← catalogue

Stephen Archer, and Other Tales

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #9191 · 456,062 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Stephen Archer, and Other Tales
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Stephen Archer, and Other Tales

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: October 1, 2005 [eBook #9191]
                Most recently updated: April 19, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9191

Credits: Text file produced by Jonathan Ingram, Beth Trapaga and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team
        
        HTML file produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEPHEN ARCHER, AND OTHER TALES ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Beth Trapaga and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team








STEPHEN ARCHER AND OTHER TALES

By George Macdonald




CONTENTS.


STEPHEN ARCHER

THE GIFTS OF THE CHILD CHRIST

THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGEN AND NYCTERIS

THE BUTCHER'S BILLS

POET IN A STORM

IF I HAD A FATHER




STEPHEN ARCHER


Stephen Archer was a stationer, bookseller, and newsmonger in one of the
suburbs of London. The newspapers hung in a sort of rack at his door, as
if for the convenience of the public to help themselves in passing. On
his counter lay penny weeklies and books coming out in parts, amongst
which the _Family Herald_ was in force, and the _London Journal_ not
to be found. I had occasion once to try the extent of his stock, for I
required a good many copies of one of Shakspere's plays--at a penny, if
I could find such. He shook his head, and told me he could not encourage
the sale of such productions. This pleased me; for, although it was of
little consequence what he thought concerning Shakspere, it was of the
utmost import that he should prefer principle to pence. So I loitered
in the shop, looking for something to buy; but there was nothing in the
way of literature: his whole stock, as far as I could see, consisted of
little religious volumes of gay binding and inferior print; he had
nothing even from the Halifax press. He was a good-looking fellow, about
thirty, with dark eyes, overhanging brows that indicated thought, mouth
of character, and no smile. I was interested in him.

I asked if he would mind getting the plays I wanted. He said he would
rather not. I bade him good morning.

More than a year after, I saw him again. I had passed his shop many
times, but this morning, I forget why, I went in. I could hardly
recall the former appearance of the man, so was it swallowed up in a
new expression. His face was alive, and his behaviour courteous. A
similar change had passed upon his stock. There was _Punch_ and _Fun_
amongst the papers, and tenpenny Shaksperes on the counter, printed on
straw-paper, with ugly wood-cuts. The former class of publications had
not vanished, but was mingled with cheap editions of some worthy of
being called books.

"I see you have changed your mind since I saw you last," I said.

"You have the advantage of me, sir," he returned. "I did not know you
were a customer."

"Not much of that," I replied; "only in intention. I wanted you to get
me some penny Shaksperes, and you would not take the order."

"Oh! I think I remember," he answered, with just a trace of confusion;
adding, with a smile, "I'm married now;" and I fancied I could read a
sort of triumph over his former self.

I laughed, of course--the best expression of sympathy at hand--and,
after a little talk, left the shop, resolved to look in again soon.
Before a month was over, I had made the acquaintance of his wife too,
and between them learned so much of their history as to be able to
give the following particulars concerning it.

Stephen Archer was one of the deacons, rather a young one perhaps, of
a dissenting congregation. The chapel was one of the oldest in the
neighbourhood, quite triumphant in ugliness, but possessed of a history
which gave it high rank with those who frequented it. The sacred odour
of the names of pastors who had occupied its pulpit, lingered about
its walls--names unknown beyond its precincts, but starry in the eyes
of those whose world lay within its tabernacle. People generally do
not know what a power some of these small _conventicles_ are in the
education of the world. If only as an outlet for the energies of men of
lowly education and position, who in connexion with most of the churches
of the Establishment would find no employment, they are of inestimable
value.

To Stephen Archer, for instance, when I saw him first, his chapel was
the sole door out of the common world into the infinite. When he
entered, as certainly did the awe and the hush of the sacred place
overshadow his spirit as if it had been a gorgeous cathedral-house
borne aloft upon the joined palms of its Gothic arches. The Master is
truer than men think, and the power of His presence, as Browning has
so well set forth in his "Christmas Eve," is where two or three are
gathered in His name. And inasmuch as Stephen was not a man of
imagination, he had the greater need of the undefined influences of
the place.

He had been chief in establishing a small mission amongst the poor in
the neighbourhood, with the working of which he occupied the greater
part of his spare time. I will not venture to assert that his mind was
pure from the ambition of gathering from these to swell the flock at
the little chapel; nay, I will not even assert that there never arose
a suggestion of the enemy that the pence of these rescued brands might
alleviate the burden upon the heads and shoulders of the poorly
prosperous caryatids of his church; but I do say that Stephen was an
honest man in the main, ever ready to grow honester: and who can
demand more?

One evening, as he was putting up the shutters of his window, his
attention was arrested by a shuffling behind him. Glancing round, he
set down the shutter, and the next instant boxed a boy's ears, who ran
away howling and mildly excavating his eyeballs, while a young,
pale-faced woman, with the largest black eyes he had ever seen,
expostulated with him on the proceeding.

"Oh, sir!" she said, "he wasn't troubling you." There was a touch of
indignation in the tone.

"I'm sorry I can't return the compliment," said Stephen, rather
illogically. "If I'd ha' known you liked to have your shins kicked, I
might ha' let the young rascal alone. But you see I didn't know it."

"He's my brother," said the young woman, conclusively.

"The more shame to him," returned Stephen. "If he'd been your husband,
now, there might ha' been more harm than good in interferin', 'cause
he'd only give it you the worse after; but brothers! Well, I'm sure
it's a pity I interfered."

"I don't see the difference," she retorted, still with offence.

"I beg your pardon, then," said Stephen. "I promise you I won't
interfere next time."

So saying, he turned, took up his shutter, and proceeded to close his
shop. The young woman walked on.

Stephen gave an inward growl or two at the depravity of human nature,
and set out to make his usual visits; but before he reached the place,
he had begun to doubt whether the old Adam had not overcome him in the
matter of boxing the boy's ears; and the following interviews appeared
in consequence less satisfactory than usual. Disappointed with
himself, he could not be so hopeful about others.

As he was descending a stair so narrow that it was only just possible
for two people to pass, he met the same young woman ascending. Glad of
the opportunity, he stepped aside with his best manners and said:

"I am sorry I offended you this evening. I did not know that the boy
was your brother."

"Oh, sir!" she returned--for to one in her position, Stephen Archer
was a gentleman: had he not a shop of his own?--"you didn't hurt him
much; only I'm so anxious to save him."

"To be sure," returned Stephen, "that is the one thing needful."

"Yes, sir," she rejoined. "I try hard, but boys will be boys."

"There is but one way, you know," said Stephen, following the words
with a certain formula which I will not repeat.

The girl stared. "I don't know about that," she said. "What I want is
to keep him out of prison. Sometimes I think I shan't be able long.
Oh, sir! if you be the gentleman that goes about here, couldn't you
help me? I can't get anything for him to do, and I can't be at home to
look after him."

"What is he about all day, then?"

"The streets," she answered. "I don't know as he's ever done anything
he oughtn't to, but he came home once in a fright, and that breathless
with running, that I thought he'd ha' fainted. If I only could get him
into a place!"

"Do you live here?" he asked.

"Yes, sir; I do."

At the moment a half-bestial sound below, accompanied by uncertain
footsteps, announced the arrival of a drunken bricklayer.

"There's Joe Bradley," she said, in some alarm. "Come into my room,
sir, till he's gone up; there's no harm in him when he's sober, but he
ain't been sober for a week now."

Stephen obeyed; and she, taking a key from her pocket, and unlocking a
door on the landing, led him into a room to which his back-parlour was
a paradise. She offered him the only chair in the room, and took her
place on the edge of the bed, which showed a clean but much-worn
patchwork quilt. Charley slept on the bed, and she on a shake-down in
the corner. The room was not untidy, though the walls and floor were
not clean; indeed there were not in it articles enough to make it
untidy withal.

"Where do you go on Sundays?" asked Stephen.

"Nowheres. I ain't got nobody," she added, with a smile, "to take me
nowheres."

"What do you do then?"

"I've plenty to do mending of Charley's trousers. You see they're only
shoddy, and as fast as I patch 'em in one place they're out in
another."

"But you oughtn't to work Sundays."

"I have heard tell of people as say you oughtn't to work of a Sunday;
but where's the differ when you've got a brother to look after? He
ain't got no mother."

"But you're breaking the fourth commandment; and you know where people
go that do that. You believe in hell, I suppose."

"I always thought that was a bad word."

"To be sure! But it's where you'll go if you break the Sabbath."

"Oh, sir!" she said, bursting into tears, "I don't care what become of
me if I could only save that boy."

"What do you mean by _saving_ him?"

"Keep him out of prison, to be sure. I shouldn't mind the workus
myself, if I could get him into a place."

_A place_ was her heaven, a prison her hell. Stephen looked at her
more attentively. No one who merely glanced at her could help seeing
her eyes first, and no one who regarded them could help thinking her
nice-looking at least, all in a shabby cotton dress and black shawl as
she was. It was only the "penury and pine" that kept her from being
beautiful. Her features were both regular and delicate, with an
anxious mystery about the thin tremulous lips, and a beseeching look,
like that of an animal, in her fine eyes, hazy with the trouble that
haunted her mouth. Stephen had the good sense not to press the Sabbath
question, and by degrees drew her story from her.

Her father had been a watchmaker, but, giving way to drink, had been,
as far back as she could remember, entirely dependent on her mother,
who by charing and jobbing managed to keep the family alive. Sara was
then the only child, but, within a few months after her father's
death, her mother died in giving birth to the boy. With her last
breath she had commended him to his sister. Sara had brought him
up--how she hardly knew. He had been everything to her. The child that
her mother had given her was all her thought. Those who start with the
idea "that people with nought are naughty," whose eyes are offended by
rags, whose ears cannot distinguish between vulgarity and wickedness,
and who think the first duty is care for self, must be excused from
believing that Sara Coulter passed through all that had been _decreed_
for her without losing her simplicity and purity. But God is in the
back slums as certainly as--perhaps to some eyes more evidently
than--in Belgravia. That which was the burden of her life--namely, the
care of her brother--was her salvation. After hearing her story, which
he had to draw from her, because she had no impulse to talk about
herself, Stephen went home to turn the matter over in his mind.

The next Sunday, after he had had his dinner, he went out into the
same region, and found himself at Sara's door. She was busy over a
garment of Charley's, who was sitting on the bed with half a loaf in
his hand. When he recognized Stephen he jumped down, and would have
rushed from the room; but changing his mind, possibly because of the
condition of his lower limbs, he turned, and springing into the bed,
scrambled under the counterpane, and drew it over his head.

"I am sorry to see you working on Sunday," Stephen said, with an
emphasis that referred to their previous conversation.

"You would not have the boy go naked?" she returned, with again a
touch of indignation. She had been thinking how easily a man of
Stephen's social position could get him a place if he would. Then
recollecting her manners, she added, "I should get him better clothes
if he had a place. Wouldn't you like to get a place now, Charley?"

"Yes," said Charley, from under the counterpane, and began to peep at
the visitor.

He was not an ill-looking boy--only roguish to a degree. His eyes, as
black as his sister's, but only half as big, danced and twinkled with
mischief. Archer would have taken him off to his ragged class, but
even of rags he had not at the moment the complement necessary for
admittance. He left them, therefore, with a few commonplaces of
religious phrase, falling utterly meaningless. But he was not one to
confine his ministrations to words: he was an honest man. Before the
next Sunday it was clear to him that he could do nothing for the soul
of Sara until he had taken the weight of her brother off it.

When he called the next Sunday the same vision precisely met his
view. She might have been sitting there ever since, with those
wonderfully-patched trousers in her hands, and the boy beside her,
gnawing at his lump of bread. But many a long seam had passed
through her fingers since then, for she worked at a clothes-shop all
the week with the sewing-machine, whence arose the possibility of
patching Charley's clothes, for the overseer granted her a cutting
or two now and then.

After a little chat, Stephen put the question:

"If I find a place for Charley, will you go to Providence Chapel next
Sunday?"

"I will go _anywhere_ you please, Mr. Archer," she answered, looking
up quickly with a flushed face. She would have accompanied him to any
casino in London just as readily: her sole thought was to keep Charley
out of prison. Her father had been in prison once; to keep her
mother's child out of prison was the grand object of her life.

"Well," he resumed, with some hesitation, for he had arrived at the
resolution through difficulties, whose fogs yet lingered about him,
"if he will be an honest, careful boy, I will take him myself."

"Charley! Charley!" cried Sara, utterly neglectful of the source of
the benefaction; and rising, she went to the bed and hugged him.

"Don't, Sara!" said Charley, petulantly.

"I don't want girls to squash me. Leave go, I say. You mend my
trousers, and _I_ 'll take care of _my_self."

"The little wretch!" thought Stephen.

Sara returned to her seat, and her needle went almost as fast as her
sewing-machine. A glow had arisen now, and rested on her pale cheek:
Stephen found himself staring at a kind of transfiguration, back from
the ghostly to the human. His admiration extended itself to her deft
and slender fingers and there brooded until his conscience informed
him that he was actually admiring the breaking of the Sabbath;
whereupon he rose. But all the time he was about amongst the rest of
his people, his thoughts kept wandering back to the desolate room, the
thankless boy, and the ministering woman. Before leaving, however, he
had arranged with Sara that she should bring her brother to the shop
the next day.

The awe with which she entered it was not shared by Charley, who was
never ripe for anything but frolic. Had not Stephen been influenced by
a desire to do good, and possibly by another feeling too embryonic for
detection, he would never have dreamed of making an errand boy of a
will-o'-the-wisp. As such, however, he was installed, and from that
moment an anxiety unknown before took possession of Stephen's bosom.
He was never at ease, for he never knew what the boy might be about.
He would have parted with him the first fortnight, but the idea of the
prison had passed from Sara's heart into his, and he saw that to turn
the boy away from his first place would be to accelerate his
gravitation thitherward. He had all the tricks of a newspaper boy
indigenous in him. Repeated were the complaints brought to the shop.
One time the paper was thrown down the area, and brought into the
breakfast-room defiled with wet. At another it was found on the
door-step, without the bell having been rung, which could hardly have
been from forgetfulness, for Charley's delight was to set the bell
ringing furiously, and then wait till the cook appeared, taking good
care however to leave space between them for a start. Sometimes the
paper was not delivered at all, and Stephen could not help suspecting
that he had sold it in the street. Yet both for his sake and Sara's he
endured, and did not even box his ears. The boy hardly seemed to be
wicked: the spirit that possessed him was rather a _polter-geist_, as
the Germans would call it, than a demon.

Meantime, the Sunday after Charley's appointment, Archer, seated in
his pew, searched all the chapel for the fulfilment of Sara's part of
the agreement, namely, her presence. But he could see her nowhere.
The fact was, her promise was so easy that she had scarcely thought
of it after, not suspecting that Stephen laid any stress upon its
fulfilment, and, indeed, not knowing where the chapel was. She had
managed to buy a hit of something of the shoddy species, and while
Stephen was looking for her in the chapel, she was making a jacket for
Charley. Greatly disappointed, and chiefly, I do believe, that she had
not kept her word, Stephen went in the afternoon to call upon her.

He found her working away as before, and saving time by taking her
dinner while she worked, for a piece of bread lay on the table by her
elbow, and beside it a little brown sugar to make the bread go down.
The sight went to Stephen's heart, for he had just made his dinner off
baked mutton and potatoes, washed down with his half-pint of stout.

"Sara!" he said solemnly, "you promised to come to our chapel, and you
have not kept your word." He never thought that "our chapel" was not
the landmark of the region.

"Oh, Mr. Archer," she answered, "I didn't know as you cared about it.
But," she went on, rising and pushing her bread on one side to make
room for her work, "I'll put on my bonnet directly." Then she checked
herself, and added, "Oh! I beg your pardon, sir--I'm so shabby! You
couldn't be seen with the likes of me."

It touched Stephen's chivalry--and something deeper than chivalry. He
had had no intention of walking with her.

"There's no chapel in the afternoon," he said; "but I'll come and
fetch you in the evening."

Thus it came about that Sara was seated in Stephen's pew, next to
Stephen himself, and Stephen felt a strange pleasure unknown before,
like that of the shepherd who having brought the stray back to the
fold cares little that its wool is torn by the bushes, and it looks a
ragged and disreputable sheep. It was only Sara's wool that might seem
disreputable, for she was a very good-faced sheep. He found the hymns
for her, and they shared the same book. He did not know then that Sara
could not read a word of them.

The gathered people, the stillness, the gaslights, the solemn ascent
of the minister into the pulpit, the hearty singing of the
congregation, doubtless had their effect upon Sara, for she had never
been to a chapel and hardly to any place of assembly before. From all
amusements, the burden of Charley and her own retiring nature had kept
her back.

But she could make nothing of the sermon. She confessed afterwards
that she did not know she had anything to do with it. Like "the
Northern Farmer," she took it all for the clergyman's business, which
she amongst the rest had to see done. She did not even wonder why
Stephen should have wanted to bring her there. She sat when other
people sat, pretended to kneel when other people pretended to kneel,
and stood up when other people stood up--still brooding upon Charley's
jacket.

But Archer's feelings were not those he had expected. He had brought
her, intending her to be done good to; but before the sermon was over
he wished he had not brought her. He resisted the feeling for a long
time, but at length yielded to it entirely; the object of his
solicitude all the while conscious only of the lighted stillness and
the new barrier between Charley and Newgate. The fact with regard to
Stephen was that a certain hard _pan_, occasioned by continual
ploughings to the same depth and no deeper, in the soil of his mind,
began this night to be broken up from within, and that through the
presence of a young woman who did not for herself put together two
words of the whole discourse.

The pastor was preaching upon the saying of St. Paul, that he could
wish himself accursed from Christ for his brethren. Great part of his
sermon was an attempt to prove that he could not have meant what his
words implied. For the preacher's mind was so filled with the supposed
paramount duty of saving his own soul, that the enthusiasm of the
Apostle was simply incredible. Listening with that woman by his side,
Stephen for the first time grew doubtful of the wisdom of his pastor.
Nor could he endure that such should be the first doctrine Sara heard
from his lips. Thus was he already and grandly repaid for his
kindness; for the presence of a woman who without any conscious
religion was to herself a law of love, brought him so far into
sympathy with the mighty soul of St. Paul, that from that moment the
blessing of doubt was at work in his, undermining prison walls.

He walked home with Sara almost in silence, for he found it impossible
to impress upon her those parts of the sermon with which he had no
fault to find, lest she should retort upon that one point. The arrows
which Sara escaped, however, could from her ignorance have struck her
only with their feather end.

Things proceeded in much the same fashion for a while. Charley went
home at night to his sister's lodging, generally more than two hours
after leaving the shop, but gave her no new ground of complaint. Every
Sunday evening Sara went to the chapel, taking Charley with her when
she could persuade him to go; and, in obedience with the supposed wish
of Stephen, sat in his pew. He did not go home with her any more for a
while, and indeed visited her but seldom, anxious to avoid scandal,
more especially as he was a deacon.

But now that Charley was so far safe, Sara's cheek began to generate a
little of that celestial rosy red which is the blossom of the
woman-plant, although after all it hardly equalled the heart of the
blush rose. She grew a little rounder in form too, for she lived
rather better now,--buying herself a rasher of bacon twice a week.
Hence she began to be in more danger, as any one acquainted with her
surroundings will easily comprehend. But what seemed at first the ruin
of her hopes dissipated this danger.

One evening, when she returned from her work, she found Stephen in her
room. She made him the submissive grateful salutation, half courtesy,
half bow, with which she always greeted him, and awaited his will.

"I am very sorry to have to tell you, Sara, that your brother--"

She turned white as a shroud, and her great black eyes grew greater
and blacker as she stared in agonized expectancy while Stephen
hesitated in search of a better form of communication. Finding none,
he blurted out the fact--

"--has robbed me, and run away."

"Don't send him to prison, Mr. Archer," shrieked Sara, and laid
herself on the floor at his feet with a grovelling motion, as if
striving with her mother earth for comfort. There was not a film of
art in this. She had never been to a theatre. The natural urging of
life gave the truest shape to her entreaty. Her posture was the result
of the same feeling which made the nations of old bring their
sacrifices to the altar of a deity who, possibly benevolent in the
main, had yet cause to be inimical to them. From the prostrate living
sacrifice arose the one prayer, "Don't send him to prison; don't send
him to prison!"

Stephen gazed at her in bewildered admiration, half divine and all
human. A certain consciousness of power had, I confess, a part in his
silence, but the only definite shape this consciousness took was of
beneficence. Attributing his silence to unwillingness, Sara got
half-way from the ground--that is, to her knees--and lifted a face of
utter entreaty to the sight of Stephen. I will not say words fail me
to describe the intensity of its prayer, for words fail me to describe
the commonest phenomenon of nature: all I can is to say, that it made
Stephen's heart too large for its confining walls. "Mr. Archer," she
said, in a voice hollow with emotion, "I will do _anything_ you like.
I will be your slave. Don't send Charley to prison."

The words were spoken with a certain strange dignity of
self-abnegation. It is not alone the country people of Cumberland or
of Scotland, who in their highest moments are capable of poetic
utterance.

An indescribable thrill of conscious delight shot through the frame of
Stephen as the woman spoke the words. But the gentleman in him
triumphed. I would have said _the Christian_, for whatever there was
in Stephen of the _gentle_ was there in virtue of the _Christian_,
only he failed in one point: instead of saying at once, that he had no
intention of prosecuting the boy, he pretended, I believe from the
satanic delight in power that possesses every man of us, that he would
turn it over in his mind. It might have been more dangerous, but it
would have been more divine, if he had lifted the kneeling woman to
his heart, and told her that not for the wealth of an imagination
would he proceed against her brother. The divinity, however, was
taking its course, both rough-hewing and shaping the ends of the two.

She rose from the ground, sat on the one chair, with her face to the
wall, and wept, helplessly, with the added sting, perhaps, of a faint
personal disappointment. Stephen failed to attract her notice, and
left the room. She started up when she heard the door close, and flew
to open it, but was only in time to hear the outer door. She sat down
and cried again.

Stephen had gone to find the boy if he might, and bring him to his
sister. He ought to have said so, for to permit suffering for the sake
of a joyful surprise is not good. Going home first, he was hardly
seated in his room, to turn over not the matter but the means, when a
knock came to the shop-door, the sole entrance, and there were two
policemen bringing the deserter in a cab. He had been run over in the
very act of decamping with the contents of the till, had lain all but
insensible at the hospital while his broken leg was being set, but, as
soon as he came to himself, had gone into such a fury of determination
to return to his master, that the house-surgeon saw that the only
chance for the ungovernable creature was to yield. Perhaps he had some
dim idea of restoring the money ere his master should have discovered
its loss. As he was very little, they made a couch for him in the cab,
and so sent him.

It would appear that the suffering and the faintness had given his
conscience a chance of being heard. The accident was to Charley what
the sight of the mountain-peak was to the boy Wordsworth. He was
delirious when he arrived, and instead of showing any contrition
towards his master, only testified an extravagant joy at finding him
again. Stephen had him taken into the back room, and laid upon his own
bed. One of the policemen fetched the charwoman, and when she arrived,
Stephen went to find Sara.

She was sitting almost as he had left her, with a dull, hopeless look.

"I am sorry to say Charley has had an accident," he said.

She started up and clasped her hands.

"He is not in prison?" she panted in a husky voice.

"No; he is at my house. Come and see him. I don't think he is in any
danger, but his leg is broken."

A gleam of joy crossed Sara's countenance. She did not mind the broken
leg, for he was safe from her terror. She put on her bonnet, tied the
strings with trembling hands, and went with Stephen.

"You see God wants to keep him out of prison too," he said, as they
walked along the street.

But to Sara this hardly conveyed an idea. She walked by his side in
silence.

"Charley! Charley!" she cried, when she saw him white on the bed,
rolling his head from side to side. Charley ordered her away with
words awful to hear, but which from him meant no more than words of
ordinary temper in the mouth of the well-nurtured man or woman. She
had spoiled and indulged him all his life, and now for the first time
she was nothing to him, while the master who had lectured and
restrained him was everything. When the surgeon wanted to change his
dressings, he would not let him touch them till his master came.
Before he was able to leave his bed, he had developed for Stephen a
terrier-like attachment. But, after the first feverishness was over,
his sister waited upon him.

Stephen got a lodging, and abandoned his back room to the brother and
sister. But he had to attend to his shop, and therefore saw much of
both of them. Finding then to his astonishment that Sara could not
read, he gave all his odd moments to her instruction, and her mind
being at rest about Charley so long as she had him in bed, her spirit
had leisure to think of other things.

She learned rapidly. The lesson-book was of course the New Testament;
and Stephen soon discovered that Sara's questions, moving his pity at
first because of the ignorance they displayed, always left him
thinking about some point that had never occurred to him before; so
that at length he regarded Sara as a being of superior intelligence
waylaid and obstructed by unfriendly powers upon her path towards the
threshold of the kingdom, while she looked up to him as to one supreme
in knowledge as in goodness. But she never could understand the
pastor. This would have been a great trouble to Stephen, had not his
vanity been flattered by her understanding of himself. He did not
consider that growing love had enlightened his eyes to see into her
heart, and enabled him thus to use an ordinary human language for the
embodiment of common-sense ideas; whereas the speech of the pastor
contained such an admixture of technicalities as to be unintelligible
to the neophyte.

Stephen was now distressed to find that whereas formerly he had
received everything without question that his minister spoke, he now
in general went home in a doubting, questioning mood, begotten of
asking himself what Sara would say. He feared at first that the old
Adam was beginning to get the upper hand of him, and that Satan was
laying snares for his soul. But when he found at the same time that
his conscience was growing more scrupulous concerning his business
affairs, his hope sprouted afresh.

One day, after Charley had been out for the first time, Sara, with a
little tremor of voice and manner, addressed Stephen thus:--

"I shall take Charley home to-morrow, if you please, Mr. Archer."

"You don't mean to say, Sara, you've been paying for those lodgings
all this time?" half-asked, half-exclaimed Stephen.

"Yes, Mr. Archer. We, must have somewhere to go to. It ain't easy to
get a room at any moment, now them railways is everywheres."

"But I hope as how you're comfortable where you are, Sara?"

"Yes, Mr. Archer. But what am I to do for all your kindness?"

"You can pay me all in a lump, if you like, Sara. Only you don't owe
me nothing."

Her colour came and went. She was not used to men. She could not tell
what he would have her understand, and could not help trembling.

"What do you mean, Mr. Archer?" she faltered out.

"I mean you can give me yourself, Sara, and that'll clear all scores."

"But, Mr. Archer--you've been a-teaching of me good things--You
_don't_ mean to marry me!" exclaimed Sara, bursting into tears.

"Of course I do, Sara. Don't cry about it. I won't if you don't like."

This is how Stephen came to change his mind about his stock in trade.




THE GIFTS OF THE CHILD CHRIST.


CHAPTER I.


"My hearers, we grow old," said the preacher. "Be it summer or be it
spring with us now, autumn will soon settle down into winter, that
winter whose snow melts only in the grave. The wind of the world sets
for the tomb. Some of us rejoice to be swept along on its swift wings,
and hear it bellowing in the hollows of earth and sky; but it will
grow a terror to the man of trembling limb and withered brain, until
at length he will long for the shelter of the tomb to escape its
roaring and buffeting. Happy the man who shall then be able to believe
that old age itself, with its pitiable decays and sad dreams of youth,
is the chastening of the Lord, a sure sign of his love and his
fatherhood."

It was the first Sunday in Advent; but "the chastening of the Lord"
came into almost every sermon that man preached.

"Eloquent! But after all, _can_ this kind of thing be true?" said to
himself a man of about thirty, who sat decorously listening. For many
years he had thought he believed this kind of thing--but of late he
was not so sure.

Beside him sat his wife, in her new winter bonnet, her pretty face
turned up toward the preacher; but her eyes--nothing else--revealed
that she was not listening. She was much younger than her
husband--hardly twenty, indeed.

In the upper corner of the pew sat a pale-faced child about five,
sucking her thumb, and staring at the preacher.

The sermon over, they walked home in proximity. The husband looked
gloomy, and his eyes sought the ground. The wife looked more smiling
than cheerful, and her pretty eyes went hither and thither. Behind
them walked the child--steadily, "with level-fronting eyelids."

It was a late-built region of large, common-place houses, and at one
of them they stopped and entered. The door of the dining-room was
open, showing the table laid for their Sunday dinner. The gentleman
passed on to the library behind it, the lady went up to her bedroom,
and the child a stage higher to the nursery.

It wanted half an hour to dinner. Mr. Greatorex sat down, drummed with
his fingers on the arm of his easy-chair, took up a book of arctic
exploration, threw it again on the table, got up, and went to the
smoking-room. He had built it for his wife's sake, but was often glad
of it for his own. Again he seated himself, took a cigar, and smoked
gloomily.

Having reached her bedroom, Mrs. Greatorex took off her bonnet, and
stood for ten minutes turning it round and round. Earnestly she
regarded it--now gave a twist to the wire-stem of a flower, then
spread wider the loop of a bow. She was meditating what it lacked of
perfection rather than brooding over its merits: she was keen in
bonnets.

Little Sophy--or, as she called herself by a transposition of
consonant sounds common with children, Phosy--found her nurse Alice in
the nursery. But she was lost in the pages of a certain London weekly,
which had found her in a mood open to its influences, and did not even
look up when the child entered. With some effort Phosy drew off her
gloves, and with more difficulty untied her hat. Then she took off her
jacket, smoothed her hair, and retreated to a corner. There a large
shabby doll lay upon her little chair: she took it up, disposed it
gently upon the bed, seated herself in its place, got a little book
from where she had left it under the chair, smoothed down her skirts,
and began simultaneously to read and suck her thumb. The book was an
unhealthy one, a cup filled to the brim with a poverty-stricken and
selfish religion: such are always breaking out like an eruption here
and there over the body of the Church, doing their part, doubtless, in
carrying off the evil humours generated by poverty of blood, or the
congestion of self-preservation. It is wonderful out of what spoiled
fruit some children will suck sweetness.

But she did not read far: her thoughts went back to a phrase which had
haunted her ever since first she went to church: "Whom the Lord
loveth, he chasteneth."

"I wish he would chasten me," she thought for the hundredth time.

The small Christian had no suspicion that her whole life had been a
period of chastening--that few children indeed had to live in such a
sunless atmosphere as hers.

Alice threw down the newspaper, gazed from the window into the
back-yard of the next house, saw nothing but an elderly man-servant
brushing a garment, and turned upon Sophy.

"Why don't you hang up your jacket, miss?" she said, sharply.

The little one rose, opened the wardrobe-door wide, carried a chair to
it, fetched her jacket from the bed, clambered up on the chair, and,
leaning far forward to reach a peg, tumbled right into the bottom of
the wardrobe.

"You clumsy!" exclaimed the nurse angrily, and pulling her out by the
arm, shook her.

Alice was not generally rough to her, but there were reasons to-day.

Phosy crept back to her seat, pale, frightened, and a little hurt.
Alice hung up the jacket, closed the wardrobe, and, turning,
contemplated her own pretty face and neat figure in the glass
opposite. The dinner-bell rang.

"There, I declare!" she cried, and wheeled round on Phosy. "And your
hair not brushed yet, miss! Will you ever learn to do a thing without
being told it? Thank goodness, I shan't be plagued with you long! But
I pity her as comes after me: I do!"

"If the Lord would but chasten me!" said the child to herself, as she
rose and laid down her book with a sigh.

The maid seized her roughly by the arm, and brushed her hair with an
angry haste that made the child's eyes water, and herself feel a
little ashamed at the sight of them.

"How could anybody love such a troublesome chit?" she said, seeking
the comfort of justification from the child herself.

Another sigh was the poor little damsel's only answer. She looked very
white and solemn as she entered the dining-room.

Mr. Greatorex was a merchant in the City. But he was more of a man
than a merchant, which all merchants are not. Also, he was more
scrupulous in his dealings than some merchants in the same line of
business, who yet stood as well with the world as he; but, on the
other hand, he had the meanness to pride himself upon it as if it had
been something he might have done without and yet held up his head.

Some six years before, he had married to please his parents; and a
year before, he had married to please himself. His first wife had
intellect, education, and heart, but little individuality--not enough
to reflect the individuality of her husband. The consequence was, he
found her uninteresting. He was kind and indulgent however, and not
even her best friend blamed him much for manifesting nothing beyond
the average devotion of husbands. But in truth his wife had great
capabilities, only they had never ripened, and when she died, a
fortnight after giving birth to Sophy, her husband had not a suspicion
of the large amount of undeveloped power that had passed away with
her.

Her child was so like her both in countenance and manner that he was
too constantly reminded of her unlamented mother; and he loved neither
enough to discover that, in a sense as true as marvellous, the child
was the very flower-bud of her mother's nature, in which her retarded
blossom had yet a chance of being slowly carried to perfection. Love
alone gives insight, and the father took her merely for a miniature
edition of the volume which he seemed to have laid aside for ever in
the dust of the earth's lumber-room. Instead, therefore, of watering
the roots of his little human slip from the well of his affections, he
had scarcely as yet perceived more in relation to her than that he was
legally accountable for her existence, and bound to give her shelter
and food. If he had questioned himself on the matter, he would have
replied that love was not wanting, only waiting upon her growth, and
the development of something to interest him.

Little right as he had had to expect anything from his first marriage,
he had yet cherished some hopes therein--tolerably vague, it is true,
yet hardly faint enough, it would seem, for he was disappointed in
them. When its bonds fell from him, however, he flattered himself that
he had not worn them in vain, but had through them arrived at a
knowledge of women as rare as profound. But whatever the reach of this
knowledge, it was not sufficient to prevent him from harbouring the
presumptuous hope of so choosing and so fashioning the heart and mind
of a woman that they should be as concave mirrors to his own. I do not
mean that he would have admitted the figure, but such was really the
end he blindly sought. I wonder how many of those who have been
disappointed in such an attempt have been thereby aroused to the
perception of what a frightful failure their success would have been
on both sides. It was bad enough that Augustus Greatorex's theories
had cramped his own development; it would have been ten-fold worse had
they been operative to the stunting of another soul.

Letty Merewether was the daughter of a bishop _in partibus_. She had
been born tolerably innocent, had grown up more than tolerably pretty,
and was, when she came to England at the age of sixteen, as nearly a
genuine example of Locke's sheet of white paper as could well have
fallen to the hand of such an experimenter as Greatorex would fain
become.

In his suit he had prospered--perhaps too easily. He loved the girl,
or at least loved the modified reflection of her in his own mind;
while she, thoroughly admiring the dignity, good looks, and
accomplishments of the man whose attentions flattered her
self-opinion, accorded him deference enough to encourage his vainest
hopes. Although she knew little, fluttering over the merest surfaces
of existence, she had sense enough to know that he talked sense to
her, and foolishness enough to put it down to her own credit, while
for the sense itself she cared little or nothing. And Greatorex,
without even knowing what she was rough-hewn for, would take upon him
to shape her ends!--an ambition the Divinity never permits to succeed:
he who fancies himself the carver finds himself but the chisel, or
indeed perhaps only the mallet, in the hand of the true workman.

During the days of his courtship, then, Letty listened and smiled, or
answered with what he took for a spiritual response, when it was
merely a brain-echo. Looking down into the pond of her being, whose
surface was, not yet ruffled by any bubbling of springs from below, he
saw the reflection of himself and was satisfied. An able man on his
hobby looks a centaur of wisdom and folly; but if he be at all a wise
man, the beast will one day or other show him the jade's favour of
unseating him. Meantime Augustus Greatorex was fooled, not by poor
little Letty, who was not capable of fooling him, but by himself.
Letty had made no pretences; had been interested, and had shown her
interest; had understood, or seemed to understand, what he said to
her, and forgotten it the next moment--had no pocket to put it in, did
not know what to do with it, and let it drop into the Limbo of Vanity.
They had not been married many days before the scouts of advancing
disappointment were upon them. Augustus resisted manfully for a time.
But the truth was each of the two had to become a great deal more than
either was, before any approach to unity was possible. He tried to
interest her in one subject after another--tried her first, I am
ashamed to say, with political economy. In that instance, when he came
home to dinner he found that she had not got beyond the first page of
the book he had left with her. But she had the best of excuses,
namely, that of that page she had not understood a sentence. He saw
his mistake, and tried her with poetry. But Milton, with whom
unfortunately he commenced his approaches, was to her, if not equally
unintelligible, equally uninteresting. He tried her next with the
elements of science, but with no better success. He returned to
poetry, and read some of the Faerie Queene with her: she was, or
seemed to be, interested in all his talk about it, and inclined to go
on with it in his absence, but found the first stanza she tried more
than enough without him to give life to it. She could give it none,
and therefore it gave her none. I believe she read a chapter of the
Bible every day, but the only books she read with any real interest
were novels of a sort that Augustus despised. It never occurred to him
that he ought at once to have made friends of this Momus of
unrighteousness, for by them he might have found entrance to the
sealed chamber. He ought to have read with her the books she did like,
for by them only could he make her think, and from them alone could he
lead her to better. It is but from the very step upon which one stands
that one can move to the next. Besides these books, there was nothing
in her scheme of the universe but fashion, dress, calls, the park,
other-peopledom, concerts, plays, churchgoing--whatever could show
itself on the frosted glass of her _camera obscura_--make an interest
of motion and colour in her darkened chamber. Without these, her
bosom's mistress would have found life unendurable, for not yet had
she ascended her throne, but lay on the floor of her nursery,
surrounded with toys that imitated life.

It was no wonder, therefore, that Augustus was at length compelled to
allow himself disappointed. That it was the fault of his
self-confidence made the thing no whit better. He was too much of a
man not to cherish a certain tenderness for her, but he soon found to
his dismay that it had begun to be mingled with a shadow of contempt.
Against this he struggled, but with fluctuating success. He stopped
later and later at business, and when he came home spent more and more
of his time in the smoking-room, where by and by he had bookshelves
put up. Occasionally he would accept an invitation to dinner and
accompany his wife, but he detested evening parties, and when Letty,
who never refused an invitation if she could help it, went to one, he
remained at home with his books. But his power of reading began to
diminish. He became restless and irritable. Something kept gnawing at
his heart. There was a sore spot in it. The spot grew larger and
larger, and by degrees the centre of his consciousness came to be a
soreness: his cherished idea had been fooled; he had taken a silly
girl for a woman of undeveloped wealth;--a bubble, a surface whereon
fair colours chased each other, for a hearted crystal.

On her part, Letty too had her grief, which, unlike Augustus, she did
not keep to herself, receiving in return from more than one of her
friends the soothing assurance that Augustus was only like all other
men; that women were but their toys, which they cast away when weary
of them. Letty did not see that she was herself making a toy of her
life, or that Augustus was right in refusing to play with such a
costly and delicate thing. Neither did Augustus see that, having, by
his own blunder, married a mere child, he was bound to deal with her
as one, and not let the child suffer for his fault more than what
could not be helped. It is not by pressing our insights upon them, but
by bathing the sealed eyelids of the human kittens, that we can help
them.

And all the time poor little Phosy was left to the care of Alice, a
clever, careless, good-hearted, self-satisfied damsel, who, although
seldom so rough in her behaviour as we have just seen her, abandoned
the child almost entirely to her own resources. It was often she sat
alone in the nursery, wishing the Lord would chasten her--because then
he would love her.

The first course was nearly over ere Augustus had brought himself to
ask--

"What did you think of the sermon to-day, Letty?"

"Not much," answered Letty. "I am not fond of finery. I prefer
simplicity."

Augustus held his peace bitterly. For it was just finery in a sermon,
without knowing it, that Letty was fond of: what seemed to him a
flimsy syllabub of sacred things, beaten up with the whisk of
composition, was charming to Letty; while, on the contrary, if a man
such as they had been listening to was carried away by the thoughts
that struggled in him for utterance, the result, to her judgment, was
finery, and the object display. In excuse it must be remembered that
she had been used to her father's style, which no one could have
aspersed with lack of sobriety. Presently she spoke again.

"Gus, dear, couldn't you make up your mind for once to go with me to
Lady Ashdaile's to-morrow? I am getting quite ashamed of appearing so
often without you."

"There is another way of avoiding that unpleasantness," remarked her
husband drily.

"You cruel creature!" returned Letty playfully. "But I must go this
once, for I promised Mrs. Holden."

"You know, Letty," said her husband, after a little pause, "it gets of
more and more consequence that you should not fatigue yourself. By
keeping such late hours in such stifling rooms you are endangering two
lives--remember that, Letty. It you stay at home to-morrow, I will
come home early, and read to you all the evening."

"Gussy, that _would_ be charming. You _know_ there is nothing in the
world I should enjoy so much. But this time I really mustn't."

She launched into a list of all the great nobodies and small
somebodies who were to be there, and whom she positively must see: it
might be her only chance.

Those last words quenched a sarcasm on Augustus' lips. He was kinder
than usual the rest of the evening, and read her to sleep with the
Pilgrim's Progress.

Phosy sat in a corner, listened, and understood. Or where she
misunderstood, it was an honest misunderstanding, which never does
much hurt. Neither father nor mother spoke to her till they bade her
good night. Neither saw the hungry heart under the mask of the still
face. The father never imagined her already fit for the modelling she
was better without, and the stepmother had to become a mother before
she could value her.

Phosy went to bed to dream of the Valley of Humiliation.




CHAPTER II.


The next morning Alice gave her mistress warning. It was quite
unexpected, and she looked at her aghast.

"Alice," she said at length, "you're never going to leave me at such a
time!"

"I'm sorry it don't suit you, ma'am, but I must."

"Why, Alice? What is the matter? Has Sophy been troublesome?"

"No, ma'am; there's no harm in that child."

"Then what can it be, Alice? Perhaps you are going to be married
sooner than you expected?"

Alice gave her chin a little toss, pressed her lips together, and was
silent.

"I have always been kind to you," resumed her mistress.

"I'm sure, ma'am, I never made no complaints!" returned Alice, but as
she spoke she drew herself up straighter than before.

"Then what is it?" said her mistress.

"The fact is, ma'am," answered the girl, almost fiercely, "I _cannot_
any longer endure a state of domestic slavery."

"I don't understand you a bit better," said Mrs. Greatorex, trying,
but in vain, to smile, and therefore looking angrier than she was.

"I mean, ma'am--an' I see no reason as I shouldn't say it, for it's
the truth--there's a worm at the root of society where one yuman bein'
's got to do the dirty work of another. I don't mind sweepin' up my
own dust, but I won't sweep up nobody else's. I ain't a goin' to
demean myself no longer! There!"

"Leave the room, Alice," said Mrs. Greatorex; and when, with a toss
and a flounce, the young woman had vanished, she burst into tears of
anger and annoyance.

The day passed. The evening came. She dressed without Alice's usual
help, and went to Lady Ashdaile's with her friend. There a reaction
took place, and her spirits rose unnaturally. She even danced--to the
disgust of one or two quick-eyed matrons who sat by the wall.

When she came home she found her husband sitting up for her. He said
next to nothing, and sat up an hour longer with his book.

In the night she was taken ill. Her husband called Alice, and ran
himself to fetch the doctor. For some hours she seemed in danger, but
by noon was much better. Only the greatest care was necessary.

As soon as she could speak, she told Augustus of Alice's warning, and
he sent for her to the library.

She stood before him with flushed cheeks and flashing eyes.

"I understand, Alice, you have given your mistress warning," he said
gently.

"Yes, sir."

"Your mistress is very ill, Alice."

"Yes, sir."

"Don't you think it would be ungrateful of you to leave her in her
present condition? She's not likely to be strong for some time to
come."

The use of the word "ungrateful" was an unfortunate one. Alice begged
to know what she had to be grateful for. Was her work worth nothing?
And her master, as every one must who claims that which can only be
freely given, found himself in the wrong.

"Well, Alice," he said, "we won't dispute that point; and if you are
really determined on going, you must do the best you can for your
mistress for the rest of the month."

Alice's sense of injury was soothed by her master's forbearance. She
had always rather approved of Mr. Greatorex, and she left the room
more softly than she had entered it.

Letty had a fortnight in bed, during which she reflected a little.

The very day on which she left her room, Alice sought an interview
with her master, and declared she could not stay out her month; she
must go home at once.

She had been very attentive to her mistress during the fortnight:
there must be something to account for her strange behaviour.

"Come now, Alice," said her master, "what's at the back of all this?
You have been a good, well-behaved, obliging girl till now, and I am
certain you would never be like this if there weren't something wrong
somewhere."

"Something wrong, sir! No, indeed, sir! Except you call it wrong to
have an old uncle 's dies and leaves ever so much money--thousands on
thousands, the lawyers say."

"And does it come to you then, Alice?"

"I get my share, sir. He left it to be parted even between his nephews
and nieces."

"Why, Alice, you are quite an heiress, then!" returned her master,
scarcely however believing the thing so grand as Alice would have it.
"But don't you think now it would be rather hard that your fortune
should be Mrs. Greatorex's misfortune?"

"Well, I don't see as how it shouldn't," replied Alice. "It's
mis'ess's fortun' as 'as been my misfortun'--ain't it now, sir? An'
why shouldn't it be the other way next?"

"I don't quite see how your mistress's fortune can be said to be your
misfortune, Alice."

"Anybody would see that, sir, as wasn't blinded by class-prejudices."

"Class-prejudices!" exclaimed Mr. Greatorex, in surprise at the word.

"It's a term they use, I believe, sir! But it's plain enough that if
mis'ess hadn't 'a' been better off than me, she wouldn't ha' been able
to secure my services--as you calls it."

"That is certainly plain enough," returned Mr. Greatorex. "But suppose
nobody had been able to secure your services, what would have become
of you?"

"By that time the people'd have rose to assert their rights."

"To what?--To fortunes like yours?"

"To bread and cheese at least, sir," returned Alice, pertly.

"Well, but you've had something better than bread and cheese."

"I don't make no complaints as to the style of livin' in the house,
sir, but that's all one, so long as it's on the vile condition of
domestic slavery--which it's nothing can justify."

"Then of course, although you are now a woman of property, you will
never dream of having any one to wait on you," said her master, amused
with the volume of human nature thus opened to him.

"All I say, sir, is--it's my turn now; and I ain't goin' to be sit
upon by no one. I know my dooty to myself."

"I didn't know there was such a duty, Alice," said her master.

Something in his tone displeased her.

"Then you know now, sir," she said, and bounced out of the room.

The next moment, however, ashamed of her rudeness, she re-entered,
saying,

"I don't want to be unkind, sir, but I must go home. I've got a
brother that's ill, too, and wants to see me. If you don't object to
me goin' home for a month, I promise you to come back and see mis'ess
through her trouble--as a friend, you know, sir."

"But just listen to me first, Alice," said Mr. Greatorex. "I've had
something to do with wills in my time, and I can assure you it is not
likely to be less than a year before you can touch the money. You had
much better stay where you are till your uncle's affairs are settled.
You don't know what may happen. There's many a slip between cup and
lip, you know."

"Oh! it's all right, sir. Everybody knows the money's left to his
nephews and nieces, and me and my brother's as good as any."

"I don't doubt it: still, if you'll take my advice, you'll keep a
sound roof over your head till another's ready for you."

Alice only threw her chin in the air, and said almost threateningly,

"Am I to go for the month, sir?"

"I'll talk to your mistress about it," answered Mr. Greatorex, not at
all sure that such an arrangement would be for his wife's comfort.

But the next day Mrs. Greatorex had a long talk with Alice, and the
result was that on the following Monday she was to go home for a
month, and then return for two months more at least. What Mr.
Greatorex had said about the legacy, had had its effect, and, besides,
her mistress had spoken to her with pleasure in her good fortune.
About Sophy no one felt any anxiety: she was no trouble to any one,
and the housemaid would see to her.




CHAPTER III.


On the Sunday evening, Alice's lover, having heard, not from herself,
but by a side wind, that she was going home the next day, made his
appearance in Wimborne Square, somewhat perplexed--both at the move,
and at her leaving him in ignorance of the same. He was a
cabinet-maker in an honest shop in the neighbourhood, and in
education, faculty, and general worth, considerably Alice's
superior--a fact which had hitherto rather pleased her, but now gave
zest to the change which she imagined had subverted their former
relation. Full of the sense of her new superiority, she met him draped
in an indescribable strangeness. John Jephson felt, at the very first
word, as if her voice came from the other side of the English Channel.
He wondered what he had done, or rather what Alice could imagine he
had done or said, to put her in such tantrums.

"Alice, my dear," he said--for John was a man to go straight at the
enemy, "what's amiss? What's come over you? You ain't altogether like
your own self to-night! And here I find you're goin' away, and ne'er a
word to me about it! What have I done?"

Alice's chin alone made reply. She waited the fitting moment, with
splendour to astonish, and with grandeur to subdue her lover. To tell
the sad truth, she was no longer sure that it would be well to
encourage him on the old footing; was she not standing on tiptoe, her
skirts in her hand, on the brink of the brook that parted serfdom from
gentility, on the point of stepping daintily across, and leaving
domestic slavery, red hands, caps, and obedience behind her? How then
was she to marry a man that had black nails, and smelt of glue? It was
incumbent on her at least, for propriety's sake, to render him at once
aware that it was in condescension ineffable she took any notice of
him.

"Alice, my girl!" began John again, in expostulatory tone.

"Miss Cox, if you please, John Jephson," interposed Alice.

"What on 'arth's come over you?" exclaimed John, with the first throb
of rousing indignation. "But if you ain't your own self no more, why,
Miss Cox be it. 'T seems to me 's if I warn't my own self no more--'s
if I'd got into some un else, or 't least hedn't got my own ears on m'
own head.--Never saw or heerd Alice like this afore!" he added,
turning in gloomy bewilderment to the housemaid for a word of human
sympathy.

The movement did not altogether please Alice, and she felt she must
justify her behaviour.

"You see, John," she said, with dignity, keeping her back towards him,
and pretending to dust the globe of a lamp, "there's things as no
woman can help, and therefore as no man has no right to complain of
them. It's not as if I'd gone an' done it, or changed myself, no more
'n if it 'ad took place in my cradle. What can I help it, if the world
goes and changes itself? Am _I_ to blame?--tell me that. It's not
that. I make no complaint, but I tell you it ain't me, it's
circumstances as is gone and changed theirselves, and bein' as
circumstances is changed, things ain't the same as they was, and Miss
is the properer term from you to me, John Jephson."

"Dang it if I know what you're a drivin' at, Alice!--Miss Cox!--and I
beg yer pardon, miss, I'm sure.--Dang me if I do!"

"Don't swear, John Jephson--leastways before a lady. It's not proper."

"It seems to me, Miss Cox, as if the wind was a settin' from Bedlam,
or may be Colney Hatch," said John, who was considered a humourist
among his comrades. "I wouldn't take no liberties with a lady, Miss
Cox; but if I might be so bold as to arst the joke of the thing--"

"Joke, indeed!" cried Alice. "Do you call a dead uncle and ten
thousand pounds a joke?"

"God bless me!" said John. "You don't mean it, Alice?"

"I do mean it, and that you'll find, John Jephson. I'm goin' to bid
you good-bye to-morrer."

"Whoy, Alice!" exclaimed honest John, aghast.

"It's truth I tell ye," said Alice.

"And for how long?" gasped John, fore-feeling illimitable misfortune.

"That depends," returned Alice, who did not care to lessen the effect
of her communication by mentioning her promised return for a season.
"--It ain't likely," she added, "as a heiress is a goin' to act the
nuss-maid much longer."

"But Alice," said John, "you don't mean to say--it's not in your mind
now--it can't be, Alice--you're only jokin' with me--"

"Indeed, and I'm not!" interjected Alice, with a sniff.

"I don't mean that way, you know. What I mean is, you don't mean as
how this 'ere money--dang it all!--as how it's to be all over between
you and me?--You _can't_ mean that, Alice!" ended the poor fellow,
with a choking in his throat.

It was very hard upon him! He must either look as if he wanted to
share her money, or else as if he were ready to give her up.

"Arst yourself, John Jephson," answered Alice, "whether it's likely a
young lady of fortun' would be keepin' company with a young man as
didn't know how to take off his hat to her in the park?"

Alice did not above half mean what she said: she wished mainly to
enhance her own importance. At the same time she did mean it half, and
that would have been enough for Jephson. He rose, grievously wounded.

"Good-bye, Alice," he said, taking the hand she did not refuse. "Ye're
throwin' from ye what all yer money won't buy."

She gave a scornful little laugh, and John walked out of the kitchen.

At the door he turned with one lingering look; but in Alice there was
no sign of softening. She turned scornfully away, and no doubt enjoyed
her triumph to the full.

The next morning she went away.




CHAPTER IV.


Mr. Greatorex had ceased to regard the advent of Christmas with much
interest. Naturally gifted with a strong religious tendency, he had,
since his first marriage, taken, not to denial, but to the side of
objection, spending much energy in contempt for the foolish opinions
of others, a self-indulgence which does less than little to further
the growth of one's own spirit in truth and righteousness. The only
person who stands excused--I do not say justified--in so doing, is the
man who, having been taught the same opinions, has found them a legion
of adversaries barring his way to the truth. But having got rid of
them for himself, it is, I suspect, worse than useless to attack them
again, save as the ally of those who are fighting their way through
the same ranks to the truth. Greatorex had been indulging his
intellect at the expense of his heart. A man may have light in the
brain and darkness in the heart. It were better to be an owl than a
strong-eyed apteryx. He was on the path which naturally ends in
blindness and unbelief. I fancy, if he had not been neglectful of his
child, she would ere this time have relighted his Christmas-candles
for him; but now his second disappointment in marriage had so dulled
his heart that he had begun to regard life as a stupid affair, in
which the most enviable fool was the man who could still expect to
realize an ideal. He had set out on a false track altogether, but had
not yet discovered that there had been an immoral element at work in
his mistake.

For what right had he to desire the fashioning of any woman after his
ideas? did not the angel of her eternal Ideal for ever behold the face
of her Father in heaven? The best that can be said for him is, that,
notwithstanding his disappointment and her faults, yea,
notwithstanding his own faults, which were, with all his cultivation
and strength of character, yet more serious than hers, he was still
kind to her; yes, I may say for him, that, notwithstanding even her
silliness, which is a sickening fault, and one which no supremacy of
beauty can overshadow, he still loved her a little. Hence the care he
showed for her in respect of the coming sorrow was genuine; it did not
all belong to his desire for a son to whom he might be a father
indeed--after his own fancies, however. Letty, on her part, was as
full of expectation as the girl who has been promised a doll that can
shut and open its eyes, and cry when it is pinched; her carelessness
of its safe arrival came of ignorance and not indifference.

It cannot but seem strange that such a man should have been so
careless of the child he had. But from the first she had painfully
reminded him of her mother, with whom in truth he had never
quarrelled, but with whom he had not found life the less irksome on
that account. Add to this that he had been growing fonder of
business,--a fact which indicated, in a man of his endowment and
development, an inclination downwards of the plane of his life. It was
some time since he had given up reading poetry. History had almost
followed: he now read little except politics, travels, and popular
expositions of scientific progress.

That year Christmas Eve fell upon a Monday. The day before, Letty not
feeling very well, her husband thought it better not to leave her, and
gave up going to church. Phosy was utterly forgotten, but she dressed
herself, and at the usual hour appeared with her prayer-book in her
hand ready for church. When her father told her that he was not going,
she looked so blank that he took pity upon her, and accompanied her to
the church-door, promising to meet her as she came out. Phosy sighed
from relief as she entered, for she had a vague idea that by going to
church to pray for it she might move the Lord to chasten her. At least
he would see her there, and might think of it. She had never had such
an attention from her father before, never such dignity conferred upon
her as to be allowed to appear in church alone, sitting in the pew by
herself like a grown damsel. But I doubt if there was any pride in her
stately step, or any vanity in the smile--no, not smile, but
illuminated mist, the vapour of smiles, which haunted her sweet little
solemn church-window of a face, as she walked up the aisle.

The preacher was one of whom she had never heard her father speak
slighting word, in whom her unbounded trust had never been shaken.
Also he was one who believed with his whole soul in the things that
make Christmas precious. To him the birth of the wonderful baby hinted
at hundreds of strange things in the economy of the planet. That a man
could so thoroughly persuade himself that, he believed the old fable,
was matter of marvel to some of his friends who held blind Nature the
eternal mother, and Night the everlasting grandmother of all things.
But the child Phosy, in her dreams or out of them, in church or
nursery, with her book or her doll, was never out of the region of
wonders, and would have believed, or tried to believe, anything that
did not involve a moral impossibility.

What the preacher said I need not even partially repeat; it is enough
to mention a certain metamorphosed deposit from the stream of his
eloquence carried home in her mind by Phosy: from some of his sayings
about the birth of Jesus into the world, into the family, into the
individual human bosom, she had got it into her head that Christmas
Day was not a birthday like that she had herself last year, but that,
in some wonderful way, to her requiring no explanation, the baby Jesus
was born every Christmas Day afresh. What became of him afterwards she
did not know, and indeed she had never yet thought to ask how it was
that he could come to every house in London as well as No. 1, Wimborne
Square. Little of a home as another might think it, that house was yet
to her the centre of all houses, and the wonder had not yet widened
rippling beyond it: into that spot of the pool the eternal gift would
fall.

Her father forgot the time over his book, but so entranced was her
heart with the expectation of the promised visit, now so near--the day
after to-morrow--that, if she did not altogether forget to look for
him as she stepped down the stair from the church door to the street,
his absence caused her no uneasiness; and when, just as she reached
it, he opened the house-door in tardy haste to redeem his promise, she
looked up at him with a solemn, smileless repose, born of spiritual
tension and speechless anticipation, upon her face, and walking past
him without change in the rhythm of her motion, marched stately up the
stairs to the nursery. I believe the centre of her hope was that when
the baby came she would beg him on her knees to ask the Lord to
chasten her.

When dessert was over, her mother on the sofa in the drawing-room, and
her father in an easy-chair, with a bottle of his favourite wine by
his side, she crept out of the room and away again to the nursery.
There she reached up to her little bookshelf, and, full of the sermon
as spongy mists are full of the sunlight, took thence a volume of
stories from the German, the re-reading of one of which, narrating the
visit of the Christ-child, laden with gifts, to a certain household,
and what he gave to each and all therein, she had, although sorely
tempted, saved up until now, and sat down with it by the fire, the
only light she had. When the housemaid, suddenly remembering she must
put her to bed, and at the same time discovering it was a whole hour
past her usual time, hurried to the nursery, she found her fast asleep
in her little armchair, her book on her lap, and the fire
self-consumed into a dark cave with a sombre glow in its deepest
hollows. Dreams had doubtless come to deepen the impressions of sermon
and _mährchen_, for as she slowly yielded to the hands of Polly
putting her to bed, her lips, unconsciously moved of the slumbering
but not sleeping spirit, more than once murmured the words _Lord
loveth_ and _chasteneth_. Right blessedly would I enter the dreams of
such a child--revel in them, as a bee in the heavenly gulf of a
cactus-flower.




CHAPTER V.


On Christmas Eve the church bells were ringing through the murky air
of London, whose streets lay flaring and steaming below. The brightest
of their constellations were the butchers' shops, with their shows of
prize beef; around them, the eddies of the human tides were most
confused and knotted. But the toy-shops were brilliant also. To Phosy
they would have been the treasure-caves of the Christ-child--all
mysteries, all with insides to them--boxes, and desks, and windmills,
and dove-cots, and hens with chickens, and who could tell what all? In
every one of those shops her eyes would have searched for the
Christ-child, the giver of all their wealth. For to her he was
everywhere that night--ubiquitous as the luminous mist that brooded
all over London--of which, however, she saw nothing but the glow above
the mews. John Jephson was out in the middle of all the show, drifting
about in it: he saw nothing that had pleasure in it, his heart was so
heavy. He never thought once of the Christ-child, or even of the
Christ-man, as the giver of anything. Birth is the one standing
promise-hope for the race, but for poor John this Christmas held no
promise. With all his humour, he was one of those people, generally
dull and slow--God grant me and mine such dullness and such sloth--who
having once loved, cannot cease. During the fortnight he had scarce
had a moment's ease from the sting of his Alice's treatment. The
honest fellow's feelings were no study to himself; he knew nothing but
the pleasure and the pain of them; but, I believe it was not mainly
for himself that he was sorry. Like Othello, "the pity of it" haunted
him: he had taken Alice for a downright girl, about whom there was and
could be no mistake; and the first hot blast of prosperity had swept
her away like a hectic leaf. What were all the shops dressed out in
holly and mistletoe, what were all the rushing flaming gas-jets, what
the fattest of prize-pigs to John, who could never more imagine a
spare-rib on the table between Alice and him of a Sunday? His
imagination ran on seeing her pass in her carriage, and drop him a nod
of condescension as she swept noisily by him--trudging home weary from
his work to his loveless fireside. _He_ didn't want her money!
Honestly, he would rather have her without than with money, for he now
regarded it as an enemy, seeing what evil changes it could work.
"There be some devil in it, sure!" he said to himself. True, he had
never found any in his week's wages, but he did remember once finding
the devil in a month's wages received in the lump.

As he was thus thinking with himself, a carriage came suddenly from a
side street into the crowd, and while he stared at it, thinking Alice
might be sitting inside it while he was tramping the pavement alone,
she passed him on the other side on foot--was actually pushed against
him: he looked round, and saw a young woman, carrying a small bag,
disappearing in the crowd. "There's an air of Alice about _her_" said
John to himself, seeing her back only. But of course it couldn't be
Alice; for her he must look in the carriages now! And what a fool he
was: every young woman reminded him of the one he had lost! Perhaps if
he was to call the next day--Polly was a good-natured creature--he
might hear some news of her.

It had been a troubled fortnight with Mrs. Greatorex. She wished much
that she could have talked to her husband more freely, but she had not
learned to feel at home with him. Yet he had been kinder and more
attentive than usual all the time, so much so that Letty thought with
herself--if she gave him a boy, he would certainly return to his first
devotion. She said _boy_, because any one might see he cared little
for Phosy. She had never discovered that he was disappointed in
herself, but, since her disregard of his wishes had brought evil upon
her, she had begun to suspect that he had some ground for being
dissatisfied with her. She never dreamed of his kindness as the effort
of a conscientious nature to make the best of what could not now be
otherwise helped. Her own poverty of spirit and lack of worth
achieved, she knew as little of as she did of the riches of Michael
the archangel. One must have begun to gather wisdom before he can see
his own folly.

That evening she was seated alone in the drawing-room, her husband
having left her to smoke his cigar, when the butler entered and
informed her that Alice had returned, but was behaving so oddly that
they did not know what to do with her. Asking wherein her oddness
consisted, and learning that it was mostly in silence and tears, she
was not sorry to gather that some disappointment had befallen her, and
felt considerable curiosity to know what it was. She therefore told
him to send her upstairs.

Meantime Polly, the housemaid, seeing plainly enough from her return
in the middle of her holiday, and from her utter dejection, that
Alice's expectations had been frustrated, and cherishing no little
resentment against her because of her _uppishness_ on the first news
of her good fortune, had been ungenerous enough to take her revenge in
a way as stinging in effect as bitter in intention; for she loudly
protested that no amount of such luck as she pretended to suppose in
Alice's possession, would have induced _her_ to behave herself so that
a handsome honest fellow like John Jephson should be driven to despise
her, and take up with her betters. When her mistress's message came,
Alice was only too glad to find refuge from the kitchen in the
drawing-room.

The moment she entered, she fell on her knees at the foot of the couch
on which her mistress lay, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed
grievously.

Nor was the change more remarkable in her bearing than in her person.
She was pale and worn, and had a hunted look--was in fact a mere
shadow of what she had been. For a time her mistress found it
impossible to quiet her so as to draw from her her story: tears and
sobs combined with repugnance to hold her silent.

"Oh, ma'am!" she burst out at length, wringing her hands, "how ever
_can_ I tell you? You will never speak to me again. Little did I think
such a disgrace was waiting me!"

"It was no fault of yours if you were misinformed," said her mistress,
"or that your uncle was not the rich man you fancied."

"Oh, ma'am, there was no mistake there! He was more than twice as rich
as I fancied. If he had only died a beggar, and left things as they
was!"

"Then he didn't leave it to his nephews and nieces as they told
you?--Well, there's no disgrace in that."

"Oh! but he did, ma'am: that was all right; no mistake there either,
ma'am.--And to think o' me behavin' as I did--to you and master as was
so good to me! Who'll ever take any more notice of me now, after what
has come out--as I'm sure I no more dreamed on than the child unborn!"

An agonized burst of fresh weeping followed, and it was with prolonged
difficulty, and by incessant questioning, that Mrs. Greatorex at
length drew from her the following facts.

Before Alice and her brother could receive the legacy to which they
laid claim, it was necessary to produce certain documents, the absence
of which, as of any proof to take their place, led to the unavoidable
publication of a fact previously known only to a living few--namely,
that the father and mother of Alice Hopwood had never been married,
which fact deprived them of the smallest claim on the legacy, and fell
like a millstone upon Alice and her pride. From the height of her
miserable arrogance she fell prone--not merely hurled back into the
lowly condition from which she had raised her head only to despise it
with base unrighteousness, and to adopt and reassert the principles
she had abhorred when they affected herself--not merely this, but, in
her own judgment at least, no longer the respectable member of society
she had hitherto been justified in supposing herself. The relation of
her father and mother she felt overshadow her with a disgrace
unfathomable--the more overwhelming that it cast her from the gates of
the Paradise she had seemed on the point of entering: her fall she
measured by the height of the social ambition she had cherished, and
had seemed on the point of attaining. But it is not an evil that the
devil's money, which this legacy had from the first proved to Alice,
should turn to a hot cinder in the hand. Rarely had a more haughty
spirit than hers gone before a fall, and rarely has the fall been more
sudden or more abject. And the consciousness of the behaviour into
which her false riches had seduced her, changed the whip of her
chastisement into scorpions. Worst of all, she had insulted her lover
as beneath her notice, and the next moment had found herself too vile
for his. Judging by herself, in the injustice of bitter humiliation
she imagined him scoffing with his mates at the base-born menial who
would set up for a fine lady. But had she been more worthy of honest
John, she would have understood him better. As it was, no really good
fortune could have befallen her but such as now seemed to her the
depth of evil fortune. Without humiliation to prepare the way for
humility, she must have become capable of more and more baseness,
until she lost all that makes life worth having.

When Mrs. Greatorex had given her what consolation she found handy,
and at length dismissed her, the girl, unable to endure her own
company, sought the nursery, where she caught Sophy in her arms and
embraced her with fervour. Never in her life having been the object of
any such display of feeling, Phosy was much astonished: when Alice had
set her down and she had resumed her seat by the fireside, she went on
staring for a while--and then a strange sort of miming ensued.

It was Phosy's habit--one less rare with children than may by most be
imagined--to do what she could to enter into any state of mind whose
shows were sufficiently marked for her observation. She sought to lay
hold of the feeling that produced the expression: less than the
reproduction of a similar condition in her own imaginative sensorium,
subject to her leisurely examination, would in no case satisfy the
little metaphysician. But what was indeed very odd was the means she
took for arriving at the sympathetic knowledge she desired. As if she
had been the most earnest student of dramatic expression through the
facial muscles, she would sit watching the countenance of the object
of her solicitude, all the time, with full consciousness, fashioning
her own as nearly as she could into the lines and forms of the other:
in proportion as she succeeded, the small psychologist imagined she
felt in herself the condition that produced the phenomenon she
observed--as if the shape of her face cast inward its shadow upon her
mind, and so revealed to it, through the two faces, what was moving
and shaping in the mind of the other.

In the present instance, having at length, after modelling and
remodelling her face like that of a gutta-percha doll for some time,
composed it finally into the best correspondence she could effect, she
sat brooding for a while, with Alice's expression as it were frozen
upon it. Gradually the forms assumed melted away, and allowed her
still, solemn face to look out from behind them. The moment this
evanishment was complete, she rose and went to Alice, where she sat
staring into the fire, unconscious of the scrutiny she had been
undergoing, and, looking up in her face, took her thumb out of her
mouth, and said,

"Is the Lord chastening Alice? I wish he would chasten Phosy."

Her face was calm as that of the Sphinx; there was no mist in the
depth of her gray eyes, not a cloud on the wide heaven of her
forehead.

Was the child crazed? What could the atom mean, with her big eyes
looking right into her? Alice never had understood her: it were indeed
strange if the less should comprehend the greater! She was not yet,
capable of recognising the word of the Lord in the mouth of babes and
sucklings. But there was a something in Phosy's face besides its
calmness and unintelligibility. What it was Alice could never have
told--yet it did her good. She lifted the child on her lap. There she
soon fell asleep. Alice undressed her, laid her in her crib, and went
to bed herself.

But, weary as she was, she had to rise again before she got to sleep.
Her mistress was again taken ill. Doctor and nurse were sent for in
hot haste; hansom cabs came and went throughout the night, like noisy
moths to the one lighted house in the street; there were soft steps
within, and doors were gently opened and shut. The waters of Mara had
risen and filled the house.

Towards morning they were ebbing slowly away. Letty did not know that
her husband was watching by her bedside. The street was quiet now. So
was the house. Most of its people had been up throughout the night,
but now they had all gone to bed except the strange nurse and Mr.
Greatorex.

It was the morning of Christmas Day, and little Phosy knew it in every
cranny of her soul. She was not of those who had been up all night,
and now she was awake, early and wide, and the moment she awoke she
was speculating: He was coming to-day--_how_ would he come? Where
should she find the baby Jesus? And when would he come? In the
morning, or the afternoon, or in the evening? Could such a grief be in
store for her as that he would not appear until night, when she would
be again in bed? But she would not sleep till all hope was gone. Would
everybody be gathered to meet him, or would he show himself to one
after another, each alone? Then her turn would be last, and oh, if he
would come to the nursery! But perhaps he would not appear to her at
all!--for was she not one whom the Lord did not care to chasten?

Expectation grew and wrought in her until she could lie in bed no
longer. Alice was fast asleep. It must be early, but whether it was
yet light or not she could not tell for the curtains. Anyhow she would
get up and dress, and then she would be ready for Jesus whenever he
should come. True, she was not able to dress herself very well, but he
would know, and would not mind. She made all the haste she could,
consistently with taking pains, and was soon attired after a fashion.

She crept out of the room and down the stair. The house was very
still. What if Jesus should come and find nobody awake? Would he go
again and give them no presents? She couldn't expect any herself--but
might he not let her take theirs for the rest? Perhaps she ought to
wake them all, but she dared not without being sure.

On the last landing above the first floor, she saw, by the low
gaslight at the end of the corridor, an unknown figure pass the foot
of the stair: could she have anything to do with the marvel of the
day? The woman looked up, and Phosy dropped the question. Yet she
might be a charwoman, whose assistance the expected advent rendered
necessary. When she reached the bottom of the stair she saw her
disappearing in her step-mother's room. That she did not like. It was
the one room into which she could not go. But, as the house was so
still, she would search everywhere else, and if she did not find him,
would then sit down in the hall and wait for him.

The room next the foot of the stair, and opposite her step-mother's, was
the spare room, with which she associated ideas of state and grandeur:
where better could she begin than at the guest-chamber?--There!--Could
it be? Yes!--Through the chink of the scarce-closed door she saw light.
Either he was already there or there they were expecting him. From that
moment she felt as if lifted out of the body. Far exalted above all
dread, she peeped modestly in, and then entered. Beyond the foot of the
bed, a candle stood on a little low table, but nobody was to be seen.
There was a stool near the table: she would sit on it by the candle,
and wait for him. But ere she reached it, she caught sight of something
upon the bed that drew her thither. She stood entranced.--_Could_ it
be?--It _might_ be. Perhaps he had left it there while he went into her
mamma's room with something for her.--The loveliest of dolls ever
imagined! She drew nearer. The light was low, and the shadows were
many: she could not be sure what it was. But when she had gone close
up to it, she concluded with certainty that it was in very truth a
doll--perhaps intended for her--but beyond doubt the most exquisite
of dolls. She dragged a chair to the bed, got, up, pushed her little
arms softly under it, and drawing it gently to her, slid down with it.
When she felt her feet firm on the floor, filled with the solemn
composure of holy awe she carried the gift of the child Jesus to the
candle, that she might the better admire its beauty and know its
preciousness. But the light had no sooner fallen upon it than a strange
undefinable doubt awoke within her. Whatever it was, it was the very
essence of loveliness--the tiny darling with its alabaster face, and its
delicately modelled hands and fingers! A long night-gown covered all
the rest.--Was it possible?--Could it be?--Yes, indeed! it must be--it
could be nothing else than a _real_ baby! What a goose she had been!
Of course it was baby Jesus himself!--for was not this his very own
Christmas Day on which he was always born?--If she had felt awe of his
gift before, what a grandeur of adoring love, what a divine dignity
possessed her, holding in her arms the very child himself! One shudder
of bliss passed through her, and in an agony of possession she clasped
the baby to her great heart--then at once became still with the
satisfaction of eternity, with the peace of God. She sat down on the
stool, near the little table, with her back to the candle, that its
rays should not fall on the eyes of the sleeping Jesus and wake him:
there she sat, lost in the very majesty of bliss, at once the mother
and the slave of the Lord Jesus.

She sat for a time still as marble waiting for marble to awake,
heedful as tenderest woman not to rouse him before his time, though
her heart was swelling with the eager petition that he would ask his
Father to be as good as chasten her. And as she sat, she began, after
her wont, to model her face to the likeness of his, that she might
understand his stillness--the absolute peace that dwelt on his
countenance. But as she did so, again a sudden doubt invaded her:
Jesus lay so very still--never moved, never opened his pale eye-lids!
And now set thinking, she noted that he did not breathe. She had seen
babies asleep, and their breath came and went--their little bosoms
heaved up and down, and sometimes they would smile, and sometimes they
would moan and sigh. But Jesus did none of all these things: was it
not strange? And then he was cold--oh, so cold!

A blue silk coverlid lay on the bed: she half rose and dragged it off,
and contrived to wind it around herself and the baby. Sad at heart,
very sad, but undismayed, she sat and watched him on her lap.




CHAPTER VI.


Meantime the morning of Christmas Day grew. The light came and filled
the house. The sleepers slept late, but at length they stirred. Alice
awoke last--from a troubled sleep, in which the events of the night
mingled with her own lost condition and destiny. After all Polly had
been kind, she thought, and got Sophy up without disturbing her.

She had been but a few minutes down, when a strange and appalling
rumour made itself--I cannot say audible, but--somehow known through
the house, and every one hurried up in horrible dismay.

The nurse had gone into the spare room, and missed the little dead
thing she had laid there. The bed was between her and Phosy, and she
never saw her. The doctor had been sharp with her about something the
night before: she now took her revenge in suspicion of him, and after
a hasty and fruitless visit of inquiry to the kitchen, hurried to Mr.
Greatorex.

The servants crowded to the spare room, and when their master,
incredulous indeed, yet shocked at the tidings brought him, hastened
to the spot, he found them all in the room, gathered at the foot of
the bed. A little sunlight filtered through the red window-curtains,
and gave a strange pallid expression to the flame of the candle, which
had now burned very low. At first he saw nothing but the group of
servants, silent, motionless, with heads leaning forward, intently
gazing: he had come just in time: another moment and they would have
ruined the lovely sight. He stepped forward, and saw Phosy, half
shrouded in blue, the candle behind illuminating the hair she had
found too rebellious to the brush, and making of it a faint aureole
about her head and white face, whence cold and sorrow had driven all
the flush, rendering it colourless as that upon her arm which had
never seen the light. She had pored on the little face until she knew
death, and now she sat a speechless mother of sorrow, bending in the
dim light of the tomb over the body of her holy infant.

How it was I cannot tell, but the moment her father saw her she looked
up, and the spell of her dumbness broke.

"Jesus is dead," she said, slowly and sadly, but with perfect
calmness. "He is dead," she repeated. "He came too early, and there
was no one up to take care of him, and he's dead--dead--dead!"

But as she spoke the last words, the frozen lump of agony gave way;
the well of her heart suddenly filled, swelled, overflowed; the last
word was half sob, half shriek of utter despair and loss.

Alice darted forward and took the dead baby tenderly from her. The
same moment her father raised the little mother and clasped her to his
bosom. Her arms went round his neck, her head sank on his shoulder,
and sobbing in grievous misery, yet already a little comforted, he
bore her from the room.

"No, no, Phosy!" they heard him say, "Jesus is not dead, thank God. It
is only your little brother that hadn't life enough, and is gone back
to God for more."

Weeping the women went down the stairs. Alice's tears were still
flowing, when John Jephson entered. Her own troubles forgotten in the
emotion of the scene she had just witnessed, she ran to his arms and
wept on his bosom.

John stood as one astonished.

"O Lord! this _is_ a Christmas!" he sighed at last.

"Oh John!" cried Alice, and tore herself from his embrace, "I forgot!
You'll never speak to me again, John! Don't do it, John."

And with the words she gave a stifled cry, and fell a weeping again,
behind her two shielding hands.

"Why, Alice!--you ain't married, are you?" gasped John, to whom that
was the only possible evil.

"No, John, and never shall be: a respectable man like you would never
think of looking twice at a poor girl like me!"

"Let's have one more look anyhow," said John, drawing her hands from
her face. "Tell me what's the matter, and if there's anything can be
done to right you, I'll work day and night to do it, Alice."

"There's nothing _can_ be done, John," replied Alice, and would again
have floated out on the ocean of her misery, but in spite of wind and
tide, that is sobs and tears, she held on by the shore at his
entreaty, and told her tale, not even omitting the fact that when she
went to the eldest of the cousins, inheriting through the misfortune
of her and her brother so much more than their expected share, and
"demeaned herself" to beg a little help for her brother, who was dying
of consumption, he had all but ordered her out of the house, swearing
he had nothing to do with her or her brother, and saying she ought to
be ashamed to show her face.

"And that when we used to make mud pies together!" concluded Alice
with indignation. "There, John! you have it all," she added. "--And
now?"

With the word she gave a deep, humbly questioning look into his honest
eyes.

"Is that all, Alice?" he asked.

"Yes, John; ain't it enough?" she returned.

"More'n enough," answered John. "I swear to you, Alice, you're worth
to me ten times what you would ha' been, even if you'd ha' had me,
with ten thousand pounds in your ridicule. Why, my woman, I never saw
you look one 'alf so 'an'some as you do now!"

"But the disgrace of it, John!" said Alice, hanging her head, and so
hiding the pleasure that would dawn through all the mist of her
misery.

"Let your father and mother settle that betwixt 'em, Alice. 'Tain't
none o' my business. Please God, we'll do different.--When shall it
be, my girl?"

"When you like, John," answered Alice, without raising her head,
thoughtfully.

When she had withdrawn herself from the too rigorous embrace with
which he received her consent, she remarked--

"I do believe, John, money ain't a good thing! Sure as I live, with
the very wind o' that money, the devil entered into me. Didn't you
hate me, John? Speak the truth now."

"No, Alice. I did cry a bit over you, though. You _was_ possessed
like."

"I _was_ possessed. I do believe if that money hadn't been took from
me, I'd never ha' had you, John. Ain't it awful to think on?"

"Well, no. O' coorse! How could ye?" said Jephson--with reluctance.

"Now, John, don't ye talk like that, for I won't stand it. Don't you
go for to set me up again with excusin' of me. I'm a nasty conceited
cat, I am--and all for nothing but mean pride."

"Mind ye, ye're mine now, Alice; an' what's mine's mine, an' I won't
have it abused. I knows you twice the woman you was afore, and all the
world couldn't gi' me such another Christmas-box--no, not if it was
all gold watches and roast beef."

When Mr. Greatorex returned to his wife's room, and thought to find
her asleep as he had left her, he was dismayed to hear sounds of soft
weeping from the bed. Some tone or stray word, never intended to reach
her ear, had been enough to reveal the truth concerning her baby.

"Hush! hush!" he said, with more love in his heart than had moved
there for many months, and therefore more in his tone than she had
heard for as many;--"if you cry you will be ill. Hush, my dear!"

In a moment, ere he could prevent her, she had flung her arms around
his neck as he stooped over her.

"Husband! husband!" she cried, "is it my fault?"

"You behaved perfectly," he returned. "No woman could have been
braver."

"Ah, but I wouldn't stay at home when you wanted me."

"Never mind that now, my child," he said.

At the word she pulled his face down to hers.

"I have _you_, and I don't care," he added.

"_Do_ you care to have me?" she said, with a sob that ended in a loud
cry. "Oh! I don't deserve it. But I _will_ be good after this. I
promise you I will."

"Then you must begin now, my darling. You must lie perfectly still,
and not cry a bit, or you will go after the baby, and I shall be left
alone."

She looked up at him with such a light in her face as he had never
dreamed of there before. He had never seen her so lovely. Then she
withdrew her arms, repressed her tears, smiled, and turned her face
away. He put her hands under the clothes, and in a minute or two she
was again fast asleep.




CHAPTER VII.


That day, when Phosy and her father had sat down to their Christmas
dinner, he rose again, and taking her up as she sat, chair and all,
set her down close to him, on the other side of the corner of the
table. It was the first of a new covenant between them. The father's
eyes having been suddenly opened to her character and preciousness, as
well as to his own neglected duty in regard to her, it was as if a
well of life had burst forth at his feet. And every day, as he looked
in her face and talked to her, it was with more and more respect for
what he found in her, with growing tenderness for her predilections,
and reverence for the divine idea enclosed in her ignorance, for her
childish wisdom, and her calm seeking--until at length he would have
been horrified at the thought of training her up in _his_ way: had she
not a way of her own to go--following--not the dead Jesus, but Him
who liveth for evermore? In the endeavour to help her, he had to find
his own position towards the truth; and the results were weighty.--Nor
did the child's influence work forward merely. In his intercourse with
her he was so often reminded of his first wife, and that, with the
gloss or comment of a childish reproduction, that his memories of her
at length grew a little tender, and through the child he began to
understand the nature and worth of the mother. In her child she had
given him what she could not be herself. Unable to keep up with him,
she had handed him her baby, and dropped on the path.

Nor was little Sophy his only comfort. Through their common loss and
her husband's tenderness, Letty began to grow a woman. And her growth
was the more rapid that, himself taught through Phosy, her husband no
longer desired to make her adopt his tastes, and judge with his
experiences, but, as became the elder and the tried, entered into her
tastes and experiences--became, as it were, a child again with her,
that, through the thing she was, he might help the thing she had to
be.

As soon as she was able to bear it, he told her the story of the dead
Jesus, and with the tale came to her heart love for Phosy. She had
lost a son for a season, but she had gained a daughter for ever.

Such were the gifts the Christ-child brought to one household that
Christmas. And the days of the mourning of that household were ended.




THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGEN AND NYCTERIS.


_A DAY AND NIGHT MÄHRCHEN_.


CHAPTER I. WATHO.


There was once a witch who desired to know everything. But the wiser a
witch is, the harder she knocks her head against the wall when she
comes to it. Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind. She
cared for nothing in itself--only for knowing it. She was not
naturally cruel, but the wolf had made her cruel.

She was tall and graceful, with a white skin, red hair, and black
eyes, which had a red fire in them. She was straight and strong, but
now and then would fall bent together, shudder, and sit for a moment
with her head turned over her shoulder, as if the wolf had got out of
her mind on to her back.




CHAPTER II. AURORA.


This witch got two ladies to visit her. One of them belonged to the
court, and her husband had been sent on a far and difficult embassy.
The other was a young widow whose husband had lately died, and who had
since lost her sight, Watho lodged them in different parts of her
castle, and they did not know of each other's existence.

The castle stood on the side of a hill sloping gently down into a
narrow valley, in which was a river, with a pebbly channel and a
continual song. The garden went down to the bank of the river,
enclosed by high walls, which crossed the river and there stopped.
Each wall had a double row of battlements, and between the rows was a
narrow walk.

In the topmost story of the castle the Lady Aurora occupied a spacious
apartment of several large rooms looking southward. The windows
projected oriel-wise over the garden below, and there was a splendid
view from them both up and down and across the river. The opposite
side of the valley was steep, but not very high. Far away snow-peaks
were visible. These rooms Aurora seldom left, but their airy spaces,
the brilliant landscape and sky, the plentiful sunlight, the musical
instruments, books, pictures, curiosities, with the company of Watho
who made herself charming, precluded all dulness. She had venison and
feathered game to eat, milk and pale sunny sparkling wine to drink.

She had hair of the yellow gold, waved and rippled; her skin was fair,
not white like Watho's, and her eyes were of the blue of the heavens
when bluest; her features were delicate but strong, her mouth large
and finely curved, and haunted with smiles.




CHAPTER III. VESPER.


Behind the castle the hill rose abruptly; the north-eastern tower,
indeed, was in contact with the rock, and communicated with the
interior of it. For in the rock was a series of chambers, known only
to Watho and the one servant whom she trusted, called Falca. Some
former owner had constructed these chambers after the tomb of an
Egyptian king, and probably with the same design, for in the centre of
one of them stood what could only be a sarcophagus, but that and
others were walled off. The sides and roofs of them were carved in low
relief, and curiously painted. Here the witch lodged the blind lady,
whose name was Vesper. Her eyes were black, with long black lashes;
her skin had a look of darkened silver, but was of purest tint and
grain; her hair was black and fine and straight-flowing; her features
were exquisitely formed, and if less beautiful yet more lovely from
sadness; she always looked as if she wanted to lie down and not rise
again. She did not know she was lodged in a tomb, though now and then
she wondered she never touched a window. There were many couches,
covered with richest silk, and soft as her own cheek, for her to lie
upon; and the carpets were so thick, she might have cast herself down
anywhere--as befitted a tomb. The place was dry and warm, and
cunningly pierced for air, so that it was always fresh, and lacked
only sunlight. There the witch fed her upon milk, and wine dark as a
carbuncle, and pomegranates, and purple grapes, and birds that dwell
in marshy places; and she played to her mournful tunes, and caused
wailful violins to attend her, and told her sad tales, thus holding
her ever in an atmosphere of sweet sorrow.




CHAPTER IV. PHOTOGEN.


Watho at length had her desire, for witches often get what they want:
a splendid boy was born to the fair Aurora. Just as the sun rose, he
opened his eyes. Watho carried him immediately to a distant part of
the castle, and persuaded the mother that he never cried but once,
dying the moment he was born. Overcome with grief, Aurora left the
castle as soon as she was able, and Watho never invited her again.

And now the witch's care was, that the child should not know darkness.
Persistently she trained him until at last he never slept during the
day, and never woke during the night. She never let him see anything
black, and even kept all dull colours out of his way. Never, if she
could help it, would she let a shadow fall upon him, watching against
shadows as if they had been live things that would hurt him. All day
he basked in the full splendour of the sun, in the same large rooms
his mother had occupied. Watho used him to the sun, until he could
bear more of it than any dark-blooded African. In the hottest of every
day, she stript him and laid him in it, that he might ripen like a
peach; and the boy rejoiced in it, and would resist being dressed
again. She brought all her knowledge to bear on making his muscles
strong and elastic and swiftly responsive--that his soul, she said
laughing, might sit in every fibre, be all in every part, and awake
the moment of call. His hair was of the red gold, but his eyes grew
darker as he grew, until they were as black as Vesper's. He was the
merriest of creatures, always laughing, always loving, for a moment
raging, then laughing afresh. Watho called him Photogen.




CHAPTER V. NYCTERIS.


Five or six months after the birth of Photogen, the dark lady also
gave birth to a baby: in the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the
dead of night, under the feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe,
a girl came into the darkness with a wail. And just as she was born
for the first time, Vesper was born for the second, and passed into a
world as unknown to her as this was to her child--who would have to be
born yet again before she could see her mother.

Watho called her Nycteris, and she grew as like Vesper as possible--in
all but one particular. She had the same dark skin, dark eyelashes and
brows, dark hair, and gentle sad look; but she had just the eyes of
Aurora, the mother of Photogen, and if they grew darker as she grew
older, it was only a darker blue. Watho, with the help of Falca, took
the greatest possible care of her--in every way consistent with her
plans, that is,--the main point in which was that she should never see
any light but what came from the lamp. Hence her optic nerves, and
indeed her whole apparatus for seeing, grew both larger and more
sensitive; her eyes, indeed, stopped short only of being too large.
Under her dark hair and forehead and eyebrows, they looked like two
breaks in a cloudy night-sky, through which peeped the heaven where
the stars and no clouds live. She was a sadly dainty little creature.
No one in the world except those two was aware of the being of the
little bat. Watho trained her to sleep during the day, and wake during
the night. She taught her music, in which she was herself a
proficient, and taught her scarcely anything else.




CHAPTER VI. HOW PHOTOGEN GREW.


The hollow in which the castle of Watho lay, was a cleft in a plain
rather than a valley among hills, for at the top of its steep sides,
both north and south, was a table-land, large and wide. It was covered
with rich grass and flowers, with here and there a wood, the outlying
colony of a great forest. These grassy plains were the finest hunting
grounds in the world. Great herds of small, but fierce cattle, with
humps and shaggy manes, roved about them, also antelopes and gnus, and
the tiny roedeer, while the woods were swarming with wild creatures.
The tables of the castle were mainly supplied from them. The chief of
Watho's huntsmen was a fine fellow, and when Photogen began to outgrow
the training she could give him, she handed him over to Fargu. He with
a will set about teaching him all he knew. He got him pony after pony,
larger and larger as he grew, every one less manageable than that
which had preceded it, and advanced him from pony to horse, and from
horse to horse, until he was equal to anything in that kind which the
country produced. In similar fashion he trained him to the use of bow
and arrow, substituting every three months a stronger bow and longer
arrows; and soon he became, even on horseback, a wonderful archer. He
was but fourteen when he killed his first bull, causing jubilation
among the huntsmen, and, indeed, through all the castle, for there too
he was the favourite. Every day, almost as soon as the sun was up, he
went out hunting, and would in general be out nearly the whole of the
day. But Watho had laid upon Fargu just one commandment, namely, that
Photogen should on no account, whatever the plea, be out until
sundown, or so near it as to wake in him the desire of seeing what was
going to happen; and this commandment Fargu was anxiously careful not
to break; for, although he would not have trembled had a whole herd of
bulls come down upon him, charging at full speed across the level, and
not an arrow left in his quiver, he was more than afraid of his
mistress. When she looked at him in a certain way, he felt, he said,
as if his heart turned to ashes in his breast, and what ran in his
veins was no longer blood, but milk and water. So that, ere long, as
Photogen grew older, Fargu began to tremble, for he found it steadily
growing harder to restrain him. So full of life was he, as Fargu said
to his mistress, much to her content, that he was more like a live
thunderbolt than a human being. He did not know what fear was, and
that not because he did not know danger; for he had had a severe
laceration from the razor-like tusk of a boar--whose spine, however,
he had severed with one blow of his hunting-knife, before Fargu could
reach him with defence. When he would spur his horse into the midst of
a herd of bulls, carrying only his bow and his short sword, or shoot
an arrow into a herd, and go after it as if to reclaim it for a
runaway shaft, arriving in time to follow it with a spear-thrust
before the wounded animal knew which way to charge, Fargu thought with
terror how it would be when he came to know the temptation of the
huddle-spot leopards, and the knife-clawed lynxes, with which the
forest was haunted. For the boy had been so steeped in the sun, from
childhood so saturated with his influence, that he looked upon every
danger from a sovereign height of courage. When, therefore, he was
approaching his sixteenth year, Fargu ventured to beg of Watho that
she would lay her commands upon the youth himself, and release him
from responsibility for him. One might as soon hold a tawny-maned lion
as Photogen, he said. Watho called the youth, and in the presence of
Fargu laid her command upon him never to be out when the rim of the
sun should touch the horizon, accompanying the prohibition with hints
of consequences, none the less awful that they were obscure. Photogen
listened respectfully, but, knowing neither the taste of fear nor the
temptation of the night, her words were but sounds to him.




CHAPTER VII. HOW NYCTERIS GREW.


The little education she intended Nycteris to have, Watho gave her by
word of mouth. Not meaning she should have light enough to read by, to
leave other reasons unmentioned, she never put a book in her hands.
Nycteris, however, saw so much better than Watho imagined, that the
light she gave her was quite sufficient, and she managed to coax Falca
into teaching her the letters, after which she taught herself to read,
and Falca now and then brought her a child's book. But her chief
pleasure was in her instrument. Her very fingers loved it, and would
wander about over its keys like feeding sheep. She was not unhappy.
She knew nothing of the world except the tomb in which she dwelt, and
had some pleasure in everything she did. But she desired,
nevertheless, something more or different. She did not know what it
was, and the nearest she could come to expressing it to herself
was--that she wanted more room. Watho and Falca would go from her
beyond the shine of the lamp, and come again; therefore surely there
must be more room somewhere. As often as she was left alone, she would
fall to poring over the coloured bas-reliefs on the walls. These were
intended to represent various of the powers of Nature under
allegorical similitudes, and as nothing can be made that does not
belong to the general scheme, she could not fail at least to imagine a
flicker of relationship between some of them, and thus a shadow of the
reality of things found its way to her.

There was one thing, however, which moved and taught her more than all
the rest--the lamp, namely, that hung from the ceiling, which she
always saw alight, though she never saw the flame, only the slight
condensation towards the centre of the alabaster globe. And besides
the operation of the light itself after its kind, the indefiniteness
of the globe, and the softness of the light, giving her the feeling as
if her eyes could go in and into its whiteness, were somehow also
associated with the idea of space and room. She would sit for an hour
together gazing up at the lamp, and her heart would swell as she
gazed. She would wonder what had hurt her, when she found her face wet
with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without
knowing it. She never looked thus at the lamp except when she was
alone.




CHAPTER VIII. THE LAMP.


Watho having given orders, took it for granted they were obeyed, and
that Falca was all night long with Nycteris, whose day it was. But
Falca could not get into the habit of sleeping through the day, and
would often leave her alone half the night. Then it seemed to Nycteris
that the white lamp was watching over her. As it was never permitted
to go out--while she was awake at least--Nycteris, except by shutting
her eyes, knew less about darkness than she did about light. Also, the
lamp being fixed high overhead, and in the centre of everything, she
did not know much about shadows either. The few there were fell almost
entirely on the floor, or kept like mice about the foot of the walls.

Once, when she was thus alone, there came the noise of a far-off
rumbling: she had never before heard a sound of which she did not know
the origin, and here therefore was a new sign of something beyond
these chambers. Then came a trembling, then a shaking; the lamp
dropped from the ceiling to the floor with a great crash, and she felt
as if both her eyes were hard shut and both her hands over them. She
concluded that it was the darkness that had made the rumbling and the
shaking, and rushing into the room, had thrown down the lamp. She sat
trembling. The noise and the shaking ceased, but the light did not
return. The darkness had eaten it up!

Her lamp gone, the desire at once awoke to get out of her prison. She
scarcely knew what _out_ meant; out of one room into another, where
there was not even a dividing door, only an open arch, was all she
knew of the world. But suddenly she remembered that she had heard
Falca speak of the lamp _going out_: this must be what she had meant?
And if the lamp had gone out, where had it gone? Surely where Falca
went, and like her it would come again. But she could not wait. The
desire to go out grew irresistible. She must follow her beautiful
lamp! She must find it! She must see what it was about!

Now there was a curtain covering a recess in the wall, where some of
her toys and gymnastic things were kept; and from behind that curtain
Watho and Falca always appeared, and behind it they vanished. How they
came out of solid wall, she had not an idea, all up to the wall was
open space, and all beyond it seemed wall; but clearly the first and
only thing she could do, was to feel her way behind the curtain. It
was so dark that a cat could not have caught the largest of mice.
Nycteris could see better than any cat, but now her great eyes were
not of the smallest use to her. As she went she trod upon a piece of
the broken lamp. She had never worn shoes or stockings, and the
fragment, though, being of soft alabaster, it did not cut, yet hurt
her foot. She did not know what it was, but as it had not been there
before the darkness came, she suspected that it had to do with the
lamp. She kneeled therefore, and searched with her hands, and bringing
two large pieces together, recognized the shape of the lamp. Therewith
it flashed upon her that the lamp was dead, that this brokenness was
the death of which she had read without understanding, that the
darkness had killed the lamp. What then could Falca have meant when
she spoke of the lamp _going out_? There was the lamp--dead, indeed,
and so changed that she would never have taken it for a lamp but for
the shape! No, it was not the lamp any more now it was dead, for all
that made it a lamp was gone, namely, the bright shining of it. Then
it must be the shine, the light, that had gone out! That must be what
Falca meant--and it must be somewhere in the other place in the wall.
She started afresh after it, and groped her way to the curtain.

Now she had never in her life tried to get out, and did not know how;
but instinctively she began to move her hands about over one of the
walls behind the curtain, half expecting them to go into it, as she
supposed Watho and Falca did. But the wall repelled her with
inexorable hardness, and she turned to the one opposite. In so doing,
she set her foot upon an ivory die, and as it met sharply the same
spot the broken alabaster had already hurt, she fell forward with her
outstretched hands against the wall. Something gave way, and she
tumbled out of the cavern.




CHAPTER IX. OUT.


But alas! _out_ was very much like _in_, for the same enemy, the
darkness, was here also. The next moment, however, came a great
gladness--a firefly, which had wandered in from the garden. She saw
the tiny spark in the distance. With slow pulsing ebb and throb of
light, it came pushing itself through the air, drawing nearer and
nearer, with that motion which more resembles swimming than flying,
and the light seemed the source of its own motion.

"My lamp! my lamp!" cried Nycteris. "It is the shiningness of my lamp,
which the cruel darkness drove out. My good lamp has been waiting for
me here all the time! It knew I would come after it, and waited to
take me with it."

She followed the firefly, which, like herself, was seeking the way
out. If it did not know the way, it was yet light; and, because all
light is one, any light may serve to guide to more light. If she was
mistaken in thinking it the spirit of her lamp, it was of the same
spirit as her lamp--and had wings. The gold-green jet-boat, driven by
light, went throbbing before her through a long narrow passage.
Suddenly it rose higher, and the same moment Nycteris fell upon an
ascending stair. She had never seen a stair before, and found going-up
a curious sensation. Just as she reached what seemed the top, the
firefly ceased to shine, and so disappeared. She was in utter darkness
once more. But when we are following the light, even its extinction is
a guide. If the firefly had gone on shining, Nycteris would have seen
the stair turn, and would have gone up to Watho's bedroom; whereas
now, feeling straight before her, she came to a latched door, which
after a good deal of trying she managed to open--and stood in a maze
of wondering perplexity, awe, and delight. What was it? Was it outside
of her, or something taking place in her head? Before her was a very
long and very narrow passage, broken up she could not tell how, and
spreading out above and on all sides to an infinite height and breadth
and distance--as if space itself were growing out of a trough. It was
brighter than her rooms had ever been--brighter than if six alabaster
lamps had been burning in them. There was a quantity of strange
streaking and mottling about it, very different from the shapes on her
walls. She was in a dream of pleasant perplexity, of delightful
bewilderment. She could not tell whether she was upon her feet or
drifting about like the firefly, driven by the pulses of an inward
bliss. But she knew little as yet of her inheritance. Unconsciously
she took one step forward from the threshold, and the girl who had
been from her very birth a troglodyte, stood in the ravishing glory of
a southern night, lit by a perfect moon--not the moon of our northern
clime, but a moon like silver glowing in a furnace--a moon one could
see to be a globe--not far off, a mere flat disc on the face of the
blue, but hanging down halfway, and looking as if one could see all
round it by a mere bending of the neck.

"It is my lamp!" she said, and stood dumb with parted lips. She looked
and felt as if she had been standing there in silent ecstasy from the
beginning.

"No, it is not my lamp," she said after a while; "it is the mother of
all the lamps."

And with that she fell on her knees, and spread out her hands to the
moon. She could not in the least have told what was in her mind, but
the action was in reality just a begging of the moon to be what she
was--that precise incredible splendour hung in the far-off roof, that
very glory essential to the being of poor girls born and bred in
caverns. It was a resurrection--nay, a birth itself, to Nycteris. What
the vast blue sky, studded with tiny sparks like the heads of diamond
nails, could be; what the moon, looking so absolutely content with
light.--why, she knew less about them than you and I! but the greatest
of astronomers might envy the rapture of such a first impression at
the age of sixteen. Immeasurably imperfect it was, but false the
impression could not be, for she saw with the eyes made for seeing,
and saw indeed what many men are too wise to see.

As she knelt, something softly flapped her, embraced her, stroked her,
fondled her. She rose to her feet, but saw nothing, did not know what
it was. It was likest a woman's breath. For she know nothing of the
air even, had never breathed the still newborn freshness of the world.
Her breath had come to her only through long passages and spirals in
the rock. Still less did she know of the air alive with motion--of
that thrice blessed thing, the wind of a summer night. It was like a
spiritual wine, filling her whole being with an intoxication of purest
joy. To breathe was a perfect existence. It seemed to her the light
itself she drew into her lungs. Possessed by the power of the gorgeous
night, she seemed at one and the same moment annihilated and
glorified.

She was in the open passage or gallery that ran round the top of the
garden walls, between the cleft battlements, but she did not once look
down to see what lay beneath. Her soul was drawn to the vault above
her, with its lamp and its endless room. At last she burst into tears,
and her heart was relieved, as the night itself is relieved by its
lightning and rain.

And now she grew thoughtful. She must hoard this splendour! What a
little ignorance her gaolers had made of her! Life was a mighty bliss,
and they had scraped hers to the bare bone! They must not know that
she knew. She must hide her knowledge--hide it even from her own eyes,
keeping it close in her bosom, content to know that she had it, even
when she could not brood on its presence, feasting her eyes with its
glory. She turned from the vision, therefore, with a sigh of utter
bliss, and with soft quiet steps and groping hands, stole back into
the darkness of the rock. What was darkness or the laziness of Time's
feet to one who had seen what she had that night seen? She was lifted
above all weariness--above all wrong.

When Falca entered, she uttered a cry of terror. But Nycteris called
to her not to be afraid, and told her how there had come a rumbling
and a shaking, and the lamp had fallen. Then Falca went and told her
mistress, and within an hour a new globe hung in the place of the old
one. Nycteris thought it did not look so bright and clear as the
former, but she made no lamentation over the change; she was far too
rich to heed it. For now, prisoner as she knew herself, her heart was
full of glory and gladness; at times she had to hold herself from
jumping up, and going dancing and singing about the room. When she
slept, instead of dull dreams, she had splendid visions. There were
times, it is true, when she became restless, and impatient to look
upon her riches, but then she would reason with herself, saying, "What
does it matter if I sit here for ages with my poor pale lamp, when out
there a lump is burning at which ten thousand little lamps are glowing
with wonder?"

She never doubted she had looked upon the day and the sun, of which
she had read; and always when she read of the day and the sun, she had
the night and the moon in her mind; and when she read of the night and
the moon, she thought only of the cave and the lamp that hung there.




CHAPTER X. THE GREAT LAMP.


It was some time before she had a second opportunity of going out, for
Falca, since the fall of the lamp, had been a little more careful, and
seldom left her for long. But one night, having a little headache,
Nycteris lay down upon her bed, and was lying with her eyes closed,
when she heard Falca come to her, and felt she was bending over her.
Disinclined to talk, she did not open her eyes, and lay quite still.
Satisfied that she was asleep, Falca left her, moving so softly that
her very caution made Nycteris open her eyes and look after her--just
in time to see her vanish--through a picture, as it seemed, that hung
on the wall a long way from the usual place of issue. She jumped up,
her headache forgotten, and ran in the opposite direction; got out,
groped her way to the stair, climbed, and reached the top of the
wall.--Alas! the great room was not so light as the little one she had
left. Why?--Sorrow of sorrows! the great lamp was gone! Had its globe
fallen? and its lovely light gone out upon great wings, a resplendent
firefly, oaring itself through a yet grander and lovelier room? She
looked down to see if it lay anywhere broken to pieces on the carpet
below; but she could not even see the carpet. But surely nothing very
dreadful could have happened--no rumbling or shaking, for there were
all the little lamps shining brighter than before, not one of them
looking as if any unusual matter had befallen. What if each of those
little lamps was growing into a big lamp, and after being a big lamp
for a while, had to go out and grow a bigger lamp still--out there,
beyond this _out_?--Ah! here was the living thing that would not be
seen, come to her again--bigger to-night! with such loving kisses, and
such liquid strokings of her cheeks and forehead, gently tossing her
hair, and delicately toying with it! But it ceased, and all was still.
Had it gone out? What would happen next? Perhaps the little lamps had
not to grow great lamps, but to fall one by one and go out
first?--With that, came from below a sweet scent, then another, and
another. Ah, how delicious! Perhaps they were all coming to her only
on their way out after the great lamp!--Then came the music of the
river, which she had been too absorbed in the sky to note the first
time. What was it? Alas! alas! another sweet living thing on its way
out. They were all marching slowly out in long lovely file, one after
the other, each taking its leave of her as it passed! It must be so:
here were more and more sweet sounds, following and fading! The whole
of the _Out_ was going out again; it was all going after the great
lovely lamp! She would be left the only creature in the solitary day!
Was there nobody to hang up a new lamp for the old one, and keep the
creatures from going?--She crept back to her rock very sad. She tried
to comfort herself by saying that anyhow there would be room out
there; but as she said it she shuddered at the thought of _empty_
room.

When next she succeeded in getting out, a half-moon hung in the east:
a new lamp had come, she thought, and all would be well.

It would be endless to describe the phases of feeling through which
Nycteris passed, more numerous and delicate than those of a thousand
changing moons. A fresh bliss bloomed in her soul with every varying
aspect of infinite nature. Ere long she began to suspect that the new
moon was the old moon, gone out and come in again like herself; also
that, unlike herself, it wasted and grew again; that it was indeed a
live thing, subject like herself to caverns, and keepers, and
solitudes, escaping and shining when it could. Was it a prison like
hers it was shut in? and did it grow dark when the lamp left it? Where
could be the way into it?--With that first she began to look below, as
well as above and around her; and then first noted the tops of the
trees between her and the floor. There were palms with their
red-fingered hands full of fruit; eucalyptus trees crowded with little
boxes of powder-puffs; oleanders with their half-caste roses; and
orange trees with their clouds of young silver stars, and their aged
balls of gold. Her eyes could see colours invisible to ours in the
moonlight, and all these she could distinguish well, though at first
she took them for the shapes and colours of the carpet of the great
room. She longed to get down among them, now she saw they were real
creatures, but she did not know how. She went along the whole length
of the wall to the end that crossed the river, but found no way of
going down. Above the river she stopped to gaze with awe upon the
rushing water. She knew nothing of water but from what she drank and
what she bathed in; and, as the moon shone on the dark, swift stream,
singing lustily as it flowed, she did not doubt the river was alive, a
swift rushing serpent of life, going--out?--whither? And then she
wondered if what was brought into her rooms had been killed that she
might drink it, and have her bath in it.

Once when she stepped out upon the wall, it was into the midst of a
fierce wind. The trees were all roaring. Great clouds were rushing
along the skies, and tumbling over the little lamps: the great lamp
had not come yet. All was in tumult. The wind seized her garments and
hair, and shook them as if it would tear them from her. What could she
have done to make the gentle creature so angry? Or was this another
creature altogether--of the same kind, but hugely bigger, and of a
very different temper and behaviour? But the whole place was angry! Or
was it that the creatures dwelling in it, the wind, and the trees, and
the clouds, and the river, had all quarrelled, each with all the rest?
Would the whole come to confusion and disorder? But, as she gazed
wondering and disquieted, the moon, larger than ever she had seen her,
came lifting herself above the horizon to look, broad and red, as if
she, too, were swollen with anger that she had been roused from her
rest by their noise, and compelled to hurry up to see what her
children were about, thus rioting in her absence, lest they should
rack the whole frame of things. And as she rose, the loud wind grew
quieter and scolded less fiercely, the trees grew stiller and moaned
with a lower complaint, and the clouds hunted and hurled themselves
less wildly across the sky. And as if she were pleased that her
children obeyed her very presence, the moon grew smaller as she
ascended the heavenly stair; her puffed cheeks sank, her complexion
grew clearer, and a sweet smile spread over her countenance, as
peacefully she rose and rose. But there was treason and rebellion in
her court; for, ere she reached the top of her great stairs, the
clouds had assembled, forgetting their late wars, and very still they
were as they laid their heads together and conspired. Then combining,
and lying silently in wait until she came near, they threw themselves
upon her, and swallowed her up. Down from the roof came spots of wet,
faster and faster, and they wetted the cheeks of Nycteris; and what
could they be but the tears of the moon, crying because her children
were smothering her? Nycteris wept too, and not knowing what to think,
stole back in dismay to her room.

The next time, she came out in fear and trembling. There was the moon
still! away in the west--poor, indeed, and old, and looking dreadfully
worn, as if all the wild beasts in the sky had been gnawing at
her--but there she was, alive still, and able to shine!




CHAPTER XI. THE SUNSET.


Knowing nothing of darkness, or stars, or moon, Photogen spent his
days in hunting. On a great white horse he swept over the grassy
plains, glorying in the sun, fighting the wind, and killing the
buffaloes.

One morning, when he happened to be on the ground a little earlier
than usual, and before his attendants, he caught sight of an animal
unknown to him, stealing from a hollow into which the sunrays had not
yet reached. Like a swift shadow it sped over the grass, slinking
southward to the forest. He gave chase, noted the body of a buffalo it
had half eaten, and pursued it the harder. But with great leaps and
bounds the creature shot farther and farther ahead of him, and
vanished. Turning therefore defeated, he met Fargu, who had been
following him as fast as his horse could carry him.

"What animal was that, Fargu?" he asked. "How he did run!"

Fargu answered he might be a leopard, but he rather thought from his
pace and look that he was a young lion.

"What a coward he must be!" said Photogen.

"Don't be too sure of that," rejoined Fargu. "He is one of the
creatures the sun makes uncomfortable. As soon as the sun is down, he
will be brave enough."

He had scarcely said it, when he repented nor did he regret it the
less when he found that Photogen made no reply. But alas! said was
said.

"Then," said Photogen to himself, "that contemptible beast is one of
the terrors of sundown, of which Madam Watho spoke!"

He hunted all day, but not with his usual spirit. He did not ride so
hard, and did not kill one buffalo. Fargu to his dismay observed also
that he took every pretext for moving farther south, nearer to the
forest. But all at once, the sun now sinking in the west, he seemed to
change his mind, for he turned his horse's head, and rode home so fast
that the rest could not keep him in sight. When they arrived, they
found his horse in the stable, and concluded that he had gone into the
castle. But he had in truth set out again by the back of it. Crossing
the river a good way up the valley, he reascended to the ground they
had left, and just before sunset reached the skirts of the forest.

The level orb shone straight in between the bare stems, and saying to
himself he could not fail to find the beast, he rushed into the wood.
But even as he entered, he turned, and looked to the west. The rim of
the red was touching the horizon, all jagged with broken hills. "Now,"
said Photogen, "we shall see;" but he said it in the face of a darkness
he had not proved. The moment the sun began to sink among the spikes
and saw-edges, with a kind of sudden flap at his heart a fear
inexplicable laid hold of the youth; and as he had never felt anything
of the kind before, the very fear itself terrified him. As the sun
sank, it rose like the shadow of the world, and grew deeper and
darker. He could not even think what it might be, so utterly did it
enfeeble him. When the last flaming scimitar-edge of the sun went out
like a lamp, his horror seemed to blossom into very madness. Like the
closing lids of an eye--for there was no twilight, and this night no
moon--the terror and the darkness rushed together, and he knew them
for one. He was no longer the man he had known, or rather thought
himself. The courage he had had was in no sense his own--he had only
had courage, not been courageous; it had left him, and he could
scarcely stand--certainly not stand straight, for not one of his
joints could he make stiff or keep from trembling. He was but a spark
of the sun, in himself nothing.

The beast was behind him--stealing upon him! He turned. All was dark
in the wood, but to his fancy the darkness here and there broke into
pairs of green eyes, and he had not the power even to raise his
bow-hand from his side. In the strength of despair he strove to rouse
courage enough--not to fight--that he did not even desire--but to run.
Courage to flee home was all he could ever imagine, and it would not
come. But what he had not, was ignominiously given him. A cry in the
wood, half a screech, half a growl, sent him running like a
boar-wounded cur. It was not even himself that ran, it was the fear
that had come alive in his legs: he did not know that they moved. But
as he ran he grew able to run--gained courage at least to be a coward.
The stars gave a little light. Over the grass he sped, and nothing
followed him. "How fallen, how changed," from the youth who had
climbed the hill as the sun went down! A mere contempt to himself, the
self that contemned was a coward with the self it contemned! There lay
the shapeless black of a buffalo, humped upon the grass: he made a
wide circuit, and swept on like a shadow driven in the wind. For the
wind had arisen, and added to his terror: it blew from behind him. He
reached the brow of the valley, and shot down the steep descent like a
falling star. Instantly the whole upper country behind him arose and
pursued him! The wind came howling after him, filled with screams,
shrieks, yells, roars, laughter, and chattering, as if all the animals
of the forest were careering with it. In his ears was a trampling
rush, the thunder of the hoofs of the cattle, in career from every
quarter of the wide plains to the brow of the hill above him! He fled
straight for the castle, scarcely with breath enough to pant.

As he reached the bottom of the valley, the moon peered up over its
edge. He had never seen the moon before--except in the daytime, when
he had taken her for a thin bright cloud. She was a fresh terror to
him--so ghostly! so ghastly! so gruesome!--so knowing as she looked
over the top of her garden-wall upon the world outside! That was the
night itself! the darkness alive--and after him! the horror of
horrors coming down the sky to curdle his blood, and turn his brain to
a cinder! He gave a sob, and made straight for the river, where it ran
between the two walls, at the bottom of the garden. He plunged in,
struggled through, clambered up the bank, and fell senseless on the
grass.




CHAPTER XII. THE GARDEN.


Although Nycteris took care not to stay out long at a time, and used
every precaution, she could hardly have escaped discovery so long, had
it not been that the strange attacks to which Watho was subject had
been more frequent of late, and had at last settled into an illness
which kept her to her bed. But whether from an access of caution or
from suspicion, Falca, having now to be much with her mistress both
day and night, took it at length into her head to fasten the door as
often as she went by her usual place of exit; so that one night, when
Nycteris pushed, she found, to her surprise and dismay, that the wall
pushed her again, and would not let her through; nor with all her
searching could she discover wherein lay the cause of the change. Then
first she felt the pressure of her prison-walls, and turning, half in
despair, groped her way to the picture where she had once seen Falca
disappear. There she soon found the spot by pressing upon which the
wall yielded. It let her through into a sort of cellar, where was a
glimmer of light from a sky whose blue was paled by the moon. From the
cellar she got into a long passage, into which the moon was shining,
and came to a door. She managed to open it, and, to her great joy,
found herself in _the other place_, not on the top of the wall,
however, but in the garden she had longed to enter. Noiseless as a
fluffy moth she flitted away into the covert of the trees and shrubs,
her bare feet welcomed by the softest of carpets, which, by the very
touch, her feet knew to be alive, whence it came that it was so sweet
and friendly to them. A soft little wind was out among the trees,
running now here, now there, like a child that had got its will. She
went dancing over the grass, looking behind her at her shadow, as she
went. At first she had taken it for a little black creature that made
game of her, but when she perceived that it was only where she kept
the moon away, and that every tree, however great and grand a
creature, had also one of these strange attendants, she soon learned
not to mind it, and by and by it became the source of as much
amusement to her, as to any kitten its tail. It was long before she
was quite at home with the trees, however. At one time they seemed to
disapprove of her; at another not even to know she was there, and to
be altogether taken up with their own business. Suddenly, as she went
from one to another of them, looking up with awe at the murmuring
mystery of their branches and leaves, she spied one a little way off,
which was very different from all the rest. It was white, and dark,
and sparkling, and spread like a palm--a small slender palm, without
much head; and it grew very fast, and sang as it grew. But it never
grew any bigger, for just as fast as she could see it growing, it kept
falling to pieces. When she got close to it, she discovered that it
was a water-tree--made of just such water as she washed with--only it
was alive of course, like the river--a different sort of water from
that, doubtless, seeing the one crept swiftly along the floor, and the
other shot straight up, and fell, and swallowed itself, and rose
again. She put her feet into the marble basin, which was the
flower-pot in which it grew. It was full of real water, living and
cool--so nice, for the night was hot!

But the flowers! ah, the flowers! she was friends with them from the
very first. What wonderful creatures they were!--and so kind and
beautiful--always sending out such colours and such scents--red scent,
and white scent, and yellow scent--for the other creatures! The one
that was invisible and everywhere, took such a quantity of their
scents, and carried it away! yet they did not seem to mind. It was
their talk, to show they were alive, and not painted like those on the
walls of her rooms, and on the carpets.

She wandered along down the garden until she reached the river. Unable
then to get any further--for she was a little afraid, and justly, of
the swift watery serpent--she dropped on the grassy bank, dipped her
feet in the water, and felt it running and pushing against them. For a
long time she sat thus, and her bliss seemed complete, as she gazed at
the river, and watched the broken picture of the great lamp overhead,
moving up one side of the roof, to go down the other.




CHAPTER XIII. SOMETHING QUITE NEW.


A beautiful moth brushed across the great blue eyes of Nycteris. She
sprang to her feet to follow it--not in the spirit of the hunter, but
of the lover. Her heart--like every heart, if only its fallen sides
were cleared away--was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved
everything she saw. But as she followed the moth, she caught sight of
something lying on the bank of the river, and not yet having learned
to be afraid of anything, ran straight to see what it was. Reaching
it, she stood amazed. Another girl like herself! But what a
strange-looking girl!--so curiously dressed too!--and not able to
move! Was she dead? Filled suddenly with pity, she sat down, lifted
Photogen's head, laid it on her lap, and began stroking his face. Her
warm hands brought him to himself. He opened his black eyes, out of
which had gone all the fire, and looked up with a strange sound of
fear, half moan, half gasp. But when he saw her face, he drew a deep
breath, and lay motionless--gazing at her: those blue marvels above
him, like a better sky, seemed to side with courage and assuage his
terror. At length, in a trembling, awed voice, and a half whisper, he
said, "Who are you?"

"I am Nycteris," she answered.

"You are a creature of the darkness, and love the night," he said, his
fear beginning to move again.

"I may be a creature of the darkness," she replied. "I hardly know
what you mean. But I do not love the night. I love the day--with all
my heart; and I sleep all the night long."

"How can that be?" said Photogen, rising on his elbow, but dropping his
head on her lap again the moment he saw the moon; "--how can it be,"
he repeated, "when I see your eyes there--wide awake?"

She only smiled and stroked him, for she did not understand him, and
thought he did not know what he was saying.

"Was it a dream then?" resumed Photogen, rubbing his eyes. But with
that his memory came clear, and he shuddered, and cried, "Oh horrible!
horrible! to be turned all at once into a coward! a shameful,
contemptible, disgraceful coward! I am ashamed--ashamed--and _so_
frightened! It is all so frightful!"

"What is so frightful?" asked Nycteris, with a smile like that of a
mother to her child waked from a bad dream.

"All, all," he answered; "all this darkness and the roaring."

"My dear," said Nycteris, "there is no roaring. How sensitive you must
be! What you hear is only the walking of the water, and the running
about of the sweetest of all the creatures. She is invisible, and I
call her Everywhere, for she goes through all the other creatures and
comforts them. Now she is amusing herself, and them too, with shaking
them and kissing them, and blowing in their faces. Listen: do you call
that roaring? You should hear her when she is rather angry though! I
don't know why, but she is sometimes, and then she does roar a
little."

"It is so horribly dark!" said Photogen, who, listening while she
spoke, had satisfied himself that there was no roaring.

"Dark!" she echoed. "You should be in my room when an earthquake has
killed my lamp. I do not understand. How _can_ you call this dark? Let
me see: yes, you have eyes, and big ones, bigger than Madam Watho's or
Falca's--not so big as mine, I fancy--only I never saw mine. But
then--oh yes!--I know now what is the matter! You can't see with them
because they are so black. Darkness can't see, of course. Never mind:
I will be your eyes, and teach you to see. Look here--at these lovely
white things in the grass, with red sharp points all folded together
into one. Oh, I love them so! I could sit looking at them all day, the
darlings!"

Photogen looked close at the flowers, and thought he had seen
something like them before, but could not make them out. As Nycteris
had never seen an open daisy, so had he never seen a closed one.

Thus instinctively Nycteris tried to turn him away from his fear; and
the beautiful creature's strange lovely talk helped not a little to
make him forget it.

"You call it dark!" she said again, as if she could not get rid of the
absurdity of the idea; "why, I could count every blade of the green
hair--I suppose it is what the books call grass--within two yards of
me! And just look at the great lamp! It is brighter than usual to-day,
and I can't think why you should be frightened, or call it dark!"

As she spoke, she went on stroking his cheeks and hair, and trying to
comfort him. But oh how miserable he was! and how plainly he looked
it! He was on the point of saying that her great lamp was dreadful to
him, looking like a witch, walking in the sleep of death; but he was
not so ignorant as Nycteris, and knew even in the moonlight that she
was a woman, though he had never seen one so young or so lovely
before; and while she comforted his fear, her presence made him the
more ashamed of it. Besides, not knowing her nature, he might annoy
her, and make her leave him to his misery. He lay still therefore,
hardly daring to move: all the little life he had seemed to come from
her, and if he were to move, she might move; and if she were to leave
him, he must weep like a child.

"How did you come here?" asked Nycteris, taking his face between her
hands.

"Down the hill," he answered.

"Where do you sleep?" she asked.

He signed in the direction of the house. She gave a little laugh of
delight.

"When you have learned not to be frightened, you will always be
wanting to come out with me," she said.

She thought with herself she would ask her presently, when she had
come to herself a little, how she had made her escape, for she must,
of course, like herself have got out of a cave, in which Watho and
Falca had been keeping her.

"Look at the lovely colours," she went on, pointing to a rose-bush, on
which Photogen could not see a single flower. "They are far more
beautiful--are they not?--than any of the colours upon your walls. And
then they are alive, and smell so sweet!"

He wished she would not make him keep opening his eyes to look at
things he could not see; and every other moment would start and grasp
tight hold of her, as some fresh pang of terror shot into him.

"Come, come, dear!" said Nycteris; "you must not go on this way. You
must be a brave girl, and--"

"A girl!" shouted Photogen, and started to his feet in wrath. "If you
were a man, I should kill you."

"A man?" repeated Nycteris: "what is that? How could I be that? We are
both girls--are we not?"

"No, I am not a girl," he answered; "--although," he added, changing
his tone, and casting himself on the ground at her feet, "I have given
you too good reason to call me one."

"Oh, I see!" returned Nycteris. "No, of course! you can't be a girl:
girls are not afraid--without reason. I understand now: it is because
you are not a girl that you are so frightened."

Photogen twisted and writhed upon the grass.

"No, it is not," he said sulkily; "it is this horrible darkness that
creeps into me, goes all through me, into the very marrow of my
bones--that is what makes me behave like a girl. If only the sun would
rise!"

"The sun! what is it?" cried Nycteris, now in her turn conceiving a
vague fear.

Then Photogen broke into a rhapsody, in which he vainly sought to
forget his.

"It is the soul, the life, the heart, the glory of the universe," he
said. "The worlds dance like motes in his beams. The heart of man is
strong and brave in his light, and when it departs his courage grows
from him--goes with the sun, and he becomes such as you see me now."

"Then that is not the sun?" said Nycteris, thoughtfully, pointing up
to the moon.

"That!" cried Photogen, with utter scorn; "I know nothing about
_that_, except that it is ugly and horrible. At best it can be only
the ghost of a dead sun. Yes, that is it! That is what makes it look
so frightful."

"No," said Nycteris, after a long, thoughtful pause; "you must be
wrong there. I think the sun is the ghost of a dead moon, and that is
how he is so much more splendid as you say.--Is there, then, another
big room, where the sun lives in the roof?"

"I do not know what you mean," replied Photogen. "But you mean to be
kind, I know, though you should not call a poor fellow in the dark a
girl. If you will let me lie here, with my head in your lap, I should
like to sleep. Will you watch me, and take care of me?"

"Yes, that I will," answered Nycteris, forgetting all her own danger.

So Photogen fell asleep.




CHAPTER XIV. THE SUN.


There Nycteris sat, and there the youth lay, all night long, in the
heart of the great cone-shadow of the earth, like two Pharaohs in one
pyramid. Photogen slept, and slept; and Nycteris sat motionless lest
she should wake him, and so betray him to his fear.

The moon rode high in the blue eternity; it was a very triumph of
glorious night; the river ran babble-murmuring in deep soft syllables;
the fountain kept rushing moon-ward, and blossoming momently to a
great silvery flower, whose petals were for ever falling like snow,
but with a continuous musical clash, into the bed of its exhaustion
beneath; the wind woke, took a run among the trees, went to sleep, and
woke again; the daisies slept on their feet at hers, but she did not
know they slept; the roses might well seem awake, for their scent
filled the air, but in truth they slept also, and the odour was that
of their dreams; the oranges hung like gold lamps in the trees, and
their silvery flowers were the souls of their yet unembodied children;
the scent of the acacia blooms filled the air like the very odour of
the moon herself.

At last, unused to the living air, and weary with sitting so still and
so long, Nycteris grew drowsy. The air began to grow cool. It was
getting near the time when she too was accustomed to sleep. She closed
her eyes just a moment, and nodded--opened them suddenly wide, for she
had promised to watch.

In that moment a change had come. The moon had got round, and was
fronting her from the west, and she saw that her face was altered,
that she had grown pale, as if she too were wan with fear, and from
her lofty place espied a coming terror. The light seemed to be
dissolving out of her; she was dying--she was going out! And yet
everything around looked strangely clear--clearer than ever she had
seen anything before: how could the lamp be shedding more light when
she herself had less? Ah, that was just it! See how faint she looked!
It was because the light was forsaking her, and spreading itself over
the room, that she grew so thin and pale! She was giving up
everything! She was melting away from the roof like a bit of sugar in
water.

Nycteris was fast growing afraid, and sought refuge with the face upon
her lap. How beautiful the creature was!--what to call it she could
not think, for it had been angry when she called it what Watho called
her. And, wonder upon wonder! now, even in the cold change that was
passing upon the great room, the colour as of a red rose was rising in
the wan cheek. What beautiful yellow hair it was that spread over her
lap! What great huge breaths the creature took! And what were those
curious things it carried? She had seen them on her walls, she was
sure.

Thus she talked to herself while the lamp grew paler and paler, and
everything kept growing yet clearer. What could it mean? The lamp was
dying--going out into the other place of which the creature in her lap
had spoken, to be a sun! But why were the things growing clearer
before it was yet a sun? That was the point. Was it her growing into a
sun that did it? Yes! yes! it was coming death! She knew it, for it
was coming upon her also! She felt it coming! What was she about to
grow into? Something beautiful, like the creature in her lap? It might
be! Anyhow, it must be death; for all her strength was going out of
her, while all around her was growing so light she could not bear it!
She must be blind soon! Would she be blind or dead first?

For the sun was rushing up behind her. Photogen woke, lifted his head
from her lap, and sprang to his feet. His face was one radiant smile.
His heart was full of daring--that of the hunter who will creep into
the tiger's den. Nycteris gave a cry, covered her face with her hands,
and pressed her eyelids close. Then blindly she stretched out her arms
to Photogen, crying, "Oh, I am so frightened! What is this? It must be
death! I don't wish to die yet. I love this room and the old lamp. I
do not want the other place! This is terrible. I want to hide. I want
to get into the sweet, soft, dark hands of all the other creatures. Ah
me! ah me!"

"What is the matter with you, girl?" said Photogen, with the arrogance
of all male creatures until they have been taught by the other kind.
He stood looking down upon her over his bow, of which he was examining
the string. "There is no fear of anything now, child. It is day. The
sun is all but up. Look! he will be above the brow of yon hill in one
moment more! Good-bye. Thank you for my night's lodging. I'm off.
Don't be a goose. If ever I can do anything for you--and all that, you
know!"

"Don't leave me; oh, don't leave me!" cried Nycteris. "I am dying! I
am dying! I cannot move. The light sucks all the strength out of me.
And oh, I am so frightened!"

But already Photogen had splashed through the river, holding high his
bow that it might not get wet. He rushed across the level, and
strained up the opposing hill. Hearing no answer, Nycteris removed her
hands. Photogen had reached the top, and the same moment the sunrays
alighted upon him: the glory of the king of day crowded blazing upon
the golden-haired youth. Radiant as Apollo, he stood in mighty
strength, a flashing shape in the midst of flame. He fitted a glowing
arrow to a gleaming bow. The arrow parted with a keen musical twang of
the bowstring, and Photogen darting after it, vanished with a shout.
Up shot Apollo himself, and from his quiver scattered astonishment and
exultation. But the brain of poor Nycteris was pierced through and
through. She fell down in utter darkness. All around her was a flaming
furnace. In despair and feebleness and agony, she crept back, feeling
her way with doubt and difficulty and enforced persistence to her
cell. When at last the friendly darkness of her chamber folded her
about with its cooling and consoling arms, she threw herself on her
bed and fell fast asleep. And there she slept on, one alive in a tomb,
while Photogen, above in the sun-glory, pursued the buffaloes on the
lofty plain, thinking not once of her where she lay dark and forsaken,
whose presence had been his refuge, her eyes and her hands his
guardians through the night. He was in his glory and his pride; and
the darkness and its disgrace had vanished for a time.




CHAPTER XV. THE COWARD HERO.


But no sooner had the sun reached the noonstead, than Photogen began
to remember the past night in the shadow of that which was at hand,
and to remember it with shame. He had proved himself--and not to
himself only, but to a girl as well--a coward!--one bold in the
daylight, while there was nothing to fear, but trembling like any
slave when the night arrived. There was, there must be, something
unfair in it! A spell had been cast upon him! He had eaten, he had
drunk something that did not agree with courage! In any case he had
been taken unprepared! How was he to know what the going down of the
sun would be like? It was no wonder he should have been surprised into
terror, seeing it was what it was--in its very nature so terrible!
Also, one could not see where danger might be coming from! You might
be torn in pieces, carried off, or swallowed up, without even seeing
where to strike a blow! Every possible excuse he caught at, eager as a
self-lover to lighten his self-contempt. That day he astonished the
huntsmen--terrified them with his reckless darings--all to prove to
himself he was no coward. But nothing eased his shame. One thing only
had hope in it--the resolve to encounter the dark in solemn earnest,
now that he knew something of what it was. It was nobler to meet a
recognized danger than to rush contemptuously into what seemed
nothing--nobler still to encounter a nameless horror. He could conquer
fear and wipe out disgrace together. For a marksman and swordsman like
him, he said, one with his strength and courage, there was but danger.
Defeat there was not. He knew the darkness now, and when it came he
would meet it as fearless and cool as now he felt himself. And again
he said, "We shall see!"

He stood under the boughs of a great beech as the sun was going down,
far away over the jagged hills: before it was half down, he was
trembling like one of the leaves behind him in the first sigh of the
night-wind. The moment the last of the glowing disc vanished, he
bounded away in terror to gain the valley, and his fear grew as he
ran. Down the side of the hill, an abject creature, he went bounding
and rolling and running; fell rather than plunged into the river, and
came to himself, as before, lying on the grassy bank in the garden.

But when he opened his eyes, there were no girl-eyes looking down into
his; there were only the stars in the waste of the sunless Night--the
awful all-enemy he had again dared, but could not encounter. Perhaps
the girl was not yet come out of the water! He would try to sleep, for
he dared not move, and perhaps when he woke he would find his head on
her lap, and the beautiful dark face, with its deep blue eyes, bending
over him. But when he woke he found his head on the grass, and
although he sprang up with all his courage, such as it was, restored,
he did not set out for the chase with such an _elan_ as the day
before; and, despite the sun-glory in his heart and veins, his hunting
was this day less eager; he ate little, and from the first was
thoughtful even to sadness. A second time he was defeated and
disgraced! Was his courage nothing more than the play of the sunlight
on his brain? Was he a mere ball tossed between the light and the
dark? Then what a poor contemptible creature he was! But a third
chance lay before him. If he failed the third time, he dared not
foreshadow what he must then think of himself! It was bad enough
now--but then!

Alas! it went no better. The moment the sun was down, he fled as if
from a legion of devils.

Seven times in all, he tried to face the coming night in the strength
of the past day, and seven times he failed--failed with such increase
of failure, with such a growing sense of ignominy, overwhelming at
length all the sunny hours and joining night to night, that, what with
misery, self-accusation, and loss of confidence, his daylight courage
too began to fade, and at length, from exhaustion, from getting wet,
and then lying out of doors all night, and night after night,--worst
of all, from the consuming of the deathly fear, and the shame of
shame, his sleep forsook him, and on the seventh morning, instead of
going to the hunt, he crawled into the castle, and went to bed. The
grand health, over which the witch had taken such pains, had yielded,
and in an hour or two he was moaning and crying out in delirium.




CHAPTER XVI. AN EVIL NURSE.


Watho was herself ill, as I have said, and was the worse tempered;
and, besides, it is a peculiarity of witches, that what works in
others to sympathy, works in them to repulsion. Also, Watho had a
poor, helpless, rudimentary spleen of a conscience left, just enough
to make her uncomfortable, and therefore more wicked. So, when she
heard that Photogen was ill, she was angry. Ill, indeed! after all she
had done to saturate him with the life of the system, with the solar
might itself! He was a wretched failure, the boy! And because he was
_her_ failure, she was annoyed with him, began to dislike him, grew to
hate him. She looked on him as a painter might upon a picture, or a
poet, upon a poem, which he had only succeeded in getting into an
irrecoverable mess. In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close
together, and often tumble over each other. And whether it was that
her failure with Photogen foiled also her plans in regard to Nycteris,
or that her illness made her yet more of a devil's wife, certainly
Watho now got sick of the girl too, and hated to know her about the
castle.

She was not too ill, however, to go to poor Photogen's room and
torment him. She told him she hated him like a serpent, and hissed
like one as she said it, looking very sharp in the nose and chin, and
flat in the forehead. Photogen thought she meant to kill him, and
hardly ventured to take anything brought him. She ordered every ray of
light to be shut out of his room; but by means of this he got a little
used to the darkness. She would take one of his arrows, and now tickle
him with the feather end of it, now prick him with the point till the
blood ran down. What she meant finally I cannot tell, but she brought
Photogen speedily to the determination of making his escape from the
castle: what he should do then he would think afterwards. Who could
tell but he might find his mother somewhere beyond the forest! If it
were not for the broad patches of darkness that divided day from day,
he would fear nothing!

But now, as he lay helpless in the dark, ever and anon would come
dawning through it the face of the lovely creature who on that first
awful night nursed him so sweetly: was he never to see her again? If
she was, as he had concluded, the nymph of the river, why had she not
re-appeared? She might have taught him not to fear the night, for
plainly she had no fear of it herself! But then, when the day came,
she did seem frightened:--why was that, seeing there was nothing to be
afraid of then? Perhaps one so much at home in the darkness, was
correspondingly afraid of the light! Then his selfish joy at the
rising of the sun, blinding him to her condition, had made him behave
to her, in ill return for her kindness, as cruelly as Watho behaved to
him! How sweet and dear and lovely she was! If there were wild beasts
that came out only at night, and were afraid of the light, why should
there not be girls too, made the same way--who could not endure the
light, as he could not bear the darkness? If only he could find her
again! Ah, how differently he would behave to her! But alas! perhaps
the sun had killed her--melted her--burned her up!--dried her up--that
was it, if she was the nymph of the river!




CHAPTER XVII

WATHO'S WOLF.


From that dreadful morning Nycteris had never got to be herself again.
The sudden light had been almost death to her; and now she lay in the
dark with the memory of a terrific sharpness--a something she dared
scarcely recall, lest the very thought of it should sting her beyond
endurance. But this was as nothing to the pain which the recollection
of the rudeness of the shining creature whom she had nursed through
his fear caused her; for, the moment his suffering passed over to her,
and he was free, the first use he made of his returning strength had
been to scorn her! She wondered and wondered; it was all beyond her
comprehension.

Before long, Watho was plotting evil against her. The witch was like a
sick child weary of his toy: she would pull her to pieces, and see how
she liked it. She would set her in the sun, and see her die, like a
jelly from the salt ocean cast out on a hot rock. It would be a sight
to soothe her wolf-pain. One day, therefore, a little before noon,
while Nycteris was in her deepest sleep, she had a darkened litter
brought to the door, and in that she made two of her men carry her to
the plain above. There they took her out, laid her on the grass, and
left her.

Watho watched it all from the top of her high tower, through her
telescope; and scarcely was Nycteris left, when she saw her sit up,
and the same moment cast herself down again with her face to the
ground.

"She'll have a sunstroke," said Watho, "and that'll be the end of
her."

Presently, tormented by a fly, a huge-humped buffalo, with great
shaggy mane, came galloping along, straight for where she lay. At
sight of the thing on the grass, he started, swerved yards aside,
stopped dead, and then came slowly up, looking malicious. Nycteris lay
quite still, and never even saw the animal.

"Now she'll be trodden to death!" said Watho. "That's the way those
creatures do."

When the buffalo reached her, he sniffed at her all over, and went
away; then came back, and sniffed again; then all at once went off as
if a demon had him by the tail.

Next came a gnu, a more dangerous animal still, and did much the same;
then a gaunt wild boar. But no creature hurt her, and Watho was angry
with the whole creation.

At length, in the shade of her hair, the blue eyes of Nycteris began
to come to themselves a little, and the first thing they saw was a
comfort. I have told already how she knew the night-daisies, each a
sharp-pointed little cone with a red tip; and once she had parted the
rays of one of them, with trembling fingers, for she was afraid she
was dreadfully rude, and perhaps was hurting it; but she did want, she
said to herself, to see what secret it carried so carefully hidden;
and she found its golden heart. But now, right under her eyes, inside
the veil of her hair, in the sweet twilight of whose blackness she
could see it perfectly, stood a daisy with its red tip opened wide
into a carmine ring, displaying its heart of gold on a platter of
silver. She did not at first recognize it as one of those cones come
awake, but a moment's notice revealed what it was. Who then could have
been so cruel to the lovely little creature, as to force it open like
that, and spread it heart-bare to the terrible death-lamp? Whoever it
was, it must be the same that had thrown her out there to be burned to
death in its fire! But she had her hair, and could hang her head, and
make a small sweet night of her own about her! She tried to bend the
daisy down and away from the sun, and to make its petals hang about it
like her hair, but she could not. Alas! it was burned and dead
already! She did not know that it could not yield to her gentle force
because it was drinking life, with all the eagerness of life, from
what she called the death-lamp. Oh, how the lamp burned her!

But she went on thinking--she did not know how; and by and by began to
reflect that, as there was no roof to the room except that in which
the great fire went rolling about, the little Red-tip must have seen
the lamp a thousand times, and must know it quite well! and it had not
killed it! Nay, thinking about farther, she began to ask the question
whether this, in which she now saw it, might not be its more perfect
condition. For not only now did the whole seem perfect, as indeed it
did before, but every part showed its own individual perfection as
well, which perfection made it capable of combining with the rest into
the higher perfection of a whole. The flower was a lamp itself! The
golden heart was the light, and the silver border was the alabaster
globe, skilfully broken, and spread wide to let out the glory. Yes;
the radiant shape was plainly its perfection! If, then, it was the
lamp which had opened it into that shape, the lamp could not be
unfriendly to it, but must be of its own kind, seeing it made it
perfect! And again, when she thought of it, there was clearly no
little resemblance between them. What if the flower then was the
little great-grandchild of the lamp, and he was loving it all the
time? And what if the lamp did not mean to hurt her, only could not
help it? The red lips looked as if the flower had some time or other
been hurt: what if the lamp was making the best it could of
her--opening her out somehow like the flower? She would bear it
patiently, and see. But how coarse the colour of the grass was!
Perhaps, however, her eyes not being made for the bright lamp, she did
not see them us they were! Then she remembered how different were the
eyes of the creature that was not a girl and was afraid of the
darkness! Ah, if the darkness would only come again, all arms,
friendly and soft everywhere about her! She would wait and wait, and
bear, and be patient.

She lay so still that Watho did not doubt she had fainted. She was
pretty sure she would be dead before the night came to revive her.




CHAPTER XVIII. REFUGE.


Fixing her telescope on the motionless form, that she might see it at
once when the morning came, Watho went down from the tower to
Photogen's room. He was much better by this time, and before she left
him, he had resolved to leave the castle that very night. The darkness
was terrible indeed, but Watho was worse than even the darkness, and
he could not escape in the day. As soon, therefore, as the house
seemed still, he tightened his belt, hung to it his hunting-knife, put
a flask of wine and some bread in his pocket, and took his bow and
arrows. He got from the house, and made his way at once up to the
plain. But what with his illness, the terrors of the night, and his
dread of the wild beasts, when he got to the level he could not walk a
step further, and sat down, thinking it better to die than to live. In
spite of his fears, however, sleep contrived to overcome him, and he
fell at full length on the soft grass.

He had not slept long when he woke with such a strange sense of
comfort and security, that he thought the dawn at least must have
arrived. But it was dark night about him. And the sky--no, it was not
the sky, but the blue eyes of his naiad looking down upon him! Once
more he lay with his head in her lap, and all was well, for plainly
the girl feared the darkness as little as he the day.

"Thank you," he said. "You are like live armour to my heart; you keep
the fear off me. I have been very ill since then. Did you come up out
of the river when you saw me cross?"

"I don't live in the water," she answered. "I live under the pale
lamp, and I die under the bright one."

"Ah, yes! I understand now," he returned. "I would not have behaved as
I did last time if I had understood; but I thought you were mocking
me; and I am so made that I cannot help being frightened at the
darkness. I beg your pardon for leaving you as I did, for, as I say, I
did not understand. Now I believe you were really frightened. Were
you not?"

"I was, indeed," answered Nycteris, "and shall be again. But why you
should be, I cannot in the least understand. You must know how gentle
and sweet the darkness is, how kind and friendly, how soft and
velvety! It holds you to its bosom and loves you. A little while ago,
I lay faint and dying under your hot lamp.--What is it you call it?"

"The sun," murmured Photogen: "how I wish he would make haste!"

"Ah! do not wish that. Do not, for my sake, hurry him. I can take care
of you from the darkness, but I have no one to take care of me from
the light.--As I was telling you, I lay dying in the sun. All at once
I drew a deep breath. A cool wind came and ran over my face. I looked
up. The torture was gone, for the death-lamp itself was gone. I hope
he does not die and grow brighter yet. My terrible headache was all
gone, and my sight was come back. I felt as if I were new made. But I
did not get up at once, for I was tired still. The grass grew cool
about me, and turned soft in colour. Something wet came upon it, and
it was now so pleasant to my feet, that I rose and ran about. And when
I had been running about a long time, all at once I found you lying,
just as I had been lying a little while before. So I sat down beside
you to take care of you, till your life--and my death--should come
again."

"How good you are, you beautiful creature!--Why, you forgave me before
ever I asked you!" cried Photogen.

Thus they fell a talking, and he told her what he knew of his history,
and she told him what she knew of hers, and they agreed they must get
away from Watho as far as ever they could.

"And we must set out at once," said Nycteris.

"The moment the morning comes," returned Photogen.

"We must not wait for the morning," said Nycteris, "for then I shall
not be able to move, and what would you do the next night? Besides,
Watho sees best in the daytime. Indeed, you must come now,
Photogen.--You must."

"I can not; I dare not," said Photogen. "I cannot move. If I but lift
my head from your lap, the very sickness of terror seizes me."

"I shall be with you," said Nycteris soothingly. "I will take care of
you till your dreadful sun comes, and then you may leave me, and go
away as fast as you can. Only please put me in a dark place first, if
there is one to be found."

"I will never leave you again, Nycteris," cried Photogen. "Only wait
till the sun comes, and brings me back my strength, and we will go
away together, and never, never part any more."

"No, no," persisted Nycteris; "we must go now. And you must learn to
be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be
only half brave. I have begun already--not to fight your sun, but to
try to get at peace with him, and understand what he really is, and
what he means with me--whether to hurt me or to make the best of me.
You must do the same with my darkness."

"But you don't know what mad animals there are away there towards the
south," said Photogen. "They have huge green eyes, and they would eat
you up like a bit of celery, you beautiful creature!"

"Come, come! you must," said Nycteris, "or I shall have to pretend to
leave you, to make you come. I have seen the green eyes you speak of,
and I will take care of you from them."

"You! How can you do that? If it were day now, I could take care of
you from the worst of them. But as it is, I can't even see them for
this abominable darkness. I could not see your lovely eyes but for the
light that is in them; that lets me see straight into heaven through
them. They are windows into the very heaven beyond the sky. I believe
they are the very place where the stars are made."

"You come then, or I shall shut them," said Nycteris, "and you shan't
see them any more till you are good. Come. If you can't see the wild
beasts, I can."

"You can! and you ask me to come!" cried Photogen.

"Yes," answered Nycteris. "And more than that, I see them long before
they can see me, so that I am able to take care of you."

"But how?" persisted Photogen. "You can't shoot with bow and arrow, or
stab with a hunting-knife."

"No, but I can keep out of the way of them all. Why, just when I found
you, I was having a game with two or three of them at once. I see, and
scent them too, long before they are near me--long before they can see
or scent me."

"You don't see or scent any now, do you?" said Photogen, uneasily,
rising on his elbow.

"No--none at present. I will look," replied Nycteris, and sprang to
her feet.

"Oh, oh! do not leave me--not for a moment," cried Photogen, straining
his eyes to keep her face in sight through the darkness.

"Be quiet, or they will hear you," she returned. "The wind is from the
south, and they cannot scent us. I have found out all about that. Ever
since the dear dark came, I have been amusing myself with them,
getting every now and then just into the edge of the wind, and letting
one have a sniff of me."

"Oh, horrible!" cried Photogen. "I hope you will not insist on doing
so any more. What was the consequence?"

"Always, the very instant, he turned with flashing eyes, and hounded
towards me--only he could not see me, you must remember. But my eyes
being so much better than his, I could see him perfectly well, and
would run away round him until I scented him, and then I knew he could
not find me anyhow. If the wind were to turn, and run the other way
now, there might be a whole army of them down upon us, leaving no room
to keep out of their way. You had better come."

She took him by the hand. He yielded and rose, and she led him away.
But his steps were feeble, and as the night went on, he seemed more
and more ready to sink.

"Oh dear! I am so tired! and so frightened!" he would say.

"Lean on me," Nycteris would return, putting her arm round him, or
patting his cheek. "Take a few steps more. Every step away from the
castle is clear gain. Lean harder on me. I am quite strong and well
now."

So they went on. The piercing night-eyes of Nycteris descried not a
few pairs of green ones gleaming like holes in the darkness, and many
a round she made to keep far out of their way; but she never said to
Photogen she saw them. Carefully she kept him off the uneven places,
and on the softest and smoothest of the grass, talking to him gently
all the way as they went--of the lovely flowers and the stars--how
comfortable the flowers looked, down in their green beds, and how
happy the stars up in their blue beds!

When the morning began to come, he began to grow better, but was
dreadfully tired with walking instead of sleeping, especially after
being so long ill. Nycteris too, what with supporting him, what with
growing fear of the light which was beginning to ooze out of the east,
was very tired. At length, both equally exhausted, neither was able to
help the other. As if by consent they stopped. Embracing each the
other, they stood in the midst of the wide grassy land, neither of
them able to move a step, each supported only by the leaning weakness
of the other, each ready to fall if the other should move. But while
the one grew weaker still, the other had begun to grow stronger. When
the tide of the night began to ebb, the tide of the day began to flow;
and now the sun was rushing to the horizon, borne upon its foaming
billows. And ever as he came, Photogen revived. At last the sun shot
up into the air, like a bird from the hand of the Father of Lights.
Nycteris gave a cry of pain, and hid her face in her hands.

"Oh me!" she sighed; "I am _so_ frightened! The terrible light stings
so!"

But the same instant, through her blindness, she heard Photogen give a
low exultant laugh, and the next felt herself caught up: she who all
night long had tended and protected him like a child, was now in his
arms, borne along like a baby, with her head lying on his shoulder.
But she was the greater, for, suffering more, she feared nothing.




CHAPTER XIX. THE WEREWOLF.


At the very moment when Photogen caught up Nycteris, the telescope of
Watho was angrily sweeping the table-land. She swung it from her in
rage, and running to her room, shut herself up. There she anointed
herself from top to toe with a certain ointment; shook down her long
red hair, and tied it round her waist; then began to dance, whirling
round and round faster and faster, growing angrier and angrier, until
she was foaming at the mouth with fury. When Falca went looking for
her, she could not find her anywhere.

As the sun rose, the wind slowly changed and went round, until it blew
straight from the north. Photogen and Nycteris were drawing near the
edge of the forest, Photogen still carrying Nycteris, when she moved a
little on his shoulder uneasily, and murmured in his ear,

"I smell a wild beast--that way, the way the wind is coming."

Photogen turned, looked back towards the castle, and saw a dark speck
on the plain. As he looked, it grew larger: it was coming across the
grass with the speed of the wind. It came nearer and nearer. It looked
long and low, but that might be because it was running at a great
stretch. He set Nycteris down under a tree, in the black shadow of its
bole, strung his bow, and picked out his heaviest, longest, sharpest
arrow. Just as he set the notch on the string, he saw that the
creature was a tremendous wolf, rushing straight at him. He loosened
his knife in its sheath, drew another arrow half-way from the quiver,
lest the first should fail, and took his aim--at a good distance, to
leave time for a second chance. He shot. The arrow rose, flew
straight, descended, struck the beast, and started again into the air,
doubled like a letter V. Quickly Photogen snatched the other, shot,
cast his bow from him, and drew his knife. But the arrow was in the
brute's chest, up to the feather; it tumbled heels over head with a
great thud of its back on the earth, gave a groan, made a struggle or
two, and lay stretched out motionless.

"I've killed it, Nycteris," cried Photogen. "It is a great red wolf."

"Oh, thank you!" answered Nycteris feebly from behind the tree. "I was
sure you would. I was not a bit afraid."

Photogen went up to the wolf. It _was_ a monster! But he was vexed
that his first arrow had behaved so badly, and was the less willing to
lose the one that had done him such good service: with a long and a
strong pull, he drew it from the brute's chest. Could he believe his
eyes? There lay--no wolf, but Watho, with her hair tied round her
waist! The foolish witch had made herself invulnerable, as she
supposed, but had forgotten that, to torment Photogen therewith, she
had handled one of his arrows. He ran back to Nycteris and told her.

She shuddered and wept, and would not look.




CHAPTER XX. ALL IS WELL.


There was now no occasion to fly a step farther. Neither of them
feared any one but Watho. They left her there, and went back. A great
cloud came over the sun, and rain began to fall heavily, and Nycteris
was much refreshed, grew able to see a little, and with Photogen's
help walked gently over the cool wet grass.

They had not gone far before they met Fargu and the other huntsmen.
Photogen told them he had killed a great red wolf, and it was Madam
Watho. The huntsmen looked grave, but gladness shone through.

"Then," said Fargu, "I will go and bury my mistress."

But when they reached the place, they found she was already buried--in
the maws of sundry birds and beasts which had made their breakfast of
her.

Then Fargu, overtaking them, would, very wisely, have Photogen go to
the king, and tell him the whole story. But Photogen, yet wiser than
Fargu, would not set out until he had married Nycteris; "for then," he
said, "the king himself can't part us; and if ever two people couldn't
do the one without the other, those two are Nycteris and I. She has
got to teach me to be a brave man in the dark, and I have got to look
after her until she can bear the heat of the sun, and he helps her to
see, instead of blinding her."

They were married that very day. And the next day they went together
to the king, and told him the whole story. But whom should they find
at the court but the father and mother of Photogen, both in high
favour with the king and queen. Aurora nearly died for joy, and told
them all how Watho had lied, and made her believe her child was dead.

No one knew anything of the father or mother of Nycteris; but when
Aurora, saw in the lovely girl her own azure eyes shining through
night and its clouds, it made her think strange things, and wonder how
even the wicked themselves may be a link to join together the good.
Through Watho, the mothers, who had never seen each other, had changed
eyes in their children.

The king gave them the castle and lands of Watho, and there they lived
and taught each other for many years that were not long. But hardly
had one of them passed, before Nycteris had come to love the day best,
because it was the clothing and crown of Photogen, and she saw that
the day was greater than the night, and the sun more lordly than the
moon; and Photogen had come to love the night best, because it was the
mother and home of Nycteris.

"But who knows," Nycteris would say to Photogen, "that, when we go
out, we shall not go into a day as much greater than your day as your
day is greater than my night?"




THE BUTCHER'S BILLS.


CHAPTER I. HUSBAND AND WIFE.


I am going to tell a story of married life. My title will prepare the
reader for something hardly heroic; but I trust it will not be found
lacking in the one genuine and worthy interest a tale ought to
have--namely, that it presents a door through which we may walk into
one region or another of the human heart, and there find ourselves not
altogether unacquainted or from home.

There was a law among the Jews which forbade the yoking together of
certain animals, either because, being unequal in size or strength,
one of them must be oppressed, or for the sake of some lesson thus
embodied to the Eastern mind--possibly for both reasons. Half the
tragedy would be taken out of social life if this law could be applied
to human beings in their various relations. I do not say that this
would be well, or that we could afford to lose the result of the
tragedy thus occasioned. Neither do I believe that there are so many
instances of unequal yoking as the misprising judgments of men by men
and women by women might lead us to imagine. Not every one declared by
the wisdom of acquaintance to have thrown himself or herself away must
therefore be set down as unequally yoked. Or it may even be that the
inequality is there, but the loss on the other side. How some people
could ever have come together must always be a puzzle until one knows
the history of the affair; but not a few whom most of us would judge
quite unsuited to each other do yet get on pretty well from, the
first, and better and better the longer they are together, and that
with mutual advantage, improvement, and development. Essential
humanity is deeper than the accidents of individuality; the common is
more powerful than the peculiar; and the honest heart will always be
learning to act more and more in accordance with the laws of its
being. It must be of much more consequence to any lady that her
husband should be a man on whose word she can depend than that he
should be of a gracious presence. But if instead of coming nearer to a
true understanding of each other, the two should from the first keep
falling asunder, then something tragic may almost be looked for.

Duncan and Lucy Dempster were a couple the very mention of whose
Christian names together would have seemed amusing to the friends who
had long ceased to talk of their unfitness. Indeed, I doubt if in
their innermost privacy they ever addressed each other except as Mr.
and Mrs. Dempster. For the first time to see them together, no one
could help wondering how the conjunction could have been effected.
Dempster was of Scotch descent, but the hereditary high cheek-bone
seemed to have got into his nose, which was too heavy a pendant for
the low forehead from which it hung. About an inch from the end it
took a swift and unexpected curve downwards, and was a curious and
abnormal nose, which could not properly be assorted with any known
class of noses. A long upper lip, a large, firm, and not quite ugly
mouth, with a chin both long and square, completed a face which, with
its low forehead, being yet longer than usual, had a particularly
equine look. He was rather under the middle height, slender, and well
enough made--altogether an ordinary mortal, known on 'Change as an
able, keen, and laborious man of business. What his special business
was I do not know. He went to the city by the eight o'clock omnibus
every morning, dived into a court, entered a little square, rushed up
two flights of stairs to a couple of rooms, and sat down in the back
one before an office table on a hair-seated chair. It was a dingy
place--not so dirty as it looked, I daresay. Even the windows, being
of bad glass, did, I believe, look dirtier than they were. It was a
place where, so far as the eye of an outsider could tell, much or
nothing might be doing. Its occupant always wore his hat in it, and
his hat always looked shabby. Some people said he was rich, others
that he would be one day. Some said he was a responsible man, whatever
the epithet may have been intended to mean. I believe he was quite as
honest as the recognized laws of his trade demanded--and for how many
could I say more? Nobody said he was avaricious--but then he moved
amongst men whose very notion was first to make money, after that to
be religious, or to enjoy themselves, as the case might be. And no one
either ever said of him that he was a good man, or a generous. He was
about forty years of age, looking somehow as if he had never been
younger. He had had a fair education--better than is generally
considered necessary for mercantile purposes--but it would have been
hard to discover any signs of it in the spending of his leisure. On
Sunday mornings he went with his wife to church, and when he came home
had a good dinner, of which now and then a friend took his share. If
no stranger was present he took his wine by himself, and went to sleep
in his easy chair of marone-coloured leather, while his wife sat on
the other side of the fire if it was winter, or a little way off by
the open window if it was summer, gently yawned now and then, and
looked at him with eyes a little troubled. Then he went off again by
the eight o'clock omnibus on Monday morning, and not an idea more or
less had he in his head, not a hair's-breadth of difference was there
in his conduct or pursuits, that he had been to church and had spent
the day out of business. That may, however, for anything I know, have
been as much the clergyman's fault as his. He was the sort of man you
might call machine-made, one in whom humanity, if in no wise
caricatured, was yet in no wise ennobled.

His wife was ten years younger than he--hardly less than
beautiful--only that over her countenance seemed to have gathered a
kind of haze of commonness. At first sight, notwithstanding, one could
not help perceiving that she was china and he was delft. She was
graceful as she sat, long-necked, slope-shouldered, and quite as tall
as her husband, with a marked daintiness about her in the absence of
the extremes of the fashion, in the quality of the lace she wore on
her black silk dress, and in the wide white sleeves of fine cambric
that covered her arms from the shoulder to the wrist. She had a
morally delicate air, a look of scrupulous nicety and lavender-stored
linen. She had long dark lashes; and when they rose, the eyelids
revealed eyes of uncommon beauty. She had good features, good teeth,
and a good complexion. The main feeling she produced and left was of
ladyhood--little more.

Sunday afternoon came fifty-two times in the year. I mention this
because then always, and nearly then only, could one calculate on
seeing them together. It came to them in a surburb of London, and the
look of it was dull. Doubtless Mr. Dempster's dinner and his repose
after it were interesting to him, but I cannot help thinking his wife
found it dreary. She had, however, got used to it. The house was a
good old one, of red brick, much larger than they required, but not
expensive, and had a general look of the refinement of its mistress.
In the summer the windows of the dining-room would generally be open,
for they looked into a really lovely garden behind the house, and the
scent of the jasmine that crept all around them would come in
plentifully. I wonder what the scent of jasmine did in Duncan
Dempster's world. Perhaps it never got farther than the general
ante-chamber of the sensorium. It often made his wife sad--she could
not tell why. To him I daresay it smelt agreeable, but I can hardly
believe it ever woke in him that dreamy sensation it gave her--of
something she had not had enough of, she could not say what. When the
heat was gone off a little he would walk out on the lawn, which was
well kept and well watered, with many flowering shrubs about it. Why
he did so, I cannot tell. He looked at nothing in particular, only
walked about for a few minutes, no doubt derived some pleasure of a
mild nature from something, and walked in again to tea. One might have
expected he would have cultivated the acquaintance of his garden a
little, if it were only for the pleasure the contrast would give him
when he got back to his loved office, for a greater contrast could not
well have been found than between his dingy dreary haunt on
weekdays--a place which nothing but duty could have made other than
repugnant to any free soul--and this nest of greenery and light and
odour. Sweet scents floated in clouds invisible about the place;
flower eyes and stars and bells and bunches shone and glowed and
lurked all around; his very feet might have learned a lesson of that
which is beyond the sense from the turf he trod; but all the time, if
he were not exactly seeing in his mind's eye the walls and tables of
his office in the City square, his thoughts were not the less brooding
over such business as he there transacted. For Mr. Dempster's was not
a free soul. How could it be when all his energies were given to
making money? This he counted his _calling_--and I believe actually
contrived to associate some feeling of duty with the notion of leaving
behind him a plump round sum of money, as if money in accumulation and
following flood, instead of money in peaceful current, were the good
thing for the world! Hence the whole realm of real life, the universe
of thought and growth, was a high-hedged park to him, within which he
never even tried to look--not even knowing that he was shut out from
it, for the hedge was of his own growing. What shall ever wake such a
man to a sense of indwelling poverty, or make him begin to hunger
after any lowliest expansion? Does a reader retort, "The man was
comfortable, and why should he be troubled?" If the end of being, I
answer, is only comfort in self, I yield. But what if there should be
at the heart of the universe a Thought to which the being of such men
is distasteful? What if to that Thought they look blots in light, ugly
things? May there not lie in that direction some possible reason why
they should bethink themselves? Dempster, however, was not yet a
clinker out of which all the life was burned, however much he looked
like one. There was in him that which might yet burn--and give light
and heat.

On the Sunday evenings Mrs. Dempster would have gladly gone to church
again, if only--though to herself she never allowed this for one of
her reasons--to slip from under the weight of her husband's presence.
He seldom spoke to her more than a sentence at a time, but he did like
to have her near him, and I suppose held, through the bare presence,
some kind of dull one-sided communication with her; what did a woman
know about business? and what did he know about except business? It is
true he had a rudimentary pleasure in music--and would sometimes ask
her to play to him, when he would listen, and after his fashion enjoy.
But although here was a gift that might be developed until his soul
could echo the music of the spheres, the embodied souls of Handel or
Mendelssohn were to him but clouds of sound wrapped about kernels--let
me say of stock or bonds.

For a year or so after their marriage it had been the custom that, the
first thing after breakfast on Monday morning, she should bring him
her account-book, that they might together go over her week's
expenses. She must cultivate the business habits in which, he said, he
found her more than deficient. How could he endure in a wife what
would have been preposterous in a clerk, and would have led to his
immediate dismissal? It was in his eyes necessary that the same strict
record of receipt and expenditure should be kept in the household as
in the office; how else was one to know in what direction things were
going? he said. He required of his wife, therefore, that every
individual thing that cost money, even to what she spent upon her own
person, should be entered in her book. She had no money of her own,
neither did he allow her any special sum for her private needs; but he
made her a tolerably liberal 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/9191