
side, the heath. If you went another way, through the garden, through the
belt of shrubs and pines that encircled it, and through the wilderness
behind that, you were at once upon the heath. If then you went as far as
the highest point in sight, wading through the heather, among the rocks
and great stones which in childhood I never doubted grew also, you saw
before you nothing but a wide, wild level, whose horizon was here and
there broken by low hills. But the seeming level was far from flat or
smooth, as I found on the day of the adventure I am about to relate. I
wonder I had never lost myself before. I suppose then first my legs were
able to wander beyond the ground with which my eyes were familiar.
It had rained all the morning and afternoon. When our last lesson was
over, my uncle went out, and I betook myself to the barn, where I amused
myself in the straw. By this time Rover must have gone back to his maker,
for I remember as with me a large, respectable dog of the old-fashioned
mastiff-type, who endured me with a patience that amounted almost to
friendliness, but never followed me about. When I grew hungry, I went
into the house to have my afternoon-meal. It was called tea, but I knew
nothing about tea, while in milk I was a connoisseur. I could tell
perfectly to which of the cows I was indebted for the milk I happened at
any time to be drinking: Miss Martha never allowed the milks of the
different cows to be mingled.
Just as my meal was over, the sun shone with sudden brilliance into my
very eyes. The storm was breaking up, and vanishing in the west. I threw
down my spoon, and ran, hatless as usual, from the house. The sun was on
the edge of the hollow; I made straight for him. The bracken was so wet
that my legs almost seemed walking through a brook, and my body through a
thick rain. In a moment I was sopping; but to be wet was of no
consequence to me. Not for many years was I able to believe that damp
could hurt.
When I reached the top, the sun was yet some distance above the horizon,
and I had gone a good way toward him before he went down. As he sank he
sent up a wind, which blew a sense of coming dark. The wind of the sunset
brings me, ever since, a foreboding of tears: it seems to say--“Your day
is done; the hour of your darkness is at hand.” It grew cold, and a
feeling of threat filled the air. All about the grave of the buried sun,
the clouds were angry with dusky yellow and splashes of gold. They
lowered tumulous and menacing. Then, lo! they had lost courage; their
bulk melted off in fierce vapour, gold and gray, and the sharp outcry of
their shape was gone. As I recall the airy scene, that horizon looks like
the void between a cataclysm and the moving afresh of the spirit of God
upon the face of the waters. I went on and on, I do not know why.
Something enticed me, or I was plunged in some meditation, then
absorbing, now forgotten, not necessarily worthless. I am jealous of
moods that can be forgotten, but such may leave traces in the character.
I wandered on. What ups and downs there were! how uneven was the surface
of the moor! The feet learned what the eyes had not seen.
All at once I woke to the fact that mountains hemmed me in. They looked
mountains, though they were but hills. What had become of home? where was
it? The light lingering in the west might surely have shown me the
direction of it, but I remember no west--nothing but a deep hollow and
dark hills. I was lost!
I was not exactly frightened at first. I knew no cause of dread. I had
never seen a tramp even; I had no sense of the inimical. I knew nothing
of the danger from cold and exposure. But awe of the fading light and
coming darkness awoke in me. I began to be frightened, and fear is like
other live things: once started, it grows. Then first I thought with
dismay, which became terror, of the slimy bogs and the deep pools in
them. But just as my heart was dying within me, I looked to the
hills--with no hope that from them would come my aid--and there, on the
edge of the sky, lifted against it, in a dip between two of the hills,
was the form of a lady on horseback. I could see the skirt of her habit
flying out against the clouds as she rode. Had she been a few feet lower,
so as to come between me and the side of the hill instead of the sky, I
should not have seen her; neither should I if she had been a few hundred
yards further off. I shrieked at the thought that she did not see me, and
I could not make her hear me. She started, turned, seemed to look whence
the cry could have come, but kept on her way. Then I shrieked in earnest,
and began to run wildly toward her. I think she saw me--that my quicker
change of place detached my shape sufficiently to make it discernible.
She pulled up, and sat like a statue, waiting me. I kept on calling as I
ran, to assure her I was doing my utmost, for I feared she might grow
impatient and leave me. But at last it was slowly indeed I staggered up
to her, spent. My foot caught, and as I fell, I clasped the leg of her
horse: I had no fear of animals more than of human beings. He was
startled, and rearing drew his leg from my arms. But he took care not to
come down on me. I rose to my feet, and stood panting.
What the lady said, or what I answered, I cannot recall. The next thing I
remember is stumbling along by her side, for she made her horse walk that
I might keep up with her. She talked a little, but I do not remember what
she said. It is all a dream now, a far-off one. It must have been like a
dream at the time, I was so exhausted. I remember a voice descending now
and then, as if from the clouds--a cold musical voice, with something in
it that made me not want to hear it. I remember her saying that we were
near her house, and would soon be there. I think she had found out from
me where I lived.
All the time I never saw her face: it was too dark. I do not think she
once spoke kindly to me. She said I had no business to be out alone; she
wondered at my father and mother. I think I was too tired to tell her I
had no father or mother. When I did speak, she indicated neither by sound
nor movement that she heard or heeded what I said. She sat up above me in
the dark, unpleasant, and all but unseen--a riddle which the troubled
child stumbling along by her horse's side did not want solved. Had there
been anything to call light, I should have run away from her. Vague
doubts of witches and ogresses crossed my mind, but I said to myself the
stories about them were not true, and kept on as best I could.
Before we reached the house, we had left the heath, and were moving along
lanes. The horse seemed to walk with more confidence, and it was harder
for me to keep up with him. I was so tired that I could not feel my legs.
I stumbled often, and once the horse trod on my foot. I fell; he went on;
I had to run limping after him. At last we stopped. I could see nothing.
The lady gave a musical cry. A voice and footsteps made answer; and
presently came the sound of a gate on its hinges. A long dark piece of
road followed. I knew we were among trees, for I heard the wind in them
over our heads. Then I saw lights in windows, and presently we stopped at
the door of a great house. I remember nothing more of that night.
CHAPTER VII.
THE MIRROR.
I woke the next morning in a strange bed, and for a long time could not
think how I came to be there. A maid appeared, and told me it was time to
get up. Greatly to my dislike, she would insist on dressing me. My
clothes looked very miserable, I remember, in consequence of what they
had gone through the night before. She was kind to me, and asked me a
great many questions, but paid no heed to my answers--a treatment to
which I had not been used: I think she must have been the lady's maid.
When I was ready, she took me to the housekeeper's room, where I had
bread and milk for breakfast. Several servants, men and women, came and
went, and I thought they all looked at me strangely. I concluded they had
no little girls in that house. Assuredly there was small favour for
children in it. In some houses the child is as a stranger; in others he
rules: neither such house is in the kingdom of heaven. I must have looked
a forlorn creature as I sat, or perched rather, on the old horsehair-sofa
in that dingy room. Nobody said more than a word or so to me. I wondered
what was going to be done with me, but I had long been able to wait for
what would come. At length, after, as it seemed, hours of weary waiting,
during which my heart grew sick with longing after my uncle, I was,
without a word of explanation, led through long passages into a room
which appeared enormous. There I was again left a long while--this time
alone. It was all white and gold, and had its walls nearly covered with
great mirrors from floor to ceiling, which, while it was indeed of great
size, was the cause of its looking so immeasurably large. But it was some
time before I discovered this, for I was not accustomed to mirrors.
Except the small one on my little dressing-table, and one still less on
Martha's, I had scarcely seen a mirror, and was not prepared for those
sheets of glass in narrow gold frames.
I went about, looking at one thing and another, but handling nothing: my
late secret had cured me of that. Weary at last, I dropped upon a low
chair, and would probably have soon fallen asleep, had not the door
opened, and some one come in. I could not see the door without turning,
and was too tired and sleepy to move. I sat still, staring, hardly
conscious, into the mirror in front of me. All at once I descried in it
my uncle--but only to see him grow white as death, and turn away, reeling
as if he would fall. The sight so bewildered me that, instead of rushing
to embrace him, I sat frozen. He clapped his hands to his eyes, steadied
himself, stood for a moment rigid, then came straight toward me. But, to
my added astonishment, he gave me no greeting, or showed any sign of joy
at having found me. Never before had he seen me for the first time any
day, without giving me a kiss; never before, it seemed to me, had he
spoken to me without a smile: I had been lost and was found, and he was
not glad! The strange reception fell on me like a numbing spell. I had
nothing to say, no impulse to move, no part in the present world. He
caught me up in his arms, hid his face upon me, knocked his shoulder
heavily against the door-post as he went from the room, walked straight
through the hall, and out of the house. I think no one saw us as we went;
I am sure neither of us saw any one. With long strides he walked down the
avenue, never turning his head. Not until we were on the moor, out of
sight of the house, did he stop. Then he set me down; and then first we
discovered that he had left his hat behind. For all his carrying of me,
and going so fast--and I must have been rather heavy--his face had no
colour in it.
“Shall I run and get it, uncle?” I said, as I saw him raise his hand to
his head and find no hat there to be taken off. “I should be back in a
minute!”
It was the first word spoken between us. “No, my little one,” he
answered, wiping his forehead: his voice sounded far away, like that of
one speaking in a dream; “I can't let you out of my sight. I've been
wandering the moor all night looking for you!”
With that he caught me up again, and pressing his face to mine, walked
with me thus, for a long quarter of a mile, I should think. Oh how safe I
felt!--and how happy!--happy beyond smiling! I loved him before, but I
never knew before what it was to lose him and find him again.
“Tell me,” he said at length.
I told him all, and he did not speak a word until my tale was finished.
“Were you very frightened,” he then asked, “when you found you had lost
your way, and darkness was coming?”
“I was frightened, or I would not have gone to the lady. But I wish I had
staid on the moor for you to find me. I knew you would soon be out
looking for me. Until she came I comforted myself with thinking that
perhaps even then you were on the moor, and I might see you any moment.”
“What else did you think of?”
“I thought that God was out on the moor, and if you were not there, he
would keep me company.”
“Ah!” said my uncle, as if thinking to himself; “she but needs him the
more when I am with her!”
“Yes, of course!” I answered; “I need him then for you as well as for
myself.”
“That is very true, my child!--Shall I tell you one thing I thought of
while looking for you?”
“Please, uncle.”
“I thought how Jesus' father and mother must have felt when they were
looking for him.”
“And they needn't have been so unhappy if they had thought who he
was--need they?”
“Certainly not. And I needn't have been so unhappy if I had thought who
you were. But I was terribly frightened, and there I was wrong.”
“Who am I, uncle?”
“Another little one of the same father as he.”
“Why were you frightened, uncle?”
“I was afraid of your being frightened.”
“I hardly had time to be frightened before the lady came.”
“Yes; you see I needn't have been so unhappy!”
My uncle always treated me as if I could understand him perfectly. This
came, I see now, from the essential childlikeness of his nature, and from
no educational theory.
“Sometimes,” he went on, “I look all around me to see if Jesus is out
anywhere, but I have never seen him yet!”
“We shall see him one day, shan't we?” I said, craning round to look into
his eyes, which were my earthly paradise. Nor are they a whit less dear
to me, nay, they are dearer, that he has been in God's somewhere, that
is, the heavenly paradise, for many a year.
“I think so,” he answered, with a sigh that seemed to swell like a
sea-wave against me, as I sat on his arm; “--I hope so. I live but for
that--and for one thing more.”
There are some, I fancy, who would blame him for not being sure, and
bring text after text to prove that he ought to have been sure. But oh
those text-people! They look to me, not like the clay-sparrows that Jesus
made fly, but like bird-skins in a glass-case, stuffed with texts. The
doubt of a man like my uncle must be a far better thing than their
assurance!
“Would you have been frightened if you had met him on the moor last
night, little one?” he asked, after a pause.
“Oh, no, uncle!” I returned. “I should have thought it was you till I
came nearer, and then I should have known who it was! He wouldn't like a
big girl like me to be frightened at him--would he?”
“Indeed not!'” answered my uncle fervently; but again his words brought
with them a great sigh, and he said no more.
When we reached home, he gave me up to Martha, and went out again--nor
returned before I was in bed. But he came to my room, and waked me with a
kiss, which sent me faster asleep than before.
CHAPTER VIII.
THANATOS AND ZOE
I think it must have been soon after this that my uncle bought himself a
horse. I know something of horses now--that is, if much riding and much
love suffice to give a knowledge of them--and the horse which was a glory
and a wonder to me then, is a glory and a wonder to me still. He was
large, big-boned, and powerful, with less beauty but more grandeur than a
thoroughbred, and full of a fiery gentleness. He was the very horse for
sir Philip Sidney!
One day, after he had had him for several months, and had let no one
saddle him but himself, therefore knew him perfectly, and knew that the
horse knew his master, I happened to be in the yard as he mounted. The
moment he was in the saddle, he bent down to me, and held out his hand.
“Come with me, little one,” he said.
Almost ere I knew, I was in the saddle before him. I grasped his hand,
instinctively caught with my foot at his, and was astride the pommel. I
will not say I sat very comfortably, but the memory of that day's delight
will never leave me--not “through all the secular to be.” There must be a
God to the world that could give any such delight as fell then to the
share of one little girl! I think my uncle must soon after have got
another saddle, for I have no recollection of any more discomfort; I
remember only the delight of the motion of the horse under me.
For, after this, I rode with him often, and he taught me to ride as
surely not many have been taught. When he saw me so at home in my seat as
to require no support, he made me change my position, and go behind him.
There I sat sideways on a cloth, like a lady of old time on a pillion.
When I had got used to this, my uncle made me stand on the horse's broad
back, holding on by his shoulders; and it was wonderful how soon, and how
unconsciously, I accommodated myself to every motion of the strength that
bore me, learning to keep my place by pure balance like a rope-dancer. I
had soon quite forgotten to hold by my uncle, and without the least
support rode as comfortably, and with as much confidence, as any rider in
a circus, though with a far less easy pace under me. When my uncle found
me capable of this, he was much pleased, though a little nervous at
times.
Able now to ride his big horse any way, he brought me one afternoon the
loveliest of Shetland ponies, not very small. With the ordinary human
distrust in good, I could hardly believe she was meant for me. She was a
dappled gray--like the twilight of a morning after rain, my uncle said.
He called her Zoe, which means Life. His own horse he called Thanatos,
which means Death. Such as understood it, thought it a terrible name to
give a horse. For most people are so afraid of Death that they regard his
very name with awe.
My uncle had a riding-habit made for me, and after a week found I could
give him no more trouble with my horsewomanship. At once I was at home on
my new friend's back, with vistas of delight innumerable opening around
me, and from that day my uncle seldom rode without me. When he went
wandering, it was almost always on foot, and then, as before, he was
always alone. The idea of offering to accompany him on such an occasion,
had never occurred to me.
But one stormy autumn afternoon--most of my memories seem of the
autumn--my uncle looked worse than usual when he went out, and I felt, I
think for the first time, a vague uneasiness about him. Perhaps I had
been thinking of him more; perhaps I had begun to wonder what the secret
could be that made him so often seem unhappy. Anyhow this evening the
desire awoke to be with him in his trouble whatever it was. There was no
curiosity in the feeling, I think, only the desire to serve him as I had
never served him yet. I had been, as long as I could remember, always at
his beck or lightest call; now I wanted to come when needed without being
called. Was it impossible a girl should do anything for a man in his
trouble? He, a great man, had helped a little girl out of the deepest
despair; could the little girl do nothing for the great man? That the big
people should do everything, did not seem fair! He had told me once that
the world was held together by what every one could do that the others
could not do: there must be something I could do that he could not do!
The rain was coming down on the roof like the steady tramp of distant
squadrons. I was in the study, therefore near the tiles, and that was how
the rain always sounded upon them. Tramp, tramp, tramp, came the whole
army of things, riding, riding, to befall my uncle and me. Tramp, tramp,
came the troops of the future, to take the citadel of the present! I was
not afraid of them, neither sought to imagine myself afraid! I had no
picture in my mind of any evil that could assail me. A little grove of
black poplars under the gable-window, kept swaying their expostulations,
and moaning their entreaties. The great rushing blasts of the wind
through their rooted resistance, made the music of the band that
accompanied the march of the unknown. I sat and listened, with the vague
conviction that something was being done somewhere. It could not be that
only the wind and the trees and the rain were in all that wailing and
marching! The Powers of life and death must somewhere be at work! Then
rose before me the face of my uncle, as he walked from the room, haloed
in a sorrowful stillness. If only I could be with him! If only I knew
where to seek him! Wishing, wishing, I sat and listened to the rain and
the wind.
Suddenly I found myself on my feet, making for the door. I would not have
ventured alone upon the moor in such a night, but I should have Zoe with
me, who knew all the ways of it--had doubtless been used to bogs in her
own country, and her mother before her! Like a small elephant, she would
put out her little foot, and tap, and sound, to see if the surface would
bear her--if the questionable spot was what it looked to her mistress, or
what she herself doubted it. When she had once made up her mind in the
negative, no foolish attempt of mine could overpersuade her--could make
her trust our weight on it a hair's-breadth. In a bog the greenest spots
are the most dangerous, and Zoe knew it: the matted roots might be afloat
on a fathomless depth of water. Backed by my uncle, she soon taught me to
be as much afraid of those green spots as she was herself. I had learned
to trust her thoroughly.
I took my way to the stable, with a hug and a kiss to Martha as I passed
her in the kitchen, I got the cowboy to saddle Zoe, fearing I might not
persuade one of the big men on such a night, and I was not quite able
myself to tighten the girths properly. She had not been out all day, and
when I mounted, she danced at the prospect of a gallop.
I took with me the little lantern I went about the place with when
there was no moon, and with this alight in my hand, we darted off at a
tight-reined gallop into the wet blowing night. What I was going for I
did not know, beyond being with my uncle. So far was I from any fear,
that, but for my shadowy uneasiness about him, I should have been filled
full of the wild joy of battle with the elements. The first part of the
way, I had to cling to the saddle: not otherwise could I keep my seat
against the wind, which blew so fiercely on me sideways, that it
threatened to blow me out of it.
I had not gone far before the saddle began to turn round with me; I was
slipping to the ground. I pulled up, dismounted, undid the girths with
difficulty, set the saddle straight, then pulled at every strap with all
my might. It was to no purpose: I could not get another hole out of one
of them. I mounted and set off again; but the moment a stronger blast
came, the saddle began to turn. Then I thought of something to try:
dismounting once more, I got up on the off side. The wind now pushed me
on to the saddle, freeing it from my leverage, while I had, besides, the
use of my legs against the wind, so that we got on bravely, my Zoe and I.
But, alas! my lantern was out, and it was impossible to light it again,
so that I had now no arrow to shoot at random for my uncle's eye. Before
long we reached a tolerable cart-track, which led across the waste to a
village, and the wind being now behind us, I resumed the more comfortable
seat in the saddle.
We were going at a good speed, and had ridden, as I judged, about three
miles, when there came a great flash of lightning--not like any flash I
had ever seen before. It was neither the reflection of lightning below
the horizon, nor the sudden zigzagged blade, the very idea of force
without weight; it was the burst of a ball-headed torrent of fire from a
dark cloud, like water sudden from a mountain's heart, which went rushing
down a rugged channel, as if the cloud were indeed a mountain, and the
fire one of its cataracts. Its endurance was momentary, but its moments
might have been counted, for it lasted appreciably longer than an
ordinary flash, revealing to my eyes what remains on my mind clear as the
picture of some neighbouring tree on the skin of one slain by lightning.
The torrent tumbled down the cloud and vanished, but left with me the
vision of a man, plainly my uncle, a few hundred yards from me, on a
gigantic gray horse, which reared high with fright. But for its size I
could have testified before a magistrate, that I had not only seen that
horse in the stable as my pony was being saddled, but had stroked and
kissed him on the nose. I conceived at once that his apparent size was an
illusion caused by the suddenness and keenness of the light, and that my
uncle had come home before I had well reached the moor, and had ridden
out after me. With a wild cry of delight, I turned at once to leave the
road and join him. But the thunder that moment burst with a terrific
bellow, and swallowed my cry. The same instant, however, came through it
from the other side the voice of my uncle only a few yards away.
“Stay, little one,” he shouted; “stay where you are. I will be with you
in a moment.”
I obeyed, as ever and always without a thought I obeyed the slightest
word of my uncle: Zoe and I stood as if never yet parted from chaos and
the dark, for Zoe too loved his voice. The wind rose suddenly from a lull
to a great roar, emptying a huge cloudful of rain upon us, so that I
heard no sound of my uncle's approach; but presently out of the dark an
arm was around me, and my head was lying on my uncle's bosom. Then the
dark and the rain seemed the natural elements for love and confidence.
“But, uncle,” I murmured, full of wonder which had had no time to take
shape, “how is it?”
He answered in a whisper that seemed to dread the ear of the wind, lest
it should hear him--
“You saw, did you?”
“I saw you upon Death away there in the middle of the lightning. I was
going to you. I don't know what to think.”
My uncle and I often called the horse by his English name.
“Neither do I,” he returned, with a strange half voice, as if he were
choking. “It must have been--I don't know what. There is a deep bog away
just there. It must be a lake by now!”
“Yes, uncle; I might have remembered! But how was I to think of that when
I saw you there--on dear old Death too! He's the last of horses to get
into a bog: he knows his own weight too well!”
“But why did you come out on such a night? What possessed you, little
one--in such a storm? I begin to be afraid what next you may do.”
“I never do anything--now--that I think you would mind me doing,” I
answered. “But if you will write out a little book of _mays_ and
_maynots_, I will learn it by heart.”
“No, no,” he returned; “we are not going back to the tables of the law!
You have a better law written in your heart, my child; I will trust to
that.--But tell me why you came out on such a night--and as dark as
pitch.”
“Just because it was such a night, uncle, and you were out in it,” I
answered. “Ain't I your own little girl? I hope you ain't sorry I came,
uncle! I am glad; and I shouldn't like ever to be glad at what made you
sorry.”
“What are you glad of?”
“That I came--because I've found you. I came to look for you.”
“Why did you come to-night more than any other night?”
“Because I wanted so much to see you. I thought I might be of use to
you.”
“You are always of use to me; but why did you think of it just to-night?”
“I don't know.--I am older than I was last night,” I replied.
He seemed to understand me, and asked me no more questions.
All the time, we had been standing still in the storm. He took Zoe's head
and turned it toward home. The dear creature set out with slow leisurely
step, heedless apparently of storm and stable. She knew who was by her
side, and he must set the pace!
As we went my uncle seemed lost in thought--and no wonder! for how could
the sight we had seen be accounted for! Or what might it indicate?
Many were the strange tales I had read, and my conviction was that the
vision belonged to the inexplicable. It grew upon me that I had seen my
uncle's double. That he should see his own double would not in itself
have much surprised me--or, indeed, that I should see it; but I had never
read of another person seeing a double at the same time with the person
doubled. During the next few days I sought hard for some possible
explanation of what had occurred, but could find nothing parallel to it
within the scope of my knowledge. I tried _fata morgana, mirage,
parhelion_, and whatever I had learned of recognized illusion, but in
vain sought satisfaction, or anything pointing in the direction of
satisfaction. I was compelled to leave the thing alone. My uncle kept
silence about it, but seemed to brood more than usual. I think he too was
convinced that it must have another explanation than present science
would afford him. Once I ventured to ask if he had come to any
conclusion; with a sad smile, he answered,
“I am waiting, little one. There is much we have to wait for. Where would
be the good of having your mind made up wrong? It only stands in the way
of getting it made up right!”
By degrees the thing went into the distance, and I ceased even
speculating upon it. But one little fact I may mention ere I leave
it--that, just as I was reaching a state of quiet mental prorogation, I
suddenly remembered that, the moment after the flash, my Zoe, startled as
she was, gave out a low whinny; I remembered the quiver of it under me:
she too must have seen her master's double!
CHAPTER IX.
THE GARDEN.
I remember nothing more to disturb the even flow of my life till I was
nearly seventeen. Many pleasant things had come and gone; many pleasant
things kept coming and going. I had studied tolerably well--at least my
uncle showed himself pleased with the progress I had made and was making.
I know even yet a good deal more than would be required for one of these
modern degrees feminine. I had besides read more of the older literature
of my country than any one I have met except my uncle. I had also this
advantage over most students, that my knowledge was gained without the
slightest prick of the spur of emulation--purely in following the same
delight in myself that shone radiant in the eyes of my uncle as he read
with me. I had this advantage also over many, that, perhaps from
impression of the higher mind, I saw and learned a thing not merely as a
fact whose glory lay in the mystery of its undeveloped harmonics, but as
the harbinger of an unknown advent. For as long as I can remember, my
heart was given to expectation, was tuned to long waiting. I constantly
felt--felt without thinking--that something was coming. I feel it now.
Were I young I dared not say so. How could I, compassed about with so
great a cloud of witnesses to the common-place! Do I not see their
superior smile, as, with voices sweetly acidulous, they quote in reply--
“Love is well on the way;
He'll be here to-day,
Or, at latest, the end of the week;
Too soon you will find him,
And the sorrow behind him
You will not go out to seek!”
Would they not tell me that such expectation was but the shadow of the
cloud called love, hanging no bigger than a man's hand on the far
horizon, but fraught with storm for mind and soul, which, when it
withdrew, would carry with it the glow and the glory and the hope of
life; being at best but the mirage of an unattainable paradise, therefore
direst of deceptions! Little do such suspect that their own behaviour has
withered their faith, and their unbelief dried up their life. They can
now no more believe in what they once felt, than a cloud can believe in
the rainbow it once bore on its bosom. But I am old, therefore dare to
say that I expect more and better and higher and lovelier things than I
have ever had. I am not going home to God to say--“Father, I have
imagined more beautiful things than thou art able to make true! They were
so good that thou thyself art either not good enough to will them, or not
strong enough to make them. Thou couldst but make thy creature dream of
them, because thou canst but dream of them thyself.” Nay, nay! In the
faith of him to whom the Father shows all things he does, I expect
lovelier gifts than I ever have been, ever shall be able to dream of
asleep, or imagine awake.
I was now approaching the verge of woman-hood. What lay beyond it I could
ill descry, though surely a vague power of undeveloped prophecy dwells in
every created thing--even in the bird ere he chips his shell.
Should I dare, or could I endure to write of what lies now to my hand, if
I did not believe that not our worst but our best moments, not our low
but our lofty moods, not our times logical and scientific, but our times
instinctive and imaginative, are those in which we perceive the truth! In
them we behold it with a beholding which is one with believing. And,
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower”,
could not Wordsworth, and cannot we, call up the vision of that hour? and
has not its memory almost, or even altogether, the potency of its
presence? Is not the very thought of any certain flower enough to make me
believe in that flower--believe it to mean all it ever seemed to mean?
That _these_ eyes may never more rest upon it with the old delight, means
little, and matters nothing. I have other eyes, and shall have yet
others. If I thought, as so many have degraded themselves to think, that
the glory of things in the morning of love was a glamour cast upon the
world, no outshine of indwelling radiance, should I care to breathe one
day more the air of this or of any world? Nay, nay, but there dwells in
everything the Father hath made, the fire of the burning bush, as at home
in his son dwelt the glory that, set free, broke out from him on the
mount of his transfiguration. The happy-making vision of things that
floods the gaze of the youth, when first he lives in the marvel of
loving, and being loved by, a woman, is the true vision--and the more
likely to be the true one, that, when he gives way to selfishness, he
loses faith in the vision, and sinks back into the commonplace unfaith of
the beggarly world--a disappointed, sneering worshipper of power and
money--with this remnant of the light yet in him, that he grumbles at the
gloom its departure has left behind. He confesses by his soreness that
the illusion ought to have been true; he seldom confesses that he loved
himself more than the woman, and so lost her. He lays the blame on God,
on the woman, on the soullessness of the universe--anywhere but on the
one being in which he is interested enough to be sure it exists--his own
precious, greedy, vulgar self. Would I dare to write of love, if I did
not believe it a true, that is, an eternal thing!
It was a summer of exceptional splendour in which my eyes were opened to
“the glory of the sum of things.” It was not so hot of the sun as summers
I have known, but there were so many gentle and loving winds about, with
never point or knife-edge in them, that it seemed all the housework of
the universe was being done by ladies. Then the way the odours went and
came on those sweet winds! and the way the twilight fell asleep into the
dark! and the way the sun rushed up in the morning, as if he cried, like
a boy, “Here I am! The Father has sent me! Isn't it jolly!” I saw more
sun-rises that year than any year before or since. And the grass was so
thick and soft! There must be grass in heaven! And the roses, both wild
and tame, that grew together in the wilderness!--I think you would like
to hear about the wilderness.
When I grew to notice, and think, and put things together, I began to
wonder how the wilderness came there. I could understand that the
solemn garden, with its great yew-hedges and alleys, and its oddly cut
box-trees, was a survival of the stately old gardens haunted by ruffs and
farthingales; but the wilderness looked so much younger that I was
perplexed with it, especially as I saw nothing like it anywhere else. I
asked my uncle about it, and he explained that it was indeed after an old
fashion, but that he had himself made the wilderness, mostly with his own
hands, when he was young. This surprised me, for I had never seen him
touch a spade, and hardly ever saw him in the garden: when I did, I
always felt as if something was going to happen. He said he had in it
tried to copy the wilderness laid out by lord St. Alban's in his essays.
I found the volume, and soon came upon the essay, On Gardens. The passage
concerning the wilderness, gave me, and still gives me so much delight,
that I will transplant it like a rose-bush into this wilderness of mine,
hoping it will give like pleasure to my reader.
“For the heath, which was the third part of our plot, I wish it to be
framed, as much as may be, to a natural wildness. Trees I would have none
in it; but some thickets, made only of sweetbriar, and honnysuckle, and
some wild vine amongst; and the ground set with violets, strawberries,
and primroses. For these are sweet, and prosper in the shade. And these
to be in the heath, here and there not in any order. I like also little
heapes, in the nature of mole-hills (such as are in wild heaths) to be
set, some with wild thyme; some with pincks; some with germander, that
gives a good flower to the eye; some with periwinkle; some with violets;
some with strawberries; some with couslips; some with daisies; some with
red roses; some with lilium convallium; some with sweet-williams red;
some with beares-foot; and the like low flowers, being withall sweet and
sightly. Part of which heapes, to be with standards, of little bushes,
prickt upon their top, and part without. The standards to be roses;
juniper; holly; beareberries (but here and there, because of the smell of
their blossom;) red currans; gooseberries; rosemary; bayes; sweetbriar;
and such like. But these standards, to be kept with cutting, that they
grow not out of course.”
Just such, in all but the gooseberries and currants, was the wilderness
of our garden: you came on it by a sudden labyrinthine twist at the end
of a narrow alley of yew, and a sudden door in the high wall. My uncle
said he liked well to see roses in the kitchen-garden, but not
gooseberries in the flower-garden, especially a wild flower-garden.
Wherein lies the difference, I never quite made out, but I feel a
difference. My main delight in the wilderness was to see the roses among
the heather--particularly the wild roses. When I was grown up, the
wilderness always affected me like one of Blake's, or one of Beddoes's
yet wilder lyrics. To make it, my uncle had taken in a part of the heath,
which came close up to the garden, leaving plenty of the heather and
ling. The protecting fence enclosed a good bit of the heath just as it
was, so that the wilderness melted away into the heath, and into the wide
moor--the fence, though contrived so as to be difficult to cross, being
so low that one had to look for it.
Everywhere the inner garden was surrounded with brick walls, and hedges
of yew within them; but immediately behind the house, the wall to the
lane was not very high.
CHAPTER X.
ONCE MORE A SECRET.
One day in June I had gone into the garden about one o'clock, whether
with or without object I forget. I had just seen my uncle start for
Wittenage. Hearing a horse's hoofs in the lane that ran along the outside
of the wall, I looked up. The same moment the horse stopped, and the face
of his rider appeared over the wall, between two stems of yew, and two
great flowers of purple lilac, in shape like two perfect bunches of
swarming bees. It was the face of a youth of eighteen, and beautiful with
a right manly beauty.
The moment I looked on this face, I fell into a sort of trance--that is,
I entered for a moment some condition of existence beyond the ramparts of
what commonly we call life. Love at first sight it was that initiated the
strange experience. But understand me: real as what immediately followed
was to the consciousness, there was no actual fact in it.
I stood gazing. My eyes seemed drawn, and drawing my person toward the
vision. Isolate over the garden-wall was the face; the rest of the man
and all the horse were hidden behind it. Betwixt the yew stems and the
two great lilac flowers--how heart and brain are yet filled with the old
scent of them!--my face, my mouth, my lips met his. I grew blind as with
all my heart I kissed him. Then came a flash of icy terror, and a shudder
which it frights me even now to recall. Instantly I knew that but a
moment had passed, and that I had not moved an inch from the spot where
first my eyes met his.
But my eyes yet rested on his; I could not draw them away. I could not
free myself. Helplessness was growing agony. His voice broke the spell.
He lifted his hunting-cap, and begged me to tell him the way to the next
village. My self-possession returned, and the joy of its restoration
drove from me any lingering embarrassment. I went forward, and without a
faltering tone, I believe, gave him detailed directions. He told me
afterwards that, himself in a state of bewildered surprise, he thought me
the coolest young person he had ever had the fortune to meet. Why should
one be pleased to know that she looked quite different from what she
felt? There is something wrong there, surely! I acknowledge the something
wrong, but do not understand it. He lifted his cap again, and rode away.
I stood still at the foot of the lilac-tree, and, from a vapour,
condensed, not to a stone, but to a world, in which a new Flora was about
to be developed. If no new spiritual sense was awakened in me, at least I
was aware of a new consciousness. I had never been to myself what I was
now.
Terror again seized me: the face might once more look over the wall, and
find me where it had left me! I turned, and went slowly away from the
house, gravitating to the darkest part of the garden.
“What has come to me,” I said, “that I seek the darkness? Is this another
secret? Am I in the grasp of a new enemy?”
And with that came the whirlwind of perplexity. Must I go the first
moment I knew I could find him, and tell my uncle what had happened, and
how I felt? or must I have, and hold, and cherish in silent heart, a
thing so wondrous, so precious, so absorbing? Had I not deliberately
promised--of my own will and at my own instance--never again to have a
secret from him? Was this a secret? Was it not a secret?
The storm was up, and went on. The wonder is that, in the fire of the
new torment, I did not come to loathe the very thought of the young
man--which would have delivered me, if not from the necessity of
confession, yet from the main difficulty in confessing.
I said to myself that the old secret was of a wrong done to my uncle;
that what had made me miserable then was a bad secret. The perception of
this difference gave me comfort for a time, but not for long. The fact
remained, that I knew something concerning myself which my best friend
did not know. It was, and I could not prevent it from being, a barrier
between us!
Yet what was it I was concealing from him? What had I to tell him? How
was I to represent a thing of which I knew neither the name nor the
nature, a thing I could not describe? Could I confess what I did not
understand? The thing might be what, in the tales I had read, was called
love, but I did not know that it was. It might be something new, peculiar
to myself; something for which there was no word in the language! How was
I to tell? I saw plainly that, if I tried to convey my new experience, I
should not get beyond the statement that I had a new experience. It did
not occur to me that the thing might be so well known, that a mere hint
of the feelings concerned, would enable any older person to classify the
consciousness. I said to myself I should merely perplex my uncle. And in
truth I believe that love, in every mind in which it arises, will vary in
colour and form--will always partake of that mind's individual isolation
in difference. This, however, is nothing to the present point.
Comfort myself as I might, that the impossible was required of no one,
and granted that the thing was impossible, it was none the less a cause
of misery, a present disaster: I was aware, and soon my uncle would be
aware, of an impenetrable something separating us. I felt that we had
already begun to grow strange to each other, and the feeling lay like
death at my heart.
Our lessons together were still going on; that I was no longer a child
had made only the difference that progress must make; and I had no
thought that they would not thus go on always. They were never for a
moment irksome to me; I might be tired by them, but never of them. We
were regularly at work together by seven, and after half an hour for
breakfast, resumed work; at half-past eleven our lessons were over. But
although the day was then clear of the imperative, much the greater part
of it was in general passed in each other's company. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together in the study. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together on horseback.
For this day, then, our lessons were over, and my uncle was from home.
This was an indisputable relief, yet the fact that it was so, pained me
keenly, for I recognized in it the first of the schism. How I got through
the day, I cannot tell. I was in a dream, not all a dream of delight.
Haunted with the face I had seen, and living in the new consciousness it
had waked in me, I spent most of it in the garden, now in the glooms of
the yew-walks, and now in the smiling wilderness. It was odd, however,
that, although I was not _expected_ to be in my uncle's room at any time
but that of lessons, all the morning I had a feeling as if I ought to be
there, while yet glad that my uncle was not there.
It was late before he returned, and I went to bed. Perhaps I retired so
soon that I might not have to look into his eyes. Usually, I sat now
until he came home. I was long in getting to sleep, and then I dreamed. I
thought I was out in the storm, and the flash came which revealed the
horse and his rider, but they were both different. The horse in the dream
was black as coal, as if carved out of the night itself; and the man
upon him was the beautiful stranger whose horse I had not seen for the
garden-wall. The darkness fell, and the voice of my uncle called to me. I
waited for him in the storm with a troubled heart, for I knew he had not
seen that vision, and I could no more tell him of it, than could
Christabel tell her father what she had seen after she lay down. I woke,
but my waking was no relief.
CHAPTER XI.
THE MOLE BURROWS.
I slept again after my dream, and do not know whether he came into my
room as he generally did when he had not said good-night to me. Of course
I woke unhappy, and the morning-world had lost something of its natural
glow, its lovely freshness: it was not this time a thing new-born of the
creating word. I dawdled with my dressing. The face kept coming, and
brought me no peace, yet brought me something for which it seemed worth
while even to lose my peace. But I did not know then, and do not yet know
what the loss of peace actually means. I only know that it must be
something far more terrible than anything I have ever known. I remained
so far true to my uncle, however, that not even for what the face seemed
to promise me, would I have consented to cause him trouble. For what I
saw in the face, I would do anything, I thought, except that.
I went to him at the usual hour, determined that nothing should distract
me from my work--that he should perceive no difference in me. I was not
at the moment awake to the fact that here again were love and deception
hand in hand. But another love than mine was there: my uncle loved me
immeasurably more than I yet loved that heavenly vision. True love is
keen-sighted as the eagle, and my uncle's love was love true, therefore
he saw what I sought to hide. It is only the shadow of love, generally a
grotesque, ugly thing, like so many other shadows, that is blind either
to the troubles or the faults of the shadow it seems to love. The moment
our eyes met, I saw that he saw something in mine that was not there when
last we parted. But he said nothing, and we sat down to our lessons.
Every now and then as they proceeded, however, I felt rather than saw his
eyes rest on me for a moment, questioning. I had never known them rest on
me so before. Plainly he was aware of some change; and could there be
anything different in the relation of two who so long had loved each
other, without something being less well and good than before? Nor was it
indeed wonderful he should see a difference; for, with all the might of
my resolve to do even better than usual, I would now and then find myself
unconscious of what either of us had last been saying. The face had come
yet again, and driven everything from its presence! I grew angry--not
with the youth, but with his face, for appearing so often when I did not
invite it. Once I caught myself on the verge of crying out, “Can't you
wait? I will come presently!” and my uncle looked up as if I had spoken.
Perhaps he had as good as heard the words; he possessed what almost
seemed a supernatural faculty of divining the thought of another--not, I
was sure, by any effort to perceive it, but by involuntary intuition. He
uttered no inquiring word, but a light sigh escaped him, which all but
made me burst into tears. I was on one side of a widening gulf, and he on
the other!
Our lessons ended, he rose immediately and left the room. Five minutes
passed, and then came the clatter of his horse's feet on the stones of
the yard. A moment more, and I heard him ride away at a quick trot. I
burst into tears where I still sat beside my uncle's empty chair. I was
weary like one in a dream searching in vain for a spot whereupon to set
down her heart-breaking burden. There was no one but my uncle to whom I
could tell any trouble, and the trouble I could not have told him had
hitherto been unimaginable! From this my reader may judge what a trouble
it was that I could not tell him my trouble. I was a traitor to my only
friend! Had I begun to love him less? had I begun to turn away from him?
I dared not believe it. That would have been to give eternity to my
misery. But it might be that at heart I was a bad, treacherous girl! I
had again a secret from him! I was not _with_ him!
I went into the garden. The day was sultry and oppressive. Coolness or
comfort was nowhere. I sought the shadow of the live yew-walls; there was
shelter in the shadow, but it oppressed the lungs while it comforted the
eyes. Not a breath of wind breathed; the atmosphere seemed to have lost
its life-giving. I went out into the wilderness. There the air was filled
and heaped with the odours of the heavenly plants that crowded its humble
floor, but they gave me no welcome. Between two bushes that flamed out
roses, I lay down, and the heather and the rose-trees closed above me. My
mind was in such a confusion of pain and pleasure--not without a hope of
deliverance somewhere in its clouded sky--that I could think no more, and
fell asleep.
I imagine that, had I never again seen the young man, I should not have
suffered. I think that, by slow natural degrees, his phantasmal presence
would have ceased to haunt me, and gradually I should have returned to my
former condition. I do not mean I should have forgotten him, but neither
should I have been troubled when I thought of him. I know I should never
have regretted having seen him. In that, I had nothing to blame myself
for, and should have felt--not that a glory had passed away from the
earth, but that I had had a vision of bliss. What it was, I should not
have had the power to recall, but it would have left with me the faith
that I had beheld something too ethereal for my memory to store. I should
have consoled myself both with the dream, and with the conviction that I
should not dream it again. The peaceful sense of recovered nearness to my
uncle would have been far more precious than the dream. The sudden fire
of transfiguration that had for a moment flamed out of the All, and
straightway withdrawn, would have become a memory only; but none the less
would that enlargement of the child way of seeing things have remained
with me. I do not think that would ever have left me: it is the care of
the prudent wise that bleaches the grass, and is as the fumes of sulphur
to the red rose of life.
Outwearied with inward conflict, I slept a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER XII.
A LETTER.
A cool soft breeze went through the curtains of my couch, and I awoke.
The blooms of the peasant-briars and the court-roses were waving together
over my head. The sigh of the wind had breathed itself out over the far
heath, and ere it died in my fairy forest of lowly plants and bushes, had
found and fanned the cheeks that lay down hot and athirst for air. It
gave me new life, and I rose refreshed. Something fluttered to the
ground. I thought it was a leaf from a white rose above me, but I looked.
At my feet lay a piece of paper. I took it up. It had been folded very
hastily, and had no address, but who could have a better right to unfold
it than I! It might be nothing; it might be a letter. Should I open it?
Should I not rather seize the opportunity of setting things right between
my heart and my uncle by taking it to him unopened? Only, if it were
indeed--I dared hardly even in thought complete the supposition--might it
not be a wrong to the youth? Might not the paper contain a confidence?
might it not be the messenger of a heart that trusted me before even it
knew my name? Would I inaugurate our acquaintance with an act of
treachery, or at least distrust? Right or wrong, thus my heart reasoned,
and to its reasoning I gave heed. “It will,” I said, “be time enough to
resolve, when I know concerning what!” This, I now see, was juggling; for
the question was whether I should be open with my uncle or not. “It might
be,” I said to myself, “that, the moment I knew the contents of the
paper, I should reproach myself that I had not read it at once!” I sat
down on a bush of heather, and unfolded it. This is what I found, written
with a pencil:--
“I am the man to whom you talked so kindly over your garden wall
yesterday. I fear you may think me presuming and impertinent. Presuming I
may be, but impertinent, surely not! If I were, would not my heart tell
me so, seeing it is all on your side?
“My name is John Day; I do not yet know yours. I have not dared to
inquire after it, lest I should hear of some impassable gulf between us.
The fear of such a gulf haunts me. I can think of nothing but the face I
saw over the wall through the clusters of lilac: the wall seems to keep
rising and rising, as if it would hide you for ever.
“Is it wrong to think thus of you without your leave? If one may not love
the loveliest, then is the world but a fly-trap hung in the great heaven,
to catch and ruin souls!
“If I am writing nonsense--I cannot tell whether I am or not--it is
because my wits wander with my eyes to gaze at you through the leaves of
the wild white rose under which you are asleep. Loveliest of faces, may
no gentlest wind of thought ripple thy perfect calm, until I have said
what I must, and laid it where she will find it!
“I live at Rising, the manor-house over the heath. I am the son of Lady
Cairnedge by a former marriage. I am twenty years of age, and have just
ended my last term at Oxford. May I come and see you? If you will not see
me, why then did you walk into my quiet house, and turn everything upside
down? I shall come to-night, in the dusk, and wait in the heather,
outside the fence. If you come, thank God! if you do not, I shall believe
you could not, and come again and again and again, till hope is dead. But
I warn you I am a terrible hoper.
“It would startle, perhaps offend you, to wake and see me; but I cannot
bear to leave you asleep. Something might come too near you. I will write
until you move, and then make haste to go.
“My heart swells with words too shy to go out. Surely a Will has brought
us together! I believe in fate, never in chance!
“When we see each other again, will the wall be down between us, or shall
I know it will part us all our mortal lives? Longer than that it cannot.
If you say to me, 'I must not see you, but I will think of you,' not one
shall ever know I have other than a light heart. Even now I begin the
endeavour to be such that, when we meet at last, as meet we must, you
shall not say, 'Is this the man, alas, who dared to love me!'
“I love you as one might love a woman-angel who, at the merest breath
going to fashion a word unfit, would spread her wings and soar. Do not, I
pray you, fear to let me come! There are things that must be done in
faith, else they never have being: let this be one of them.--You stir.”
As I came to these last words, hurriedly written, I heard behind me, over
the height, the quick gallop of a horse, and knew the piece of firm turf
he was crossing. The same moment I was there in spirit, and the
imagination was almost vision. I saw him speeding away--“to come again!”
said my heart, solemn with gladness.
Rising-manor was the house to which the lady took me that dread night
when first I knew what it was to be alone in darkness and silence and
space. Was that lady his mother? Had she rescued me for her son? I was
not willing to believe it, though I had never actually seen her. The way
was mostly dark, and during the latter portion of it, I was much too
weary to look up where she sat on her great horse. I had never to my
knowledge heard who lived at Rising. I was not born inquisitive, and
there were miles between us.
I sat still, without impulse to move a finger. I lived essentially. Now I
knew what had come to me. It was no merely idiosyncratic experience, for
the youth had the same: it was love! How otherwise could we thus be drawn
together from both sides! Verily it seemed also good enough to be that
wondrous thing ever on the lips of poets and tale-weaving magicians! Was
it not far beyond any notion of it their words had given me?
But my uncle! There lay bitterness! Was I indeed false to him, that now
the thought of him was a pain? Had I begun a new life apart from him? To
tell him would perhaps check the terrible separation! But how was I to
tell him? For the first time I knew that I had no mother! Would Mr. Day's
mother be my mother too, and help me? But from no woman save my own
mother, hardly even from her, would I ask mediation with the uncle I had
loved and trusted all my life and with my whole heart. I had never known
father or mother, save as he had been father and mother and everybody to
me! What was I to do? Gladly would I have hurried to some desert place,
and there waited for the light I needed. That I was no longer in any
uncertainty as to the word that described my condition, did not, I found,
make it easy to use the word. “Perhaps,” I argued, struggling in the
toils of my new liberty, “my uncle knows nothing of this kind of love,
and would be unable to understand me! Suppose I confessed to him what I
felt toward a man I had spoken to but once, and then only to tell him the
way to Dumbleton, would he not think me out of my mind?”
At length I bethought me that, so long as I did not know what to do, I
was not required to do anything; I must wait till I did know what to do.
But with the thought came suffering enough to be the wages of any sin
that, so far as I knew, I had ever committed. For the conviction awoke
that already the love that had hitherto been the chief joy of my being,
had begun to pale and fade. Was it possible I was ceasing to love my
uncle? What could any love be worth if mine should fail my uncle! Love
itself must be a mockery, and life but a ceaseless sliding down to the
death of indifference! Even if I never ceased to love him, it was just as
bad to love him less! Had he not been everything to me?--and this man,
what had he ever done for me? Doubtless we are to love even our enemies;
but are we to love them as tenderly as we love our friends? Or are we to
love the friend of yesterday, of whom we know nothing though we may
believe everything, as we love those who have taken all the trouble to
make true men and women of us? “What can be the matter with my soul?” I
said. “Can that soul be right made, in which one love begins to wither
the moment another begins to grow? If I be so made, I cannot help being
worthless!”
It was then first, I think, that I received a notion--anything like a
true notion, that is, of my need of a God--whence afterward I came to
see the one need of the whole race. Of course, not being able to make
ourselves, it needed a God to make us; but that making were a small thing
indeed, if he left us so unfinished that we could come to nothing
right;--if he left us so that we could think or do or be nothing
right;--if our souls were created so puny, for instance, that there was
not room in them to love as they could not help loving, without ceasing
to love where they were bound by every obligation to love right heartily,
and more and more deeply! But had I not been growing all the time I had
been in the world? There must then be the possibility of growing still!
If there was not room in me, there must be room in God for me to become
larger! The room in God must be made room in me! God had not done making
me, in fact, and I sorely needed him to go on making me; I sorely needed
to be made out! What if this new joy and this new terror had come, had
been sent, in order to make me grow? At least the doors were open; I
could go out and forsake myself! If a living power had caused me--and
certainly I did not cause myself--then that living power knew all about
me, knew every smallness that distressed me! Where should I find him? He
could not be so far that the misery of one of his own children could not
reach him! I turned my face into the grass, and prayed as I had never
prayed before. I had always gone to church, and made the responses
attentively, while I knew that was not praying, and tried to pray better
than that; but now I was really asking from God something I sorely
wanted. “Father in heaven,” I said, “I am so miserable! Please, help me!”
I rose, went into the house, and up to the study, took a sock I was
knitting for my uncle, and sat down to wait what would come. I could
think no more; I could only wait.
CHAPTER XIII.
OLD LOVE AND NEW.
While I waited, as nearly a log, under the weariness of spiritual unrest,
as a girl could well be, the door opened. Very seldom did that door open
to any one but my uncle or myself: he would let no one but me touch his
books, or even dust the room. I jumped from the chest where I sat.
It was only Martha Moon.
“How you startled me, Martha!” I cried.
“No wonder, child!” she answered. “I come with bad news! Your uncle has
had a fall. He is laid up at Wittenage with a broken right arm.”
I burst into tears.
“Oh, Martha!” I cried; “I must go to him!”
“He has sent for me,” she answered quietly.
“Dick is putting the horse to the phaeton.”
“He doesn't want me, then!” I said; but it seemed a voice not my own that
shrieked the words.
The punishment of my sin was upon me. Never would he have sent for Martha
and not me, I thought, had he not seen that I had gone wrong again, and
was no more to be trusted.
“My dear,” said Martha, “which of us two ought to be the better nurse?
You never saw your uncle ill; I've nursed him at death's door!”
“Then you don't think he is angry with me, Martha?” I said, humbled
before myself.
“Was he ever angry with you, Orbie? What is there to be angry about? I
never saw him even displeased with you!”
I had not realized that my uncle was suffering--only that he was
disabled; now the fact flashed upon me, and with it the perception that I
had been thinking only of myself: I was fast ceasing to care for him! And
then, horrible to tell! a flash of joy went through me, that he would not
be home that day, and therefore I _could_ not tell him anything!
The moment Martha left me I threw myself on the floor of the desert room.
I was in utter misery.
“Gladly would I bear every pang of his pain,” I said to myself; “yet I
have not asked one question about his accident! He must be in danger, or
he would not have sent for Martha instead of me!”
How had the thing happened, I wondered. Had Death fallen with
him--perhaps on him? He was such a horseman, I could not think he
had been thrown. Besides, Death was a good horse who loved his
master--dearly, I was sure, and would never have thrown him or let him
fall! A great gush of the old love poured from the fountain in my heart:
sympathy with the horse had unsealed it. I sprang from the floor, and ran
down to entreat Martha to take me with her: if my uncle did not want me,
I could return with Dick! But she was gone. Even the sound of her wheels
was gone. I had lain on the floor longer than I knew.
I went back to the study a little relieved. I understood now that I was
not glad he was disabled; that I was anything but glad he was suffering;
that I had only been glad for an instant that the crisis of my perplexity
was postponed. In the meantime I should see John Day, who would help me
to understand what I ought to do!
Very strange were my feelings that afternoon in the lonely house. I had
always felt it lonely when Martha, never when my uncle was out. Yet when
my uncle was in, I was mostly with him, and seldom more than a few
minutes at a time with Martha. Our feelings are odd creatures! Now that
both were away, there was neither time nor space in my heart for feeling
the house desolate; while the world outside was rich as a treasure-house
of mighty kings. The moment I was a little more comfortable with myself,
my thoughts went in a flock to the face that looked over the garden-wall,
to the man that watched me while I slept, the man that wrote that lovely
letter. Inside was old Penny with her broom: she took advantage of every
absence to sweep or scour or dust; outside was John Day, and the roses of
the wilderness! He was waiting the hour to come to me, wondering how I
would receive him!
Slowly went the afternoon. I had fallen in love at first sight, it is
true; not therefore was I eager to meet my lover. I was only more than
willing to see him. It was as sweet, or nearly as sweet, to dream of his
coming, as to have him before me--so long as I knew he was indeed coming.
I was just a little anxious lest I should not find him altogether so
beautiful as I was imagining him. That he was good, I never doubted:
could I otherwise have fallen in love with him? And his letter was so
straightforward--so manly!
The afternoon was cloudy, and the twilight came the sooner. From the
realms of the dark, where all the birds of night build their nests,
lining them with their own sooty down, the sweet odorous filmy dusk of
the summer, haunted with wings of noiseless bats, began at length to come
flickering earthward, in a snow infinitesimal of fluffiest gray and
black: I crept out into the garden. It was dark as wintry night among
the yews, but I could have gone any time through every alley of them
blind-folded. An owl cried and I started, for my soul was sunk in its own
love-dawn. There came a sudden sense of light as I opened the door into
the wilderness, but light how thin and pale, and how full of expectation!
The earth and the vast air, up to the great vault, seemed to throb and
heave with life--or was it that my spirit lay an open thoroughfare to
the life of the All? With the scent of the roses and the humbler
sweet-odoured inhabitants of the wilderness; with the sound of the brook
that ran through it, flowing from the heath and down the hill; with the
silent starbeams, and the insects that make all the little noises they
can; with the thoughts that went out of me, and returned possessed of the
earth;--with all these, and the sense of thought eternal, the universe
was full as it could hold. I stood in the doorway of the wall, and looked
out on the wild: suddenly, by some strange reaction, it seemed out of
creation's doors, out in the illimitable, given up to the bare, to the
space that had no walls! A shiver ran through me; I turned back among the
yews. It was early; I would wait yet a while! If he were already there,
he too would enjoy the calm of a lovely little wait.
A small wind came searching about, and found, and caressed me. I turned
to it; it played with my hair, and cooled my face. After a while, I left
the alley, passed out, closed the door behind me, and went straying
through the broken ground of the wilderness, among the low bushes,
meandering, as if with some frolicsome brook for a companion--a brook of
capricious windings--but still coming nearer to the fence that parted the
wilderness from the heath, my eyes bent down, partly to avoid the
hillocks and bushes, and partly from shyness of the moment when first I
should see him who was in my heart and somewhere near. Softly the moon
rose, round and full. There was still so much light in the sky that she
made no sudden change, and for a moment I did not feel her presence or
look up. In front of me, the high ground of the moor sank into a hollow,
deeply indenting the horizon-line: the moon was rising just in the gap,
and when I did look up, the lower edge of her disc was just clear of the
earth, and the head of a man looking over the fence was in the middle of
the great moon. It was like the head of a saint in a missal, girt with a
halo of solid gold. I could not see the face, for the halo hid it, as
such attributions are apt to do, but it must be he; and strengthened by
the heavenly vision, I went toward him. Walking less carefully than
before, however, I caught my foot, stumbled, and fell. There came a rush
through the bushes; he was by my side, lifted me like a child, and held
me in his arms; neither was I more frightened than a child caught up in
the arms of any well-known friend: I had been bred in faith and not
mistrust! But indeed my head had struck the ground with such force, that,
had I been inclined, I could scarcely have resisted--though why should I
have resisted, being where I would be! Does not philosophy tell us that
growth and development, cause and effect, are all, and that the days and
years are of no account? And does not more than philosophy tell us that
truth is everything?
“My darling! Are you hurt?” murmured the voice whose echoes seemed to
have haunted me for centuries.
“A little,” I answered. “I shall be all right in a minute.” I did not
add, “Put me down, please;” for I did not want to be put down directly. I
could not have stood if he had put me down. I grew faint.
Life came back, and I felt myself growing heavy in his arms.
“I think I can stand now,” I said. “Please put me down.”
He obeyed immediately.
“I've nearly broken your arms,” I said, ashamed of having become a burden
to him the moment we met.
“I could run with you to the top of the hill!” he answered.
“I don't think you could,” I returned. Perhaps I leaned a little toward
him; I do not know. He put his arm round me.
“You are not able to stand,” he said. “Shall we sit a moment?”
CHAPTER XIV.
MOTHER AND UNCLE.
I was glad enough to sink on a clump of white clover. He stretched
himself on the heather, a little way from me. Silence followed. He was
giving me time to recover myself. As soon, therefore, as I was able, it
was my part to speak.
“Where is your horse?” I asked. The first word is generally one hardly
worth saying.
“I left him at a little farmhouse, about a mile from here. I was afraid
to bring him farther, lest my mother should learn where I had been. She
takes pains to know.”
“Then will she not find out?”
“I don't know.”
“Will she not ask you where you were?”
“Perhaps. There's no knowing.”
“You will tell her, of course, if she does?”
“I think not.”
“Oughtn't you?”
“No.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes.”
“You don't mean you will tell her a story?”
“Certainly not.”
“What will you do then?”
“I will tell her that I will not tell her.”
“Would that be right?”
Through the dusk I could see the light of his smile as he answered,
“I think so. I shall not tell her.”
“But,” I began.
He interrupted me.
My heart was sinking within me. Not only had I wanted him to help me to
tell my uncle, but I shuddered at the idea of having with any man a
secret from his mother.
“It must look strange to you,” he said; “but you do not know my mother!”
“I think I do know your mother,” I rejoined. “She saved my poor little
life once.--I am not sure it was your mother, but I think it was.”
“How was that?” he said, much surprised. “When was it?”
“Many years ago--I cannot tell how many,” I answered. “But I remember all
about it well enough. I cannot have been more than eight, I imagine.”
“Could she have been at the manor then?” he said, putting the question to
himself, not me. “How was it? Tell me,” he went on, rising to his feet,
and looking at me with almost a frightened expression.
I told him the incident, and he heard me in absolute silence. When I had
done,--
“It _was_ my mother!” he broke out; “I don't know one other woman who
would have let a child walk like that! Any other would have taken you up,
or put you on the horse and walked beside you!”
“A gentleman would, I know,” I replied. “But it would not be so easy for
a lady!”
_“She_ could have done either well enough. She's as strong as a horse
herself, and rides like an Amazon. But I am not in the least surprised:
it was just like her! You poor little darling! It nearly makes me cry to
think of the tiny feet going tramp, tramp, all that horrible way, and
she high up on her big horse! She always rides the biggest horse she can
get!--And then never to say a word to you after she brought you home, or
see you the next morning!”
“Mr. Day,” I returned, “I would not have told you, had I known it would
give you occasion to speak so naughtily of your mother. You make me
unhappy.”
He was silent. I thought he was ashamed of himself, and was sorry for
him. But my sympathy was wasted. He broke into a murmuring laugh of
merriment.
“When is a mother not a mother?” he said. “--Do you give it up?--When
she's a north wind. When she's a Roman emperor. When she's an iceberg.
When she's a brass tiger.--There! that'll do. Good-bye, mother, for the
present! I mayn't know much, as she's always telling me, but I do know
that a noun is not a thing, nor a name a person!”
I would have expostulated.
“For love's sake, dearest,” he pleaded, “we will not dispute where only
one of us knows! I will tell you all some day--soon, I hope, very soon. I
am angry now!--Poor little tramping child!”
I saw I had been behaving presumptuously: I had wanted to argue while yet
in absolute ignorance of the thing in hand! Had not my uncle taught me
the folly of reasoning from the ideal where I knew nothing of the actual!
The ideal must be our guide how to treat the actual, but the actual must
be there to treat! One thing more I saw--that there could be no likeness
between his mother and my uncle!
“Will you tell me something about yourself, then?” I said.
“That would not be interesting!” he objected.
“Then why are you here?” I returned.
“Can any person without a history be interesting?”
“Yes,” he answered: “a person that was going to have a history might be
interesting.”
“Could a person with a history that was not worth telling, be
interesting? But I know yours will interest me in the hearing, therefore
it ought to interest you in the telling.
“I see,” he rejoined, with his merry laugh, “I shall have to be careful!
My lady will at once pounce upon the weak points of my logic!”
“I am no logician,” I answered; “I only know when I don't know a thing.
My uncle has taught me that wisdom lies in that.”
“Yours must be a very unusual kind of uncle!” he returned.
“If God had made many men like my uncle, I think the world wouldn't be
the same place.”
“I wonder why he didn't!” he said thoughtfully.
“I have wondered much, and cannot tell,” I replied.
“What if it wouldn't be good for the world to have many good men in it
before it was ready to treat them properly?” he suggested.
The words let me know that at least he could think. Hitherto my uncle had
seemed to me the only man that thought. But I had seen very few men.
“Perhaps that is it,” I answered. “I will think about it.--Were you
brought up at Rising? Have you been there all the time? Were you there
that night? I should surely have known had you been in the house!”
He looked at me with a grateful smile.
“I was not brought up there,” he answered. “Rising is mine, however--at
least it will be when I come of age; it was left me some ten years ago by
a great-aunt My father's property will be mine too, of course. My
mother's is in Ireland. She ought to be there, not here; but she likes my
estates better than her own, and makes the most of being my guardian.”
“You would not have her there if she is happier here?”
“All who have land, ought to live on it, or else give it to those who
will. What makes it theirs, if their only connection with it is the money
it brings them? If I let my horse run wild over the country, how could I
claim him, and refuse to pay his damages?”
“I don't quite understand you.”
“I only mean there is no bond where both ends are not tied. My mother has
no sense of obligation, so far as ever I have been able to see. But do
not be afraid: I would as soon take a wife to the house she was in, as I
would ask her to creep with me into the den of a hyena.”
It was too dreadful! I rose. He sprang to his feet.
“You must excuse me, sir!” I said. “With one who can speak so of his
mother, I am where I ought not to be.”
“You have a right to know what my mother is,” he answered--coldly, I
thought; “and I should not be a true man if I spoke of her otherwise than
truly.”
He would pretend nothing to please me! I saw that I was again in the
wrong. Was I so ill read as to imagine that a mother must of necessity be
a good woman? Was he to speak of his mother as he did not believe of her,
or be unfit for my company? Would untruth be a bond between us?
“I beg your pardon,” I said; “I was wrong. But you can hardly wonder I
should be shocked to hear a son speak so of his mother--and to one all
but a stranger!”
“What!” he returned, with a look of surprise; “do you think of me so? I
feel as if I had known you all my life--and before it!”
I felt ashamed, and was silent. If he was such a stranger, why was I
there alone with him?
“You must not think I speak so to any one,” he went on. “Of those who
know my mother, not one has a right to demand of me anything concerning
her. But how could I ask you to see me, and hide from you the truth about
her? Prudence would tell you to have nothing to do with the son of such a
woman: could I be a true man, true to you, and hold my tongue about her?
I should be a liar of the worst sort!”
He felt far too strongly, it was plain, to heed a world of commonplaces.
“Forgive me,” I said. “May I sit down again?”
He held out his hand. I took it, and reseated myself on the
clover-hillock. He laid himself again beside me, and after a little
silence began to relate what occurred to him of his external history,
while all the time I was watching for hints as to how he had come to be
the man he was. It was clear he did not find it easy to talk about
himself. But soon I no longer doubted whether I ought to have met him,
and loved him a great deal more by the time he had done.
I then told him in return what my life had hitherto been; how I knew
nothing of father or mother; how my uncle had been everything to me; how
he had taught me all I knew, had helped me to love what was good and hate
what was evil, had enabled me to value good books, and turn away from
foolish ones. In short, I made him feel that all his mother had not been
to him, my uncle had been to me; and that it would take a long time to
make me as much indebted to a husband as already I was to my uncle. Then
I put the question:
“What would you think of me if I had a secret from an uncle like that?”
“If I had an uncle like that,” he answered, “I would sooner cut my throat
than keep anything from him!”
“I have not told him,” I said, “what happened to-day--or yesterday.”
“But you will tell him?”
“The first moment I can. But I hope you understand it is hard to do. My
love for my uncle makes it hard. It has the look of turning away from him
to love another!”
With that I burst out crying. I could not help it. He let me cry, and did
not interfere. I was grateful for that. When at length I raised my head,
he spoke.
“It has that look,” he said; “but I trust it is only a look. Anyhow, he
knows that such things must be; and the more of a good man and a
gentleman he is, the less will he be pained that we should love one
another!”
“I am sure of that,” I replied. “I am only afraid that he may never have
been in love himself, and does not know how it feels, and may think I
have forsaken him for you.”
“Are you with him _always?_”
“No; I am sometimes a good deal alone. I can be alone as much as I like;
he always gives me perfect liberty. But I never before wanted to be alone
when I could be with him.”
“But he _could_ live without you?”
“Yes, indeed!” I cried. “He would be a poor creature that could not live
without another!”
He said nothing, and I added, “He often goes out alone--sometimes in the
darkest nights.”
“Then be sure he knows what love is.--But, if you would rather, I will
tell him.”
“I could not have any one, even you, tell my uncle about me.”
“You are right. When will you tell him?”
“I cannot be sure. I would go to him to-morrow, but I am afraid they will
not let me until he has got a little over this accident,” I answered--and
told him what had happened. “It is dreadful to think how he must have
suffered,” I said, “and how much more I should have thought about it but
for you! It tears my heart. Why wasn't it made bigger?”
“Perhaps that is just what is now being done with it!” he answered.
“I hope it may be!” I returned. “--But it is time I went in.”
“Shall I not see you again to-morrow evening?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “I must not see you again till I have told my uncle
everything.”
“You do not mean for weeks and weeks--till he is well enough to come
home? How _am_ I to live till then!”
“As I shall have to live. But I hope it will be but for a few days at
most. Only, then, it will depend on what my uncle thinks of the thing.”
“Will he decide for you what you are to do?”
“Yes--I think so. Perhaps if he were--” I was on the point of saying,
“like your mother,” but I stopped in time--or hardly, for I think he saw
what I just saved myself from. It was but the other morning I made the
discovery that, all our life together, John has never once pressed me to
complete a sentence I broke off.
He looked so sorrowful that I was driven to add something.
“I don't think there is much good,” I said, “in resolving what you will
or will not do, before the occasion appears, for it may have something in
it you never reckoned on. All I can say is, I will try to do what is
right. I cannot promise anything without knowing what my uncle thinks.”
We rose; he took me in his arms for just an instant; and we parted with
the understanding that I was to write to him as soon as I had spoken with
my uncle.
CHAPTER XV.
THE TIME BETWEEN.
I now felt quite able to confess to my uncle both what I had thought and
what I had done. True, I had much more to confess than when my trouble
first awoke; but the growth in the matter of the confession had been such
a growth in definiteness as well, as to make its utterance, though more
weighty, yet much easier. If I might be in doubt about revealing my
thoughts, I could be in none about revealing my actions; and I found it
was much less appalling to make known my feelings, when I had the words
of John Day to confess as well.
I may here be allowed to remark, how much easier an action is when
demanded, than it seems while in the contingent future--how much
easier when the thing is before you in its reality, and not as a mere
thought-spectre. The thing itself, and the idea of it, are two such
different grounds upon which to come either to a decision or to action!
One thing more: when a woman wants to do the right--I do not mean, wants
to coax the right to side with her--she will, somehow, be led up to it.
My uncle was very feverish and troubled the first night, and had a good
deal of delirium, during which his care and anxiety seemed all about me.
Martha had to assure him every other moment that I was well, and in no
danger of any sort: he would be silent for a time, and then again show
himself tormented with forebodings about me. In the morning, however, he
was better; only he looked sadder than usual. She thought he was, for
some cause or other, in reality anxious about me. So much I gathered from
Martha's letter, by no means scholarly, but graphic enough.
It gave me much pain. My uncle was miserable about me: he had plainly
seen, he knew and felt that something had come between us! Alas, it was
no fancy of his brain-troubled soul! Whether I was in fault or not, there
was that something! It troubled the unity that had hitherto seemed a
thing essential and indivisible!
Dared I go to him without a summons? I knew Martha would call me the
moment the doctor allowed her: it would not be right to go without that
call. What I had to tell might justify far more anxiety than the sight of
me would counteract. If I said nothing, the keen eye of his love would
assure itself of the something hid in my silence, and he would not see
that I was but waiting his improvement to tell him everything. I resolved
therefore to remain where I was.
The next two days were perhaps the most uncomfortable ever I spent. A
secret one desires to turn out of doors at the first opportunity, is not
a pleasant companion. I do not say I was unhappy, still less that once I
wished I had not seen John Day, but oh, how I longed to love him openly!
how I longed for my uncle's sanction, without which our love could not be
perfected! Then John's mother was by no means a gladsome thought--except
that he must be a good man indeed, who was good in spite of being unable
to love, respect, or trust his mother! The true notion of heaven, is to
be with everybody one loves: to him the presence of his mother--such as
she was, that is--would destroy any heaven! What a painful but salutary
shock it will be to those whose existence is such a glorifying of
themselves that they imagine their presence necessary to all about them,
when they learn that their disappearance from the world sent a thrill of
relief through the hearts of those nearest them! To learn how little
they were prized, will one day prove a strong medicine for souls
self-absorbed.
“There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed.”
CHAPTER XVI.
FAULT AND NO FAULT.
The next day I kept the house till the evening, and then went walking in
the garden in the twilight. Between the dark alleys and the open
wilderness I flitted and wandered, alternating gloom and gleam outside
me, even as they chased one another within me.
In the wilderness I looked up--and there was John! He stood outside the
fence, just as I had seen him the night before, only now there was no
aureole about his head: the moon had not yet reached the horizon.
My first feeling was anger: he had broken our agreement! I did not
reflect that there was such a thing as breaking a law, or even a promise,
and being blameless. He leaped the fence, and clearing every bush like a
deer, came straight toward me. It was no use trying to escape him. I
turned my back, and stood. He stopped close behind me, a yard or two
away.
“Will you not speak to me?” he said. “It is not my fault I am come.”
“Whose fault then, pray?” I rejoined, with difficulty keeping my
position. “Is it mine?”
“My mother's,” he answered.
I turned and looked him in the eyes, through the dusk saw that he was
troubled, ran to him, and put my arms about him.
“She has been spying,” he said, as soon as he could speak. “She will part
us at any risk, if she can. She is having us watched this very moment,
most likely. She may be watching us herself. She is a terrible woman when
she is for or against anything. Literally, I do not know what she would
not do to get her own way. She lives for her own way. The loss of it
would be to her as the loss of her soul. She will lose it this time
though! She will fail this time--if she never did before!”
“Well,” I returned, nowise inclined to take her part, “I hope she will
fail! What does she say?”
“She says she would rather go to her grave than see me your husband.”
“Why?”
“Your family seems objectionable to her.”
“What is there against it?”
“Nothing that I know.”
“What is there against my uncle? Is there anything against Martha Moon?”
I was indignant at the idea of a whisper against either.
“What have _I_ done?” I went on. “We are all of the family I know: what
is it?”
“I don't think she has had time to invent anything yet; but she pretends
there is something, and says if I don't give you up, if I don't swear
never to look at you again, she will tell it.”
“What did you answer her?”
“I said no power on earth should make me give you up. Whatever she knew,
she could know nothing against _you_, and I was as ready to go to my
grave as she was. 'Mother,' I said, 'you may tell my determination by
your own! Whether I marry her or not, you and I part company the day I
come of age; and if you speak word or do deed against one of her family,
my lawyer shall look strictly into your accounts as my guardian.' You see
I knew where to touch her!”
“It is dreadful you should have to speak like that to your mother!”
“It is; but you would feel to her just as I do if you knew all--though
you wouldn't speak so roughly, I know.”
“Can you guess what she has in her mind?”
“Not in the least. She will pretend anything. It is enough that she is
determined to part us. How, she cares nothing, so she succeed.”
“But she cannot!”
“It rests with you.”
“How with me?”
“It will be war to the knife between her and me. If she succeed, it must
be with you. I will do anything to foil her except lie.”
“What if she should make you see it your duty to give me up?”
“What if there were no difference between right and wrong! We're as good
as married!”
“Yes, of course; but I cannot quite promise, you know, until I hear what
my uncle will say.”
“If your uncle is half so good a man as you have made me think him, he
will do what he can on our side. He loves what is fair; and what can be
fairer than that those who love each other should marry?”
I knew my uncle would not willingly interfere with my happiness, and for
myself, I should never marry another than John Day--that was a thing of
course: had he not kissed me? But the best of lovers had been parted, and
that which had been might be again, though I could not see how! It _was_
good, nevertheless, to hear John talk! It was the right way for a lover
to talk! Still, he had no supremacy over what was to be!
“Some would say it cannot be so great a matter to us, when we have known
each other such a little while!” I remarked.
“The true time is the long time!” he replied. “Would it be a sign that
our love was strong, that it took a great while to come to anything? The
strongest things--”
There he stopped, and I saw why: strongest things are not generally of
quickest growth! But there was the eucalyptus! And was not St. Paul as
good a Christian as any of them? I said nothing, however: there was
indeed no rule in the matter!
“You must allow it possible,” I said, “that we may not be married!”
“I will not,” he answered. “It is true my mother may get me brought in as
incapable of managing my own affairs; but--”
“What mother would do such a wicked thing!” I cried.
“_My_ mother,” he answered.
“Oh!”
“She _would!_”
“I can't believe it.”
“I am sure of it.”
I held my peace. I could not help a sense of dismay at finding myself so
near such a woman. I knew of bad women, but only in books: it would
appear they were in other places as well!
“We must be on our guard,” he said.
“Against what?”
“I don't know; whatever she may do.”
“We can't do anything till she begins!”
“She has begun.”
“How?” I asked incredulous.
“Leander is lame,” he answered.
“I am so sorry!”
“I am so angry!”
“Is it possible I understand you?”
“Quite. _She_ did it.”
“How do you know?”
“I can no more prove it than I can doubt it. I cannot inquire into my
mother's proceedings. I leave that sort of thing to her. Let her spy on
me as she will, I am not going to spy on her.”
“Of course not! But if you have no proof, how can you state the thing as
a fact?”
“I have what is proof enough for saying it to my own soul.”
“But you have spoken of it to me!”
“You are my better soul. If you are not, then I have done wrong in saying
it to you.”
I hastened to tell him I had only made him say what I hoped he
meant--only I wasn't his _better_ soul. He wanted me then to promise that
I would marry him in spite of any and every thing. I promised that I
would never marry any one but him. I could not say more, I said, not
knowing what my uncle might think, but so much it was only fair to say.
For I had gone so far as to let him know distinctly that I loved him; and
what sort would that love be that could regard it as possible, at any
distance of time, to marry another! Or what sort of woman could she be
that would shrink from such a pledge! The mischief lies in promises made
without forecasting thought. I knew what I was about. I saw forward and
backward and all around me. A solitary education opens eyes that, in the
midst of companions and engagements, are apt to remain shut. Knowledge of
the world is no safeguard to man or woman. In the knowledge and love of
truth, lies our only safety.
With that promise he had to be, and was content.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SUMMONS.
Next morning the post brought me the following letter from my uncle.
Whoever of my readers may care to enter into my feelings as I read, must
imagine them for herself: I will not attempt to describe them. The letter
was not easy to read, as it was written in bed, and with his left hand.
“My little one,--I think I know more than you imagine. I think the secret
flew into your heart of itself; you did not take it up and put it there.
I think you tried to drive it out, and it would not go: the same Fate
that clips the thread of life, had clipped its wings that it could fly no
more! Did my little one think I had not a heart big enough to hold her
secret? I wish it had not been so: it has made her suffer! I pray my
little one to be sure that I am all on her side; that my will is to do
and contrive the best for her that lies in my power. Should I be unable
to do what she would like, she must yet believe me true to her as to my
God, less than whom only I love her:--less, because God is so much
bigger, that so much more love will hang upon him. I love you, dear, more
than any other creature except one, and that one is not in this world. Be
sure that, whatever it may cost me, I will be to you what your own
perfected soul will approve. Not to do my best for you, would be to be
false, not to God only, but to your father as well, whom I loved and love
dearly. Come to me, my child, and tell me all. I know you have done
nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of. Some things are so difficult to
tell, that it needs help to make way for them: I will help you. I am
better. Come to me at once, and we will break the creature's shell
together, and see what it is like, the shy thing!--Your uncle.”
I was so eager to go to him, that it was with difficulty I finished his
letter before starting. Death had been sent home, and was in the stable,
sorely missing his master. I called Dick, and told him to get ready to
ride with me to Wittenage; he must take Thanatos, and be at the door with
Zoe in twenty minutes.
We started. As we left the gate, I caught sight of John coming from the
other direction, his eyes on the ground, lost in meditation. I stopped.
He looked up, saw me, and was at my side in two moments.
“I have heard from my uncle,” I said. “He wants me. I am going to him.”
“If only I had my horse!” he answered.
“Why shouldn't you take Thanatos?” I rejoined.
“No,” he answered, after a moment's hesitation.
“It would be an impertinence. I will walk, and perhaps see you there.
It's only sixteen miles, I think.--What a splendid creature he is!”
“He's getting into years now,” I replied; “but he has been in the stable
several days, and I am doubtful whether Dick will feel quite at home on
him.”
“Then your uncle would rather I rode him! He knows I am no tailor!” said
John.
“How?” I asked.
“I don't mean he knows who I am, but he saw me a fortnight ago, in one of
our fields, giving Leander, who is but three, a lesson or two. He stopped
and looked on for a good many minutes, and said a kind word about my
handling of the horse. He will remember, I am sure.”
“How glad I am he knows something of you! If you don't mind being seen
with me, then, there is no reason why you should not give me your
escort.”
Dick was not sorry to dismount, and we rode away together.
I was glad of this for one definite reason, as well as many indefinite: I
wanted John to see my letter, and know what cause I had to love my uncle.
I forgot for the moment my resolution not to meet him again before
telling my uncle everything. Somehow he seemed to be going with me to
receive my uncle's approval.
He read the letter, old Death carrying him all the time as gently as he
carried myself--I often rode him now--and returned it with the tears in
his eyes. For a moment or two he did not speak. Then he said in a very
solemn way,
“I see! I oughtn't to have a chance if he be against me! I understand now
why I could not get you to promise!--All right! The Lord have mercy upon
me!”
“That he will! He is always having mercy upon us!” I answered, loving
John and my uncle and God more than ever. I loved John for this
especially, at the moment--that his nature remained uninjured toward
others by his distrust of her who should have had the first claim on his
confidence. I said to myself that, if a man had a bad mother and yet was
a good man, there could be no limit to the goodness he must come to. That
he was a man after my uncle's own heart, I had no longer the least doubt.
Nor was it a small thing to me that he rode beautifully--never seeming to
heed his horse, and yet in constant touch with him.
We reached the town, and the inn where my uncle was lying. On the road we
had arranged where he would be waiting me to hear what came next. He went
to see the horses put up, and I ran to find Martha. She met me on the
stair, and went straight to my uncle to tell him I was come, returned
almost immediately, and led me to his room.
I was shocked to see how pale and ill he looked. I feared, and was right
in fearing, that anxiety about myself had not a little to do with his
condition. His face brightened when he saw me, but his eyes gazed into
mine with a searching inquiry. His face brightened yet more when he found
his eager look answered by the smile which my perfect satisfaction
inspired. I knelt by the bedside, afraid to touch him lest I should hurt
his arm.
Slowly he laid his left hand on my head, and I knew he blessed me
silently. For a minute or two he lay still.
“Now tell me all about it,” he said at length, turning his patient blue
eyes on mine. I began at once, and if I did not tell him all, I let it be
plain there was more of the sort behind, concerning which he might
question me. When I had ended,
“Is that everything?” he asked, with a smile so like all he had ever been
to me, that my whole heart seemed to go out to meet it.
“Yes, uncle,” I answered; “I think I may say so--except that I have not
dwelt upon my feelings. Love, they say, is shy; and I fancy you will
pardon me that portion.”
“Willingly, my child. More is quite unnecessary.”
“Then you know all about it, uncle?” I ventured. “I was afraid you might
not understand me. Could any one, do you think, that had not had the same
experience?”
He made me no answer. I looked up. He was ghastly white; his head had
fallen back against the bed. I started up, hardly smothering a shriek.
“What is it, uncle?” I gasped. “Shall I fetch Martha?”
“No, my child,” he answered. “I shall be better in a moment. I am subject
to little attacks of the heart, but they do not mean much. Give me some
of that medicine on the table.”
In a few minutes his colour began to return, and the smile which was
forced at first, gradually brightened until it was genuine.
“I will tell you the whole story one day,” he said, “--whether in this
world, I am doubtful. But _when_ is nothing, or _where_, with eternity
before us.”
“Yes, uncle,” I answered vaguely, as I knelt again by the bedside.
“A person,” he said, after a while, slowly, and with hesitating effort,
“may look and feel a much better person at one time than at another.
Upon occasion, he is so happy, or perhaps so well pleased with himself,
that the good in him comes all to the surface.”
“Would he be the better or the worse man if it did not, uncle?” I asked.
“You must not get me into a metaphysical discussion, little one,” he
answered. “We have something more important on our hands. I want you to
note that, when a person is happy, he may look lovable; whereas, things
going as he does not like, another, and very unfinished phase of his
character may appear.”
“Surely everybody must know that, uncle!”
“Then you can hardly expect me to be confident that your new friend would
appear as lovable if he were unhappy!”
“I have seen you, uncle, look as if nothing would ever make you smile
again; but I knew you loved me all the time.”
“Did you, my darling? Then you were right. I dare not require of any man
that he should be as good-tempered in trouble as out of it--though he
must come to that at last; but a man must be _just_, whatever mood he is
in.”
“That is what I always knew you to be, uncle! I never waited for a change
in your looks, to tell you anything I wanted to tell you.--I know you,
uncle!” I added, with a glow of still triumph.
“Thank you, little one!” he returned, half playfully, yet gravely. “All I
want to say comes to this,” he resumed after a pause, “that when a man is
in love, you see only the best of him, or something better than he really
is. Much good may be in a man, for God made him, and the man yet not be
good, for he has done nothing, since his making, to make himself. Before
you can say you know a man, you must have seen him in a few at least of
his opposite moods. Therefore you cannot wonder that I should desire a
fuller assurance of this young man, than your testimony, founded on an
acquaintance of three or four days, can give me.”
“Let me tell you, then, something that happened to-day,” I answered.
“When first I asked him to come with me this morning, it was a temptation
to him of course, not knowing when we might see each other again; but he
hadn't his own horse, and said it would be an impertinence to ride
yours.”
“I hope you did not come alone!”
“Oh, no. I had set out with Dick, but John came after all.”
“Then his refusal to ride my horse does not come to much. It is a small
thing to have good impulses, if temptation is too much for them.”
“But I haven't done telling you, uncle!”
“I am hasty, little one. I beg your pardon.”
“I have to tell you what made him give in to riding your horse. I
confessed I was a little anxious lest Death, who had not been exercised
for some days, should be too much for Dick. John said then he thought he
might venture, for you had once spoken very kindly to him of the way he
handled his own horse.”
“Oh, that's the young fellow, is it!” cried my uncle, in a tone that
could not be taken for other than one of pleasure. “That's the fellow, is
it?” he repeated. “H'm!”
“I hope you liked the look of him, uncle!” I said.
“The boy is a gentleman anyhow!” he answered.--“You may think whether I
was pleased!--I never saw man carry himself better horseward!” he added
with a smile.
“Then you won't object to his riding Death home again?”
“Not in the least!” he replied. “The man can ride.”
“And may I go with him?--that is, if you do not want me!--I wish I could
stay with you!”
“Rather than ride home with him?”
“Yes, indeed, if it were to be of use to you!”
“The only way you can be of use to me, is to ride home with Mr. Day, and
not see him again until I have had a little talk with him. Tyranny may be
a sense of duty, you know, little one!”
“Tyranny, uncle!” I cried, as I laid my cheek to his hand, which was very
cold. “You could not make me think you a tyrant!”
“I should not like you to think me one, darling! Still less would I like
to deserve it, whether you thought me one or not! But I could not be a
tyrant to you if I would. You may defy me when you please.”
“That would be to poison my own soul!” I answered.
“You must understand,” he continued, “that I have no authority over you.
If you were going to marry Mr. Day to-morrow, I should have no right to
interfere. I am but a make-shift father to you, not a legal guardian.”
“Don't cast me off, uncle!” I cried. “You _know_ I belong to you as much
as if you were my very own father! I am sure my father will say so when
we see him. He will never come between you and me.”
He gave a great sigh, and his face grew so intense that I felt as if I
had no right to look on it.
“It is one of the deepest hopes of my existence,” he said, “to give you
back to him the best of daughters. Be good, my darling, be good, even if
you die of sorrow because of it.”
The intensity had faded to a deep sadness, and there came a silence.
“Would you like me to go now, uncle?” I asked.
“I wish I could see Mr. Day at once,” he returned, “but I am so far from
strong, that I fear both weakness and injustice. Tell him I want very
much to see him, and will let him know as soon as I am able.”
“Thank you, uncle! He will be so glad! Of course he can't feel as I do,
but he does feel that to do anything you did not like, would be just
horrid.”
“And you will not see him again, little one, after he has taken you home,
till I have had some talk with him?”
“Of course I will not, uncle.”
I bade him good-bye, had a few moments' conference with Martha, and found
John at the place appointed.
CHAPTER XVIII.
JOHN SEES SOMETHING.
As we rode, I told him everything. It did not seem in the least strange
that I should be so close to one of whom a few days before I had never
heard; it seemed as if all my life I had been waiting for him, and now he
was come, and everything was only as it should be! We were very quiet in
our gladness. Some slight anxiety about my uncle's decision, and the
certain foreboding of trouble on the part of his mother, stilled us both,
sending the delight of having found each other a little deeper and out of
the way of the practical and reasoning.
We did not urge our horses to their speed, but I felt that, for my
uncle's sake, I must not prolong the journey, forcing the last farthing
of bliss from his generosity, while yet he was uncertain of his duty. The
moon was rising just as we reached my home, and I was glad: John would
have to walk miles to reach his, for he absolutely refused to take Death
on, saying he did not know what might happen to him. As we stopped at the
gate I bethought myself that neither of us had eaten since we left in the
afternoon. I dismounted, and leaving him with the horses, got what I
could find for him, and then roused Dick, who was asleep. John confessed
that, now I had made him think of it, he was hungry enough to eat
anything less than an ox. We parted merrily, but when next we met, each
confessed it had not been without a presentiment of impending danger. For
my part, notwithstanding the position I had presumed to take with John
when first he spoke of his mother, I was now as distrustful as he, and
more afraid of her.
Much the nearest way between the two houses lay across the heath. John
walked along, eating the supper I had given him, and now and then casting
a glance round the horizon. He had got about half-way, when, looking up,
he thought he saw, dim in the ghosty light of the moon, a speck upon the
track before him. He said to himself it could hardly be any one on the
moor at such a time of the night, and went on with his supper. Looking up
again after an interval, he saw that the object was much larger, but
hardly less vague, because of a light fog which had in the meantime
risen. By and by, however, as they drew nearer to each other, a strange
thrill of recognition went through him: on the way before him, which was
little better than a footpath, and slowly approaching, came what
certainly could be neither the horse that had carried him that day, nor
his double, but what was so like him in colour, size, and bone, while so
unlike him in muscle and bearing, that he might have been he, worn but
for his skin to a skeleton. Straight down upon John he came, spectral
through the fog, as if he were asleep, and saw nothing in his way. John
stepped aside to let him pass, and then first looked in the face of his
rider: with a shock of fear that struck him in the middle of the body,
making him gasp and choke, he saw before him--so plainly that, but
for the impossibility, he could have sworn to him in any court of
justice--the man whom he knew to be at that moment confined to his bed,
twenty miles away, with a broken arm. Sole other human being within sight
or sound in that still moonlight, on that desolate moor, the horseman
never lifted his head, never raised his eyes to look at him. John stood
stunned. He hardly doubted he saw an apparition. When at length he roused
himself, and looked in the direction in which it went, it had all but
vanished in the thickening white mist.
He found the rest of his way home almost mechanically, and went straight
to bed, but for a long time could not sleep.
For what might not the apparition portend? Mr. Whichcote lay hurt by a
fall from his horse, and he had met his very image on the back of just
such a horse, only turned to a skeleton! Was he bearing him away to the
tomb?
Then he remembered that the horse's name was Death.
CHAPTER XIX.
JOHN IS TAKEN ILL.
In the middle of the night he woke with a start, ill enough to feel that
he was going to be worse. His head throbbed; the room seemed turning
round with him, and when it settled, he saw strange shapes in it. A
few rays of the sinking moon had got in between the curtains of one
of the windows, and had waked up everything! The furniture looked
odd--unpleasantly odd. Something unnatural, or at least unearthly, must
be near him! The room was an old-fashioned one, in thorough keeping with
the age of the house--the very haunt for a ghost, but he had heard of no
ghost in that room! He got up to get himself some water, and drew the
curtains aside. He could have been in no thraldom to an apprehensive
imagination; for what man, with a brooding terror couched in him, would,
in the middle of the night, let in the moon? To such a passion, she is
worse than the deepest darkness, especially when going down, as she was
then, with the weary look she gets by the time her work is about over,
and she has long been forsaken of the poor mortals for whom she has so
often to be up and shining all night. He poured himself some water and
drank it, but thought it did not taste nice. Then he turned to the
window, and looked out.
The house was in a large park. Its few trees served mainly to show how
wide the unbroken spaces of grass. Before the house, motionless as a
statue, stood a great gray horse with hanging neck, his shadow stretched
in mighty grotesque behind him, and on his back the very effigy of my
uncle, motionless too as marble. The horse stood sidewise to the house,
but the face of his rider was turned toward it, as if scanning its
windows in the dying glitter of the moon. John thought he heard a cry
somewhere, and went to his door, but, listening hard, heard nothing. When
he looked again from the window, the apparition seemed fainter, and
farther away, though neither horse nor rider had changed posture. He
rubbed his eyes to see more plainly, could no longer distinguish the
appearance, and went back to bed. In the morning he was in a high
fever--unconscious save of restless discomfort and undefined trouble.
He learned afterward from the housekeeper, that his mother herself nursed
him, but he would take neither food nor medicine from her hand. No doctor
was sent for. John thought, and I cannot but think, that the water in his
bottle had to do with the sudden illness. His mother may have merely
wished to prevent him from coming to me; but, for the time at least, the
conviction had got possession of him, that she was attempting his life.
He may have argued in semi conscious moments, that she would not scruple
to take again what she was capable of imagining she had given. Her
attentions, however, may have arisen from alarm at seeing him worse than
she had intended to make him, and desire to counteract what she had done.
For several days he was prostrate with extreme exhaustion. Necessarily, I
knew nothing of this; neither was I, notwithstanding my more than doubt
of his mother, in any immediate dread of what she might do. The cessation
of his visits could, of course, cause me no anxiety, seeing it was
thoroughly understood between us that we were not at liberty to meet.
CHAPTER XX.
A STRANGE VISIT.
On the fifth night after that on which he left me to walk home, I was
roused, about two o'clock, by a sharp sound as of sudden hail against my
window, ceasing as soon as it began. Wondering what it was, for hail it
could hardly be, I sprang from the bed, pulled aside the curtain, and
looked out. There was light enough in the moon to show me a man looking
up at the window, and love enough in my heart to tell me who he was. How
he knew the window mine, I have always forgotten to ask him. I would have
drawn back, for it vexed me sorely to think him too weak to hold to our
agreement, but the face I looked down upon was so ghastly and deathlike,
that I perceived at once his coming must have its justification. I did
not speak, for I would not have any in the house hear; but, putting on my
shoes and a big cloak, I went softly down the stair, opened the door
noiselessly, and ran to the other side of the house. There stood John,
with his eyes fixed on my window. As I turned the corner I could see, by
their weary flashing, that either something terrible had happened, or he
was very ill. He stood motionless, unaware of my approach.
“What is it?” I said under my breath, putting a hand on his shoulder.
He did not turn his head or answer me, but grew yet whiter, gasped, and
seemed ready to fall. I put my arm round him, and his head sank on the
top of mine.
Whatever might be the matter, the first thing was to get him into
the house, and make him lie down. I moved a little, holding him fast,
and mechanically he followed his support; so that, although with
some difficulty, I soon got him round the house, and into the great
hall-kitchen, our usual sitting-room; there was fire there that would
only want rousing, and, warm as was the night, I felt him very cold. I
let him sink on the wide sofa, covered him with my cloak, and ran to
rouse old Penny. The aged sleep lightly, and she was up in an instant.
I told her that a gentleman I knew had come to the house, either
sleep-walking or delirious, and she must come and help me with him. She
struck a light, and followed me to the kitchen.
John lay with his eyes closed, in a dead faint. We got him to swallow
some brandy, and presently he came to himself a little. Then we put him
in my warm bed, and covered him with blankets. In a minute or so he was
fast asleep. He had not spoken a word. I left Penny to watch him, and
went and dressed myself, thinking hard. The result was, that, having
enjoined Penny to let no one near him, _whoever_ it might be, I went to
the stable, saddled Zoe, and set off for Wittenage.
It was sixteen miles of a ride. The moon went down, and the last of my
journey was very dark, for the night was cloudy; but we arrived in
safety, just as the dawn was promising to come as soon as it could. No
one in the town seemed up, or thinking of getting up. I had learned a
lesson from John, however, and I knew Martha's window, which happily
looked on the street. I got off Zoe, who was tired enough to stand still,
for she was getting old and I had not spared her, and proceeded to search
for a stone small enough to throw at the window. The scared face of
Martha showed itself almost immediately.
“It's me!” I cried, no louder than she could just hear; “it's me, Martha!
Come down and let me in.”
Without a word of reply, she left the window, and after some fumbling
with the lock, opened the door, and came out to me, looking gray with
scare, but none the less with all her wits to her hand.
“How is my uncle, Martha?” I said.
“Much better,” she answered.
“Then I must see him at once!”
“He's fast asleep, child! It would be a world's pity to wake him!”
“It would be a worse pity not!” I returned.
“Very well: must-be must!” she answered.
I made Zoe fast to the lamp-post: the night was warm, and hot as she was,
she would take no hurt. Then I followed Martha up the stair.
But my uncle was awake. He had heard a little of our motions and
whisperings, and lay in expectation of something.
“I thought I should hear from you soon!” he said. “I wrote to Mr. Day on
Thursday, but have had no reply. What has happened? Nothing serious, I
hope?”
“I hardly know, uncle. John Day is lying at our house, unable to move or
speak.”
My uncle started up as if to spring from his bed, but fell back again
with a groan.
“Don't be alarmed, uncle!” I said. “He is, I hope, safe for the moment,
with Penny to watch him; but I am very anxious Dr. Southwell should see
him.”
“How did it come about, little one?”
“There has been no accident that I know of. But I scarcely know more than
you,” I replied--and told him all that had taken place within my ken.
He lay silent a moment, thinking.
“I can't say I like his lying there with only Penny to protect him!” he
said. “He must have come seeking refuge! I don't like the thing at all!
He is in some danger we do not know!”
“I will go back at once, uncle,” I replied, and rose from the bedside,
where I had seated myself a little tired.
“You must, if we cannot do better. But I think we can. Martha shall go,
and you will stay with me. Run at once and wake Dr. Southwell. Ask him to
come directly.”
I ran all the way--it was not far--and pulled the doctor's night-bell. He
answered it himself. I gave him my uncle's message, and he was at the inn
a few minutes after me. My uncle told him what had happened, and begged
him to go and see the patient, carrying Martha with him in his gig.
The doctor said he would start at once. My uncle begged him to give
strictest orders that no one was to see Mr. Day, whoever it might be.
Martha heard, and grew like a colonel of dragoons ordered to charge with
his regiment.
In less than half an hour they started--at a pace that delighted me.
When Zoe was put up and attended to, and I was alone with my uncle, I got
him some breakfast to make up for the loss of his sleep. He told me it
was better than sleep to have me near him.
What I went through that night and the following day, I need not recount.
Whoever has loved one in danger and out of her reach, will know what it
was like. The doctor did not make his appearance until five o'clock,
having seen several patients on his way back. The young man, he reported,
was certainly in for a fever of some kind---he could not yet pronounce
which. He would see him again on the morrow, he said, and by that time it
would have declared itself. Some one in the neighbourhood must watch the
case; it was impossible for him to give it sufficient attention. My uncle
told him he was now quite equal to the task himself, and we would all go
together the next day. My delight at the proposal was almost equalled by
my satisfaction that the doctor made no objection to it.
For joy I scarcely slept that night: I was going to nurse John! But I was
anxious about my uncle. He assured me, however, that in one day more he
would in any case have insisted on returning. If it had not been for a
little lingering fever, he said, he would have gone much sooner.
“That was because of me, uncle!” I answered with contrition.
“Perhaps,” he replied; “but I had a blow on the head, you know!”
“There is one good thing,” I said: “you will know John the sooner from
seeing him ill! But perhaps you will count that only a mood, uncle, and
not to be trusted!”
He smiled. I think he was not _very_ anxious about the result of a nearer
acquaintance with John Day. I believe he had some faith in my spiritual
instinct.
Uncle went with the doctor in his brougham, and I rode Zoe. The back of
the house came first in sight, and I saw the window-blinds of my room
still down. The doctor had pronounced it the fittest for the invalid, and
would not have him moved to the guest-chamber Penny had prepared for him.
In the only room I had ever occupied as my own, I nursed John for a space
of three weeks.
From the moment he saw me, he began to improve. My uncle noted this, and
I fancy liked John the better for it. Nor did he fail to note the
gentleness and gratitude of the invalid.
CHAPTER XXI.
A FOILED ATTEMPT.
The morning after my uncle's return, came a messenger from Rising with
his lady's compliments, asking if Mr. Whichcote could tell her anything
of her son: he had left the house unseen, during a feverish attack, and
as she could get no tidings of him, she was in great anxiety. She had
accidentally heard that he had made Mr. Whichcote's acquaintance, and
therefore took the liberty of extending to him the inquiry she had
already made everywhere else among his friends. My uncle wrote in answer,
that her son had come to his house in a high fever; that he had been
under medical care ever since; and that he hoped in a day or two he might
be able to return. If he expressed a desire to see his mother, he would
immediately let her know, but in the meantime it was imperative he should
be kept quiet.
From this letter, Lady Cairnedge might surmise that her relations
with her son were at least suspected. Within two hours came another
message--that she would send a close carriage to bring him home the next
day. Then indeed were my uncle and I glad that we had come. For though
Martha would certainly have defended the citadel to her utmost, she might
have been sorely put to it if his mother proceeded to carry him away by
force. My uncle, in reply, begged her not to give herself the useless
trouble of sending to fetch him: in the state he was in at present, it
would be tantamount to murder to remove him, and he would not be a party
to it.
When I yielded my place in the sick-room to Martha and went to bed, my
heart was not only at ease for the night, but I feared nothing for the
next day with my uncle on my side--or rather on John's side.
We were just rising from our early dinner, for we were old-fashioned
people, when up drove a grand carriage, with two strong footmen behind,
and a servant in plain clothes on the box by the coachman. It pulled up
at the door, and the man on the box got down and rang the bell, while his
fellows behind got down also, and stood together a little way behind him.
My uncle at once went to the hall, but no more than in time, for there
was Penny already on her way to open the door. He opened it himself, and
stood on the threshold.
“If you please, sir,” said the man, not without arrogance, “we're come to
take Mr. Day home.”
“Tell your mistress,” returned my uncle, “that Mr. Day has expressed no
desire to return, and is much too unwell to be informed of her ladyship's
wish.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” said the man, “we have her ladyship's orders
to bring him. We'll take every possible care of him. The carriage is an
extra-easy one, and I'll sit inside with the young gentleman myself. If
he ain't right in his head, he'll never know nothink till he comes to
himself in his own bed.”
My uncle had let the man talk, but his anger was fast rising.
“I cannot let him go. I would not send a beggar to the hospital in the
state he is in.”
“But, indeed, sir, you must! We have our orders.”
“If you fancy I will dismiss a guest of mine at the order of any human
being, were it the queen's own majesty,” said my uncle--I heard the
words, and with my mind's eyes saw the blue flash of his as he said
them--“you will find yourself mistaken.”
“I'm sorry,” said the man quietly, “but I have my orders! Let me pass,
please. It is my business to find the young gentleman, and take him home.
No one can have the right to keep him against his mother's will,
especially when he's not in a fit state to judge for himself.”
“Happily I am in a fit state to judge for him,” said my uncle, coldly.
“I dare not go back without him. Let me pass,” he returned, raising his
voice a little, and approaching the door as if he would force his way.
I ought to have mentioned that, as my uncle went to the door, he took
from a rack in the hall a whip with a bamboo stock, which he generally
carried when he rode. His answer to the man was a smart, though
left-handed blow with the stock across his face: they were too near for
the thong. He staggered back, and stood holding his hand to his face. His
fellow-servants, who, during the colloquy, had looked on with
gentlemanlike imperturbability, made a simultaneous step forward. My
uncle sent the thong with a hiss about their ears. They sprang toward him
in a fury, but halted immediately and recoiled. He had drawn a small
swordlike weapon, which I did not know to be there, from the stock of the
whip. He gave one swift glance behind him. I was in the hall at his back.
“Shut the door, Orba,” he cried.
I shut him out, and ran to a window in the little drawing-room, which
commanded the door. Never had I seen him look as now--his pale face pale
no longer, but flushed with anger. Neither, indeed, until that moment had
I ever seen the _natural_ look of anger, the expression of _pure_ anger.
There was nothing mean or ugly in it--not an atom of hate. But how his
eyes blazed!
“Go back,” he cried, in a voice far more stern than loud. “If one of you
set foot on the lowest step, and I will run him through.”
The men saw he meant it; they saw the closed door, and my uncle with his
back to it. They turned and spoke to each other. The coachman sat
immovable on his box. They mounted, and he drove away.
I ran and opened the door. My uncle came in with a smile. He went up the
stair, and I followed him to the room where the invalid lay. We were both
anxious to learn if he had been disturbed.
He was leaning on his elbow, listening. He looked a good deal more like
himself.
“I knew you would defend me, sir!” he said, with a respectful confidence
which could not but please my uncle.
“You did not want to go home--did you?” he asked with a smile.
“I should have thrown myself out of the carriage!” answered John; “--that
is, if they had got me into it. But, please, tell me, sir,” he went on,
“how it is I find myself in your house? I have been puzzling over it all
the morning. I have no recollection of coming.”
“You understand, I fancy,” rejoined my uncle, “that one of the family has
a notion she can take better care of you than anybody else! Is not that
enough to account for it?”
“Hardly, sir. Belorba cannot have gone and rescued me from my mother!”
“How do you know that? Belorba is a terrible creature when she is roused.
But you have talked enough. Shut your eyes, and don't trouble yourself to
recollect. As you get stronger, it will all come back to you. Then you
will be able to tell us, instead of asking us to tell you.”
He left us together. I quieted John by reading to him, and absolutely
declining to talk.
“You are a captive. The castle is enchanted: speak a single word,” I
said, “and you will find yourself in the dungeon of your own room.”
He looked at me an instant, closed his eyes, and in a few minutes was
fast asleep. He slept for two hours, and when he woke was quite himself.
He was very weak, but the fever was gone, and we had now only to feed him
up, and keep him quiet.
CHAPTER XXII.
JOHN RECALLS AND REMEMBERS.
What a weight was off my heart! It seemed as if nothing more could go
wrong. But, though John was plainly happy, he was not quite comfortable:
he worried himself with trying to remember how he had come to us. The
last thing he could definitely recall before finding himself with us, was
his mother looking at him through a night that seemed made of blackness
so solid that he marvelled she could move in it. She brought him
something to drink, but he fancied it blood, and would not touch it. He
remembered now that there was a red tumbler in his room. He could recall
nothing after, except a cold wind, and a sense of utter weariness but
absolute compulsion: he must keep on and on till he found the gate of
heaven, to which he seemed only for ever coming nearer. His conclusion
was, that he knew what he was about every individual moment, but had no
memory; each thing he did was immediately forgotten, while the knowledge
of what he had to do next remained with him. It was, he thought, a mental
condition analogous with walking, in which every step is a frustrated
fall. I set this down here, because, when I told my uncle what John had
been saying, myself not sure that I perceived what he meant, he declared
the boy a philosopher of the finest grain. But he warned me not to
encourage his talking, and especially not to ask him to explain. There
was nothing, he said, worse for a weak brain, than to set a strong will
to work it.
I tried to obey him, but it grew harder as the days went on. There were
not many of them, however; he recovered rapidly. When at length my uncle
talked not only to but with him, I regarded it as a virtual withdrawal of
his prohibition, and after that spoke to John of whatever came into his
or my head.
It was then he told me all he could remember since the moment he left me
with his supper in his hand. A great part of his recollection was the
vision of my uncle on the moor, and afterward in the park. We did not
know what to make of it. I should at once have concluded it caused by
prelusive illness, but for my remembrance of what both my uncle and
myself had seen, so long before, in the thunderstorm; while John, willing
enough to attribute its recurrence to that cause, found it impossible to
concede that he was anything but well when crossing the moor. I thought,
however, that excitement, fatigue, and lack of food, might have something
to do with it, and with his illness too; while, if he was in a state to
see anything phantasmal, what shape more likely to appear than that of my
uncle!
He would not hear of my mentioning the thing to my uncle. I would for my
own part have gone to him with it immediately; but could not with John's
prayer in my ears. I resolved, however, to gain his consent if I could.
He had by this time as great a respect for my uncle as I had myself, but
could not feel at home with him as I did. Whether the vision was only a
vision, or indeed my uncle's double, whatever a double may be, the tale
of it could hardly be an agreeable one to him; and naturally John shrank
from the risk of causing him the least annoyance.
The question of course came up, what he was to do when able to leave us.
He had spoken very plainly to my uncle concerning his relations with his
mother--had told him indeed that he could not help suspecting he owed his
illness to her.
I was nearly always present when they talked, but remember in especial a
part of what passed on one occasion.
“I believe I understand my mother,” said John, “--but only after much
thinking. I loved her when a child; and if she had not left me for the
sake of liberty and influence--that at least is how I account for her
doing so--I might at this moment be struggling for personal freedom,
instead of having that over.”
“There are women,” returned my uncle, “some of them of the most admired,
who are slaves to a demoniacal love of power. The very pleasure of their
consciousness consists in the knowledge that they have power--not power
to do things, but power to make other people do things. It is an
insanity, but a devilishly immoral and hateful insanity.--I do not say
the lady in question is one of such, for I do not know her; I only say I
have known such a one.”
John replied that certainly the love of power was his mother's special
weakness. She was spoiled when a child, he had been told; had her every
wish regarded, her every whim respected. This ruinous treatment sprang,
he said, from the self-same ambition, in another form, on the part of
her mother--the longing, namely, to secure her child's supreme
affection--with the natural consequence that they came to hate one
another. His father and she had been married but fifteen months, when he
died of a fall, following the hounds. Within six months she was engaged,
but the engagement was broken off, and she went abroad, leaving him
behind her. She married lord Cairnedge in Venice, and returned to England
when John was nearly four, and seemed to have lost all memory of her. His
stepfather was good to him, but died when he was about eight. His mother
was very severe. Her object plainly was to plant her authority so in his
very nature, that he should never think of disputing her will.
“But,” said John, “she killed my love, and so I grew able to cast off her
yoke.”
“The world would fare worse, I fancy,” remarked my uncle, “if violent
women bore patient children. The evil would become irremediable. The
children might not be ruined, but they would bring no discipline to the
mother!”
“Her servants,” continued John, “obey her implicitly, except when they
are sure she will never know. She treats them so imperiously, that they
admire her, and are proud to have such a mistress. But she is convinced
at last, I believe, that she will never get me to do as she pleases; and
therefore hates me so heartily, that she can hardly keep her ladylike
hands off me. I do not think I have been unreasonable; I have not found
it difficult to obey others that were set over me; but when I found
almost her every requirement part of a system for reducing me to a
slavish obedience, I began to lay down lines of my own. I resolved to do
at once whatever she asked me, whether pleasant to me or not, so long as
I saw no reason why it should not be done. Then I was surprised to find
how seldom I had to make a stand against her wishes. At the same time,
the mode in which she conveyed her pleasure, was invariably such as to
make a pretty strong effort of the will necessary for compliance with it.
But the effort to overcome the difficulty caused by her manner, helped to
develop in me the strength to resist where it was not right to yield. By
far the most serious difference we had yet had, arose about six months
ago, when she insisted I should make myself agreeable to a certain lady,
whom I by no means disliked. She had planned our marriage, I believe, as
one of her parallels in the siege of the lady's noble father, then a
widower of a year. I told her I would not lay myself out to please any
lady, except I wanted to marry her. 'And why, pray, should you not marry
her?' she returned. I answered that I did not love her, and would not
marry until I saw the woman I could not be happy without, and she
accepted me. She went into a terrible passion, but I found myself quite
unmoved by it: it is a wonderful heartener to know yourself not merely
standing up for a right, but for the right to do the right thing! 'You
wouldn't surely have me marry a woman I didn't care a straw for!' I said.
'Quench my soul!' she cried--I have often wondered where she learned the
oath--'what would that matter? She wouldn't care a straw for you in a
month!'--'Why should I marry her then?'--'Because your mother wishes it,'
she replied, and turned to march from the room as if that settled the
thing. But I could not leave it so. The sooner she understood the better!
'Mother!' I cried, 'I will not marry the lady. I will not pay her the
least attention that could be mistaken to mean the possibility of it.'
She turned upon me. I have just respect enough left for her, not to say
what her face suggested to me. She was pale as a corpse; her very lips
were colourless; her eyes--but I will not go on. 'Your father all over!'
she snarled--yes, snarled, with an inarticulate cry of fiercest loathing,
and turned again and went. If I do not quite think my mother, _at
present_, would murder me, I do think she would do anything short of
murder to gain her ends with me. But do not be afraid; I am sufficiently
afraid to be on my guard.
“My father was a rich man, and left my mother more than enough; there was
no occasion for her to marry again, except she loved, and I am sure she
did not love lord Cairnedge. I wish, for my sake, not for his, he were
alive now. But the moment, I am one and twenty, I shall be my own master,
and hope, sir, you will not count me unworthy to be the more Belorba's
servant. One thing I am determined upon: my mother shall not cross my
threshold but at my wife's invitation; and I shall never ask my wife to
invite her. She is too dangerous.
“We had another altercation about Miss Miles, an hour or two before I
first saw Orba. They were far from worthy feelings that possessed me up
to the moment when I caught sight of her over the wall. It was a leap out
of hell into paradise. The glimpse of such a face, without shadow of
scheme or plan or selfish end, was salvation to me. I thank God!”
Perhaps I ought not to let those words about myself stand, but he said
them.
He had talked too long. He fell back in his chair, and the tears began to
gather in his eyes. My uncle rose, put his arm about me, and led me to
the study.
“Let him rest a bit, little one,” he said as we entered. “It is long
since we had a good talk!”
He seated himself in his think-chair--a name which, when a child, I had
given it, and I slid to the floor at his feet.
“I cannot help thinking, little one,” he began, “that you are going to be
a happy woman! I do believe that is a man to be trusted. As for the
mother, there is no occasion to think of her, beyond being on your guard
against her. You will have no trouble with her after you are married.”
“I cannot help fearing she will do us a mischief, uncle,” I returned.
“Sir Philip Sidney says--'Since a man is bound no further to himself than
to do wisely, chance is only to trouble them that stand upon chance.'
That is, we are responsible only for our actions, not for their results.
Trust first in God, then in John Day.”
“I was sure you would like him, uncle!” I cried, with a flutter of loving
triumph.
“I was nearly as sure myself--such confidence had I in the instinct of my
little one. I think that I, of the two of us, may, in this instance,
claim the greater faith!”
“You are always before me, uncle!” I said. “I only follow where you lead.
But what do you think the woman will do next?”
“I don't think. It is no use. We shall hear of her before long. If all
mothers were like her, the world would hardly be saved!”
“It would not be worth saving, uncle.”
“Whatever can be saved, must be worth saving, my child.”
“Yes, uncle; I shouldn't have said that,” I replied.
CHAPTER XXIII.
LETTER AND ANSWER.
We did hear of her before long. The next morning a letter was handed to
my uncle as we sat at breakfast. He looked hard at the address, changed
countenance, and frowned very dark, but I could not read the frown. Then
his face cleared a little; he opened, read, and handed the letter to me.
Lady Cairnedge hoped Mr. Whichcote would excuse one who had so lately
come to the neighbourhood, that, until an hour ago, she knew nothing of
the position and character of the gentleman in whose house her son had,
in a momentary, but, alas! not unusual aberration, sought shelter, and
found generous hospitality. She apologized heartily for the unceremonious
way in which she had sent for him. In her anxiety to have him home, if
possible, before he should realize his awkward position in the house of a
stranger, she had been inconsiderate! She left it to the judgment of his
kind host whether she should herself come to fetch him, or send her
carriage with the medical man who usually attended him. In either case
her servants must accompany the carriage, as he would probably object to
being removed. He might, however, be perfectly manageable, for he was,
when himself, the gentlest creature in the world!
I was in a rage. I looked up, expecting to see my uncle as indignant with
the diabolical woman as I was myself. But he seemed sunk in reverie, his
body present, his spirit far away. A pang shot through my heart. Could
the wicked device have told already?
“May I ask, uncle,” I said, and tried hard to keep my voice steady, “how
you mean to answer this vile epistle?”
He looked up with a wan smile, such as might have broke from Lazarus when
he found himself again in his body.
“I will take it to the young man,” he answered.
“Please, let us go at once then, uncle! I cannot sit still.”
He rose, and we went together to John's room.
He was much better--sitting up in bed, and eating the breakfast Penny had
carried him.
“I have just had a letter from your mother, Day,” said my uncle.
“Indeed!” returned John dryly.
“Will you read it, and tell me what answer you would like me to return.”
“Hardly like her usual writing--though there's her own strange S!”
remarked John as he looked at it.
“Does she always make an S like that?” asked my uncle, with something
peculiar in his tone, I thought.
“Always--like a snake just going to strike.”
My uncle's face grew ghastly pale. He almost snatched the letter from
John's hand, looked at it, gave it back to him, and, to our dismay, left
the room.
“What can be the matter, John?” I said, my heart sinking within me.
“Go to him,” said John.
I dared not. I had often seen him _like_ that before walking out into the
night; but there was something in his face now which I had not seen there
before. It looked as if some terrible suspicion were suddenly confirmed.
“You see what my mother is after!” said John. “You have now to believe
_her_, that I am subject to fits of insanity, or to believe _me_, that
there is nothing she will not do to get her way.”
“Her object is clear,” I replied. “But if she thinks to fool my uncle,
she will find herself mistaken!”
“She hopes to fool both you and your uncle,” he rejoined. “The only wise
thing I could do, she will handle so as to convince any expert of my
madness--I mean, my coming to you! My reasons will go for nothing--less
than no-thing--with any one she chooses to bewitch. She will look at me
with an anxious love no doctor could doubt. No one can know _you_ do not
know that I am not mad--or at least subject to attacks of madness!”
“Oh, John, don't frighten me!” I cried.
“There! you are not sure about it!”
It seemed cruel of him to tease me so; but I saw presently why he did it:
he thought his mother's letter had waked a doubt in my uncle; and he
wanted me not to be vexed with my uncle, even if he deserted him and went
over to his mother's side.
“I love your uncle,” he said. “I know he is a true man! I _will_ not be
angry with him if my mother do mislead him. The time will come when he
will know the truth. It must appear at last! I shall have to fight her
alone, that's all! The worst is, if he thinks with my mother I shall have
to go at once!--If only somebody would sell my horse for me!”
I guessed that his mother kept him short of money, and remembered with
gladness that I was not quite penniless at the moment.
“In the meantime, you must keep as quiet as you can, John,” I said.
“Where is the good of planning upon an _if_? To trust is to get ready,
uncle says. Trust is better than foresight.”
John required little such persuading. And indeed something very different
was in my uncle's mind from what John feared.
Presently I caught a glimpse of him riding out of the yard. I ran to a
window from which I could see the edge of the moor, and saw him cross it
at an uphill gallop.
He was gone about four hours, and on his return went straight to his own
room. Not until nine o'clock did I go to him, and then he came with me to
supper.
He looked worn, but was kind and genial as usual. After supper he sent
for Dick, and told him to ride to Rising, the first thing in the morning,
with a letter he would find on the hall-table.
The letter he read to us before we parted for the night. It was all we
could have wished. He wrote that he must not have any one in his house
interfered with; so long as a man was his guest, he was his servant. Her
ladyship had, however, a perfect right to see her son, and would be
welcome; only the decision as to his going or remaining must rest with
the young man himself. If he chose to accompany his mother, well and
good! though he should be sorry to lose him. If he declined to return
with her, he and his house continued at his service.
CHAPTER XXIV.
HAND TO HAND.
We looked for lady Cairnedge all the next day. John was up by noon, and
ready to receive her in the drawing-room; he would not see her in his
bedroom. But the hours passed, and she did not come.
In the evening, however, when the twilight was thickening, and already
all was dark in the alleys of the garden, her carriage drove quietly
up--with a startling scramble of arrest at the door. The same servants
were outside, and a very handsome dame within. As she descended, I saw
that she was tall, and, if rather stout, not stouter than suited her age
and style. Her face was pale, but she seemed in perfect health. When I
saw her closer, I found her features the most regular I had ever seen.
Had the soul within it filled the mould of that face, it would have been
beautiful. As it was, it was only handsome--to me repulsive. The moment I
saw it, I knew myself in the presence of a masked battery.
My uncle had insisted that she should be received where we usually sat,
and had given Penny orders to show her into the hall-kitchen.
I was alone there, preparing something for John. We were not expecting
her, for it seemed now too late to look for her. My uncle was in the
study, and Martha somewhere about the house. My heart sank as I turned
from the window, and sank yet lower when she appeared in the doorway of
the kitchen. But as I advanced, I caught sight of my uncle, and went
boldly to meet the enemy. He had come down his stair, and had just
stepped into a clear blaze of light, which that moment burst from the
wood I had some time ago laid damp upon the fire. The next instant I saw
the lady's countenance ghastly with terror, looking beyond me. I turned,
but saw nothing, save that my uncle had disappeared. When I faced her
again, only a shadow of her fright remained. I offered her my hand--for
she was John's mother, but she did not take it. She stood scanning me
from head to foot.
“I am lady Cairnedge,” she said. “Where is my son?”
I turned yet again. My uncle had not come back. I was not prepared to
take his part. I was bewildered. A dead silence fell. For the first time
in my life, my uncle seemed to have deserted me, and at the moment when
most I needed him! I turned once more to the lady, and said, hardly
knowing what,
“You wish to see Mr. Day?”
She answered me with a cold stare.
“I will go and tell him you are here,” I faltered; and passing her, I
sped along the passage to the drawing-room.
“John!” I cried, bursting in, “she's come! Do you still mean to see her?
Are you able? Uncle--”
There I stopped, for his eyes were stern, and not looking at me, but at
something behind me. One moment I thought his fever had returned, but
following his gaze I looked round:--there stood lady Cairnedge! John was
face to face with his mother, and my uncle was not there to defend him!
“Are you ready?” she said, nor pretended greeting. She seemed slightly
discomposed, and in haste.
I was by this time well aware of my lover's determination of character,
but I was not prepared for the tone in which he addressed the icy woman
calling herself his mother.
“I am ready to listen,” he answered.
“John!” she returned, with mingled severity and sharpness, “let us have
no masquerading! You are perfectly fit to come home, and you must come at
once. The carriage is at the door.”
“You are quite right, mother,” answered John calmly; “I _am_ fit to go
home with you. But Rising does not quite agree with me. I dread such
another attack, and do not mean to go.”
The drawing-room had a rectangular bay-window, one of whose three sides
commanded the door. The opposite side looked into a little grove of
larches. Lady Cairnedge had already realized the position of the room.
She darted to the window, and saw her carriage but a few yards away.
She would have thrown up the sash, but found she could not. She twisted
her handkerchief round her gloved hand, and dashed it through a pane.
“Men!” she cried, in a loud, commanding voice, “come at once.”
The
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