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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Wingfold, Curate V1, by George MacDonald
+(#22 in our series by George MacDonald)
+
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+
+Title: Thomas Wingfold, Curate V1
+
+Author: George MacDonald
+
+Release Date: June, 2004  [EBook #5973]
+[This file was first posted on October 2, 2002]
+[Most recently updated March 29, 2004]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE V1 ***
+
+
+
+
+Charles Franks, Charles Aldarondo, and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team.
+
+
+
+THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE.
+
+By George MacDonald, LL.D.
+
+IN THREE VOLUMES.
+
+VOL I.
+
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+HELEN LINGARD.
+
+
+
+
+
+A swift, gray November wind had taken every chimney of the house for
+an organ-pipe, and was roaring in them all at once, quelling the
+more distant and varied noises of the woods, which moaned and surged
+like a sea. Helen Lingard had not been out all day. The morning,
+indeed, had been fine, but she had been writing a long letter to her
+brother Leopold at Cambridge, and had put off her walk in the
+neighbouring park till after luncheon, and in the meantime the wind
+had risen, and brought with it a haze that threatened rain. She was
+in admirable health, had never had a day's illness in her life, was
+hardly more afraid of getting wet than a young farmer, and enjoyed
+wind, especially when she was on horseback. Yet as she stood looking
+from her window, across a balcony where shivered more than one
+autumnal plant that ought to have been removed a week ago, out upon
+the old-fashioned garden and meadows beyond, where each lonely tree
+bowed with drifting garments--I was going to say, like a suppliant,
+but it was AWAY from its storming enemy--she did not feel inclined
+to go out. That she was healthy was no reason why she should be
+unimpressible, any more than that good temper should be a reason for
+indifference to the behaviour of one's friend. She always felt
+happier in a new dress, when it was made to her mind and fitted her
+body; and when the sun shone she was lighter-hearted than when it
+rained: I had written MERRIER, but Helen was seldom merry, and had
+she been made aware of the fact, and questioned why, would have
+answered--Because she so seldom saw reason.
+
+She was what all her friends called a sensible girl; but, as I say,
+that was no reason why she should be an insensible girl as well, and
+be subject to none of the influences of the weather. She did feel
+those influences, and therefore it was that she turned away from the
+window with the sense, rather than the conviction, that the fireside
+in her own room was rendered even, more attractive by the unfriendly
+aspect of things outside and the roar in the chimney, which happily
+was not accompanied by a change in the current of the smoke.
+
+The hours between luncheon and tea are confessedly dull, but dulness
+is not inimical to a certain kind of comfort, and Helen liked to be
+that way comfortable. Nor had she ever yet been aware of self-rebuke
+because of the liking. Let us see what kind and degree of comfort
+she had in the course of an hour and a half attained. And in
+discovering this I shall be able to present her to my reader with a
+little more circumstance.
+
+She sat before the fire in a rather masculine posture. I would not
+willingly be rude, but the fact remains--a posture in which she
+would not, I think, have sat for her photograph--leaning back in a
+chintz-covered easy-chair, all the lines of direction about her
+parallel with the lines of the chair, her arms lying on its arms,
+and the fingers of each hand folded down over the end of each
+arm--square, straight, right-angled,--gazing into the fire, with
+something of the look of a sage, but one who has made no discovery.
+
+She had just finished the novel of the day, and was suffering a mild
+reaction--the milder, perhaps, that she was not altogether satisfied
+with the consummation. For the heroine had, after much sorrow and
+patient endurance, at length married a man whom she could not help
+knowing to be not worth having. For the author even knew it, only
+such was his reading of life, and such his theory of artistic duty,
+that what it was a disappointment to Helen to peruse, it seemed to
+have been a comfort to him to write. Indeed, her dissatisfaction
+went so far that, although the fire kept burning away in perfect
+content before her, enhanced by the bellowing complaint of the wind
+in the chimney, she yet came nearer thinking than she had ever been
+in her life. Now thinking, especially to one who tries it for the
+first time, is seldom, or never, a quite comfortable operation, and
+hence Helen was very near becoming actually uncomfortable. She was
+even on the borders of making the unpleasant discovery that the
+business of life--and that not only for North Pole expeditions,
+African explorers, pyramid-inspectors, and such like, but for every
+man and woman born into the blindness of the planet--is to discover;
+after which discovery there is little more comfort to be had of the
+sort with which Helen was chiefly conversant. But she escaped for
+the time after a very simple and primitive fashion, although it was
+indeed a narrow escape.
+
+Let me not be misunderstood, however, and supposed to imply that
+Helen was dull in faculty, or that she contributed nothing to the
+bubbling of the intellectual pool in the social gatherings at
+Glaston. Far from it. When I say that she came near thinking, I say
+more for her than any but the few who know what thinking is will
+understand, for that which chiefly distinguishes man from those he
+calls the lower animals is the faculty he most rarely exercises.
+True, Helen supposed she could think--like other people, because the
+thoughts of other people had passed through her in tolerable plenty,
+leaving many a phantom conclusion behind; but this was THEIR
+thinking, not hers. She had thought no more than was necessary now
+and then to the persuasion that she saw what a sentence meant, after
+which, her acceptance or rejection of what was contained in it,
+never more than lukewarm, depended solely upon its relation to what
+she had somehow or other, she could seldom have told how, come to
+regard as the proper style of opinion to hold upon things in
+general.
+
+The social matrix which up to this time had ministered to her
+development, had some relations with Mayfair, it is true, but scanty
+ones indeed with the universe; so that her present condition was
+like that of the common bees, every one of which Nature fits for a
+queen, but its nurses, prevent from growing one by providing for it
+a cell too narrow for the unrolling of royalty, and supplying it
+with food not potent enough for the nurture of the ideal--with this
+difference, however, that the cramped and stinted thing comes out,
+if no queen, then a working bee, and Helen, who might be both, was
+neither yet. If I were at liberty to mention the books on her table,
+it would give a few of my readers no small help towards the settling
+of her position in the "valued file" of the young women of her
+generation; but there are reasons against it.
+
+She was the daughter of an officer, who, her mother dying when she
+was born, committed her to the care of a widowed aunt, and almost
+immediately left for India, where he rose to high rank, and somehow
+or other amassed a considerable fortune, partly through his marriage
+with a Hindoo lady, by whom he had one child, a boy some three years
+younger than Helen. When he died, he left his fortune equally
+divided between the two children.
+
+Helen was now three-and-twenty, and her own mistress. Her appearance
+suggested Norwegian blood, for she was tall, blue-eyed, and
+dark-haired--but fair-skinned, with regular features, and an over
+still-some who did not like her said hard--expression of
+countenance. No one had ever called her NELLY; yet she had long
+remained a girl, lingering on the broken borderland after several of
+her school companions had become young matrons. Her drawing-master,
+a man of some observation and insight, used to say Miss Lingard
+would wake up somewhere about forty.
+
+The cause of her so nearly touching the borders of thought this
+afternoon, was, that she became suddenly aware of feeling bored. Now
+Helen was even seldomer bored than merry, and this time she saw no
+reason for it, neither had any person to lay the blame upon. She
+might have said it was the weather, but the weather had never done
+it before. Nor could it be want of society, for George Bascombe was
+to dine with them. So was the curate, but he did not count for much.
+Neither was she weary of herself. That, indeed, might be only a
+question of time, for the most complete egotist, Julius Caesar, or
+Napoleon Bonaparte, must at length get weary of his paltry self; but
+Helen, from the slow rate of her expansion, was not old enough yet.
+Nor was she in any special sense wrapt up in herself: it was only
+that she had never yet broken the shell which continues to shut in
+so many human chickens, long after they imagine themselves citizens
+of the real world.
+
+Being somewhat bored then, and dimly aware that to be bored was out
+of harmony with something or other, Helen was on the verge of
+thinking, but, as I have said, escaped the snare in a very direct
+and simple fashion: she went fast asleep, and never woke till her
+maid brought her the cup of kitchen-tea from which the inmates of
+some houses derive the strength to prepare for dinner.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THOMAS WINGFOLD.
+
+
+
+
+
+The morning, whose afternoon was thus stormy, had been fine, and the
+curate went out for a walk. Had it been just as stormy, however, he
+would have gone all the same. Not that he was a great walker, or,
+indeed, fond of exercise of any sort, and his walking, as an
+Irishman might say, was half sitting--on stiles and stones and
+fallen trees. He was not in bad health, he was not lazy, or given to
+self-preservation, but he had little impulse to activity of any
+sort. The springs in his well of life did not seem to flow quite
+fast enough.
+
+He strolled through Osterfield park, and down the deep descent to
+the river, where, chilly as it was, he seated himself upon a large
+stone on the bank, and knew that he was there, and that he had to
+answer to Thomas Wingfold; but why he was there, and why he was not
+called something else, he did not know. On each side of the stream
+rose a steeply-sloping bank, on which grew many fern-bushes, now
+half withered, and the sunlight upon them, this November morning,
+seemed as cold as the wind that blew about their golden and green
+fronds. Over a rocky bottom the stream went--talking rather than
+singing--down the valley towards the town, where it seemed to linger
+a moment to embrace the old abbey church, before it set out on its
+leisurely slide through the low level to the sea. Its talk was
+chilly, and its ripples, which came half from the obstructions in
+its channel below, and half from the wind that ruffled it above,
+were not smiles, but wrinkles rather--even in the sunshine. Thomas
+felt cold himself, but the cold was of the sort that comes from the
+look rather than the feel of things. He did not, however, much care
+how he felt--not enough, certainly, to have made him put on a
+great-coat: he was not deeply interested in himself. With his stick,
+a very ordinary bit of oak, he kept knocking pebbles into the water,
+and listlessly watching them splash. The wind blew, the sun shone,
+the water ran, the ferns waved, the clouds went drifting over his
+head, but he never looked up, or took any notice of the doings of
+Mother Nature at her house-work: everything seemed to him to be
+doing only what it had got to do, because it had got it to do, and
+not because it cared about it, or had any end in doing it. For he,
+like every other man, could read nature only by his own lamp, and
+this was very much how he had hitherto responded to the demands made
+upon him.
+
+His life had not been a very interesting one, although early
+passages in it had been painful. He had done fairly well at Oxford:
+it had been expected of him, and he had answered expectation; he had
+not distinguished himself, nor cared to do so. He had known from the
+first that he was intended for the church, and had not objected, but
+received it as his destiny--had even, in dim obedience, kept before
+his mental vision the necessity of yielding to the heights and
+hollows of the mould into which he was being thrust. But he had
+taken no great interest in the matter.
+
+The church was to him an ancient institution of such approved
+respectability that it was able to communicate it, possessing
+emoluments, and requiring observances. He had entered her service;
+she was his mistress, and in return for the narrow shelter, humble
+fare, and not quite too shabby garments she allotted him, he would
+perform her hests--in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the
+house for ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had
+never dreamed of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of
+its unattainable remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life
+or his position in it, taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind
+of acceptance, and laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even
+bare suffering. He had a certain dull prejudice in favour of
+honesty, would not have told the shadow of a lie to be made
+Archbishop of Canterbury, and yet was so uninstructed in the things
+that constitute practical honesty that some of his opinions would
+have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked reading the prayers,
+for the making of them vocal in the church was pleasant to him, and
+he had a not unmusical voice. He visited the sick--with some
+repugnance, it is true, but without delay, and spoke to them such
+religious commonplaces as occurred to him, depending mainly on the
+prayers belonging to their condition for the right performance of
+his office. He never thought about being a gentleman, but always
+behaved like one.
+
+I suspect that at this time there lay somewhere in his mind, keeping
+generally well out of sight however, that is, below the skin of his
+consciousness, the unacknowledged feeling that he had been hardly
+dealt with. But at no time, even when it rose plainest, would he
+have dared to add--by Providence. Had the temptation come, he would
+have banished it and the feeling together.
+
+He did not read much, browsed over his newspaper at breakfast with a
+polite curiosity, sufficient to season the loneliness of his slice
+of fried bacon, and took more interest in some of the naval
+intelligence than in anything else. Indeed it would have been
+difficult for himself even to say in what he did take a large
+interest. When leisure awoke a question as to how he should employ
+it, he would generally take up his Horace and read aloud one of his
+more mournful odes--with such attention to the rhythm, I must add,
+as, although plentiful enough among scholars in respect of the dead
+letter, is rarely found with them in respect of the living vocal
+utterance.
+
+Nor had he now sat long upon his stone, heedless of the world's
+preparations for winter, before he began repeating to himself the
+poet's Æquam memento rebus in arduis, which he had been trying much,
+but with small success, to reproduce in similar English cadences,
+moved thereto in part by the success of Tennyson in his O
+mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies--a thing as yet alone in the
+language, so far as I know. It was perhaps a little strange that the
+curate should draw the strength of which he was most conscious from
+the pages of a poet whose hereafter was chiefly servicable to him--
+in virtue of its unsubstantiality and poverty, the dreamlike
+thinness of its reality--in enhancing the pleasures of the world of
+sun and air, cooling shade and songful streams, the world of wine
+and jest, of forms that melted more slowly from encircling arms, and
+eyes that did not so swiftly fade and vanish in the distance. Yet
+when one reflects but for a moment on the poverty-stricken
+expectations of Christians from their hereafter, I cease to wonder
+at Wingfold; for human sympathy is lovely and pleasant, and if a
+Christian priest and a pagan poet feel much in the same tone
+concerning the affairs of a universe, why should they not comfort
+each other by sitting down together in the dust?
+
+   "No hair it boots thee whether from Inachus
+     Ancient descended, or, of the poorest born,
+      Thy being drags, all bare and roofless--
+        Victim the same to the heartless Orcus.
+
+     All are on one road driven; for each of us
+     The urn is tossed, and, later or earlier,
+       The lot will drop and all be sentenced
+        Into the boat of eternal exile."
+
+Having thus far succeeded with these two stanzas, Wingfold rose, a
+little pleased with himself, and climbed the bank above him, wading
+through mingled sun and wind and ferns--so careless of their
+shivering beauty and their coming exile, that a watcher might have
+said the prospect of one day leaving behind him the shows of this
+upper world could have no part in the curate's sympathy with Horace.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE DINERS.
+
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Ramshorn, Helen's aunt, was past the middle age of woman; had
+been handsome and pleasing, had long ceased to be either; had but
+sparingly recognised the fact, yet had recognised it, and felt
+aggrieved. Hence in part it was that her mouth had gathered that
+peevish and wronged expression which tends to produce a moral nausea
+in the beholder. If she had but known how much uglier in the eyes of
+her fellow-mortals her own discontent made her, than the severest
+operation of the laws of mortal decay could have done, she might
+have tried to think less of her wrongs and more of her privileges.
+As it was, her own face wronged her own heart, which was still
+womanly, and capable of much pity--seldom exercised. Her husband
+had been dean of Halystone, a man of insufficient weight of
+character to have the right influence in the formation of his
+wife's. He had left her tolerably comfortable as to circumstances,
+but childless. She loved Helen, whose even imperturbability had by
+mere weight, as it might seem, gained such a power over her that she
+was really mistress in the house without either of them knowing it.
+
+Naturally desirous of keeping Helen's fortune in the family, and
+having, as I say, no son of her own, she had yet not far to look to
+find a cousin capable, as she might well imagine, of rendering
+himself acceptable to the heiress. He was the son of her younger
+sister, married, like herself, to a dignitary of the Church, a canon
+of a northern cathedral. This youth, therefore, Greorge Bascombe by
+name, whose visible calling at present was to eat his way to the
+bar, she often invited to Glaston; and on this Friday afternoon he
+was on his way from London to spend the Saturday and Sunday with the
+two ladies. The cousins liked each other, had not had more of each
+other's society than was favourable to their aunt's designs, who was
+far too prudent to have made as yet any reference to them, and stood
+altogether in as suitable a relative position for falling in love
+with each other as Mrs. Ramshorn could well have desired. Her chief,
+almost her only uneasiness, arose from the important and but too
+evident fact, that Helen Lingard was not a girl of the sort to fall
+readily in love. That, however, was of no consequence, provided it
+did not come in the way of marrying her cousin, who, her aunt felt
+confident, was better fitted to rouse her dormant affections than
+any other youth she had ever seen, or was ever likely to see. Upon
+this occasion she had asked Thomas Wingfold to meet him, partly with
+the design that he should act as a foil to her nephew, partly in
+order to do her duty by the church, to which she felt herself belong
+not as a lay member, but in some undefined professional capacity, in
+virtue of her departed dean. Wingfold had but lately come to the
+parish, and, as he was merely curate, she had not been in haste to
+invite him. On the other hand, he was the only clergyman officiating
+in the abbey church, which was grand and old, with a miserable
+living and a non-resident rector. He, to do him justice, paid nearly
+the amount of the tithes in salary to his curate, and spent the rest
+on the church material, of which, for certain reasons, he retained
+the incumbency, the presentation to which belonged to his own
+family.
+
+The curate presented himself at the dinner-hour in Mrs. Ramshorn's
+drawing-room, looking like any other gentleman, satisfied with his
+share in the administration of things, and affecting nothing of the
+professional either in dress, manner, or tone. Helen saw him for the
+first time in private life, and, as she had expected, saw nothing
+remarkable--a man who looked about thirty, was a little over the
+middle height, and well enough constructed as men go, had a good
+forehead, a questionable nose, clear grey eyes, long, mobile,
+sensitive mouth, large chin, pale complexion, and straight black
+hair, and might have been a lawyer just as well as a clergyman. A
+keener, that is, a more interested eye than hers, might have
+discovered traces of suffering in the forms of the wrinkles which,
+as he talked, would now and then flit like ripples over his
+forehead; but Helen's eyes seldom did more than slip over the faces
+presented to her; and had it been otherwise, who could be expected
+to pay much regard to Thomas Wingfold when George Bascombe was
+present? There, indeed, stood a man by the corner of the
+mantelpiece!--tall and handsome as an Apollo, and strong as the
+young Hercules, dressed in the top of the plainest fashion,
+self-satisfied, but not offensively so, good-natured, ready to
+smile, as clean in conscience, apparently, and as large in sympathy,
+as his shirt-front. Everybody who knew him, counted George Bascombe
+a genuine good fellow, and George himself knew little to the
+contrary, while Helen knew nothing.
+
+One who had only chanced to get a glimpse of her in her own room, as
+in imagination my reader has done, would hardly have recognised her
+again in the drawing-room. For in her own room she was but as she
+appeared to herself in her mirror--dull, inanimate; but in the
+drawing-room her reflection from living eyes and presences served to
+stir up what waking life was in her. When she spoke, her face dawned
+with a clear, although not warm light; and although it must be owned
+that when it was at rest, the same over-stillness, amounting almost
+to dulness, the same seeming immobility, ruled as before, yet, even
+when she was not speaking, the rest was often broken by a smile--a
+genuine one, for although there was much that was stiff, there was
+nothing artificial about Helen. Neither was there much of the
+artificial about her cousin; for his good-nature, and his smile, and
+whatever else appeared upon him, were all genuine enough--the only
+thing in this respect not quite satisfactory to the morally
+fastidious man being his tone in speaking. Whether he had caught it
+at the university, or amongst his father's clerical friends, or in
+the professional society he now frequented, I cannot tell, but it
+had been manufactured somewhere--after a large, scrolly kind of
+pattern, sounding well-bred and dignified. I wonder how many speak
+with the voices that really belong to them.
+
+Plainly, to judge from the one Bascombe used, he was accustomed to
+lay down the law, but in gentlemanly fashion, and not as if he cared
+a bit about the thing in question himself. By the side of his easy
+carriage, his broad chest, and towering Greek-shaped head, Thomas
+Wingfold dwindled almost to vanishing--in a word, looked nobody. And
+besides his inferiority in size and self-presentment, he had a
+slight hesitation of manner, which seemed to anticipate, if not to
+court, the subordinate position which most men, and most women too,
+were ready to assign him. He said, "Don't you think?" far oftener
+than "I think" and was always more ready to fix his attention upon
+the strong points of an opponent's argument than to re-assert his
+own in slightly altered phrase like most men, or even in fresh forms
+like a few; hence--self-assertion, either modestly worn like a shirt
+of fine chain-armour, or gaunt and obtrusive like plates of steel,
+being the strength of the ordinary man--what could the curate appear
+but defenceless, therefore weak, and therefore contemptible? The
+truth is, he had less self-conceit than a mortal's usual share, and
+was not yet possessed of any opinions interesting enough to himself
+to seem worth defending with any approach to vivacity.
+
+Bascombe and he bowed in response to their introduction with proper
+indifference, after a moment's solemn pause exchanged a sentence or
+two which resembled an exercise in the proper use of a foreign
+language, and then gave what attention Englishmen are capable of
+before dinner to the two ladies--the elder of whom, I may just
+mention, was dressed in black velvet with heavy Venetian lace, and
+the younger in black silk, with old Honiton. Neither of them did
+much towards enlivening the conversation. Mrs. Ramshorn, whose
+dinner had as yet gained in interest with her years, sat peevishly
+longing for its arrival, but cast every now and then a look of mild
+satisfaction upon her nephew, which, however, while it made her eyes
+sweeter, did not much alter the expression of her mouth. Helen
+improved, as she fancied, the arrangement of a few green-house
+flowers in an ugly vase on the table.
+
+At length the butler appeared, the curate took Mrs. Ramshorn, and
+the cousins followed--making, in the judgment of the butler as he
+stood in the hall, and the housekeeper as she peeped from the
+baise-covered door that led to the still-room, as handsome a couple
+as mortal eyes need wish to see. They looked nearly of an age, the
+lady the more stately, the gentleman the more graceful, or, perhaps
+rather, ELEGANT, of the two.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THEIR TALK.
+
+
+
+
+
+During dinner, Bascombe had the talk mostly to himself, and rattled
+well, occasionally rebuked by his aunt for some remark which might
+to a clergyman appear objectionable; nor as a partisan was she
+altogether satisfied with the curate that he did not seem inclined
+to take clerical exception. He ate his dinner, quietly responding to
+Bascombe's sallies--which had usually more of vivacity than
+keenness, more of good spirits than wit--with a curious flickering
+smile, or a single word of agreement. It might have seemed that he
+was humouring a younger man, but the truth was, the curate had not
+yet seen cause for opposing him.
+
+How any friend could have come to send Helen poetry I cannot
+imagine, but that very morning she had received by post a small
+volume of verse, which, although just out, and by an unknown author,
+had already been talked of in what are called literary circles.
+Wingfold had read some extracts from the book that same morning, and
+was therefore not quite unprepared when Helen asked him if he had
+seen it. He suggested that the poems, if the few lines he had seen
+made a fair sample, were rather of the wailful order.
+
+"If there is one thing I despise more than another," said Bascombe,
+"it is to hear a man, a fellow with legs and arms, pour out his
+griefs into the bosom of that most discreet of confidantes, Society,
+bewailing his hard fate, and calling upon youths and maidens to fill
+their watering-pots with tears, and with him water the sorrowful
+pansies and undying rue of the race. I believe I am quoting."
+
+"I think you must be, George," said Helen. "I never knew you venture
+so near the edge of poetry before."
+
+"Ah, that is all you know of me, Miss Lingard!" returned Bascombe.
+"--And then," he resumed, turning again to Wingfold, "what is it
+they complain of? That some girls preferred a better man perhaps, or
+that a penny paper once told the truth of their poetry."
+
+"Or it may be only that it is their humour to be sad," said
+Wingfold. "But don't you think," he continued, "it is hardly worth
+while to be indignant with them? Their verses are a relief to them,
+and do nobody any harm."
+
+"They do all the boys and girls harm that read them, and themselves
+who write them more harm than anybody, confirming them in tearful
+habits, and teaching eyes unused to weep. I quote again, I believe,
+but from whom I am innocent. If I ever had a grief, I should have
+along with it the decency to keep it to myself."
+
+"I don't doubt you would, George," said his cousin, who seemed more
+playfully inclined than usual. "But," she added, with a smile,
+"would your silence be voluntary, or enforced?"
+
+"What!" returned Bascombe, "you think I could not plain my woes to
+the moon? Why not I as well as another? I could roar you as 'twere
+any nightingale."
+
+"You have had your sorrows, then, George?"
+
+"Never anything worse yet than a tailor's bill, Helen, and I hope
+you won't provide me with any. I am not in love with decay. I
+remember a fellow at Trinity, the merriest of all our set at a
+wine-party, who, alone with his ink-pot, was for ever enacting the
+part of the unheeded poet, complaining of the hard hearts and
+tuneless ears of his generation. I went into his room once, and
+found him with the tears running down his face, a pot of stout half
+empty on the table, and his den all but opaque with tobacco-smoke,
+reciting, with sobs--I had repeated the lines so often before they
+ceased to amuse me, that I can never forget them--
+
+   'Heard'st thou a quiver and clang?
+      In thy sleep did it make thee start?
+     'Twas a chord in twain that sprang--
+       But the lyre-shell was my heart.'
+
+He took a pull at the stout, laid his head on the table, and sobbed
+like a locomotive."
+
+"But it's not very bad--not bad at all, so far as I see," said
+Helen, who had a woman's weakness for the side attacked, in addition
+to a human partiality for fair play.
+
+"No, not bad at all--for absolute nonsense," said Bascombe.
+
+"He had been reading Heine," said Wingfold.
+
+"And burlesquing him," returned Bascombe. "Fancy hearing one of the
+fellow's heart-strings crack, and taking it for a string of his
+fiddle in the press! By the way, what are the heart-strings? Have
+they any anatomical synonym? But I have no doubt it was good
+poetry."
+
+"Do you think poetry and common sense necessarily opposed to each
+other?" asked Wingfold.
+
+"I confess a leaning to that opinion," replied Bascombe, with a
+half-conscious smile.
+
+"What do you say of Horace, now?" suggested Wingfold.
+
+"Unfortunately for me, you have mentioned the one poet for whom I
+have any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense.
+He never cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the
+bargain. But common sense would be just as good in prose as in
+verse."
+
+"Possibly; but what we have of it in Horace would never have reached
+us but for the forms into which he has cast it. How much more
+enticing acorns in the cup are! I was watching two children picking
+them up to-day."
+
+"That may be; there have always been more children than grown men,"
+returned Bascombe. "For my part, I would sweep away all illusions,
+and get at the heart of the affair."
+
+"But," said Wingfold, with the look of one who, as he tries to say
+it, is seeing a thing for the first time, "does not the acorn-cup
+belong to the acorn? May not some of what you call illusions, be the
+finer, or at least more ethereal qualities of the thing itself? You
+do not object to music in church, for instance?"
+
+Bascombe was on the point of saying he objected to it nowhere except
+in church, but for his aunt's sake, or rather for his own sake in
+his aunt's eyes, he restrained himself, and uttered his feelings
+only in a peculiar smile, of import so mingled, that its meaning was
+illegible ere it had quivered along his lip and vanished.
+
+"I am no metaphysician," he said, and Wingfold accepted the
+dismissal of the subject.
+
+Little passed between the two men over their wine; and as neither of
+them cared to drink more than a couple of glasses, they soon
+rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room.
+
+Mrs. Ramshorn was taking her usual forty winks in her arm-chair, and
+their entrance did not disturb her. Helen was turning over some
+music.
+
+"I am looking for a song for you, George," she said. "I want Mr.
+Wingfold to hear you sing, lest he should take you for a man of
+stone and lime."
+
+"Never mind looking," returned her cousin. "I will sing one you have
+never heard."
+
+And seating himself at the piano, he sang the following verses. They
+were his own, a fact he would probably have allowed to creep out,
+had they met with more sympathy. His voice was a full bass one, full
+of tone.
+
+   "Each man has his lampful, his lampful of oil;
+    He may dull its glimmer with sorrow and toil;
+    He may leave it unlit, and let it dry,
+    Or wave it aloft, and hold it high:
+    For mine, it shall burn with a fearless flame
+    In the front of the darkness that has no name.
+
+   "Sunshine and Wind?--are ye there? Ho! ho!
+    Are ye comrades or lords, as ye shine and blow?
+    I care not, I! I will lift my head
+    Till ye shine and blow on my grassy bed.
+    See, brother Sun, I am shining too!
+    Wind, I am living as well as you!
+
+   "Though the sun go out like a vagrant spark,
+    And his daughter planets are left in the dark,
+    I care not, I! For why should I care?
+    I shall be hurtless, nor here nor there.
+    Sun and Wind, let us shine and shout,
+    For the day draws nigh when we all go out!"
+
+"I don't like the song," said Helen, wrinkling her brows a little.
+"It sounds--well, heathenish."
+
+She would, I fear, have said nothing of the sort, being used to that
+kind of sound from her cousin, had not a clergyman been present. Yet
+she said it from no hypocrisy, but simple regard to his professional
+feelings,
+
+"I sung it for Mr. Wingfold," returned Bascombe. "It would have been
+a song after Horace's own heart."
+
+"Don't you think," rejoined the curate, "the defiant tone of your
+song would have been strange to him? I confess that what I find
+chiefly attractive in Horace is his sad submission to the
+inevitable."
+
+"Sad?" echoed Bascombe.
+
+"Don't you think so?"
+
+"No. He makes the best of it, and as merrily as he can."
+
+"AS HE CAN, I grant you," said Wingfold.
+
+Here Mrs. Ramshorn woke, and the subject was dropped, leaving Mr.
+Wingfold in some perplexity as to this young man and his talk, and
+what the phenomenon signified. Was heathenism after all secretly
+cherished, and about to become fashionable in English society? He
+saw little of its phases, and for what he knew it might be so.
+
+Helen sat down to the piano. Her time was perfect, and she never
+blundered a note. She played well and woodenly, and had for her
+reward a certain wooden satisfaction in her own performance. The
+music she chose was good of its kind, but had more to do with the
+instrument than the feelings, and was more dependent upon execution
+than expression. Bascombe yawned behind his handkerchief, and
+Wingfold gazed at the profile of the player, wondering how, with
+such fine features and complexion, with such a fine-shaped and
+well-set head? her face should be so far short of interesting. It
+seemed a face that had no story.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+A STAGGERING QUESTION.
+
+
+
+
+
+It was time the curate should take his leave. Bascombe would go out
+with him and have his last cigar. The wind had fallen, and the moon
+was shining. A vague sense of contrast came over Wingfold, and as he
+stepped on the pavement from the threshold of the high gates of
+wrought iron, he turned involuntarily and looked back at the house.
+It was of red brick, and flat-faced in the style of Queen Anne's
+time, so that the light could do nothing with it in the way of
+shadow, and dwelt only on the dignity of its unpretentiousness. But
+aloft over its ridge the moon floated in the softest, loveliest
+blue, with just a cloud here and there to show how blue it was, and
+a sparkle where its blueness took fire in a star. It was autumn,
+almost winter, below, and the creepers that clung to the house waved
+in the now gentle wind like the straggling tresses of old age; but
+above was a sky that might have overhung the last melting of spring
+into summer. At the end of the street rose the great square tower of
+the church, seeming larger than in the daylight. There was something
+in it all that made the curate feel there ought to be more--as if
+the night knew something he did not; and he yielded himself to its
+invasion.
+
+His companion having carefully lighted his cigar all round its
+extreme periphery, took it from his mouth, regarded its glowing end
+with a smile of satisfaction, and burst into a laugh. It was not a
+scornful laugh, neither was it a merry or a humorous laugh; it was
+one of satisfaction and amusement.
+
+"Let me have a share in the fun," said the curate.
+
+"You have it," said his companion--rudely, indeed, but not quite
+offensively, and put his cigar in his mouth again.
+
+Wingfold was not one to take umbrage easily. He was not important
+enough in his own eyes for that, but he did not choose to go
+farther.
+
+"That's a fine old church," he said, pointing to the dark mass
+invading the blue--so solid, yet so clear in outline.
+
+"I am glad the mason-work is to your mind," returned Bascombe,
+almost compassionately. "It must be some satisfaction, perhaps
+consolation to you."
+
+Before he had thus concluded the sentence a little scorn had crept
+into his tone.
+
+"You make some allusion which I do not quite apprehend," said the
+curate.
+
+"Now, I am going to be honest with you," said Bascombe abruptly, and
+stopping, he turned towards his companion, and took the
+full-flavoured Havannah from his lips. "I like you," he went on,
+"for you seem reasonable; and besides, a man ought to speak out what
+he thinks. So here goes!--Tell me honestly--do you believe one word
+of all that!"
+
+And he in his turn pointed in the direction of the great tower.
+
+The curate was taken by surprise and made no answer: it was as if he
+had received a sudden blow in the face. Recovering himself
+presently, however, he sought room to pass the question without
+direct encounter.
+
+"How came the thing there?" he said, once more indicating the
+church-tower.
+
+"By faith, no doubt," answered Bascombe, laughing,--"but not your
+faith; no, nor the faith of any of the last few generations."
+
+"There are more churches built now, ten times over, than in any
+former period of our history."
+
+"True; but of what sort? All imitation--never an original amongst
+them all!"
+
+"If they had found out the right way, why change it?"
+
+"Good! But it is rather ominous for the claim of a divine origin to
+your religion that it should be the only one thing that in these
+days takes the crab's move--backwards. You are indebted to your
+forefathers for your would-be belief, as well as for their genuine
+churches. You hardly know what your belief is. There is my aunt--as
+good a specimen as I know of what you call a Christian!--so
+accustomed is she to think and speak too after the forms of what you
+heard my cousin call heathenism, that she would never have
+discovered, had she been as wide awake as she was sound asleep, that
+the song I sung was anything but a good Christian ballad."
+
+"Pardon me; I think you are wrong there."
+
+"What! did you never remark how these Christian people, who profess
+to believe that their great man has conquered death, and all that
+rubbish--did you never observe the way they look if the least
+allusion is made to death, or the eternity they say they expect
+beyond it? Do they not stare as if you had committed a breach of
+manners? Religion itself is the same way: as much as you like about
+the church, but don't mention Christ! At the same time, to do them
+justice, it is only of death in the abstract they decline to hear;
+they will listen to the news of the death of a great and good man,
+without any such emotion. Look at the poetry of death--I mean the
+way Christian poets write of it! A dreamless sleep they call it--the
+bourne from whence, knows no waking. 'She is gone for ever!' cries
+the mother over her daughter. And that is why such things are not to
+be mentioned, because in their hearts they have no hope, and in
+their minds no courage to face the facts of existence. We haven't
+the pluck of the old fellows, who, that they might look death
+himself in the face without dismay, accustomed themselves, even at
+their banquets, to the sight of his most loathsome handiwork, his
+most significant symbol--and enjoyed their wine the better for
+it!--your friend Horace, for instance."
+
+"But your aunt now would never consent to such an interpretation of
+her opinions. Nor do I allow that it is fair."
+
+"My dear sir, if there is one thing I pride myself upon, it is fair
+play, and I grant you at once she would not. But I am speaking, not
+of creeds, but of beliefs. And I assert that the forms of common
+Christian speech regarding death come nearer those of Horace than
+your saint, the old Jew, Saul of Tarsus."
+
+It did not occur to Wingfold that people generally speak from the
+surfaces, not the depths of their minds, even when those depths are
+moved; nor yet that possibly Mrs. Ramshorn was not the best type of
+a Christian, even in his soft-walking congregation! In fact, nothing
+came into his mind with which to meet what Bascombe said--the real
+force whereof he could not help feeling--and he answered nothing.
+His companion followed his apparent yielding with fresh pressure.
+
+"In truth," he said, "I do not believe that YOU believe more than an
+atom here and there of what you profess. I am confident you have
+more good sense by a great deal."
+
+"I am sorry to find that you place good sense above good faith, Mr.
+Bascombe; but I am obliged by your good opinion, which, as I read
+it, amounts to this--that I am one of the greatest humbugs you have
+the misfortune to be acquainted with."
+
+"Ha! ha! ha!--No, no; I don't say that. I know so well how to make
+allowance for the prejudices a man has inherited from foolish
+ancestors, and which have been instilled into him, as well, with his
+earliest nourishment, both bodily and mental. But--come now--I do
+love open dealing--I am myself open as the day--did you not take to
+the church as a profession, in which you might eat a piece of
+bread--as somebody says in your own blessed Bible--dry enough bread
+it may be, for the old lady is not over-generous to her younger
+children--still a gentlemanly sort of livelihood?"
+
+Wingfold held his peace. It was incontestably with such a view that
+he had signed the articles and sought holy orders--and that without
+a single question as to truth or reality in either act.
+
+"Your silence is honesty, Mr. Wingfold, and I honour you for it,"
+said Bascombe. "It is an easy thing for a man in another profession
+to speak his mind, but silence such as yours, casting a shadow
+backward over your past, require courage: I honour you, sir."
+
+As he spoke, he laid his hand on Wingfold's shoulder with the grasp
+of an athlete.
+
+"Can the sherry have anything to do with it?" thought the curate.
+The fellow was, or seemed to be, years younger than himself! It was
+an assurance unimaginable--yet there it stood--six feet of it good!
+He glanced at the church tower. It had not vanished in mist! It
+still made its own strong, clear mark on the eternal blue!
+
+"I must not allow you to mistake my silence, Mr. Bascombe," he
+answered the same moment. "It is not easy to reply to such demands
+all at once. It is not easy to say in times like these, and at a
+moment's notice, what or how much a man believes. But whatever my
+answer might be had I time to consider it, my silence must at least
+not be interpreted to mean that I do NOT believe as my profession
+indicates. That, at all events, would be untrue."
+
+"Then I am to understand, Mr. Wingfold, that you neither believe nor
+disbelieve the tenets of the church whose bread you eat?" said
+Bascombe, with the air of a reprover of sin.
+
+"I decline to place myself between the horns of any such dilemma,"
+returned Wingfold, who was now more than a little annoyed at his
+persistency in forcing his way within the precincts of another's
+personality.
+
+"It is but one more proof--more than was necessary--to convince me
+that the old system is a lie--a lie of the worst sort, seeing it may
+prevail even to the self-deception of a man otherwise remarkable for
+honesty and directness. Good night, Mr. Wingfold."
+
+With lifted hats, but no hand-shaking, the men parted.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE CURATE IN THE CHURCHYARD.
+
+
+
+
+
+Bascombe was chagrined to find that the persuasive eloquence with
+which he hoped soon to play upon the convictions of jurymen at his
+own sweet will, had not begotten even communicativenes, not to say
+confidence, in the mind of a parson who knew himself fooled,--and
+partly that it gave him cause to doubt how far it might be safe to
+urge his attack in another and to him more important quarter. He had
+a passion for convincing people, this Hercules of the new world. He
+sauntered slowly back to his aunt's, husbanding his cigar a little,
+and looking up at the moon now and then,--not to admire the marvel
+of her shining, but to think yet again what a fit type of an effete
+superstition she was, in that she retained her power of fascination
+even in death.
+
+Wingfold walked slowly away, with his eyes on the ground gliding
+from under his footsteps. It was only eleven o'clock, but this the
+oldest part of the town seemed already asleep. They had not met a
+single person on their way, and hardly seen a lighted window. But he
+felt unwilling to go home, which at first he was fain to attribute
+to his having drunk a little more wine than was good for him, whence
+this feverishness and restlessness so strange to his experience. In
+the churchyard, on the other side of which his lodging lay, he
+turned aside from the flagged path and sat down upon a gravestone,
+where he was hardly seated ere he began to discover that it was
+something else than the wine which had made him feel so
+uncomfortable. What an objectionable young fellow that Bascombe was!
+--presuming and arrogant to a degree rare, he hoped, even in a
+profession for which insolence was a qualification. What rendered it
+worse was that his good nature--and indeed every one of his gifts,
+which were all of the popular order--was subservient to an
+assumption not only self-satisfied but obtrusive!--And yet--and
+yet--the objectionable character of his self-constituted judge being
+clear as the moon to the mind of the curate, was there not something
+in what he had said? This much remained undeniable at least, that
+when the very existence of the church was denounced as a humbug in
+the hearing of one who ate her bread, and was her pledged servant,
+his very honesty had kept that man from speaking a word in her
+behalf! Something must be wrong somewhere: was it in him or in the
+church? In him assuredly, whether in her or not. For had he not been
+unable to utter the simple assertion that he did believe the things
+which, as the mouthpiece of the church, he had been speaking in the
+name of the truth every Sunday--would again speak the day after
+to-morrow? And now the point was--WHY could he not say he believed
+them? He had never consciously questioned them; he did not question
+them now; and yet, when a forward, overbearing young infidel of a
+lawyer put it to him--plump--as if he were in the witness-box, or
+rather indeed in the dock--did he believe a word of what the church
+had set him to teach?--a strange something--was it honesty?--if so,
+how dishonest had he not hitherto been?--was it diffidence?--if so,
+how presumptuous his position in that church!--this nondescript
+something seemed to raise a "viewless obstruction" in his throat,
+and, having thus rendered him the first moment incapable of speaking
+out like a man, had taught him the next--had it?--to quibble--"like
+a priest" the lawyer-fellow would doubtless have said! He must go
+home and study Paley--or perhaps Butler's Analogy--he owed the
+church something, and ought to be able to strike a blow for her. Or
+would not Leighton be better? Or a more modern writer--say Neander,
+or Coleridge, or perhaps Dr. Liddon? There were thousands able to
+fit him out for the silencing of such foolish men as this Bascombe
+of the shirt-front!
+
+Wingfold found himself filled with contempt, but the next moment
+was not sure whether this Bascombe or one Wingfold were the more
+legitimate object of it. One thing was undeniable--his friends HAD
+put him into the priest's office, and he had yielded to go, that he
+might eat a piece of bread. He had no love for it except by fits,
+when the beauty of an anthem, or the composition of a collect, awoke
+in him a faint consenting admiration, or a weak, responsive
+sympathy. Did he not, indeed, sometimes despise himself, and that
+pretty heartily, for earning his bread by work which any pious old
+woman could do better than he? True, he attended to his duties; not
+merely "did church," but his endeavour also that all things should
+be done decently and in order. All the same it remained a fact that
+if Barrister Bascombe were to stand up and assert in full
+congregation--as no doubt he was perfectly prepared to do--that
+there was no God anywhere in the universe, the Rev. Thomas Wingfold
+could not, on the church's part, prove to anybody that there
+was;--dared not, indeed, so certain would he be of discomfiture,
+advance a single argument on his side of the question. Was it even
+HIS side of the question? Could he say he believed there was a God?
+Or was not this all he knew--that there was a church of England,
+which paid him for reading public prayers to a God in whom the
+congregation--and himself--were supposed by some to believe, by
+others, Bascombe, for instance, not?
+
+These reflections were not pleasant, especially with Sunday so near.
+For what if there were hundreds, yes, thousands of books,
+triumphantly settling every question which an over-seething and
+ill-instructed brain might by any chance suggest,--what could it
+boot?--how was a poor finite mortal, with much the ordinary faculty
+and capacity, and but a very small stock already stored, to set
+about reading, studying, understanding, mastering, appropriating the
+contents of those thousands of volumes necessary to the arming of
+him who, without pretending himself the mighty champion to seek the
+dragon in his den, might yet hope not to let the loathly worm
+swallow him, armour and all, at one gulp in the highway? Add to this
+that--thought of all most dismayful!--he had himself to convince
+first, the worst dragon of all to kill, for bare honesty's sake, in
+his own field; while, all the time he was arming and fighting--like
+the waves of the flowing tide in a sou'-wester, Sunday came in upon
+Sunday, roaring on his flat, defenceless shore, Sunday behind Sunday
+rose towering, in awful perspective, away to the verge of an
+infinite horizon--Sunday after Sunday of dishonesty and sham--yes,
+hypocrisy, far worse than any idolatry. To begin now, and in such
+circumstances, to study the evidences of Christianity, were about as
+reasonable as to send a man, whose children were crying for their
+dinner, off to China to make his fortune!
+
+He laughed the idea to scorn, discovered that a gravestone in a
+November midnight was a cold chair for study, rose, stretched
+himself disconsolately, almost despairingly, looked long at the
+persistent solidity of the dark church and the waving line of its
+age-slackened ridge, which, like a mountain-range, shot up suddenly
+in the tower and ceased--then turning away left the houses of the
+dead crowded all about the house of the resurrection. At the farther
+gate he turned yet again, and gazed another moment on the tower.
+Towards the sky it towered, and led his gaze upward. There still
+soared, yet rested, the same quiet night with its delicate heaps of
+transparent blue, its cool-glowing moon, its steely stars, and its
+something he did not understand. He went home a little quieter of
+heart, as if he had heard from afar something sweet and strange.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE COUSINS.
+
+
+
+
+
+George Bascombe was a peculiar development of the present century,
+almost of the present generation. In the last century, beyond a
+doubt, the description of such a man would have been incredible. I
+do not mean that he was the worse or the better for that. There are
+types both of good and of evil which to the past would have been
+incredible because unintelligible.
+
+It is very hard sometimes for a tolerably honest man, as we have
+just seen in the case of Wingfold, to say what he believes, and it
+ought to be yet harder to say what another man does not believe;
+therefore I shall presume no farther concerning Bascombe in this
+respect than to say that the thing he SEEMED most to believe was
+that he had a mission to destroy the beliefs of everybody else.
+Whence he derived this mission he would not have thought a
+reasonable question--would have answered that, if any man knew any
+truth unknown to another, understood any truth better, or could
+present it more clearly than another, the truth itself was his
+commission of apostleship. And his stand was indubitably a firm one.
+Only there was the question--whether his presumed commission was
+verily truth or no. It must be allowed that a good deal turns upon
+that.
+
+According to the judgment of some men who thought they knew him,
+Bascombe was as yet--I will not say incapable of distinguishing,
+but careless of the distinction between--not a fact and a law,
+perhaps, but a law and a truth. They said also that he inveighed
+against the beliefs of other people, without having ever seen more
+than a distorted shadow of those beliefs--some of them he was not
+capable of seeing, they said--only capable of denying. Now while he
+would have been perfectly justified, they said, in asserting that he
+saw no truth in the things he denied, was he justifiable in
+concluding that his not seeing a thing was a proof of its
+non-existence--anything more, in fact, than a presumption against
+its existence? or in denouncing every man who said he believed this
+or that which Bascombe did not believe, as either a knave or a fool,
+if not both in one? He would, they said, judge anybody--a
+Shakespeare, a Bacon, a Milton--without a moment's hesitation or a
+quiver of reverence--judge men who, beside him, were as the living
+ocean to a rose-diamond. If he was armed in honesty, the rivets were
+of self-satisfaction. The suit, they allowed, was adamantine,
+unpierceable.
+
+That region of a man's nature which has to do with the unknown was
+in Bascombe shut off by a wall without chink or cranny; he was
+unaware of its existence. He had come out of the darkness, and was
+going back into the darkness; all that lay between, plain and clear,
+he had to do with--nothing more. He could not present to himself the
+idea of a man who found it impossible to live without some dealings
+with the supernal. To him a man's imagination was of no higher
+calling than to amuse him with its vagaries. He did not know,
+apparently, that Imagination had been the guide to all the physical
+discoveries which he worshipped, therefore could not reason that
+perhaps she might be able to carry a glimmering light even into the
+forest of the supersensible.
+
+How far he was original in the views he propounded, will, to those
+who understand the times of which I write, be plain enough. The
+lively reception of another man's doctrine, especially if it comes
+over water or across a few ages of semi-oblivion, and has to be
+gathered with occasional help from a dictionary, raises many a man,
+in his own esteem, to the same rank with its first propounder; after
+which he will propound it so heartily himself as to forget the
+difference, and love it as his own child.
+
+It may seem strange that the son of a clergyman should take such a
+part in the world's affairs, but one who observes will discover
+that, at college at least, the behaviour of sons of clergymen
+resembles in general as little as that of any, and less than that of
+most, the behaviour enjoined by the doctrines their fathers have to
+teach. The cause of this is matter of consideration for those
+fathers. In Bascombe's case, it must be mentioned also that, instead
+of taking freedom from prejudice as a portion of the natural
+accomplishment of a gentleman, he prided himself upon it, and
+THEREFORE would often go dead against the things presumed to be held
+by THE CLOTH, long before he had begun to take his position as an
+iconoclast.
+
+Lest I should, however, tire my reader with the delineations of a
+character not of the most interesting, I shall, for the present,
+only add that Bascombe had persuaded himself, and without much
+difficulty, that he was one of the prophets of a new order of
+things. At Cambridge he had been so regarded by a few who had lauded
+him as a mighty foe to humbug--and in some true measure he deserved
+the praise. Since then he had found a larger circle, and had even
+radiated of his light, such, as it was, from the centres of London
+editorial offices. But all I have to do with now is the fact that he
+had grown desirous to add his cousin, Helen Lingard, to the number
+of those who believed in him, and over whom, therefore, he exercised
+a prophet's influence.
+
+No doubt it added much to the attractiveness of the intellectual
+game that the hunt was on the home grounds of such a proprietress as
+Helen--a handsome, a gifted, and, above all, a ladylike young woman.
+To do Bascombe justice, the fact that she was an heiress also had
+very little weight in the matter. If he had ever had any thought of
+marrying her, that thought was not consciously present to him when
+first he became aware of his wish to convert her to his views of
+life. But, although he was not in love with her, he admired her, and
+believed he saw in her one that resembled himself.
+
+As to Helen, although she was no more conscious of cause of
+self-dissatisfaction than her cousin, she was not therefore
+positively self-satisfied like him. For that her mind was not active
+enough.
+
+If it seem, as it may, to some of my readers, difficult to believe
+that she should have come to her years without encountering any
+questions, giving life to any aspirations, or even forming any
+opinions that could rightly be called her own, I would remind them
+that she had always had good health, and that her intellectual
+faculties had been kept in full and healthy exercise, nor had once
+afforded the suspicion of a tendency towards artistic utterance in
+any direction. She was no mere dabbler in anything: in music, for
+instance, she had studied thorough bass, and studied it well; yet
+her playing was such as I have already described it. She understood
+perspective, and could copy an etching, in pen and ink, to a
+hair's-breadth, yet her drawing was hard and mechanical. She was
+pretty much at home in Euclid, and thoroughly enjoyed a geometric
+relation, but had never yet shown her English master the slightest
+pleasure in an analogy, or the smallest sympathy with any poetry
+higher than such as very properly delights schoolboys. Ten thousand
+things she knew without wondering at one of them. Any attempt to
+rouse her admiration, she invariably received with quiet
+intelligence but no response. Yet her drawing-master was convinced
+there lay a large soul asleep somewhere below the calm grey morning
+of that wide-awake yet reposeful intelligence.
+
+As far as she knew--only she had never thought anything about
+it--she was in harmony with creation animate and inanimate, and for
+what might or might not be above creation, or at the back, or the
+heart, or the mere root of it, how could she think about a something
+the idea of which had never yet been presented to her by love or
+philosophy, or even curiosity? As for any influence from the public
+offices of religion, a contented soul may glide through them all for
+a long life, unstruck to the last, buoyant and evasive as a bee
+amongst hailstones. And now her cousin, unsolicited, was about to
+assume, if she should permit him, the unspiritual direction of her
+being, so that she need never be troubled from the quarter of the
+unknown.
+
+Mrs. Ramshorn's house had formerly been the manor-house, and,
+although it now stood in an old street, with only a few yards of
+ground between it and the road, it had a large and ancient garden
+behind it. A large garden of any sort is valuable, but an ancient
+garden is invaluable, and this one had retained a very antique
+loveliness. The quaint memorials of its history lived on into the
+new, changed, unsympathetic time, and stood there, aged, modest, and
+unabashed. Yet not one of the family had ever cared for it on the
+ground of its old-fashionedness; its preservation was owing merely
+to the fact that their gardener was blessed with a wholesome
+stupidity rendering him incapable of unlearning what his father, who
+had been gardener there before him, had had marvellous difficulty in
+teaching him. We do not half appreciate the benefits to the race
+that spring from honest dulness. The CLEVER people are the ruin of
+everything.
+
+Into this garden, Bascombe walked the next morning, after breakfast,
+and Helen, who, next to the smell of a fir-wood fire, honestly liked
+the odour of a good cigar, spying him from her balcony, which was
+the roof of the veranda, where she was trimming the few remaining
+chrysanthemums that stood outside the window of her room, ran down
+the little wooden stair that led from it to the garden, and joined
+him. Nothing could just at present have been more to his mind.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE GARDEN.
+
+
+
+
+
+"Take a cigar, Helen?" said George.
+
+"No, thank you," answered Helen; "I like it diluted."
+
+"I don't see why ladies should not have things strong as men."
+
+"Not if they don't want them. You can't enjoy everything--I mean,
+one can't have the strong and the delicate both at once. I don't
+believe a smoker can have the same pleasure in smelling a rose that
+I have."
+
+"Isn't it a pity we never can compare sensations?"
+
+"I don't think it matters much: everyone would have to keep to his
+own after all."
+
+"That's good, Helen! If ever man try to humbug you, he will find he
+has lost his stirrups. If only there were enough like you left in
+this miserable old hulk of a creation!"
+
+It was an odd thing that when in the humour of finding fault,
+Bascombe would not unfrequently speak of the cosmos as a creation.
+He was himself unaware of the curious fact.
+
+"You seem to have a standing quarrel with the creation, George! Yet
+one might think you had as little ground as most people to complain
+of your portion in it," said Helen.
+
+"Well, you know, I don't complain for myself. I don't pretend to
+think I am specially ill-used. But I am not everybody. And then
+there's such a lot of born-fools in it!"
+
+"If they are born-fools they can't help it."
+
+"That may be; only it makes it none the pleasanter for other people;
+but, unfortunately, they are not the only or the worst sort of
+fools. For one born-fool there are a thousand wilful ones. For one
+man that will honestly face an honest argument, there are ten
+thousand that will dishonestly shirk it. There's that curate-fellow
+now--Wingfold I think aunt called him--look at him now!"
+
+"I can't see much in him to rouse indignation," said Helen. "He
+seems a very inoffensive man."
+
+"I don't call it inoffensive when a man sells himself to the keeping
+up of a system that----"
+
+Here Bascombe checked himself, remembering that a sudden attack upon
+what was, at least, the more was the pity, a time-honoured system,
+might rouse a woman's prejudices; and as Helen had already listened
+to a large amount of undermining remark without perceiving the
+direction of his tunnels, he resolved, before venturing an open
+assault, to make sure that those prejudices stood, lightly borne,
+over an abyss of seething objection. He had had his experiences as
+the prophet-pioneer of glad tidings to the nations, and had before
+now, although such weakness he could not anticipate in Helen, seen
+one whom he considered a most promising pupil, turned suddenly away
+in a storm of terror and disgust.
+
+"What a folly is it now," he instantly resumed, leaving the general
+and attacking a particular, "to think to make people good by
+promises and threats--promises of a heaven that would bore the
+dullest among them to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of
+which, if only half conceived, would be enough to paralyse every
+nerve of healthy action in the human system!"
+
+"All nations have believed in a future state, either of reward or
+punishment," objected Helen.
+
+"Mere Brocken-spectres of their own approbation or disapprobation of
+themselves. And whither has it brought the race?"
+
+"What then would you substitute for it, George?"
+
+"Why substitute anything? Ought not men be good to one another
+because they are made up of ones and others? Do you or I need
+threats and promises to make us kind? And what right have we to
+judge others worse than ourselves? Mutual compassion," he went on,
+blowing out a mouthful of smoke and then swelling his big chest with
+a huge lungsful of air, "might be sufficient to teach poor
+ephemerals kindness and consideration enough to last their time."
+
+"But how would you bring such reflections to bear?" asked Helen,
+pertinently.
+
+"I would reason thus: You must consider that you are but a part of
+the whole, and that whatever you do to hurt the whole, or injure any
+of its parts, will return upon you who form one of those parts."
+
+"How would that influence the man whose favourite amusement is to
+beat his wife!"
+
+"Not at all, I grant you. But that man is what he is from being born
+and bred under a false and brutal system. Having deluged his
+delicate brain with the poisonous fumes of adulterated liquor, and
+so roused all the terrors of a phantom-haunted imagination, he sees
+hostile powers above watching for his fall, and fiery ruin beneath
+gaping to receive him, and in pure despair acts like the madman the
+priests and the publicans have made him. Helen," continued Bascombe
+with solemnity, regarding her fixedly, "to deliver the race from the
+horrors of such falsehoods, which by no means operate only on the
+vulgar and brutal, for to how many of the most refined and delicate of
+human beings are not their lives rendered bitter by the evil suggestions
+of lying systems--I care not what they are called--philosophy,
+religion, society, I care not?--to deliver men, I say, from such
+ghouls of the human brain, were indeed to have lived! and in the
+consciousness of having spent his life in the slaying of such dragons,
+a man may well go from the nameless past into the nameless future
+rejoicing, careless even if his poor length of days be shortened by
+his labours to leave blessing behind him, and, full of courage even
+in the moment of final dissolution, cast her mockery back into the
+face of mocking Life, and die her enemy, and the friend of Death!"
+
+George's language was a little confused. Perhaps he mingled his
+ideas a little for Helen's sake--or rather for obscurity's sake.
+Anyhow, the mournful touch in it was not his own, but taken from the
+poems of certain persons whose opinions resembled his, but floated
+on the surface of mighty and sad hearts. Tall, stately, comfortable
+Helen walked composedly by his side, softly shared his cigar, and
+thought what a splendid pleader he would make. Perhaps to her it
+sounded rather finer than it was, for its tone of unselfishness, the
+aroma of self-devotion that floated about it, pleased and attracted
+her. Was not here a youth in the prime of being and the dawn of
+success, handsome, and smoking the oldest of Havannahs, who, so far
+from being enamoured of his own existence, was anxious and careful
+about that of less favoured mortals, for whose welfare indeed he was
+willing to sacrifice his life?--nothing less could be what he meant.
+And how fine he looked as he said it, with his head erect, and his
+nostrils quivering like those of a horse! For his honesty, that was
+self-evident!
+
+Perhaps, had she been capable of looking into it, the self-evident
+honesty might have resolved itself into this--that he thoroughly
+believed in himself; that he meant what he said; and that he offered
+her nothing he did not prize and cleave to as his own.
+
+To one who had read Darwin, and had chanced to see them as they
+walked in their steady, stately young life among the ancient cedars
+and clipped yews of the garden, with the rags and tatters of the
+ruined summer hanging over and around them, they must have looked as
+fine an instance of natural selection as the world had to show. And
+now in truth for the first time, with any shadow of purpose, that
+is, did the thought of Helen as a wife occur to Bascombe. She
+listened so well, was so ready to take what he presented to her, was
+evidently so willing to become a pupil, that he began to say to
+himself that here was the very woman made--no, not made, that
+implied a maker--but for him, without the MADE; that is, if ever he
+should bring himself by marriage to limit the freedom to which man,
+the crown of the world, the blossom of nature, the cauliflower of
+the spine, was predestined or doomed, without will in himself or
+beyond himself, from an eternity of unthinking matter, ever
+producing what was better than itself in the prolific darkness of
+non-intent.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE PARK.
+
+
+
+
+
+At the bottom of Mrs. Ramshorn's garden was a deep sunk fence, which
+allowed a large meadow, a fragment of what had once been the
+manor-park, to belong, so far as the eye was concerned, to the
+garden. Nor was this all, for in the sunk fence was a door with a
+little tunnel, by which they could pass at once from the garden to
+the meadow. So, the day being wonderfully fine, Bascombe proposed to
+his cousin a walk in the park, the close-paling of which, with a
+small door in it, whereto Mrs. Ramshorn had the privilege of a key,
+was visible on the other side of the meadow. The two keys had but to
+be fetched from the house, and in a few minutes they were in the
+park. The turf was dry, the air was still, and although the woods
+were very silent, and looked mournfully bare, the grass drew nearer
+to the roots of the trees, and the sunshine filled them with streaks
+of gold, blending lovelily with the bright green of the moss that
+patched the older stems. Neither horses nor dogs say to themselves,
+I suppose, that the sunshine makes them glad, yet both are happier,
+after the rules of equine and canine existence, on a bright day:
+neither Helen nor George could have understood a poem of Keats--not
+to say Wordsworth--(I do not mean they would not have fancied they
+did)--and yet the soul of nature that dwelt in these common shows
+did not altogether fail of influence upon them.
+
+"I wonder what the birds do with themselves all the winter," said
+Helen.
+
+"Eat berries, and make the best of it," answered George.
+
+"I mean what becomes of them all. We see so few of them."
+
+"About as many as you see in summer. Because you hear them you fancy
+you see them."
+
+"But there is so little to hide them in winter."
+
+"Little is wanted to hide our dusky creatures."
+
+"They must have a hard time of it in frost and snow."
+
+"Oh! I don't know," returned George. "They enjoy life on the whole,
+I believe. It ain't such a very bad sort of a world as some people
+would have it. Nature is cruel enough in some of her arrangements,
+it can't be denied. She don't scruple to carry out her plans. It is
+nothing to her that for the life of one great monster of a
+high-priest, millions upon millions of submissive little fishes
+should be sacrificed; and then if anybody come within the teeth of
+her machinery, don't she mangle him finely--with her fevers and her
+agues and her convulsions and consumptions and what not? But still,
+barring her own necessities, and the consequences of man's ignorance
+and foolhardiness, she is on the whole rather a good-natured old
+woman, and scatters a deal of tolerably fair enjoyment around her."
+
+"One WOULD think the birds must be happy in summer, at least, to
+hear them sing," corroborated Helen.
+
+"Yes, or to see them stripping a hawthorn bush in winter--always
+provided the cat or the hawk don't get hold of them. With that
+nature does not trouble herself. Well, it's soon over--with all of
+us, and that's a comfort. If men would only get rid of their cats
+and hawks,--such as the fancy for instance, that all their
+suffering comes of the will of a malignant power! That is the kind
+of thing that makes the misery of the world!"
+
+"I don't quite see----" began Helen.
+
+"We were talking about the birds in winter," interrupted George,
+careful not to swell too suddenly any of the air-bags with which he
+would float Helen's belief. He knew wisely, and he knew how, to
+leave a hint to work while it was yet not half understood. By the
+time it was understood, it would have grown a little familiar: the
+supposed pup when it turned out a cub, would not be so terrible as
+if it had presented itself at once as leonate.
+
+And so they wandered across the park, talking easily.
+
+"They've got on a good way since I was here last," said George, as
+they came in sight of the new house the new earl was building. "But
+they don't seem much in a hurry with it either."
+
+"Aunt says it is twenty years since the foundations were laid by the
+uncle of the present earl," said Helen; "and then for some reason or
+other the thing was dropped."
+
+"Was there no house on the place before?"
+
+"Oh! yes--not much of a house, though."
+
+"And they pulled it down, I suppose."
+
+"No; it stands there still."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Down in the hollow there--over those trees--about the worst place
+they could have built in. Surely you have seen it! Poldie and I used
+to run all over it."
+
+"No, I never saw it. Was it empty then?"
+
+"Yes, or almost. I can remember some little attention paid to the
+garden, but none to the house. It is just falling slowly to pieces.
+Would you like to see it?"
+
+"That I should," returned Bascombe, who was always ready for any new
+impression on his sensorium, and away they went to look at the old
+house of Glaston as it was called, after some greatly older and
+probably fortified place.
+
+In the hollow all the water of the park gathered to a lake before
+finding its way to the river Lythe. This lake was at the bottom of
+the old garden, and the house at the top of it. The garden was
+walled on the two sides, and the walls ran right down to the lake.
+There were wonderful legends current amongst the children of Glaston
+concerning that lake, its depth, and the creatures in it; and one
+terrible story, which had been made a ballad of, about a lady
+drowned in a sack, whose ghost might still be seen when the moon was
+old, haunting the gardens and the house. Hence it came that none of
+them went near it, except those few whose appetites for adventure
+now and then grew keen enough to prevent their imaginations from
+rousing more fear than supplied the proper relish of danger. The
+house itself even those few never dared to enter.
+
+Not so had it been with Helen and Leopold. The latter had
+imagination enough to receive everything offered, but Helen was the
+leader, and she had next to none. In her childhood she had heard the
+tales alluded to from her nurses, but she had been to school since,
+and had learned not to believe them; and certainly she was not one
+to be frightened at what she did not believe. So when Leopold came
+in the holidays, the place was one of their favoured haunts, and
+they knew every cubic yard in the house.
+
+"Here," said Helen to her cousin, as she opened the door in a little
+closet, and showed a dusky room which had no window but a small one
+high up in the wall of a back staircase, "here is one room into
+which I never could get Poldie without the greatest trouble. I gave
+it up at last, he always trembled so till he got out again. I will
+show you such a curious place at the other end of it."
+
+She led the way to a closet similar to that by which they had
+entered, and directed Bascombe how to raise a trap which filled all
+the floor of it so that it did not show. Under the trap was a sort
+of well, big enough to hold three upon emergency.
+
+"If only they could contrive to breathe," said George. "It looks
+ugly. If it had but a brain and a tongue it could tell tales."
+
+"Come," said Helen. "I don't know how it is, but I don't like the
+look of it myself now. Let us get into the open air again."
+
+Ascending from the hollow, and passing through a deep belt of trees
+that surrounded it, they came again to the open park, and by-and-by
+reached the road that led from the lodge to the new building, upon
+which they presently encountered a strange couple.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE DWARFS.
+
+
+
+
+
+The moment they had passed them, George turned to his cousin with a
+countenance which bore moral indignation mingled with disgust. The
+healthy instincts of the elect of his race were offended by the
+sight of such physical failures, such mockeries of humanity as
+those.
+
+The woman was little if anything over four feet in height. She was
+crooked, had a high shoulder, and walked like a crab, one leg being
+shorter than the other. Her companion walked quite straight, with a
+certain appearance of dignity which he neither assumed nor could
+have avoided, and which gave his gait the air of a march. He was not
+an inch taller than the woman, had broad, square shoulders,
+pigeon-breast, and invisible neck. He was twice her age, and they
+seemed father and daughter. They heard his breathing, loud with
+asthma, as they went by.
+
+"Poor things!" said Helen, with cold kindness.
+
+"It is shameful!" said George, in a tone of righteous anger. "Such
+creatures have no right to existence. The horrid manakin!"
+
+"But, George!" said Helen, in expostulation, "the poor wretch can't
+help his deformity."
+
+"No; but what right had he to marry and perpetuate such odious
+misery!"
+
+"You are too hasty: the young woman is his niece."
+
+"She ought to have been strangled the moment she was born--for the
+sake of humanity. Monsters ought not to live."
+
+"Unfortunately they have all got mothers," said Helen; and something
+in her face made him fear he had gone too far.
+
+"Don't mistake me, dear Helen," he said. "I would neither starve nor
+drown them after they had reached the faculty of resenting such
+treatment--of the justice of which," he added, smiling, "I am afraid
+it would be hard to convince them. But such people actually marry
+--I have known cases,--and that ought to be provided against by
+suitable enactments and penalties."
+
+"And so," rejoined Helen, "because they are unhappy already, you
+would heap unhappiness upon them?"
+
+"Now, Helen, you must not be unfair to me any more than to your
+hunchbacks. It is the good of the many I seek, and surely that is
+better than the good of the few."
+
+"What I object to is, that it should be at the expense of the
+few--who are least able to bear it."
+
+"The expense is trifling," said Bascombe. "Grant that it would be
+better for society that no such--or rather put it this way: grant
+that it would be well for each individual that goes to make up
+society that he were neither deformed, sickly, nor idiotic, and you
+mean the same that I do. A given space of territory under given
+conditions will always maintain a certain number of human beings;
+therefore such a law as I propose would not mean that the number
+drawing the breath of heaven should, to take the instance before us
+in illustration, be two less, but that a certain two of them should
+not be such as he or she who passed now, creatures whose existence
+is a burden to them, but such as you and I, Helen, who may say
+without presumption that we are no disgrace to Nature's handicraft."
+
+Helen was not sensitive. She neither blushed nor cast down her eyes.
+But his tenets, thus expounded, had nothing very repulsive in them
+so far as she saw, and she made no further objection to them.
+
+As they walked up the garden again, through the many lingering signs
+of a more stately if less luxurious existence than that of their
+generation, she was calmly listening to a lecture on the ground of
+law, namely, the resignation of certain personal rights for the
+securing of other and more important ones: she understood, was
+mildly interested, and entirely satisfied.
+
+They seated themselves in the summer-house, a little wooden room
+under the down-sloping boughs of a huge cedar, and pursued their
+conversation--or rather Bascombe pursued his monologue. A lively
+girl would in all probability have been bored to death by him, but
+Helen was not a lively girl, and was not bored at all. Ere they went
+into the house she had heard, amongst a hundred other things of
+wisdom, his views concerning crime and punishment--with which, good
+and bad, true and false, I shall not trouble my reader, except in
+regard to one point--that of the obligation to punish. Upon this
+point he was severe.
+
+No person, he said, ought to allow any weakness of pity to prevent
+him from bringing to punishment the person who broke the laws upon
+which the well-being of the community depended. A man must remember
+that the good of the whole, and not the fate of the individual, was
+to be regarded.
+
+It was altogether a notable sort of tête-à-tête between two such
+perfect specimens of the race, and as at length they entered the
+house, they professed to each other to have much enjoyed their walk.
+
+Holding the opinions he did, Bascombe was in one thing inconsistent:
+he went to "divine service" on the Sunday with his aunt and
+cousin--not to humour Helen's prejudices, but those of Mrs.
+Ramshorn, who, belonging, as I have said, to the profession, had
+strong opinions as to the wickedness of not going to church. It was
+of no use, he said to himself, trying to upset her ideas, for to
+succeed would only be to make her miserable, and his design was to
+make the race happy. In the grand old Abbey, therefore, they heard
+together morning prayers, the Litany, and the Communion, all in one,
+after a weariful and lazy modern custom not yet extinct, and then a
+dull, sensible sermon, short, and tolerably well read, on the duty
+of forgiveness of injuries.
+
+I dare say it did most of the people present a little good,
+undefinable as the faint influences of starlight, to sit under that
+"high embowed roof," within that vast artistic isolation, through
+whose mighty limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to
+feel the awful infinitude of the parent space out of which it is
+scooped. I dare also say that the tones of the mellow old organ
+spoke to something in many of the listeners that lay deeper far than
+the plummet of their self-knowledge had ever sounded. I think also
+that the prayers, the reading of which, in respect of intelligence,
+was admirable, were not only regarded as sacred utterances, but felt
+to be soothing influences by not a few of those who made not the
+slightest effort to follow them with their hearts; and I trust that
+on the whole their church-going tended rather to make them better
+than to harden them. But as to the main point, the stirring up of
+the children of the Highest to lay hold of the skirts of their
+Father's robe, the waking of the individual conscience to say I WILL
+ARISE, and the strengthening of the captive Will to break its bonds
+and stand free in the name of the eternal creating Freedom--for
+nothing of that was there any special provision. This belonged, in
+the nature of things, to the sermon, in which, if anywhere, the
+voice of the indwelling Spirit might surely be heard--out of his
+holy temple, if indeed that be the living soul of man, as St. Paul
+believed; but there was no sign that the preacher regarded his
+office as having any such end, although in his sermon lingered the
+rudimentary tokens that such must have been the original intent of
+pulpit-utterance.
+
+On the way home, Bascombe made some objections to the discourse,
+partly to show his aunt that he had been attending. He admitted that
+one might forgive and forget what did not come within the scope of
+the law, but, as he had said to Helen before, a man was bound, he
+said, to punish the wrong which through him affected the community.
+
+"George," said his aunt, "I differ from you there. Nobody ought to
+go to the law to punish an injury. I would forgive ever so many
+before I would run the risk of the law. But as to FORGETTING an
+injury--some injuries at least--no, that I never would!--And I don't
+believe, let the young man say what he will, that that is required
+of anyone."
+
+Helen said nothing. She had no enemies to forgive, no wrongs worth
+remembering, and was not interested in the question. She thought it
+a very good sermon indeed.
+
+When Bascombe left for London in the morning, he carried with him
+the lingering rustle of silk, the odour of lavender, and a certain
+blueness, not of the sky, which seemed to have something behind it,
+as never did the sky to him. He had never met woman so worthy of
+being his mate, either as regarded the perfection of her form, or
+the hidden development of her brain--evident in her capacity for the
+reception of truth, as his own cousin, Helen Lingard. Might not the
+relationship account for the fact?
+
+Helen thought nothing to correspond. She considered George a fine
+manly fellow. What bold and original ideas he had about everything!
+Her brother was a baby to him! But then Leopold was such a love of a
+boy! Such eyes and such a smile were not to be seen on this side the
+world. Helen liked her cousin, was attached to her aunt, but loved
+her brother Leopold, and loved nobody else. His Hindoo mother, high
+of caste, had given him her lustrous eyes and pearly smile, which,
+the first moment she saw him, won his sister's heart. He was then
+but eight years old, and she but eleven. Since then, he had been
+brought up by his father's elder brother, who had the family estate
+in Yorkshire, but he had spent part of all his holidays with her,
+and they often wrote to each other. Of late indeed his letters had
+not been many, and a rumour had reached her that he was not doing
+quite satisfactorily at Cambridge, but she explained it away to the
+full contentment of her own heart, and went on building such castles
+as her poor aerolithic skill could command, with Leopold ever and
+always as the sharer of her self-expansion.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CURATE AT HOME.
+
+
+
+
+
+If we could arrive at the feelings of a fish of the northern ocean
+around which the waters suddenly rose to tropical temperature, and
+swarmed with strange forms of life, uncouth and threatening, we
+should have a fair symbol of the mental condition in which Thomas
+Wingfold now found himself. The spiritual fluid in which his being
+floated had become all at once more potent, and he was in
+consequence uncomfortable. A certain intermittent stinging, as if
+from the flashes of some moral electricity, had begun to pass in
+various directions through the crude and chaotic mass he called
+himself, and he felt strangely restless. It never occurred to
+him--as how should it?--that he might have commenced undergoing the
+most marvellous of all changes,--one so marvellous, indeed, that for
+a man to foreknow its result or understand what he was passing
+through, would be more strange than that a caterpillar should
+recognise in the rainbow-winged butterfly hovering over the flower
+at whose leaf he was gnawing, the perfected idea of his own
+potential self--I mean the change of being born again. Nor were the
+symptoms such as would necessarily have suggested, even to a man
+experienced in the natural history of the infinite, that the process
+had commenced.
+
+A restless night followed his reflections in the churchyard, and he
+did not wake at all comfortable. Not that ever he had been in the
+way of feeling comfortable. To him life had not been a land flowing
+with milk and honey. He had had few smiles, and not many of those
+grasps of the hand which let a man know another man is near him in
+the battle--for had it not been something of a battle, how could he
+have come to the age of six-and-twenty without being worse than he
+was? He would not have said: "All these have I kept from my youth
+up;" but I can say that for several of them he had shown fight,
+although only One knew anything of it. This morning, then, it was
+not merely that he did not feel comfortable: he was consciously
+uncomfortable. Things were getting too hot for him. That infidel
+fellow had poked several most awkward questions at him--yes, into
+him, and a good many more had in him--self arisen to meet them.
+Usually he lay a little while before he came to himself; but this
+morning he came to himself at once, and not liking the interview,
+jumped out of bed as if he had hoped to leave himself there behind
+him.
+
+He had always scorned lying, until one day, when still a boy at
+school, he suddenly found that he had told a lie, after which he
+hated it--yet now, if he was to believe--ah! whom? did not the
+positive fellow and his own conscience say the same thing?--his
+profession, his very life was a lie! the very bread he ate grew on
+the rank fields of falsehood!--No, no; it was absurd! it could not
+be! What had he done to find himself damned to such a depth? Yet the
+thing must be looked to. He batht himself without remorse and never
+even shivered, though the water in his tub was bitterly cold,
+dressed with more haste than precision, hurried over his breakfast,
+neglected his newspaper, and took down a volume of early church
+history. But he could not read: the thing was hopeless--utterly.
+With the wolves of doubt and the jackals of shame howling at his
+heels, how could he start for a thousand-mile race! For God's sake
+give him a weapon to turn and face them with! Evidence! all of it
+that was to be had, was but such as one man received, another man
+refused; and the popular acceptance was worth no more in respect of
+Christianity than of Mahometanism, for how many had given the
+subject at all better consideration than himself? And there was
+Sunday with its wolves and jackals, and but a hedge between! He did
+not so much mind reading the prayers: he was not accountable for
+what was in them, although it was bad enough to stand up and read
+them. Happy thing he was not a dissenter, for then he would have had
+to pretend to pray from his own soul, which would have been too
+horrible! But there was the sermon! That at least was supposed to
+contain, or to be presented as containing, his own sentiments. Now
+what were his sentiments? For the life of him he could not tell. Had
+he ANY sentiments, any opinions, any beliefs, any unbeliefs? He had
+plenty of sermons--old, yellow, respectable sermons, not
+lithographed, neither composed by mind nor copied out by hand
+unknown, but in the neat writing of his old D.D. uncle, so legible
+that he never felt it necessary to read them over beforehand--just
+saw that he had the right one. A hundred and fifty-seven such
+sermons, the odd one for the year that began on a Sunday, of
+unquestionable orthodoxy, had his kind old uncle left him in his
+will, with the feeling probably that he was not only setting him up
+in sermons for life, but giving him a fair start as well in the race
+of which a stall in some high cathedral was the goal. For his own
+part he had never made a sermon, at least never one he had judged
+worth preaching to a congregation. He had rather a high idea, he
+thought, of preaching, and these sermons of his uncle he considered
+really excellent. Some of them, however, were altogether doctrinal,
+some very polemical: of such he must now beware. He would see of
+what kind was the next in order; he would read it and make sure it
+contained nothing he was not, in some degree at least, prepared to
+hold his face to and defend--if he could not absolutely swear he
+believed it purely true.
+
+He did as resolved. The first he took up was in defence of the
+Athanasian creed! That would not do. He tried another. That was upon
+the Inspiration of the Scriptures. He glanced through it--found
+Moses on a level with St. Paul, and Jonah with St. John, and doubted
+greatly. There might be a sense--but--! No, he would not meddle with
+it. He tried a third: that was on the Authority of the Church. It
+would not do. He had read each of all these sermons, at least once,
+to a congregation, with perfect composure and following
+indifference, if not peace of mind, but now he could not come on one
+with which he was even in sympathy--not to say one of which he was
+certain that it was more true than false. At last he took up the odd
+one--that which could come into use but once in a week of years--and
+this was the sermon Bascombe heard and commented upon. Having read
+it over, and found nothing to compromise him with his conscience,
+which was like an irritable man trying to find his way in a windy
+wood by means of a broken lantern, he laid all the rest aside and
+felt a little relieved.
+
+Wingfold had never neglected the private duty of a clergyman in
+regard of morning and evening devotions, but was in the habit of
+dressing and undressing his soul with the help of certain chosen
+contents of the prayer-book--a somewhat circuitous mode of
+communicating with Him who was so near him,--that is, if St. Paul
+was right in saying that he lived, and moved, and was, IN Him; but
+that Saturday he knelt by his bedside at noon, and began to pray or
+try to pray as he had never prayed or tried to pray before. The
+perplexed man cried out within the clergyman, and pressed for some
+acknowledgment from God of the being he had made.
+
+But--was it strange to tell? or if strange, was it not the most
+natural result nevertheless?--almost the same moment he began to
+pray in this truer fashion, the doubt rushed up in him like a
+torrent-spring from the fountains of the great deep--Was
+there--could there be a God at all? a real being who might actually
+hear his prayer? In this crowd of houses and shops and churches,
+amidst buying and selling, and ploughing and praising and
+backbiting, this endless pursuit of ends and of means to ends, while
+yet even the wind that blew where it listed blew under laws most
+fixed, and the courses of the stars were known to a hair's-breadth,
+--was there--could there be a silent invisible God working his own
+will in it all? Was there a driver to that chariot whose
+multitudinous horses seemed tearing away from the pole in all
+directions? and was he indeed, although invisible and inaudible,
+guiding that chariot, sure as the flight of a comet, straight to its
+goal? Or was there a soul to that machine whose myriad wheels went
+grinding on and on, grinding the stars into dust, matter into man,
+and man into nothingness? Was there--could there be a living heart
+to the universe that did positively hear him--poor, misplaced,
+dishonest, ignorant Thomas Wingfold, who had presumed to undertake a
+work he neither could perform nor had the courage to forsake, when
+out of the misery of the grimy little cellar of his consciousness he
+cried aloud for light and something to make a man of him? For now
+that Thomas had begun to doubt like an honest being, every ugly
+thing within him began to show itself to his awakened probity.
+
+But honest and of good parentage as the doubts were, no sooner had
+they shown themselves than the wings of the ascending prayers
+fluttered feebly and failed. They sank slowly, fell, and lay as
+dead, while all the wretchedness of his position rushed back upon
+him with redoubled inroad. Here was a man who could not pray, and
+yet must go and read prayers and preach in the old attesting church,
+as if he too were of those who knew something of the secrets of the
+Almighty, and could bring out from his treasury, if not things new
+and surprising, then things old and precious! Ought he not to send
+round the bell-man to cry aloud that there would be no service? But
+what right had he to lay his troubles, the burden of his dishonesty,
+upon the shoulders of them who faithfully believed, and who looked
+to him to break to them their daily bread? And would not any attempt
+at a statement of the reasons he had for such an outrageous breach
+of all decorum be taken for a denial of those things concerning
+which he only desired most earnestly to know that they were true.
+For he had received from somewhere, he knew not how or whence, a
+genuine prejudice in favour of Christianity, while of those
+refractions and distorted reflexes of it which go by its name and
+rightly disgust many, he had had few of the tenets thrust upon his
+acceptance.
+
+Thus into the dark pool of his dull submissive life, the bold words
+of the unbeliever had fallen--a dead stone perhaps, but causing a
+thousand motions in the living water. Question crowded upon
+question, and doubt upon doubt, until he could bear it no longer,
+and starting from the floor on which at last he had sunk prostrate,
+he rushed in all but involuntary haste from the house, and scarcely
+knew where he was until, in a sort, he came to himself some little
+distance from the town, wandering hurriedly in field-paths.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+AN INCIDENT.
+
+
+
+
+
+It was a fair morning of All Hallows' summer. The trees were nearly
+despoiled, but the grass was green, and there was a memory of spring
+in the low sad sunshine: even the sunshine, the gladdest thing in
+creation, is sad sometimes. There was no wind, nothing to fight
+with, nothing to turn his mind from its own miserable perplexities.
+How endlessly his position as a clergyman, he thought, added to his
+miseries! Had he been a man unpledged, he could have taken his own
+time to think out the truths of his relations; as it was, he felt
+like a man in a coffin: out he must get, but had not room to make a
+single vigorous effort for freedom! It did not occur to him yet
+that, uupressed from without, his honesty unstung, he might have
+taken more time to find out where he was than would have been either
+honest or healthful.
+
+He came to a stile where his path joined another that ran both ways,
+and there seated himself, just as the same strange couple I have
+already described as met by Miss Lingard and Mr. Bascombe approached
+and went by. After they had gone a good way, he caught sight of
+something lying in the path, and going to pick it up, found it was a
+small manuscript volume.
+
+With the pleasurable instinct of service, he hastened after them.
+They heard him, and turning waited his approach. He took off his
+hat, and presenting the book to the young woman, asked if she had
+dropped it. Possibly, had they been ordinary people of the class to
+which they seemed to belong, he would not have uncovered to them,
+for he naturally shrunk from what might be looked upon as a display
+of courtesy, but their deformity rendered it imperative. Her face
+flushed so at sight of the book, that, in order to spare her
+uneasiness, Wingfold could not help saying with a smile,
+
+"Do not be alarmed: I have not read one word of it."
+
+She returned his smile with much sweetness, and said--
+
+"I see I need not have been afraid."
+
+Her companion joined in thanks and apologies for having caused him
+so much trouble. Wingfold assured them it had been but a pleasure.
+It was far from a scrutinizing look with which he regarded them, but
+the interview left him with the feeling that their faces were
+refined and intelligent, and their speech was good. Again he lifted
+his rather shabby hat, the man responded with equal politeness in
+removing from a great grey head one rather better, and they turned
+from each other and went their ways, the sight of their malformation
+arousing in the curate no such questions as those with which it had
+agitated the tongue, if not the heart, of George Bascombe, to widen
+the scope of his perplexities. He had heard the loud breathing of
+the man, and seen the projecting eyes of the woman, but he never
+said to himself therefore that they were more hardly dealt with than
+he. Had such a thought occurred to him, he would have comforted the
+pain of his sympathy with the reflection that at least neither of
+them was a curate of the church of England who knew positively
+nothing of the foundation upon which that church professed to stand.
+
+How he got through the Sunday he never could have told. What times a
+man may get through--he knows not how! As soon as it was over, it
+was all a mist--from which gleamed or gloomed large the face of
+George Bascombe with its keen unbelieving eyes and scornful lips.
+All the time he was reading the prayers and lessons, all the time he
+was reading his uncle's sermon, he had not only been aware of those
+eyes, but aware also of what lay behind them--seeing and reading
+the reflex of himself in Bascombe's brain; but nothing more whatever
+could he recall.
+
+Like finger-posts dim seen, on a moorland journey, through the
+gathering fogs, Sunday after Sunday passed. I will not request my
+reader to accompany me across the confusions upon which was blowing
+that wind whose breath was causing a world to pass from chaos to
+cosmos. One who has ever gone through any experience of the kind
+himself, will be able to imagine it; to one who has not, my
+descriptions would be of small service: he would but shrink from the
+representation as diseased and of no general interest. And he would
+be so far right, that the interest in such things must be most
+particular and individual, or none at all.
+
+The weeks passed and seemed to bring him no light, only increased
+earnestness in the search after it. Some assurance he must find
+soon, else he would resign his curacy, and look out for a situation
+as tutor.
+
+Of course all this he ought to have gone through long ago! But how
+can a man go through anything till his hour be come? Saul of Tarsus
+was sitting at the feet of Gamaliel when our Lord said to his
+apostles--"Yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will
+think that he doeth God service." Wingfold had all this time been
+skirting the wall of the kingdom of heaven without even knowing that
+there was a wall there, not to say seeing a gate in it. The fault
+lay with those who had brought him up to the church as to the
+profession of medicine, or the bar, or the drapery business--as if
+it lay on one level of choice with other human callings. Nor were
+the honoured of the church who had taught him free from blame, who
+never warned him to put his shoes from off his feet for the holiness
+of the ground. But how were they to warn him, if they had sowed and
+reaped and gathered into barns on that ground, and had never
+discovered therein treasure more holy than libraries, incomes, and
+the visits of royalty? As to visions of truth that make a man sigh
+with joy, and enlarge his heart with more than human tenderness--how
+many of those men had ever found such treasure in the fields of the
+church? How many of them knew save by hearsay whether there be any
+Holy Ghost! How then were they to warn other men from the dangers of
+following in their footsteps and becoming such as they? Where, in a
+general ignorance and community of fault, shall we begin to blame?
+Wingfold had no time to accuse anyone after the first gush of
+bitterness. He had to awake from the dead and cry for light, and was
+soon in the bitter agony of the cataleptic struggle between life and
+death.
+
+He thought afterwards, when the time had passed, that surely in this
+period of darkness he had been visited and upheld by a power whose
+presence and even influence escaped his consciousness. He knew not
+how else he could have got through it. Also he remembered that
+strange helps had come to him; that the aspects of nature then
+wonderfully softened towards him, that then first he began to feel
+sympathy with her ways and shows, and to see in them all the working
+of a diffused humanity. He remembered how once a hawthorn bud set
+him weeping; and how once, as he went miserable to church, a child
+looked up in his face and smiled, and how in the strength of that
+smile he had walked boldly to the lectern.
+
+He never knew how long he had been in the strange birth agony, in
+which the soul is as it were at once the mother that bears and the
+child that is born.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+A REPORT OF PROGRESS.
+
+
+
+
+
+In the meantime George Bascombe came and went; every visit he showed
+clearer notions as to what he was for, and what he was against;
+every visit he found Helen more worthy and desirable than
+theretofore, and flattered himself he made progress in the
+conveyance of his opinions and judgments over into her mind. His
+various accomplishments went far in aid of his design. There was
+hardly anything Helen could do that George could not do as well, and
+some he could do better, while there were many things George was at
+home in which were sealed to her. The satisfaction of teaching such
+a pupil he found great. When at length he began to make love to her,
+Helen found it rather agreeable than otherwise; and, if there was a
+little more MAKING in it than some women would have liked, Helen was
+not sufficiently in love with him to detect its presence. Still the
+pleasure of his preference was such that it opened her mind with a
+favourable prejudice towards whatever in the shape of theory or
+doctrine he would have her receive; and much that a more experienced
+mind would have rejected because of its evident results in practice,
+was by her accepted in the ignorance which confined her regard of
+his propositions to their intellectual relations, and prevented her
+from following them into their influences upon life, which would
+have reflected light upon their character. For life in its real
+sense was to her as yet little more definite and present than a
+dream that waits for the coming night. Hence, when her cousin at
+length ventured to attack even those doctrines which all women who
+have received a Christian education would naturally be expected to
+revere the most, she was able to listen to him unshocked. But she
+little thought, or he either, that it was only in virtue of what
+Christian teaching she had had that she was capable of appreciating
+what was grand in his doctrine of living for posterity without a
+hope of good result to self beyond the consciousness that future
+generations of perishing men and women would be a little more
+comfortable, and perhaps a little less faulty therefrom. She did not
+reflect, either, that no one's theory concerning death is of much
+weight in his youth while life FEELS interminable, or that the gift
+of comfort during a life of so little value that the giver can part
+with it without regret, is scarcely one to be looked upon as a
+mighty benefaction.
+
+"But truth is truth," George would have replied.
+
+What you profess to teach them might be a fact, but could never be a
+truth, I answer. And the veiy value which you falsely put upon facts
+you have learned to attribute to them from the supposed existence of
+something at the root of all facts--namely, TRUTHS, or eternal laws
+of being. Still, if you believe that men will be happier from
+learning your discovery that there is no God, preach it, and prosper
+in proportion to its truth. No; that from my pen would be a
+curse--no, preach it not, I say, until you have searched all spaces
+of space, up and down, in greatness and smallness--where I grant
+indeed, but you cannot know, that you will not find him--and all
+regions of thought and feeling, all the unknown mental universe of
+possible discovery--preach it not until you have searched that also,
+I say, lest what you count a truth should prove to be no fact, and
+there should after all be somewhere, somehow, a very, living God, a
+Truth indeed, in whom is the universe. If you say, "But I am
+convinced there is none," I answer--You may be convinced that there
+is no God such as this or that in whom men imagine they believe, but
+you cannot be convinced there is no God.
+
+Meantime George did not forget the present of this life in its
+future, continued particular about his cigars and his wine, ate his
+dinners with what some would call a good conscience and I would call
+a dull one, were I sure it was not a good digestion they really
+meant, and kept reading hard and to purpose.
+
+Matters as between the two made no rapid advance. George went on
+loving Helen more than any other woman, and Helen went on liking
+George next best to her brother Leopold. Whether it came of
+prudence, of which George possessed not a little, of coldness of
+temperament, or a pride that would first be sure of acceptance, I do
+not know, but he made no formal offer yet of handing himself over to
+Helen, and certainly Helen was in no haste to hear, more than he to
+utter, the irrevocable.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+JEREMY TAYLOR.
+
+
+
+
+
+One Tuesday morning, in the spring, the curate received by the local
+post the following letter dated from The Park-Gate.
+
+"Respected Sir,
+
+"An obligation on my part which you have no doubt forgotten gives me
+courage to address you on a matter which seems to me of no small
+consequence concerning yourself. You do not know me, and the name at
+the end of my letter will have for you not a single association. The
+matter itself must be its own excuse.
+
+"I sat in a free seat at the Abbey church last Sunday morning. I had
+not listened long to the sermon ere I began to fancy I foresaw what
+was coming, and in a few minutes more I seemed to recognise it as
+one of Jeremy Taylor's. When I came home, I found that the best
+portions of one of his sermons had, in the one you read, been
+wrought up with other material.
+
+"If, sir, I imagined you to be one of such as would willingly have
+that regarded as their own which was better than they could produce,
+and would with contentment receive any resulting congratulations, I
+should feel that I was only doing you a wrong if I gave you a hint
+which might aid you in avoiding detection; for the sooner the truth
+concerning such a one was known, and the judgment of society brought
+to bear upon it, the better for him, whether the result were
+justification or the contrary. But I have read that in your
+countenance and demeanour which convinces me that, however custom
+and the presence of worldly elements in the community to which you
+belong may have influenced your judgment, you require only to be set
+thinking of a matter, to follow your conscience with regard to
+whatever you may find involved in it. I have the honour to be,
+respected sir,
+
+"Your obedient servant and well-wisher,
+
+"Joseph Polwarth."
+
+Wingfold sat staring at the letter, slightly stunned. The feeling
+which first grew recognizable in the chaos it had caused, was
+vexation at having so committed himself; the next, annoyance with
+his dead old uncle for having led him into such a scrape. There in
+the good doctor's own handwriting lay the sermon, looking nowise
+different from the rest! Had he forgotten his marks of quotation? Or
+to that sermon did he always have a few words of extempore
+introduction? For himself he was as ignorant of Jeremy Taylor as of
+Zoroaster. It could not be that that was his uncle's mode of making
+his sermons? Was it possible they could all be pieces of literary
+mosaic? It was very annoying. If the fact came to be known, it would
+certainly be said that he had attempted to pass off Jeremy Taylor's
+for his own--as if he would have the impudence to make the attempt,
+and with such a well-known writer! But what difference did it make
+whether the writer was well or ill known? None, except as to the
+relative probabilities of escape and discovery! And should the
+accusation be brought against him, how was he to answer it? By
+burdening the reputation of his departed uncle with the odium of the
+fault? Was it worse in his uncle to use Jeremy Taylor than in
+himself to use his uncle? Or would his remonstrants accept the
+translocation of blame? Would the church-going or chapel-going
+inhabitants of Glaston remain mute when it came to be discovered
+that since his appointment he had not once preached a sermon of his
+own? How was it that knowing all about it in the background of his
+mind, he had never come to think of it before? It was true that,
+admirer of his uncle as he was, he had never imagined himself
+reaping any laurels from the credit of his sermons; it was equally
+true however that he had not told a single person of the hidden
+cistern whence he drew his large discourse. But what could it matter
+to any man, so long as a good sermon was preached, where it came
+from? He did not occupy the pulpit in virtue of his personality, but
+of his office, and it was not a place for the display of
+originality, but for dispensing the bread of life.--From the stores
+of other people?--Yes, certainly--if other people's bread was
+better, and no one the worse for his taking it. "For me, I have
+none," he said to himself. Why then should that letter have made him
+uncomfortable? What had he to be ashamed of? Why should he object to
+being found out? What did he want to conceal? Did not everybody know
+that very few clergymen really made their own sermons? Was it not
+absurd, this mute agreement that, although all men knew to the
+contrary, it must appear to be taken for granted that a man's
+sermons were of his own mental production? Still more absurd as well
+as cruel was the way in which they sacrificed to the known falsehood
+by the contempt they poured upon any fellow the moment they were
+able to say of productions which never could have been his, that
+they were by this man or that man, or bought at this shop or that
+shop in Great Queen Street or Booksellers' Row. After that he was an
+enduring object for the pointed finger of a mild scorn. It was
+nothing but the old Spartan game of--steal as you will and enjoy as
+you can: you are nothing the worse; but woe to you if you are caught
+in the act! There WAS something contemptible about the whole thing.
+He was a greater humbug than he had believed himself, for upon this
+humbug which he now found himself despising he had himself been
+acting diligently! It dawned upon him that, while there was nothing
+wrong in preaching his uncle's sermons, there was evil in yielding
+to cast any veil, even the most transparent, over the fact that the
+sermons were not his own.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE PARK GATE.
+
+
+
+
+
+He had however one considerate, even friendly parishioner, it
+seemed, whom it became him at least to thank for his openness. He
+ceased to pace the room, sat down at his writing-table, and
+acknowledged Mr. Polwarth's letter, expressing his obligation for
+its contents, and saying that he would do himself the honour of
+calling upon him that afternoon, in the hope of being allowed to say
+for himself what little could be said, and of receiving counsel in
+regard to the difficulty wherein he found himself. He sent the note
+by his land-lady's boy, and as soon as he had finished his lunch,
+which meant his dinner, for he could no longer afford to dull his
+soul in its best time for reading and thinking, he set out to find
+Park Gate, which he took for some row of dwellings in the suburbs.
+
+Going in the direction pointed out, and finding he had left all the
+houses behind him, he stopped at the gate of Osterfield Park to make
+further inquiry. The door of the lodge was opened by one whom he
+took, for the first half second, to be a child, but recognized the
+next as the same young woman whose book he had picked up in the
+fields a few months before. He had never seen her since, but her
+deformity and her face together had made it easy to remember her.
+
+"We have met before," he said, in answer to her courtesy and smile,
+"and you must now do me a small favour if you can."
+
+"I shall be most happy, sir. Please come in," she answered.
+
+"I am sorry I cannot at this moment, as I have an engagement. Can
+you tell me where Mr. Polwarth of the Park Gate lives?"
+
+The girl's smile of sweetness changed to one of amusement as she
+repeated, in a gentle voice through which ran a thread of suffering,
+
+"Come in, sir, please. My uncle's name is Joseph Polwarth, and this
+is the gate to Osterfield Park. People know it as the Park-gate."
+
+The house was not one of those trim, modern park-lodges, all angles
+and peaks, which one sees everywhere now-a-days, but a low cottage,
+with a very thick, wig-like thatch, into which rose two astonished
+eyebrows over the stare of two half-awake dormer-windows. On the
+front of it were young leaves and old hips enough to show that in
+summer it must be covered with roses.
+
+Wingfold entered at once, and followed her through the kitchen, upon
+which the door immediately opened, a bright place, with stone floor,
+and shining things on the walls, to a neat little parlour, cozy and
+rather dark, with a small window to the garden behind, and a smell
+of last year's roses.
+
+"My uncle will be here in a few minutes," she said, placing a chair
+for him. "I would have had a fire here, but my uncle always talks
+better amongst his books. He expected you, but my lord's steward
+sent for him up to the new house."
+
+He took the chair she offered him, and sat down to wait. He had not
+much of the gift of making talk--a questionable accomplishment,
+--and he never could approach his so-called inferiors but as his
+equals, the fact being that in their presence he never felt any
+difference. Notwithstanding his ignorance of the lore of
+Christianity, Thomas Wingfold was, in regard to some things, gifted
+with what I am tempted to call a divine stupidity. Many of the
+distinctions and privileges after which men follow, and of the
+annoyances and slights over which they fume, were to the curate
+inappreciable: he did not and could not see them.
+
+"So you are warders of the gate here, Miss Polwarth?" he said,
+assuming that to be her name, and rightly, when the young woman, who
+had for a moment left the room, returned.
+
+"Yes," she answered, "we have kept it now for about eight years,
+sir.--It is no hard task. But I fancy there will be a little more to
+do when the house is finished."
+
+"It is a long way for you to go to church."
+
+"It would be, sir; but I do not go," she said.
+
+"Your uncle does."
+
+"Not very often, sir."
+
+She left the door open and kept coming and going between the kitchen
+and the parlour, busy about house affairs. Wingfold sat and watched
+her as he had opportunity with growing interest.
+
+She had the full-sized head that is so often set on a small body,
+and it looked yet larger from the quantity of rich brown hair upon
+it--hair which some ladies would have given their income to
+possess. Clearly too it gave pleasure to its owner, for it was
+becomingly as well as carefully and modestly dressed. Her face
+seemed to Wingfold more interesting every fresh peep he had of it,
+until at last he pronounced it to himself one of the sweetest he had
+ever seen. Its prevailing expression was of placidity, and something
+that was not contentment merely: I would term it satisfaction, were
+I sure that my reader would call up the very antipode of
+SELF-satisfaction. And yet there were lines of past and shadows of
+present suffering upon it. The only sign however that her poor
+crooked body was not at present totally forgotten, was a slight shy
+undulation that now and then flickered along the lines of her
+sensitive mouth, seeming to indicate a shadowy dim-defined thought,
+or rather feeling, of apology, as if she would disarm prejudice by
+an expression of sorrow that she could not help the pain and
+annoyance her unsightliness must occasion. Every feature in her thin
+face was good, and seemed, individually almost, to speak of a loving
+spirit, yet he could see ground for suspecting that keen expressions
+of a quick temper could be no strangers upon those delicately
+modelled forms. Her hands and feet were both as to size and shape
+those of a mere child.
+
+He was still studying her like a book which a boy reads by stealth,
+when with slow step her uncle entered the room.
+
+Wingfold rose and held out his hand.
+
+"You are welcome, sir," said Polwarth, modestly, with the strong
+grasp of a small firm hand. "Will you walk upstairs with me, where
+we shall be undisturbed? My niece has, I hope, already made my
+apologies for not being at home to receive you.--Rachel, my child,
+will you get us a cup of tea, and by the time it is ready we shall
+have got through our business, I daresay."
+
+The face of Wingfold's host and new friend in expression a good deal
+resembled that of his niece, but bore traces of yet greater
+suffering--bodily, and it might be mental as well. It did not look
+quite old enough for the whiteness of the plentiful hair that
+crowned it, and yet there was that in it which might account for the
+whiteness.
+
+His voice was a little dry and husky, streaked as it were with the
+asthma whose sounds made that big disproportioned chest seem like
+the cave of the east wind; but it had a tone of dignity and decision
+in it, quite in harmony with both matter and style of his letter,
+and before Wingfold had followed him to the top of the steep narrow
+straight staircase, all sense of incongruity in him had vanished
+from his mind.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+THE ATTIC.
+
+
+
+
+
+The little man led the way into a tolerably large room, with
+down-sloping ceiling on both sides, lighted by a small window in the
+gable, near the fireplace, and a dormer window as well. The low
+walls, up to the slope, were filled with books; books lay on the
+table, on the bed, on chairs, and in corners everywhere.
+
+"Aha!" said Wingfold, as he entered and cast his eyes around, "there
+is no room for surprise that you should have found me out so easily,
+Mr. Polwarth! Here you have a legion of detectives for such
+rascals."
+
+The little man turned, and for a moment looked at him with a
+doubtful and somewhat pained expression, as if he had not been
+prepared for such an entrance on a solemn question; but a moment's
+reading of the curate's honest face, which by this time had a good
+deal more print upon it than would have been found there six months
+agone, sufficed; the cloud melted into a smile, and he said
+cordially,
+
+"It is very kind of you, sir, to take my presumption in such good
+part. Pray sit down, sir. You will find that chair a comfortable
+one."
+
+"Presumption!" echoed Wingfold. "The presumption was all on my part,
+and the kindness on yours. But you must first hear my explanation,
+such as it is. It makes the matter hardly a jot the better, only a
+man would not willingly look worse, or better either, than he is,
+and besides, we must understand each other if we would be friends.
+However unlikely it may seem to you, Mr. Polwarth, I really do share
+the common weakness of wanting to be taken exactly for what I am,
+neither more nor less."
+
+"It is a noble weakness, and far enough from common, I am sorry to
+think," returned Polwarth.
+
+The curate then told the gate-keeper of his uncle's legacy, and his
+own ignorance of Jeremy Taylor.
+
+"But," he concluded, "since you set me about it, my judgment has
+capsized itself, and it now seems to me worse to use my uncle's
+sermons than to have used the bishop's, which anyone might discover
+to be what they are."
+
+"I see no harm in either," said Polwarth, "provided only it be above
+board. I believe some clergymen think the only evil lies in
+detection. I doubt if they ever escape it, and believe the amount of
+successful deception in that kind to be very small indeed. Many in a
+congregation can tell, by a kind of instinct, whether a man be
+preaching his own sermons or not. But the worse evil appears to me
+to lie in the tacit understanding that a sermon must SEEM to be a
+man's own, although all in the congregation know, and the would-be
+preacher knows that they know, that it is none of his."
+
+"Then you mean, Mr. Polwarth, that I should solemnly acquaint my
+congregation next Sunday with the fact that the sermon I am about to
+read to them is one of many left me by my worthy uncle, Jonah
+Driftwood, D.D., who, on his death-bed, expressed the hope that I
+should support their teaching by my example, for, having gone over
+them some ten or fifteen times in the course of his incumbency, and
+bettered each every time until he could do no more for it, he did
+not think, save by my example, I could carry further the enforcement
+of the truths they contained:--shall I tell them all that?"
+
+Polwarth laughed, but with a certain seriousness in his merriment,
+which however took nothing from its genuineness, indeed seemed
+rather to add thereto.
+
+"It would hardly be needful to enter so fully into particulars," he
+said. "It would be enough to let them know that you wished it
+understood between them and you, that you did not profess to teach
+them anything of yourself, but merely to bring to bear upon them the
+teaching of others. It would raise complaints and objections,
+doubtless; but for that you must be prepared if you would do
+anything right."
+
+Wingfold was silent, thoughtful, saying to himself--"How straight an
+honest bow can shoot!--But this involves something awful. To stand
+up in that pulpit and speak about myself! I who, even if I had any
+opinions, could never see reason for presenting them to other
+people! It's my office, is it--not me? Then I wish my Office would
+write his own sermons. He can read the prayers well enough!"
+
+All his life, a little heave of pent-up humour would now and then
+shake his burden into a more comfortable position upon his bending
+shoulders. He gave a forlorn laugh.
+
+"But," resumed the small man, "have you never preached a sermon of
+your own thinking--I don't mean of your own making--one that came
+out of the commentaries, which are, I am told, the mines whither
+some of our most noted preachers go to dig for their first
+inspirations--but one that came out of your own heart--your delight
+in something you had found out, or something you felt much?"
+
+"No," answered Wingfold; "I have nothing, never had anything worth
+giving to another; and it would seem to me very unreasonable to
+subject a helpless congregation to the blundering attempts of such a
+fellow to put into the forms of reasonable speech things he really
+knows nothing about."
+
+"You must know about some things which it might do them good to be
+reminded of--even if they know them already," said Polwarth. "I
+cannot imagine that a man who looks things in the face as you do,
+the moment they confront you, has not lived at all, has never met
+with anything in his history which has taught him something other
+people need to be taught. I profess myself a believer in preaching,
+and consider that in so far as the church of England has ceased to
+be a preaching church--and I don't call nine-tenths of what goes by
+the name of it PREACHING--she has forgotten a mighty part of her
+high calling. Of course a man to whom no message has been personally
+given, has no right to take the place of a prophet--and cannot, save
+by more or less of simulation--but there is room for teachers as
+well as prophets, and the more need of teachers that the prophets
+are so few; and a man may right honestly be a clergyman who teaches
+the people, though he may possess none of the gifts of prophecy."
+
+"I do not now see well how you are leading me," said Wingfold,
+considerably astonished at both the aptness and fluency with which a
+man in his host's position was able to express himself. "Pray, what
+do you mean by PROPHECY?"
+
+"I mean what I take to be the sense in which St. Paul uses the
+word--I mean the highest kind of preaching. But I will come to the
+point practically: a man, I say, who does not feel in his soul that
+he has something to tell his people, should straightway turn his
+energy to the providing of such food for them as he finds feed
+himself. In other words, if he has nothing new in his own treasure,
+let him bring something old out of another man's. If his own soul is
+unfed, he can hardly be expected to find food for other people, and
+has no business in any pulpit, but ought to betake himself to some
+other employment--whatever he may have been predestined to--I mean,
+made fit for."
+
+"Then do you intend that a man SHOULD make up his sermons from the
+books he reads?"
+
+"Yes, if he cannot do better. But then I would have him read--not
+with his sermon in his eye, but with his people in his heart. Men in
+business and professions have so little time for reading or
+thinking--and idle people have still less--that their means of
+grace, as the theologians say, are confined to discipline without
+nourishment, whence their religion, if they have any, is often from
+mere atrophy but a skeleton; and the office of preaching is, after
+all, to wake them up lest their sleep turn to death; next, to make
+them hungry, and lastly, to supply that hunger; and for all these
+things, the pastor has to take thought. If he feed not the flock of
+God, then is he an hireling and no shepherd."
+
+At this moment, Rachel entered with a small tea-tray: she could
+carry only little things, and a few at a time. She cast a glance of
+almost loving solicitude at the young man who now sat before her
+uncle with head bowed, and self-abasement on his honest countenance,
+then a look almost of expostulation at her uncle, as if interceding
+for a culprit, and begging the master not to be too hard upon him.
+But the little man smiled--such a sweet smile of re-assurance, that
+her face returned at once to its prevailing expression of content.
+She cleared a place on the table, set down her tray, and went to
+bring cups and saucers.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+POLWARTH'S PLAN.
+
+
+
+
+
+"I think I understand you now," said Wingfold, after the little
+pause occasioned by the young woman's entrance. "You would have a
+man who cannot be original, deal honestly in second-hand goods. Or
+perhaps rather, he should say to the congregation--'This is not
+home-made bread I offer you, but something better. I got it from
+this or that baker's shop. I have eaten of it myself, and it has
+agreed well with me and done me good. If you chew it well, I don't
+doubt you also will find it good.'--Is that something like what you
+would have, Mr. Polwarth?"
+
+"Precisely," answered the gate-keeper. "But," he added, after a
+moment's delay, "I should be sorry if you stopped there."
+
+"Stopped there!" echoed Wingfold. "The question is whether I can
+begin there. You have no idea how ignorant I am--how little I have
+read!"
+
+"I have some idea of both, I fancy. I must have known considerably
+less than you at your age, for I was never at a university."
+
+"But perhaps even then you had more of the knowledge which, they
+say, life only can give."
+
+"I have it now at all events. But of that everyone has enough who
+lives his life. Those who gain no experience are those who shirk the
+king's highway, for fear of encountering the Duty seated by the
+roadside."
+
+"You ought to be a clergyman yourself, sir," said Wingfold, humbly.
+"How is it that such as I----"
+
+Here he checked himself, knowing something of how it was.
+
+"I hope I ought to be just what I am, neither more nor less,"
+replied Polwarth. "As to being a clergyman, Moses had a better idea
+about such things, at least so far as concerns outsides, than you
+seem to have, Mr. Wingfold. He would never have let a man who in
+size and shape is a mere mockery of the human, stand up to minister
+to the congregation. But if you will let me help you, I shall be
+most grateful; for of late I have been oppressed with the thought
+that I serve no one but myself and my niece. I am in mortal fear of
+growing selfish under the weight of my privileges."
+
+A fit of asthmatic coughing seized him, and grew in severity until
+he seemed struggling for his life. It was at the worst when his
+niece entered, but she showed no alarm, only concern, and did
+nothing but go up to him and lay her hand on his back between his
+shoulders till the fit was over. The instant the convulsion ceased,
+its pain dissolved in a smile.
+
+Wingfold uttered some lame expressions of regret that he should
+suffer so much.
+
+"It is really nothing to distress you, or me either, Mr. Wingfold,"
+said the little man. "Shall we have a cup of tea, and then resume
+our talk?"
+
+"The fact, I find, Mr. Polwarth," said the curate, giving the result
+of what had been passing through his mind, and too absorbed in that
+to reply to the invitation, "is, that I must not, and indeed cannot
+give you half-confidences. I will tell you all that troubles me, for
+it is plain that you know something of which I am ignorant,
+--something which, I have great hopes, will turn out to be the very
+thing I need to know. May I speak? Will you let me talk about
+myself?"
+
+"I am entirely at your service, Mr. Wingfold," returned Polwarth,
+and seeing the curate did not touch his tea, placed his own cup
+again on the table.
+
+The young woman got down like a child from the chair upon which she
+had perched herself at the table, and with a kind look at Wingfold,
+was about to leave the room.
+
+"No, no, Miss Polwarth!" said the curate, rising; "I shall not be
+able to go on if I feel that I have sent you away--and your tea
+untouched too! What a selfish and ungrateful fellow I am! I did not
+even observe that you had given me tea! But you would pardon me if
+you knew what I have been going through. If you don't mind staying,
+we can talk and drink our tea at the same time. I am very fond of
+tea, when it is so good as I see yours is. I only fear I may have to
+say some things that will shock you."
+
+"I will stay till then," replied Rachel, with a smile, and climbed
+again upon her chair. "I am not much afraid. My uncle says things
+sometimes fit to make a Pharisee's hair stand on his head, but
+somehow they make my heart burn inside me.--May I stop, uncle?--I
+should like so much!"
+
+"Certainly, my child, if Mr. Wingfold will not feel your presence a
+restraint."
+
+"Not in the least," said the curate.
+
+Miss Polwarth helped them to bread and butter, and a brief silence
+followed.
+
+"I was brought up to the church," said Wingfold at length, playing
+with his teaspoon, and looking down on the table. "It's an awful
+shame such a thing should have been, but I don't find out that
+anybody in particular was to blame for it. Things are all wrong that
+way, in general, I doubt. I pass my examinations with decency,
+distinguish myself in nothing, go before the bishop, am admitted a
+deacon, after a year am ordained a priest, and after another year or
+two of false preaching and of parish work, suddenly find myself
+curate in charge of a grand old abbey church; but as to what the
+whole thing means in practical relation with myself as a human
+being, I am as ignorant as Simon Magus, without his excuse. Do not
+mistake me. I think I could stand an examination on the doctrines of
+the church, as contained in the articles, and prayer-book generally.
+But for all they have done for me, I might as well have never heard
+of them."
+
+"Don't be quite sure of that, Mr. Wingfold. At least, they have
+brought you to inquire if there be anything in them."
+
+"Mr. Polwarth," returned Wingfold abruptly, "I cannot even prove
+there is a God!"
+
+"But the church of England exists for the sake of teaching
+Christianity, not proving that there is a God."
+
+"What is Christianity, then?"
+
+"God in Christ, and Christ in man."
+
+"What is the use of that if there be no God?"
+
+"None whatever."
+
+"Mr. Polwarth, can you prove there is a God?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then if you don't believe there is a God--I don't know what is to
+become of me," said the curate, in a tone of deep disappointment,
+and rose to go.
+
+"Mr. Wingfold," said the little man, with a smile and a deep breath
+as of delight at the thought that was moving in him, "I know him in
+my heart, and he is all in all to me. You did not ask whether I
+believed in him, but whether I could prove that there was a God. As
+well ask a fly, which has not yet crawled about the world, if he can
+prove that it is round!"
+
+"Pardon me, and have patience with me," said Wingfold, resuming his
+seat. "I am a fool. But it is life or death to me."
+
+"I would we were all such fools!--But please ask me no more
+questions; or ask me as many as you will, but expect no answers just
+yet. I want to know more of your mind first."
+
+"Well, I will ask questions, but press for no answers.--If you
+cannot prove there is a God, do you know for certain that such a one
+as Jesus Christ ever lived? Can it be proved with positive
+certainty? I say nothing of what they call the doctrines of
+Christianity, or the authority of the church, or the sacraments, or
+anything of that sort. Such questions are at present of no interest
+to me. And yet the fact that they do not interest me, were enough to
+prove me in as false and despicable a position as ever man found
+himself occupying--as arrant a hypocrite and deceiver as any
+god-personating priest in the Delphic temple.--I had rather a man
+despised than excused me, Mr. Polwarth, for I am at issue with
+myself, and love not my past."
+
+"I shall do neither, Mr. Wingfold. Go on, if you please, sir. I am
+more deeply interested than I can tell you."
+
+"Some few months ago then, I met a young man who takes for granted
+the opposite of all that I had up to that time taken for granted,
+and which now I want to be able to prove. He spoke with contempt of
+my profession. I could not defend my profession, and of course had
+to despise myself. I began to think. I began to pray--if you will
+excuse me for mentioning it. My whole past life appeared like the
+figures that glide over the field of a camera obscura--not an
+abiding fact in it all. A cloud gathered about me, and hangs about
+me still. I call, but no voice answers me out of the darkness, and
+at times I am in despair. I would, for the love and peace of
+honesty, give up the profession, but I shrink from forsaking what I
+may yet possibly find--though I fear, I fear--to be as true as I
+wish to find it. Something, I know not what, holds me to it--some
+dim vague affection, possibly mere prejudice, aided by a love for
+music, and the other sweet sounds of our prayers and responses. Nor
+would I willingly be supposed to deny what I dare not say--indeed
+know not how to say I believe, not knowing what it is. I should
+nevertheless have abandoned everything months ago, had I not felt
+bound by my agreement to serve my rector for a year. You are the
+only one of the congregation who has shown me any humanity, and I
+beg of you to be my friend and help me. What shall I do? After the
+avowal you have made, I may well ask you again, How am I to know
+that there is a God?"
+
+"It were a more pertinent question, sir," returned Polwarth,--"If
+there be a God, how am I to find him?--And, as I hinted before,
+there is another question--one you have already put--more pertinent
+to your position as an English clergyman: Was there ever such a man
+as Jesus Christ?--Those, I think, were your own words: what do you
+mean by SUCH a man?"
+
+"Such as he is represented in the New Testament."
+
+"From that representation, what description would you give of him
+now? What is that SUCH? What sort of person, supposing the story
+true, would you take this Jesus, from that story, to have been?"
+
+Wingfold thought for a while.
+
+"I am a worse humbug than I fancied," he said. "I cannot tell what
+he was. My thoughts of him are so vague and indistinct that it would
+take me a long time to render myself able to answer your question."
+
+"Perhaps longer still than you think, sir. It took me a very long
+time.--"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+JOSEPH POLWARTH.
+
+
+
+
+
+"Shall I tell you," the gate-keeper went on, "something of my life,
+in return of the confidence you have honoured me with?"
+
+"Nothing could be more to my mind," answered Wingfold. "And I
+trust," he added, "it is no unworthy curiosity that makes me anxious
+to understand how you have come to know so much."
+
+"Indeed it is not that I know much," said the little man. "On the
+contrary I am the most ignorant person of my acquaintance. You would
+be astonished to discover what I don't know. But the thing is that I
+know what is worth knowing. Yet I get not a crumb more than my daily
+bread by it--I mean the bread by which the inner man lives. The man
+who gives himself to making money, will seldom fail of becoming a
+rich man; and it would be hard if a man who gave himself to find
+wherewithal to still the deepest cravings of his best self, should
+not be able to find that bread of life. I tried to make a little
+money by book-selling once: I failed--not to pay my debts, but to
+make the money; I could not go into it heartily, or give it thought
+enough, so it was all right I should not succeed; but what I did and
+do make my object, does not disappoint me.
+
+"My ancestors, as my name indicates, were of and in Cornwall, where
+they held large property. Forgive the seeming boast--it is but fact,
+and can reflect little enough on one like me. Scorn and pain mingled
+with mighty hope is a grand prescription for weaning the heart from
+the judgments and aspirations of this world. Later ancestors were,
+not many generations ago, the proprietors of this very property of
+Osterfield, which the uncle of the present Lord de Barre bought, and
+to which I, their descendant, am gate-keeper. What with gambling,
+drinking, and worse, they deserved to lose it. The results of their
+lawlessness are ours: we are what and where you see us. With the
+inherited poison, the Father gave the antidote. Rachel, my child, am
+I not right when I say that you thank God with me for having THUS
+visited the iniquities of the fathers upon the children?"
+
+"I do, uncle; you know I do--from the bottom of my heart," replied
+Rachel in a low tender voice.
+
+A great solemnity came upon the spirit of Wingfold, and for a moment
+he felt as if he sat wrapt in a cloud of sacred marvel, beyond and
+around which lay a gulf of music too perfect to touch his sense. But
+presently Polwarth resumed:
+
+"My father was in appearance a remarkably fine man, tall and
+stately. Of him I have little to say. If he did not do well, my
+grandfather must be censured first. He had a sister very like Rachel
+here. Poor Aunt Lottie! She was not so happy as my little one. My
+brothers were all fine men like himself, yet they all died young
+except my brother Robert. He too is dead now, thank God, and I trust
+he is in peace. I had almost begun to fear with himself that he
+would never die. And yet he was but fifty. He left me my Rachel with
+her twenty pounds a year. I have thirty of my own, and this cottage
+we have rent-free for attending to the gate. I shall tell you more
+about my brother some day. There are none of the family left now but
+myself and Rachel. God in his mercy is about to let it cease.
+
+"I was sent to one of our smaller public schools--mainly, I believe,
+because I was an eyesore to my handsome father. There I made, I
+fancy, about as good a beginning as wretched health, and the
+miseries of a sensitive nature, ever conscious of exposure, without
+mother or home to hide its feebleness and deformity, would permit.
+For then first I felt myself an outcast. I was the butt of all the
+coarser-minded of my schoolfellows, and the kindness of some could
+but partially make up for it. On the other hand, I had no haunting
+and irritating sense of wrong, such as I believe not a few of my
+fellows in deformity feel--no burning indignation, or fierce impulse
+to retaliate on those who injured me, or on the society that scorned
+me. The isolation that belonged to my condition wrought indeed to
+the intensifying of my individuality, but that again intensified my
+consciousness of need more than of wrong, until the passion
+blossomed almost into assurance, and at length I sought even with
+agony the aid to which my wretchedness seemed to have a right. My
+longing was mainly for a refuge, for some corner into which I might
+creep, where I should be concealed and so at rest. The sole triumph
+I coveted over my persecutors was to know that they could not find
+me--that I had a friend stronger than they. It is no wonder I should
+not remember when I began to pray, and hope that God heard me. I
+used to fancy to myself that I lay in his hand and peeped through
+his fingers at my foes. That was at night, for my deformity brought
+me one blessed comfort--that I had no bedfellow. This I felt at
+first as both a sad deprivation and a painful rejection, but I
+learned to pray the sooner for the loneliness, and the heartier from
+the solitude which was as a chamber with closed door.
+
+"I do not know what I might have taken to had I been made like other
+people, or what plans my mother cherished for me. But it soon became
+evident, as time passed and I grew no taller but more mis-shapen,
+that to bring me up to a profession would be but to render my
+deformity the more painful to myself. I spent, therefore, the first
+three years after I left school at home, keeping out of my father's
+way as much as possible, and cleaving fast to my mother. When she
+died, she left her little property between me and my brother. He had
+been brought up to my father's profession--that of an engineer. My
+father could not touch the principal of this money, but neither,
+while he lived, could we the interest. I hardly know how I lived for
+the next three or four years--it must have been almost on charity, I
+think. My father was never at home, and but for the old woman who
+had been our only attendant all my life, I think very likely I
+should have starved. I spent my time mostly in reading--whatever I
+could lay my hands upon--and that not carelessly, but with such
+reflection as I was capable of. One thing I may mention, as showing
+how I was still carried in the same direction as before--that,
+without any natural turn for handicraft, I constructed for myself a
+secret place of carpenter's work in a corner of the garret, small
+indeed, but big enough for a couch on which I could lie, and a table
+as long as the couch. That was all the furniture. The walls were
+lined from top to bottom with books, mostly gathered from those
+lying about the house. Cunningly was the entrance to this nest
+contrived: I doubt if anyone may have found it yet. If some
+imaginative, dreamy boy has come upon it, what a find it must have
+been to him! I could envy him the pleasure. There I always went to
+say my prayers and read my bible. But sometimes The Arabian Nights,
+or some other book of entrancing human invention, would come
+between, and make me neglect both, and then I would feel bad and
+forsaken;--for as yet I knew little of the heart to which I cried
+for shelter and warmth and defence.
+
+"Somewhere in this time at length, I began to feel dissatisfied,
+even displeased with myself. At first the feeling was vague,
+altogether undefined--a mere sense that I did not fit into things,
+that I was not what I ought to be, what was somehow and by the
+Authority required of me. This went on, began to gather roots rather
+than send them out, grew towards something more definite. I began to
+be aware that, heavy affliction as it was to be made so different
+from my fellows, my outward deformity was but a picture of my inward
+condition. There nothing was right. Many things which in theory I
+condemned, and in others despised, were yet a part of myself, or, at
+best, part of evil disease cleaving fast unto me. I found myself
+envious and revengeful and conceited. I discovered that I looked
+down on people whom I thought less clever than myself. Once I caught
+myself scorning a young fellow to whose disadvantage I knew nothing,
+except that God had made him handsome enough for a woman. All at
+once one day, with a sickening conviction it came upon me--with one
+of those sudden slackenings of the cord of self-consciousness, in
+which it doubles back quivering, and seems to break, while the man
+for an instant beholds his individuality apart from himself, is
+generally frightened at it, and always disgusted--a strange and indeed
+awful experience, which if it lasted longer than its allotted moment,
+might well drive a man mad who had no God to whom to offer back his
+individuality, in appeal against his double consciousness--it was in
+one of these cataleptic fits of the spirit, I say, that I first saw
+plainly what a contemptible little wretch I was, and writhed in the
+bright agony of conscious worthlessness.
+
+"I now concluded that I had been nothing but a pharisee and a
+hypocrite, praying with a bad heart, and that God saw me just as
+detestable as I saw myself, and despised me and was angry with me. I
+read my bible more diligently than ever for a time, found in it
+nothing but denunciation and wrath, and soon dropped it in despair.
+I had already ceased to pray.
+
+"One day a little boy mocked me. I flew into a rage, and, rendered
+by passion for the moment fleet and strong, pursued and caught him.
+Whatever may be a man's condition of defence against evil, I have
+learnt that he cannot keep the good out of him. When the boy found
+himself in my clutches, he turned on me a look of such terror that
+it disarmed me at once, and, confounded and distressed to see a
+human being in such abject fear, a state which in my own experience
+I knew to be horrible, ashamed also that it should be before such a
+one as myself, I would have let him go instantly, but that I could
+not without first having comforted him. But not a word of mine could
+get into his ears, and I saw at length that he was so PRE-possessed,
+that every tone of kindness I uttered, sounded to him a threat:
+nothing would do but let him go. The moment he found himself free,
+he fled headlong into the pond, got out again, ran home, and told,
+with perfect truthfulness I believe, though absolute inaccuracy,
+that I threw him in. After this I tried to govern my temper, but
+found that the more I tried, the more even that I succeeded
+outwardly, that is, succeeded in suppressing the signs and deeds of
+wrath, the less could I keep down the wrath in my soul. I then tried
+never to think about myself at all, and read and read--not the
+bible--more and more, in order to forget myself. But ever through
+all my reading and thinking I was aware of the lack of harmony at
+the heart of me: I was not that which it was well to be; I was not
+at peace; I lacked; was distorted; I was sick. Such were my
+feelings, not my reflections. All that time is as the memory of an
+unlovely dream--a dream of confusion and pain.
+
+"One evening, in the twilight, I lay alone in my little den, not
+thinking, but with mind surrendered and passive to what might come
+into it. It was very hot--indeed sultry. My little skylight was
+open, but not a breath of air entered. What preceded I do not know,
+but the face of the terrified boy rose before me, or in me rather,
+and all at once I found myself eagerly, painfully, at length almost
+in an agony, persuading him that I would not hurt him, but meant
+well and friendlily towards him. Again I had just let him go in
+despair, when the sweetest, gentlest, most refreshing little waft of
+air came in at the window and just went BEING, hardly moving, over
+my forehead. Its greeting was more delicate than even my mother's
+kiss, and yet it cooled my whole body. Now whatever, or whencesoever
+the link, if any be supposed needful to account for the fact, it
+kept below in the secret places of the springs, for I saw it not;
+but the next thought of which I was aware was--What if I
+misunderstood God the same way the boy had misunderstood me! and the
+next thing was to take my New Testament from the shelf on which I
+had laid it aside.
+
+"Another evening of that same summer, I said to myself that I would
+begin at the beginning and read it through. I had no definite idea
+in the resolve; it seemed a good thing to do, and I would do it. It
+would serve towards keeping up my connection in a way with THINGS
+ABOVE. I began, but did not that night get through the first chapter
+of St. Matthew. Conscientiously I read every word of the genealogy,
+but when I came to the twenty-third verse and read: 'Thou shalt call
+his name Jesus; FOR HE SHALL SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS,' I
+fell on my knees. No system of theology had come between me and a
+common-sense reading of the book. I did not for a moment imagine
+that to be saved from my sins meant to be saved from the punishment
+of them. That would have been no glad tidings to me. My sinfulness
+was ever before me, and often my sins too, and I loved them not, yet
+could not free myself of them. They were in me and of me, and how
+was I to part myself from that which came to me with my
+consciousness, which asserted itself in me as one with my
+consciousness? I could not get behind myself so as to reach its
+root. But here was news of one who came from behind that root itself
+to deliver me from that in me which made being a bad thing! Ah, Mr.
+Wingfold! what if, after all the discoveries made, and all the
+theories set up and pulled down, amid all the commonplaces men call
+common sense, notwithstanding all the over-powering and excluding
+self-assertion of things that are seen, ever crying, 'Here we are,
+and save us there is nothing: the Unseen is the Unreal!'--what if, I
+say, notwithstanding all this, it should yet be that the strongest
+weapon a man can wield is prayer to one who made him! What if the
+man who lifts up his heart to the unknown God even, be entering,
+amid the mockery of men who worship what they call natural law and
+science, into the region whence issues every law, and where the very
+material of science is born!
+
+"To tell you all that followed, if I could recall and narrate it in
+order, would take hours. Suffice it that from that moment I was a
+student, a disciple. Soon to me also came then the two questions:
+HOW DO I KNOW THAT THERE IS A GOD AT ALL? and--HOW AM I TO KNOW THAT
+SUCH A MAN AS JESUS EVERY LIVED? I could answer neither. But in the
+meantime I was reading the story--was drawn to the man there
+presented--and was trying to understand his being, and character,
+and principles of life and action. And, to sum all in a word, many
+months had not passed ere I had forgotten to seek an answer to
+either question: they were in fact questions no longer: I had seen
+the man Christ Jesus, and in him had known the Father of him and of
+me. My dear sir, no conviction can be got, or if it could be got,
+would be of any sufficing value, through that dealer in second-hand
+goods, the intellect. If by it we could prove there is a God, it
+would be of small avail indeed: we must see him and know him, to
+know that he was not a demon. But I know no other way of knowing
+that there is a God but that which reveals WHAT he is--the only idea
+that could be God--shows him in his own self-proving existence--and
+that way is Jesus Christ as he revealed himself on earth, and as he
+is revealed afresh to every heart that seeks to know the truth
+concerning him."
+
+A pause followed, a solemn one, and then again Polwarth spoke:
+
+"Either the whole frame of existence," he said, "is a wretched,
+miserable unfitness, a chaos with dreams of a world, a chaos in
+which the higher is for ever subject to the lower, or it is an
+embodied idea growing towards perfection in him who is the one
+perfect creative Idea, the Father of lights, who suffers himself
+that he may bring his many sons into the glory which is his own
+glory."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.
+
+
+
+
+
+"But," said Wingfold--"only pray do not think I am opposing you; I
+am in the straits you have left so far behind: how am I to know that
+I should not merely have wrought myself up to the believing of that
+which I should like to be true?"
+
+"Leave that question, my dear sir, until you know what that really
+is which you want to believe. I do not imagine that you have more
+than the merest glimmer of the nature of that concerning which you,
+for the very reason that you know not what it is, most rationally
+doubt. Is a man to refuse to withdraw his curtains lest some flash
+in his own eyes should deceive him with a vision of morning while
+yet it is night? The truth to the soul is as light to the eyes: you
+may be deceived, and mistake something else for light, but you can
+never fail to know the light when it really comes."
+
+"What then would you have of me?--what am I to DO?" said Wingfold,
+who, having found his master, was docile as a child, but had not
+laid firm enough hold upon what he had last said.
+
+"I repeat," said Polwarth, "that the community whose servant you are
+was not founded to promulgate or defend the doctrine of the
+existence of a Deity, but to perpetuate the assertion of a man that
+he was the son and only revealer of the Father of men, a fact, if it
+be a fact, which precludes the question of the existence of a God,
+because it includes the answer to it. Your business, therefore, even
+as one who finds himself in your unfortunate position as a
+clergyman, is to make yourself acquainted with that man: he will be
+to you nobody save in revealing, through knowledge of his inmost
+heart, the Father to you. Take then your New Testament as if you had
+never seen it before, and read--to find out. If in him you fail to
+meet God, then go to your consciousness of the race, your
+metaphysics, your Plato, your Spinosa. Till then, this point
+remains: there was a man who said he knew him, and that if you would
+give heed to him, you too should know him. The record left of him is
+indeed scanty, yet enough to disclose what manner of man he was--his
+principles, his ways of looking at things, his thoughts of his
+Father and his brethren and the relations between them, of man's
+business in life, his destiny, and his hopes."
+
+"I see plainly," answered the curate, "that what you say, I must do.
+But how, while on duty as a clergyman, I DO NOT KNOW. How am I, with
+the sense of the unreality of my position ever growing upon me, and
+my utter inability to supply the wants of the congregation, save
+from my uncle's store of dry provender, which it takes me a great
+part of my time so to modify as, in using it, to avoid direct
+lying--with all this pressing upon me, and making me restless and
+irritable and self-contemptuous, how AM I to set myself to such
+solemn work, wherein a man must surely be clear-eyed and
+single-hearted, if he would succeed in his quest?--I must resign my
+curacy."
+
+Mr. Polwarth thought a little.
+
+"It would be well, I think, to retain it for a time at least while
+you search," he said. "If you do not within a month see prospect of
+finding him, then resign. In any case, your continuance in the
+service must depend on your knowledge of the lord of it, and his
+will concerning you."
+
+"May not a prejudice in favour of my profession blind and deceive
+me?"
+
+"I think it will rather make YOU doubtful of conclusions that
+support it."
+
+"I will go and try," said Wingfold, rising; "but I fear I am not the
+man to make discoveries in such high regions."
+
+"You are the man to find what fits your own need if the thing be
+there," said Polwarth. "But to ease your mind for the task: I know
+pretty well some of our best English writers of the more practical
+and poetic sort in theology--the two qualities go together--and if
+you will do me the favour to come again to-morrow, I shall be able,
+I trust, to provide you wherewithal to feed your flock, free of that
+duplicity which, be it as common as the surplice, and as fully
+connived as laughed at by that flock, is yet duplicity. There is no
+law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an
+eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word."
+
+"I will not attempt to thank you," said Wingfold, "but I will do as
+you tell me. You are the first real friend I have ever had--except
+my brother, who is dead."
+
+"Perhaps you have had more friends than you are aware of. You owe
+something to the man, for instance, who, with his outspoken
+antagonism, roused you first to a sense of what was lacking to you."
+
+"I hope I shall be grateful to God for it some day," returned
+Wingfold. "I cannot say that I feel much obligation to Mr. Bascombe.
+And yet when I think of it,--perhaps--I don't know--what ought a man
+to be more grateful for than honesty?"
+
+After a word of arrangement for next day the curate took his leave,
+assuredly with a stronger feeling of simple genuine respect than he
+had ever yet felt for man. Rachel bade him good night with her fine
+eyes filled with tears, which suited their expression, for they
+always seemed to be looking through sorrow to something beyond it.
+
+"If this be a type of the way the sins of the fathers are visited
+upon the children," said the curate to himself, "there must be more
+in the progression of history than political economy can explain. It
+would drive us to believe in an economy wherein rather the
+well-being of the whole was the result of individual treatment, and
+not the well-being of the individual the result of the management of
+the whole?"
+
+I will not count the milestones along the road on which Wingfold now
+began to journey. Some of the stages, however, will appear in the
+course of my story. When he came to any stiff bit of collar-work,
+the little man generally appeared with an extra horse. Every day
+during the rest of that week he saw his new friends.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+A STRANGE SERMON.
+
+
+
+
+
+On the Sunday the curate walked across the churchyard to the morning
+prayer very much as if the bells, instead of ringing the people to
+church, had been tolling for his execution. But if he was going to
+be hanged, he would at least die like a gentleman, confessing his
+sin. Only he would it were bed-time, and all well. He trembled so
+when he stood up to read that he could not tell whether or not he
+was speaking in a voice audible to the congregation. But as his hour
+drew near, the courage to meet it drew near also, and when at length
+he ascended the pulpit stairs, he was able to cast a glance across
+the sea of heads to learn whether the little man was in the poor
+seats. But he looked for the big head in vain.
+
+When he read his text, it was to a congregation as listless and
+indifferent as it was wont to be. He had not gone far, however,
+before that change of mental condition was visible in the faces
+before him, which a troop of horses would have shown by a general
+forward swivelling of the ears. Wonderful to tell, they were
+actually listening. But in truth it was no wonder, for seldom in
+any, and assuredly never in that church, had there been heard such
+an exordium to a sermon.
+
+His text was--"Confessing your faults one to another." Having read
+it with a return of the former trembling, and paused, his brain
+suddenly seemed for a moment to reel under a wave of extinction that
+struck it, then to float away upon it, and then to dissolve in it,
+as it interpenetrated its whole mass, annihilating thought and
+utterance together. But with a mighty effort of the will, in which
+he seemed to come as near as man could come to the willing of his
+own existence, he recovered himself and went on. To do justice to
+this effort, my reader must remember that he was a shy man, and that
+he knew his congregation but too well for an unsympathetic
+one--whether from their fault or his own mattered little for the
+nonce. It had been hard enough to make up his mind to the attempt
+when alone in his study, or rather, to tell the truth, in his
+chamber, but to carry out his resolve in the face of so many faces,
+and in spite of a cowardly brain, was an effort and a victory
+indeed. Yet after all, upon second thoughts, I see that the true
+resolve was the victory, sweeping shyness and every other opposing
+weakness along with it. But it wanted courage of yet another sort to
+make of his resolve a fact, and his courage, in that kind as well,
+had never yet been put to the test or trained by trial. He had not
+been a fighting boy at school; he had never had the chance of riding
+to hounds; he had never been in a shipwreck, or a house on fire; had
+never been waked from a sound sleep with a demand for his watch and
+money; yet one who had passed creditably through all these trials,
+might still have carried a doubting conscience to his grave rather
+than face what Wingfold now confronted.
+
+From the manuscript before him he read thus:
+
+"'Confess your faults one to another.'--This command of the apostle,
+my hearers, ought to justify me in doing what I fear some of you may
+consider almost as a breach of morals--talking of myself in the
+pulpit. But in the pulpit has a wrong been done, and in the pulpit
+shall it be confessed. From Sunday to Sunday, standing on this spot,
+I have read to you, without word of explanation, as if they formed
+the message I had sought and found for you, the thoughts and words
+of another. Doubtless they were better than any I could have given
+you from my own mind or experience, and the act had been a righteous
+one, had I told you the truth concerning them. But that truth I did
+not tell you.--At last, through words of honest expostulation, the
+voice of a friend whose wounds are faithful, I have been aroused to
+a knowledge of the wrong I have been doing. Therefore I now confess
+it. I am sorry. I will do so no more.
+
+"But, brethren, I have only a little garden on a bare hill-side, and
+it hath never yet borne me any fruit fit to offer for your
+acceptance; also, my heart is troubled about many things, and God
+hath humbled me. I beg of you, therefore, to bear with me for a
+little while, if, doing what is but lawful and expedient both, I
+break through the bonds of custom in order to provide you with food
+convenient for you. Should I fail in this, I shall make room for a
+better man. But for your bread of this day, I go gleaning openly in
+other men's fields--fields into which I could not have found my
+way, in time at least for your necessities, and where I could not
+have gathered such full ears of wheat, barley, and oats but for the
+more than assistance of the same friend who warned me of the wrong I
+was doing both you and myself. Right ancient fields are some of
+them, where yet the ears lie thick for the gleaner. To continue my
+metaphor: I will lay each handful before you with the name of the
+field where I gathered it; and together they will serve to show what
+some of the wisest and best shepherds of the English flock have
+believed concerning the duty of confessing our faults." He then
+proceeded to read the extracts which Mr. Polwarth had helped him to
+find--and arrange, not chronologically, but after an idea of growth.
+Each handful, as he called it, he prefaced with one or two words
+concerning him in whose field he had gleaned it.
+
+His voice steadied and strengthened as he read. Renewed contact with
+the minds of those vanished teachers gave him a delight which
+infused itself into the uttered words, and made them also joyful;
+and if the curate preached to no one else in the congregation,
+certainly he preached to himself, and before it was done had entered
+into a thorough enjoyment of the sermon.
+
+A few in the congregation were disappointed because they had looked
+for a justification and enforcement of the confessional, thinking
+the change in the curate could only have come from that portion of
+the ecclesiastical heavens towards which they themselves turned
+their faces. A few others were scandalized at such an innovation on
+the part of a young man who was only a curate. Many however declared
+that it was the most interesting sermon they had ever heard in their
+lives--which perhaps was not saying much.
+
+Mrs. Ramshorn made a class by herself. Not having yet learned to
+like Wingfold, and being herself one of the craft, with a knowledge
+of not a few of the secrets of the clerical--prison-house, shall I
+call it, or green-room?--she was indignant with the presumptuous
+young man who degraded the pulpit to a level with the dock. Who
+cared for him? What was it to a congregation of respectable people,
+many of them belonging to the first county families, that he, a mere
+curate, should have committed what he fancied a crime against them!
+He should have waited until it had been laid to his charge. Couldn't
+he repent of his sins, whatever they were, without making a boast of
+them in the pulpit, and exposing them to the eyes of a whole
+congregation? She had known people make a stock-in-trade of their
+sins! What was it to them whether the washy stuff he gave them by
+way of sermons was his own foolishness or some other noodle's!
+Nobody would have troubled himself to inquire into his honesty, if
+he had but held his foolish tongue. Better men than he had preached
+other people's sermons and never thought it worth mentioning. And
+what worse were the people? The only harm lay in letting them know
+it; that brought the profession into disgrace, and prevented the
+good the sermon would otherwise have done, besides giving the
+enemies of the truth a handle against the church. And then such a
+thing to call a sermon! As well take a string of blown eggs to
+market! Thus she expatiated, half the way home, before either of her
+companions found an opportunity of saying a word.
+
+"I am sorry to differ from you, aunt," said Helen. "I thought the
+sermon a very interesting one. He read beautifully."
+
+"For my part," said Bascombe, who was now a regular visitor from
+Saturdays to Mondays, "I used to think the fellow a muff, but, by
+Jove! I've changed my mind. If ever there was a plucky thing to do,
+that was one, and there ain't many men, let me tell you, aunt, who
+would have the pluck for it.--It's my belief, Helen," he went on,
+turning to her and speaking in a lower tone, "I've had the honour of
+doing that fellow some good. I gave him my mind about honesty pretty
+plainly the first time I saw him. And who can tell what may come
+next when a fellow once starts in the right way! We shall have him
+with us before long. I must look out for something for him, for of
+course he'll be in a devil of a fix without his profession."
+
+"I am so glad you think with me, George!" said Helen. "There was
+always something I was inclined to like about Mr. Wingfold. Indeed I
+should have liked him quite if he had not been so painfully modest."
+
+"Notwithstanding his sheepishness, though," returned Bascombe,
+"there was a sort of quiet self-satisfaction about him, and the way
+he always said Don't you think? as if he were Socrates taking
+advantage of Mr. Green and softly guiding him into a trap, which I
+confess made me set him down as conceited; but, as I say, I begin to
+change my mind. By Jove! he must have worked pretty hard too in the
+dust-bins to get together all those bits of gay rag and resplendent
+crockery!"
+
+"You heard him say he had help," said Helen.
+
+"No, I don't remember that."
+
+"It came just after that pretty simile about gleaning in old
+fields."
+
+"I remember the simile, for I thought it a very absurd one--as if
+fields would lie gleanable for generations!"
+
+"To be sure--now you point it out!" acquiesced Helen.
+
+"The grain would have sprouted and borne harvests a hundred. If a
+man will use figures, he should be careful to give them legs. I
+wonder whom he got to help him--not the rector, I suppose?"
+
+"The rector!" echoed Mrs. Ramshorn, who had been listening to the
+young people's remarks with a smile of quiet scorn on her lip,
+thinking what an advantage was experience, even if it could not make
+up for the loss of youth and beauty--"The last man in the world to
+lend himself to such a miserable makeshift and pretence! Without
+brains enough even to fancy himself able to write a sermon of his
+own, he flies to the dead,--to their very coffins as it were--and I
+will not say STEALS from them, for he does it openly, not having
+even shame enough to conceal his shame!"
+
+"I like a man to hold his face to what he does, or thinks either,"
+said Bascombe.
+
+"Ah, George!" returned his aunt, in tones of wisdom, "by the time
+you have had my experience, you will have learned a little
+prudence."
+
+Meantime, so far as his aunt was concerned, George did use prudence,
+for in her presence he did not hold his face to what he thought. He
+said to himself it would do her no good. She was so prejudiced! and
+it might interfere with his visits.--She, for her part, never had
+the slightest doubt of his orthodoxy: was he not the son of a
+clergyman and canon?--a grandson of the church herself?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+A THUNDERBOLT.
+
+
+
+
+
+Sometimes a thunderbolt, as men call it, will shoot from a clear
+sky; and sometimes into the midst of a peaceful family, or a yet
+quieter individuality, without warning of gathered storm above, or
+lightest tremble of earthquake beneath, will fall a terrible fact,
+and from the moment everything is changed. That family or that life
+is no more what it was--probably never more can be what it was.
+Better it ought to be, worse it may be--which, depends upon itself.
+But its spiritual weather is altered. The air is thick with cloud,
+and cannot weep itself clear. There may come a gorgeous sunset
+though.
+
+It were a truism for one who believes in God to say that such
+catastrophes, so rending, so frightful, never come but where they
+are needed. The Power of Life is not content that they who live in
+and by him should live poorly and contemptibly. If the presence of
+low thoughts which he repudiates, yet makes a man miserable, how
+must it be with him if they who live and move and have their being
+in him are mean and repulsive, or alienated through self-sufficiency
+and slowness of heart?
+
+I cannot report much progress in Helen during the months of winter
+and spring. But if one wakes at last, wakes at all, who shall dare
+cast the stone at him--that he ought to have awaked sooner? What man
+who is awake will dare to say that he roused himself the first
+moment it became possible to him? The main and plain and worst,
+perhaps only condemnation is--that when people do wake they do not
+get up. At the same time, however, I can hardly doubt that Helen was
+keeping the law of a progress slow as the growth of an iron-tree.
+
+Nothing had ever yet troubled her. She had never been in love, could
+hardly be said to be in love now. She went regularly to church, and
+I believe said her prayers night and morning--yet felt no
+indignation at the doctrines and theories propounded by George
+Bascombe. She regarded them as "George's ideas," and never cared to
+ask whether they were true or not, at the same time that they were
+becoming to her by degrees as like truth as falsehood can ever be.
+For to the untruthful mind the false CAN seem the true. Meantime she
+was not even capable of giving him the credit he deserved, in that,
+holding the opinions he held, he yet advocated a life spent for the
+community--without, as I presume, deriving much inspiration thereto
+from what he himself would represent as the ground of all
+conscientious action, the consideration, namely, of its reaction
+upon its originator. Still farther was it from entering the field of
+her vision that possibly some of the good which distinguished
+George's unbelief from that of his brother ephemera of the last
+century, was owing to the deeper working of that leaven which he
+denounced as the poisonous root whence sprung all the evil diseases
+that gnawed at the heart of society.
+
+One night she sat late, making her aunt a cap. The one sign of
+originality in her was the character of her millinery, of which kind
+of creation she was fond, displaying therein both invention as to
+form, and perception as to effect, combined with lightness and
+deftness of execution. She was desirous of completing it before the
+next morning, which was that of her aunt's birthday. They had had
+friends to dine with them who had stayed rather late, and it was now
+getting towards one o'clock. But Helen was not easily tired, and was
+not given to abandoning what she had undertaken; so she sat working
+away, and thinking, not of George Bascombe, but of one whom she
+loved better--far better--her brother Leopold. But she was thinking
+of him not quite so comfortably as usual. Certain anxieties she had
+ground for concerning him had grown stronger, for the time since she
+heard from him had grown very long.
+
+All at once her work ceased, her hands were arrested, her posture
+grew rigid: she was listening. HAD she heard a noise outside her
+window? My reader may remember that it opened on a balcony, which
+was at the same time the roof of a veranda that went along the back
+of the house, and had a stair at one end to the garden.
+
+Helen was not easily frightened, and had stopped her needle only
+that she might listen the better. She heard nothing. Of course it
+was but a fancy! Her hands went on again with their work.--But that
+was really very like a tap at the window! And now her heart did beat
+a little faster, if not with fear, then with something very like it,
+in which perhaps some foreboding was mingled. But she was not a
+woman to lay down her arms upon the inroad of a vague terror. She
+quietly rose, and, saying to herself it must be one of the pigeons
+that haunted the balcony, laid her work on the table, and went to
+the window. As she drew one of the curtains a little aside to peep,
+the tap was plainly and hurriedly though softly repeated, and at
+once she swept it back. There was the dim shadow of a man's head
+upon the blind, cast there by an old withered moon low in the west!
+Perhaps it was something in the shape of the shadow that made her
+pull up the blind so hurriedly, and yet with something of the awe
+with which we take "the face-cloth from the face." Yes, there was a
+face!--frightful, not as that of a corpse, but as that of a spectre
+from whose soul the scars of his mortal end have never passed away.
+Helen did not scream--her throat seemed to close and her heart to
+cease. But her eyes continued movelessly fixed on the face even
+after she knew it was the face of her brother, and the eyes of the
+face kept staring back into hers through the glass with such a look
+of concentrated eagerness that they seemed no more organs of vision,
+but caves of hunger, nor was there a movement of the lips towards
+speech. The two gazed at each other for a moment of rigid silence.
+The glass that separated them might have been the veil that divides
+those who call themselves the living from those whom they call the
+dead.
+
+It was but a moment by the clock, though to the after-consciousness
+it seemed space immeasurable. She came to herself, and slowly,
+noiselessly, though with tremulous hand, undid the sash, and opened
+the window. Nothing divided them now, yet he stood as before,
+staring into her face. Presently his lips began to move, but no
+words came from them.
+
+In Helen, horror had already roused the instinct of secrecy. She put
+out her two hands, took his face between them, and said in a hurried
+whisper, calling him by the pet name she had given him when a child,
+
+"Come in, Poldie, and tell me all about it."
+
+Her voice seemed to wake him. Slowly, with the movements of one half
+paralyzed, he shoved and dragged himself over the windowsill,
+dropped himself on the floor inside, and lay there, looking up in
+her face like a hunted animal, that hoped he had found a refuge, but
+doubted. Seeing him so exhausted, she turned from him to go and get
+some brandy, but a low cry of agony drew her back. His head was
+raised from the floor and his hands were stretched out, while his
+face entreated her, as plainly as if he had spoken, not to leave
+him. She knelt and would have kissed him, but he turned his face
+from her with an expression which seemed of disgust.
+
+"Poldie," she said, "I MUST go and get you something. Don't be
+afraid. They are all sound asleep."
+
+The grasp with which he had clutched her dress relaxed, and his hand
+fell by his side. She rose at once and went, creeping through the
+slumberous house, light and noiseless as a shadow, but with a heart
+that seemed not her own lying hard in her bosom. As she went she had
+to struggle both to rouse and to compose herself, for she could not
+think. An age seemed to have passed since she heard the clock strike
+twelve. One thing was clear--her brother had been doing something
+wrong, and dreading discovery, had fled to her. The moment this
+conviction made itself plain to her, she drew herself up with the
+great deep breath of a vow, as strong as it was silent and
+undefined, that he should not have come to her in vain.
+Silent-footed as a beast of prey, silent-handed as a thief, lithe in
+her movements, her eye flashing with the new-kindled instinct of
+motherhood to the orphan of her father, it was as if her soul had
+been suddenly raised to a white heat, which rendered her body
+elastic and responsive.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+LEOPOLD.
+
+
+
+
+
+She re-entered her room with the gait of a new-born goddess treading
+the air. Her brother was yet prostrate where she had left him. He
+raised himself on his elbow, seized with trembling hand the glass
+she offered him, swallowed the brandy at a gulp, and sank again on
+the floor. The next instant he sprang to his feet, cast a terrified
+look at the window, bounded to the door and locked it, then ran to
+his sister, threw his arms about her, and clung to her like a
+trembling child. But ever his eyes kept turning to the window.
+
+Though now twenty years of age, and at his full height, he was
+hardly so tall as Helen. Swarthy of complexion, his hair dark as the
+night, his eyes large and lustrous, with what Milton calls "quel
+sereno fulgor d' amabil nero," his frame nervous and slender, he
+looked compact and small beside her.
+
+She did her utmost to quiet him, unconsciously using the same words
+and tones with which she had soothed his passions when he was a
+child. All at once he raised his head and drew himself back from her
+arms with a look of horror, then put his hand over his eyes, as if
+her face had been a mirror and he had seen himself in it.
+
+"What is that on your wristband, Leopold?" she asked. "Have you hurt
+yourself?"
+
+The youth cast an indescribable look on his hand, but it was not
+that which turned Helen so deadly sick: with her question had come
+to her the ghastly suspicion that the blood she saw was not his, and
+she felt guilty of an unpardonable, wicked wrong against him. But
+she would never, never believe it! A sister suspect her only brother
+of such a crime! Yet her arms dropped and let him go. She stepped
+back a pace, and of themselves, as it were, her eyes went wandering
+and questioning all over him, and saw that his clothes were torn and
+soiled--stained--who could tell with what?
+
+He stood for a moment still and submissive to their search, with
+face downcast. Then, suddenly flashing his eyes on her, he said, in
+a voice that seemed to force its way through earth that choked it
+back,
+
+"Helen, I am a murderer, and they are after me. They will be here
+before daylight."
+
+He dropped on his knees, and clasped hers.
+
+"O sister! sister! save me, save me!" he cried in a voice of agony.
+
+Helen stood without response, for to stand took all her strength.
+How long she fought that horrible sickness, knowing that, if she
+moved an inch, turned from it a moment, yielded a hair's-breadth, it
+would throw her senseless on the floor, and the noise of her fall
+would rouse the house, she never could even conjecture. All was dark
+before her, as if her gaze had been on the underside of her
+coffin-lid, and her brain sank and swayed and swung in the coils of
+the white snake that was sucking at her heart. At length the
+darkness thinned; it grew a gray mist; the face of her boy-brother
+glimmered up through it, like that of Dives in hell-fire to his
+guardian-angel as he hung lax-winged and faint in the ascending
+smoke. The mist thinned, and at length she caught a glimmer of his
+pleading, despairing, self-horrified eyes: all the mother in her
+nature rushed to the aid of her struggling will; her heart gave a
+great heave; the blood ascended to her white brain, and flushed it
+with rosy life; her body was once more reconciled and obedient; her
+hand went forth, took his head between them, and pressed it against
+her.
+
+"Poldie, dear," she said, "be calm and reasonable, and I will do all
+I can for you. Here, take this.--And now, answer me one question"
+
+"You won't give me up, Helen?"
+
+"No. I will not."
+
+"Swear it, Helen."
+
+"Ah, my poor Poldie! is it come to this between you and me?"
+
+"Swear it, Helen."
+
+"So help me God, I will not!" returned Helen, looking up.
+
+Leopold rose, and again stood quietly before her, but again with
+downbent head, like a prisoner about to receive sentence.
+
+"Do you mean what you said a moment since--that the police are in
+search of you?" asked Helen, with forced calmness.
+
+"They must be. They must have been after me for days--I don't know
+how many. They will be here soon. I can't think how I have escaped
+them so long. Hark! Isn't that a noise at the street-door?--No,
+no.--There's a shadow on the curtains!--No! it's my eyes; they've
+cheated me a thousand times. Helen! I did not try to hide her; they
+must have found her long ago."
+
+"My God!" cried Helen; but checked the scream that sought to follow
+the cry.
+
+"There was an old shaft near," he went on, hurriedly. "If I had
+thrown her down that, they would never have found her, for there
+must be choke-damp at the bottom of it enough to kill a thousand of
+them. But I could not bear the thought of sending the lovely thing
+down there--even to save my life."
+
+He was growing wild again; but the horror had again laid hold upon
+Helen, and she stood speechless, staring at him.
+
+"Hide me--hide me, Helen!" he pleaded. "Perhaps you think I am mad.
+Would to God I were! Sometimes I think I must be. But this I tell
+you is no madman's fancy. If you take it for that, you will bring me
+to the gallows. So, if you will see me hanged,----"
+
+He sat down and folded his arms.
+
+"Hush! Poldie, hush!" cried Helen, in an agonized whisper. "I am
+only thinking what I can best do. I cannot hide you here, for if my
+aunt knew, she would betray you by her terrors; and if she did not
+know, and those men came, she would help them to search every corner
+of the house. Otherwise there might be a chance."
+
+Again she was silent for a few moments; then, seeming suddenly to
+have made up her mind, went softly to the door.
+
+"Don't leave me!" cried Leopold.
+
+"Hush! I must. I know now what to do. Be quiet here until I come
+back."
+
+Slowly, cautiously, she unlocked it, and left the room. In three or
+four minutes she returned, carrying a loaf of bread and a bottle of
+wine. To her dismay Leopold had vanished. Presently he came creeping
+out from under the bed, looking so abject that Helen could not help
+a pang of shame. But the next moment the love of the sister, the
+tender compassion of the woman, returned in full tide, and swallowed
+up the unsightly thing. The more abject he was, the more was he to
+be pitied and ministered to.
+
+"Here, Poldie," she said, "you carry the bread, and I will take the
+wine. You must eat something, or you will be ill."
+
+As she spoke she locked the door again. Then she put a dark shawl
+over her head, and fastened it under her chin. Her white face shone
+out from it like the moon from a dark cloud.
+
+"Follow me, Poldie," she said, and putting out the candles, went to
+the window.
+
+He obeyed without question, carrying the loaf she had put into his
+hands. The window-sash rested on a little door; she opened it, and
+stepped on the balcony. As soon as her brother had followed her, she
+closed it again, drew down the sash, and led the way to the garden,
+and so, by the door in the sunk fence, out upon the meadows.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+THE REFUGE.
+
+
+
+
+
+The night was very dusky, but Helen knew perfectly the way she was
+going. A strange excitement possessed her, and lifted her above all
+personal fear. The instant she found herself in the open air, her
+faculties seemed to come preternaturally awake, and her judgment to
+grow quite cool. She congratulated herself that there had been no
+rain, and the ground would not betray their steps. There was enough
+of light in the sky to see the trees against it, and partly by their
+outlines she guided herself to the door in the park-paling, whence
+she went as straight as she could for the deserted house.
+Remembering well her brother's old dislike to the place, she said
+nothing of their destination; but, when he suddenly stopped, she
+knew that it had dawned upon him. For one moment he hung back, but a
+stronger and more definite fear lay behind, and he went on.
+
+Emerging from the trees on the edge of the hollow, they looked down,
+but it was too dark to see the mass of the house, or the slightest
+gleam from the surface of the lake. All was silent as a deserted
+churchyard, and they went down the slope as if it had been the
+descent to Hades. Arrived at the wall of the garden, they followed
+its buttressed length until they came to a tall narrow gate of
+wrought iron, almost consumed with rust, and standing half open. By
+this they passed into the desolate garden, whose misery in the
+daytime was like that of a ruined soul, but now hidden in the
+night's black mantle. Through the straggling bushes with their arms
+they forced and with their feet they felt their way to the front
+door of the house, the steps to which, from the effects of various
+floods, were all out of the level in different directions. The door
+was unlocked as usual, needing only a strong push to open it, and
+they entered. How awfully still it seemed!--much stiller than the
+open air, though that had seemed noiseless. There was not a rat or a
+black beetle in the place. They groped their way through the hall,
+and up the wide staircase, which gave not one crack in answer to
+their needlessly careful footsteps: not a soul was within a mile of
+them. Helen had taken Leopold by the hand, and she now led him
+straight to the closet whence the hidden room opened. He made no
+resistance, for the covering wings of the darkness had protection in
+them. How desolate must the soul be that welcomes such protection!
+But when, knowing that thence no ray could reach the outside, she
+struck a light, and the spot where he had so often shuddered was
+laid bare to his soul, he gave a cry and turned and would have
+rushed away. Helen caught him, he yielded, and allowed her to lead
+him into the room. There she lighted a candle, and as it came
+gradually alive, it shed a pale yellow light around, and revealed a
+bare chamber, with a bedstead and the remains of a moth-eaten
+mattress in a corner. Leopold threw himself upon it, uttering a
+sound that more resembled a choked scream than a groan. Helen sat
+down beside him, took his head on her lap, and sought to soothe him
+with such tender loving words as had never before found birth in her
+heart, not to say crossed her lips. She took from her pocket a
+dainty morsel, and tried to make him eat, but in vain. Then she
+poured him out a cupful of wine. He drank it eagerly, and asked for
+more, which she would not give him. But instead of comforting him,
+it seemed only to rouse him to fresh horror. He clung to his sister
+as a child clings to the nurse who has just been telling him an evil
+tale, and ever his face would keep turning from her to the door with
+a look of frightful anticipation. She consoled him with all her
+ingenuity, assured him that for the present he was perfectly safe,
+and, thinking it would encourage a sense of concealment, reminded
+him of the trap in the floor of the closet and the little chamber
+underneath. But at that he started up with glaring eyes.
+
+"Helen! I remember now," he cried. "I knew it at the time! Don't you
+know I never could endure the place? I foresaw, as plainly as I see
+you now, that one day I should be crouching here for safety with a
+hideous crime on my conscience. I told you so, Helen, at the time.
+Oh! how could you bring me here?"
+
+He threw himself down again, and hid his face on her lap.
+
+With a fresh inroad of dismay Helen thought he must be going mad,
+for this was the merest trick of his imagination. Certainly he had
+always dreaded the place, but never a word of that sort had he said
+to her. Yet there was a shadow of possible comfort in the
+thought--for, what if the whole thing should prove an hallucination!
+But whether real or not, she must have his story.
+
+"Come, dearest Poldie, darling brother!" she said, "you have not yet
+told me what it is. What is the terrible thing you have done? I
+daresay it's nothing so very bad after all!"
+
+"There's the light coming!" he said, in a dull hollow voice, "--The
+morning! always the morning coming again!"
+
+"No, no, dear Poldie!" she returned. "There is no window here--at
+least it only looks on the back stair, high above heads; and the
+morning is a long way off."
+
+"How far?" he asked, staring in her eyes--"twenty years? That was
+just when I was bom! Oh that I could enter a second time into my
+mother's womb, and never be born! Why are we sent into this cursed
+world? I would God had never made it. What was the good? Couldn't he
+have let well alone?"
+
+He was silent. She must get him to sleep.
+
+It was as if a second soul had been given her to supplement the
+first, and enable her to meet what would otherwise have been the
+exorbitant demands now made upon her. With an effort of the will
+such as she could never before have even imagined, she controlled
+the anguish of her own spirit, and, softly stroking the head of the
+poor lad, which had again sought her lap, compelled herself to sing
+him for lullaby a song of which in his childhood he had been very
+fond, and with which, in all the importance of imagined motherhood,
+she had often sung him to sleep. And the old influence was potent
+yet. In a few minutes the fingers which clutched her hand relaxed,
+and she knew by his breathing that he slept. She sat still as a
+stone, not daring to move, hardly daring breathe enough to keep her
+alive, lest she should rouse him from his few blessed moments of
+self-nothingness, during which the tide of the all-infolding ocean
+of peace was free to flow into the fire-torn cave of his bosom. She
+sat motionless thus, until it seemed as if for very weariness she
+must drop in a heap on the floor, but that the aches and pains which
+went through her in all directions held her body together like ties
+and rivets. She had never before known what weariness was, and now
+she knew it for all her life. But like an irritant, her worn body
+clung about her soul and dulled it to its own grief, thus helping it
+to a pitiful kind of repose. How long she sat thus she could not
+tell--she had no means of knowing, but it seemed hours on hours, and
+yet, though the nights were now short, the darkness had not begun to
+thin. But when she thought how little access the light had to that
+room, she began to grow uneasy lest she should be missed from her
+own, or seen on her way back to it. At length some involuntary
+movement woke him. He started to his feet with a look of wild
+gladness. But there was scarcely time to recognise it before it
+vanished.
+
+"My God, it is true then!" he shrieked. "O Helen, I dreamed that I
+was innocent--that I had but dreamed I had done it. Tell me that I'm
+dreaming now. Tell me! tell me!--Tell me that I am no murderer!"
+
+As he spoke, he seized her shoulder with a fierce grasp, and shook
+her as if trying to wake her from the silence of a lethargy.
+
+"I hope you are innocent, my darling. But in any case I will do all
+I can to protect you," said Helen. "Only I shall never be able
+unless you control yourself sufficiently to let me go home."
+
+"No, Helen!" he cried; "you must not leave me. If you do, I shall go
+mad. SHE will come instead."
+
+Helen shuddered inwardly, but kept her outward composure.
+
+"If I stay with you, just think, dearest, what will happen," she
+said. "I shall be missed, and all the country will be raised to look
+for me. They will think I have been--"--She checked herself.
+
+"And so you might be--so might anyone," he cried, "so long as I am
+loose--like the Rajah's man-eating horse. O God! It has come to
+this!" And he hid his face in his hands.
+
+"And then you see, my Poldie," Helen went on as calmly as she could,
+"they would come here and find us; and I don't know what might come
+next."
+
+"Yes, yes, Helen! Go, go directly. Leave me this instant," he said,
+hurriedly, and took her by the shoulders, as if he would push her
+from the room, but went on talking. "It must be, I know; but when
+the light comes I shall go mad. Would to God I might, for the day is
+worse than the darkness; then I see my own black against the light.
+Now go, Helen. But you WILL come back to me as soon as ever you can?
+How shall I know when to begin to look for you? What o'clock is it?
+My watch has never been--since--. Ugh! the light will be here soon.
+Helen, I know now what hell is.--Ah! Yes."--As he spoke he had been
+feeling in one of his pockets.--"I will not be taken alive.--Can you
+whistle, Helen?"
+
+"Yes, Poldie," answered Helen, trembling. "Don't you remember
+teaching me?"
+
+"Yes, yes.--Then, when you come near the house, whistle, and go on
+whistling, for if I hear a step without any whistling, I shall kill
+myself."
+
+"What have you got there?" she asked in renewed terror, noticing
+that he kept his hand in the breast pocket of his coat.
+
+"Only the knife," he answered calmly.
+
+"Give it to me," she said, calmly too.
+
+He laughed, and the laugh was more terrible than any cry.
+
+"No; I'm not so green as that," he said. "My knife is my only
+friend! Who is to take care of me when you are away? Ha! ha!"
+
+She saw that the comfort of the knife must not be denied him. Nor
+did she fear any visit that might drive him to its use--except
+indeed the police WERE to come upon him--and then--what better
+could he do? she thought.
+
+"Well, well, I will not plague you," she said. "Lie down and I will
+cover you with my shawl, and you can fancy it my arms round you. I
+will come to you as soon as ever I can."
+
+He obeyed. She spread her shawl over him and kissed him.
+
+"Thank you, Helen," he said quietly.
+
+"Pray to God to deliver you, dear," she said.
+
+"He can do that only by killing me," he returned. "I will pray for
+that. But do you go, Helen. I will try to bear my misery for your
+sake."
+
+He followed her from the room with eyes out of which looked the very
+demon of silent despair.
+
+I will not further attempt to set forth his feelings. The
+incredible, the impossible, had become a fact-AND HE WAS THE MAN. He
+who knows the relief of waking from a dream of crime to the
+jubilation of recovered innocence, to the sunlight that blots out
+the thing as untrue, may by help of that conceive the misery of a
+delicate nature suddenly filled with the clear assurance of horrible
+guilt. Such a misery no waking but one that annihilated the past
+could ever console. Yes, there is yet an awaking--if a man might but
+attain unto it--an awaking into a region whose very fields are full
+of the harmony sovereign to console, not merely for having
+suffered--that needs little consoling, but for having inflicted the
+deepest wrong.
+
+The moment Helen was out of sight, Leopold drew a small silver box
+from an inner pocket, eyed it with the eager look of a hungry
+animal, took from it a portion of a certain something, put it in his
+mouth, closed his eyes, and lay still.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+HELEN WITH A SECRET.
+
+
+
+
+
+When Helen came out into the corridor, she saw that the day was
+breaking. A dim, dreary light filled the dismal house, but the
+candle had prevented her from perceiving the little of it that could
+enter that room withdrawn. A pang of fear shot to her soul, and like
+a belated spectre or a roused somnambulist she fled across the park.
+It was all so like a horrible dream, from which she must wake in
+bed! yet she knew there was no such hope for her. Her darling lay in
+that frightful house, and if anyone should see her, it might be
+death to him. But yet it was very early, and two hours would pass
+before any of the workmen would be on their way to the new house.
+Yet, like a murderer shaken out of the earth by the light, she fled.
+When she was safe in her own room, ere she could get into bed, she
+once more turned deadly sick, and next knew by the agonies of coming
+to herself that she had fainted.
+
+A troubled, weary, EXCITED sleep followed. She woke with many a
+start, as if she had sinned in sleeping, and instantly for very
+weariness, dozed off again. How kind is weariness sometimes! It is
+like the Father's hand laid a little heavy on the heart to make it
+still. But her dreams were full of torture, and even when she had no
+definite dream, she was haunted by the vague presence of blood. It
+was considerably past her usual time for rising when at length she
+heard her maid in the room. She got up wearily, but beyond the
+heaviest of hearts and a general sense of misery, nothing ailed her.
+Nor even did her head ache.
+
+But she had lived an age since she woke last; and the wonder was,
+not that she felt so different, but that she should be aware of
+being the same person as before notwithstanding all that had passed.
+Her business now was to keep herself from thinking until breakfast
+should be over. She must hold the "ebony box" of last night close
+shut even from her own eyes, lest the demons of which it was full
+should rush out and darken the world about her. She hurried to her
+bath for strength: the friendly water would rouse her to the
+present, make the past recede like a dream, and give her courage to
+face the future. Her very body seemed defiled by the knowledge that
+was within it. Alas! how must poor Leopold feel, then! But she must
+not think.
+
+All the time she was dressing, her thoughts kept hovering round the
+awful thing like moths around a foul flame, from which she could not
+drive them away. Ever and again she said to herself that she must
+not, yet ever and again she found herself peeping through the chinks
+of the thought-chamber at the terrible thing inside--the form of
+which she could not see--saw only the colour--red,--red mingled with
+ghastly whiteness. In all the world, her best-loved, her brother,
+the child of her grandfather, was the only one who knew how that
+thing came there.
+
+But while Helen's being was in such tumult that she could never more
+be the cool, indifferent, self-contented person she had hitherto
+been, her old habits and forms of existence were now of endless help
+to the retaining of her composure and the covering of her secret. A
+dim gleam of gladness woke in her at the sight of the unfinished
+cap, than which she could not have a better excuse for her lateness,
+and when she showed it to her aunt with the wish of many happy
+returns of the day, no second glance from Mrs. Ramshorn added to her
+uneasiness.
+
+But oh, how terribly the time crept in its going! for she dared not
+approach the deserted house while the daylight kept watching it like
+a dog; and what if Leopold should have destroyed himself in the
+madness of his despair before she could go to him! She had not a
+friend to help her. George Bascombe?--she shuddered at the thought
+of him. With his grand ideas of duty, he would be for giving up
+Leopold that very moment! Naturally the clergyman was the one to go
+to--and Mr. Wingfold had himself done wrong. But he had confessed
+it! No--he was a poor creature, and would not hold his tongue! She
+shook at every knock at the door, every ring at the bell, lest it
+should be the police. To be sure, he had been comparatively little
+there, and naturally they would seek him first at Goldswyre--but
+where next? At Glaston, of course. Every time a servant entered the
+room she turned away, lest her ears should make her countenance a
+traitor. The police might be watching the house, and might follow
+her when she went to him! With her opera-glass, she examined the
+meadow, then ran to the bottom of the garden, and lying down, peered
+over the sunk fence. But not a human being was in sight. Next she
+put on her bonnet, with the pretence of shopping, to see if there
+were any suspicious-looking persons in the street. But she did not
+meet a single person unknown to her between her aunt's door and Mr.
+Drew the linendraper's. There she bought a pair of gloves, and
+walked quietly back, passing the house, and going on to the Abbey,
+without meeting one person at whom she had to look twice.
+
+All the time her consciousness was like a single intense point of
+light in the middle of a darkness it could do nothing to illuminate.
+She knew nothing but that her brother lay in that horrible empty
+house, and that, if his words were not the ravings of a maniac, the
+law, whether it yet suspected him or not, was certainly after him,
+and if it had not yet struck upon his trail, was every moment on the
+point of finding it, and must sooner or later come up with him. She
+MUST save him--all that was left of him to save! But poor Helen knew
+very little about saving.
+
+One thing more she became suddenly aware of as she re-entered the
+house--the possession of a power of dissimulation, of hiding
+herself, hitherto strange to her, for hitherto she had had nothing,
+hardly even a passing dislike to conceal. The consciousness brought
+only exultation with it, for her nature was not yet delicate enough
+to feel the jar of the thought that neither words nor looks must any
+more be an index to what lay within her.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+A DAYLIGHT VISIT.
+
+
+
+
+
+But she could not rest. When would the weary day be over, and the
+longed-for rather than welcome night appear? Again she went into the
+garden, and down to the end of it, and looked out over the meadow.
+Not a creature was in sight, except a red and white cow, a child
+gathering buttercups, and a few rooks crossing from one field to
+another. It was a glorious day; the sun seemed the very centre of
+conscious peace. And now first, strange to say, Helen began to know
+the bliss of bare existence under a divine sky, in the midst of a
+divine air, the two making a divine summer, which throbbed with the
+presence of the creative spirit--but as something apart from her
+now, something she had had, but had lost, which could never more be
+hers. How could she ever be glad again, with such a frightful fact
+in her soul! Away there beyond those trees lay her unhappy brother,
+in the lonely house, now haunted indeed. Perhaps he lay there dead!
+The horrors of the morning, or his own hand, might have slain him.
+She must go to him. She would defy the very sun, and go in the face
+of the universe. Was he not her brother?--Was there no help
+anywhere? no mantle for this sense of soul-nakedness that had made
+her feel as if her awful secret might be read a mile away, lying
+crimson and livid in the bottom of her heart. She dared hardly think
+of it, lest the very act should betray the thing of darkness to the
+world of light around her. Nothing but the atmosphere of another
+innocent soul could shield hers, and she had no friend. What did
+people do when their brothers did awful deeds? She had heard of
+praying to God--had indeed herself told her brother to pray, but it
+was all folly--worse, priestcraft. As if such things AND a God could
+exist together! Yet, even with the thought of denial in her mind,
+she looked up, and gazed earnestly into the wide innocent mighty
+space, as if by searching she might find some one. Perhaps she OUGHT
+to pray. She could see no likelihood of a God, and yet something
+pushed her towards prayer. What if all this had come upon her and
+Poldie because she never prayed! If there were such horrible things
+in the world, although she had never dreamed of them--if they could
+come so near her, into her very soul, making her feel like a
+murderess, might there not be a God also, though she knew nothing of
+his whereabouts or how to reach him and gain a hearing? Certainly if
+things went with such hellish possibilities at the heart of them,
+and there was no hand at all to restrain or guide or restore, the
+world was a good deal worse place than either the Methodists or the
+Positivists made it out to be. In the form of feelings, not of
+words, hardly even of thoughts, things like these passed through her
+mind as she stood on the top of the sunk fence and gazed across the
+flat of sunny green before her. She could almost have slain herself
+to be rid of her knowledge and the awful consciousness that was its
+result. SHE would have found no difficulty in that line of
+Macbeth:--"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself."--But all
+this time there was her brother! She MUST go to him. "God hide me,"
+she cried within her. "But how can he hide me," she thought, "when I
+am hiding a murderer?" "O God," she cried again, and this time in an
+audible murmur, "I am his sister, thou knowest!" Then she turned,
+walked back to the house, and sought her aunt.
+
+"I have got a little headache," she said quite coolly, "and I want a
+long walk. Don't wait luncheon for me. It is such a glorious day! I
+shall go by the Millpool road, and across the park. Good-bye till
+tea, or perhaps dinner-time even."
+
+"Hadn't you better have a ride and be back to luncheon? I shan't
+want Jones to-day," said her aunt mournfully, who, although she had
+almost given up birthdays, thought her niece need not quite desert
+her on the disagreeable occasion.
+
+"I'm not in tne humour for riding, aunt. Nothing will do me good but
+a walk. I shall put some luncheon in my bag."
+
+She went quietly out by the front door, walked slowly, softly,
+statelily along the street and out of the town, and entered the park
+by the lodge-gate. She saw Rachel at her work in the kitchen as she
+passed, and heard her singing in a low and weak but very sweet
+voice, which went to her heart like a sting, making the tall,
+handsome, rich lady envy the poor distorted atom who, through all
+the fogs of her winter, had yet something in her that sought such
+utterance. But, indeed, if all her misery had been swept away like a
+dream, Helen might yet have envied the dwarf ten times more than she
+did now, had she but known how they stood compared with each other.
+For the being of Helen to that of Rachel was as a single, untwined
+primary cell to a finished brain; as the peeping of a chicken to the
+song of a lark--I had almost said, to a sonata of Beethoven.
+
+"Good day, Rachel," she said, calling as she passed, in a kindly,
+even then rather condescending voice, through the open door, where a
+pail of water, just set down, stood rocking the sun on its heaving
+surface, and flashing it out again into the ocean of the light. It
+seemed to poor Helen a squalid abode, but it was a home-like palace,
+and fairly furnished, in comparison with the suburban villa and
+shop-upholstery which typified the house of her spirit--now haunted
+by a terrible secret walking through its rooms, and laying a bloody
+hand upon all their whitenesses.
+
+There was no sound all the way as she went but the noise of the
+birds, and an occasional clank from the new building far away. At
+last, with beating heart and scared soul, she was within the high
+garden-wall, making her way through the rank growth of weeds and
+bushes to the dismal house. She entered trembling, and the air felt
+as if death had been before her. Hardly would her limbs carry her,
+but with slow step she reached the hidden room. He lay as she had
+left him. Was he asleep, or dead? She crept near and laid her hand
+on his forehead. He started to his feet in an agony of fright. She
+soothed and reassured him as best she was able. When the paroxysm
+relaxed--
+
+"You didn't whistle," he said.
+
+"No; I forgot," answered Helen, shocked at her own carelessness.
+"But if I had, you would not have heard me: you were fast asleep."
+
+"A good thing I was! And yet no! I wish I had heard you, for then by
+this time I should have been beyond their reach."
+
+Impulsively he showed her the short dangerous looking weapon he
+carried. Helen stretched out her hand to take it, but he hurriedly
+replaced it in his pocket.
+
+"I will find some water for you to wash with," said Helen. "There
+used to be a well in the garden, I remember. I have brought you a
+shirt."
+
+With some difficulty she found the well, all but lost in matted
+weeds under an ivy-tod, and in the saucer of a flower-pot she
+carried him some water, and put the garment with the horrible spot
+in her bag, to take it away and destroy it. Then she made him eat
+and drink. He did whatever she told him, with a dull, yet doglike
+obedience. His condition was much changed; he had a stupefied look,
+and seemed only half awake to his terrible situation. Yet he
+answered what questions she put to him even too readily--with an
+indifferent matter-of-factness, indeed, more dreadful than any most
+passionate outburst. But at the root of the apparent apathy lay
+despair and remorse,--weary, like gorged and sleeping tigers far
+back in their dens. Only the dull torpedo of misery was awake, lying
+motionless on the bottom of the deepest pool of his spirit.
+
+The mood was favourable to the drawing of his story from him, but
+there are more particulars in the narrative I am now going to give
+than Helen at that time learned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+LEOPOLD'S STORY.
+
+
+
+
+
+While yet a mere boy, scarcely more than sixteen, Leopold had made
+acquaintance with the family of a certain manufacturer, who, having
+retired from business with a rapidly-gained fortune, had some years
+before purchased an estate a few miles from Goldswyre, his uncle's
+place. Their settling in the neighbourhood was not welcome to the
+old-fashioned, long-rooted family of the Lingards; but although they
+had not called upon them, they could not help meeting them
+occasionally. Leopold's association with them commenced just after
+he had left Eton, between which time and his going up to Cambridge
+he spent a year in reading with his cousins' tutor. It was at a ball
+he first saw Emmeline, the eldest of the family. She had but lately
+returned from a school at which from the first she had had for her
+bedfellow a black ewe. It was not a place where any blackness under
+that of pitch was likely to attract notice, being one of those very
+ordinary and very common schools where everything is done that is
+done, first for manners, then for accomplishments, and lastly for
+information, leaving all the higher faculties and endowments of the
+human being as entirely unconsidered as if they had no existence.
+Taste, feeling, judgment, imagination, conscience, are in such
+places left to look after themselves, and the considerations
+presented to them, and duties required of them as religious, are
+only fitted to lower still farther such moral standard as they may
+possess. Schools of this kind send out, as their quota of the supply
+of mothers for the ages to come, young women who will consult a book
+of etiquette as to what is ladylike; who always think what is the
+mode, never what is beautiful; who read romances in which the
+wickedness is equalled only by the shallowness; who write questions
+to weekly papers concerning points of behaviour, and place their
+whole, or chief delight in making themselves attractive to men. Some
+such girls look lady-like and interesting, and many of them are
+skilled in the arts that meet their fullest development in a nature
+whose sense of existence is rounded by its own reflection in the
+mirror of self-consciousness falsified by vanity. Once understood,
+they are for a sadness or a loathing, after the nature that
+understands them; till then, they are to the beholder such as they
+desire to appear, while under the fair outside lies a nature whose
+vulgarity, if the most thorough of changes do not in the meantime
+supervene, will manifest itself hideously on the approach of middle
+age, that is, by the time when habituation shall have destroyed the
+restraints of diffidence. Receiving ever fresh and best assurance of
+their own consequence in the attention and admiration of men, such
+girls are seldom capable of any real attachment, and the marvel is
+that so few of them comparatively disgrace themselves after
+marriage.
+
+Whether it was the swarthy side of his nature, early ripened under
+the hot Indian sun, that found itself irresistibly drawn to the
+widening of its humanity in the flaxen fairness of Emmeline, or the
+Saxon element in him seeking back to its family--it might indeed
+have been both, our nature admitting of such marvellous complexity
+in its unity,--he fell in love with her, if not in the noblest yet
+in a very genuine, though at the same time very passionate way; and
+as she had, to use a Scots proverb, a crop for all corn, his
+attentions were acceptable to her. Had she been true-hearted enough
+to know anything of that love whose name was for ever suffering
+profanation upon her lips, she would, being at least a year and a
+half older than he, have been too much of a woman to encourage his
+approaches--would have felt he was a boy and must not be allowed to
+fancy himself a man. But to be just, he did look to English eyes
+older than he was. And then he was very handsome, distinguished-looking,
+of a good family, which could in no sense be said of her,--and with
+high connections--at the same time a natural contrast to herself,
+and personally attractive to her. The first moment she saw his great
+black eyes blaze, she accepted the homage, laid it on the altar of
+her self-worship, and ever after sought to see them lighted up afresh
+in worship of her only divinity. To be feelingly aware of her power
+over him, to play upon him as on an instrument, to make his cheek
+pale or glow, his eyes flash or fill, as she pleased, was a game
+almost too delightful.
+
+One of the most potent means for producing the humano-atmospheric
+play in which her soul thus rejoiced, and one whose operation was to
+none better known than to Emmeline, was jealousy, and for its
+generation she had all possible facilities--for there could not be a
+woman in regard of whom jealousy was more justifiable on any ground
+except that of being worth it. So far as it will reach, however, it
+must be remembered, in mitigation of judgment, that she had no gauge
+in herself equal to the representation of a tithe of the misery
+whose signs served to lift her to the very Paradise of falsehood:
+she knew not what she did, and possibly knowledge might have found
+in her some pity and abstinence. But when a woman, in her own nature
+cold, takes delight in rousing passion, she will, selfishly
+confident in her own safety, go to strange lengths in kindling and
+fanning the flame which is the death of the other.
+
+It is far from my intention to follow the disagreeable topic across
+the pathless swamp through which an elaboration of its phases would
+necessarily drag me. Of morbid anatomy, save for the setting forth
+of cure, I am not fond, and here there is nothing to be said of
+cure. What concerns me as a narrator is, that Emmeline consoled and
+irritated and re-consoled Leopold, until she had him her very slave,
+and the more her slave that by that time he knew something of her
+character. The knowledge took from him what little repose she had
+left him; he did no more good at school, and went to Cambridge with
+the conviction that the woman to whom he had given his soul, would
+be doing things in his absence the sight of which would drive him
+mad. Yet somehow he continued to live, reassured now and then by the
+loving letters she wrote to him, and relieving his own heart while
+he fostered her falsehood by the passionate replies he made to them.
+
+From a sad accident of his childhood, he had become acquainted with
+something of the influences of a certain baneful drug, to the use of
+which one of his attendants was addicted, and now at college, partly
+from curiosity, partly from a desire to undergo its effects, but
+chiefly in order to escape from ever-gnawing and passionate thought,
+he began to make EXPERIMENTS in its use. Experiment called for
+repetition--in order to verification, said the fiend,--and
+repetition led first to a longing after its effects, and next to a
+mad appetite for the thing itself; so that, by the time of which my
+narrative treats, he was on the verge of absolute slavery to its
+use, and in imminent peril of having to pass the rest of his life in
+alternations of ecstasy and agony, divided by dull spaces of misery,
+the ecstasies growing rarer and rarer, and the agonies more and more
+frequent, intense, and lasting; until at length the dethroned Apollo
+found himself chained to a pillar of his own ruined temple, which
+the sirocco was fast filling with desert sand.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+LEOPOLD'S STORY CONCLUDED.
+
+
+
+
+
+He knew from her letters that they were going to give a ball, at
+which as many as pleased should be welcome in fancy dresses, and
+masked if they chose. The night before it he had a dream, under the
+influence of his familiar no doubt, which made him so miserable and
+jealous that he longed to see her as a wounded man longs for water,
+and the thought arose of going down to the ball, not exactly in
+disguise, for he had no mind to act a part, but masked so that he
+should not be recognised as uninvited, and should have an
+opportunity of watching Emmeline, concerning whose engagement with a
+young cavalry officer there had lately been reports, which, however,
+before his dream, had caused him less uneasiness than many such
+preceding. The same moment the thought was a resolve.
+
+I must mention that no one whatever knew the degree of his intimacy
+with Emmeline, or that he had any ground for considering her engaged
+to him. Secrecy added much to the zest of Emmeline's pleasures.
+Everyone knew that he was a devoted admirer--but therein to be
+classed with a host.
+
+For concealment, he contented himself with a large travelling-cloak,
+a tall felt hat, and a black silk mask.
+
+He entered the grounds with an arrival of guests, and knowing the
+place perfectly, contrived to see something of her behaviour, while
+he watched for an opportunity of speaking to her alone,--a quest of
+unlikely success. Hour after hour he watched, and all the time never
+spoke or was spoken to.
+
+Those who are acquainted with the mode of operation of the drug to
+which I have referred, are aware that a man may be fully under its
+influences without betraying to the ordinary observer that he is in
+a condition differing from that of other men. But, in the living
+dream wherein he walks, his feeling of time and of space is so
+enlarged, or perhaps, I rather think, so subdivided to the
+consciousness, that everything about him seems infinite both in
+duration and extent; the action of a second has in it a
+multitudinous gradation of progress, and a line of space is marked
+out into millionths, of every one of which the consciousness takes
+note. At the same time his senses are open to every impression from
+things around him, only they appear to him in a strangely exalted
+metamorphosis, the reflex of his own mental exaltation either in
+bliss or torture, while the fancies of a man mingle with the facts
+thus introduced and modify and are in turn modified by them; whereby
+out of the chaos arises the mountain of an Earthly Paradise, whose
+roots are in the depths of hell; and whether the man be with the
+divine air and the clear rivers and the thousand-hued flowers on the
+top, or down in the ice-lake with the tears frozen to hard lumps in
+the hollows of his eyes so that he can no more have even the poor
+consolation of weeping, is but the turning of a hair, so far at
+least as his will has to do with it. The least intrusion of anything
+painful, of any jar that cannot be wrought into the general harmony
+of the vision, will suddenly alter its character, and from the
+seventh heaven of speechless bliss the man may fall plumb down into
+gulfs of horrible and torturing, it may be loathsome imaginings.
+
+Now Leopold had taken a dose of the drug on his journey, and it was
+later than usual, probably because of the motion, ere it began to
+take effect. He had indeed ceased to look for any result from it,
+when all at once, as he stood amongst the laburnums and lilacs of a
+rather late spring, something seemed to burst in his brain, and that
+moment he was Endymion waiting for Diana in her interlunar grove,
+while the music of the spheres made the blossoms of a stately yet
+flowering forest, tremble all with conscious delight.
+
+Emboldened by his new condition, he drew nigh the house. They were
+then passing from the ball to the supper-room, and he found the
+tumult so distasteful to his mood of still ecstasy that he would not
+have entered had he not remembered that he had in his pocket a note
+ready if needful to slip into her hand, containing only the words,
+"Meet me for one long minute at the circle,"--a spot well known to
+both: he threw his cloak Spanish fashion over his left shoulder,
+slouched his hat, and entering stood in a shadowy spot she must pass
+in going to or from the supper-room. There he waited, with the note
+hid in his hand--a long time, yet not a weary one, such visions of
+loveliness passed before his entranced gaze. At length SHE also
+passed--lovely as the Diana whose dress she had copied--not quite so
+perfectly as she had abjured her manners. She leaned trustingly on
+the arm of some one, but Leopold never even looked at him. He slid
+the note into her hand, which hung ungloved as inviting confidences.
+With an instinct quickened and sharpened tenfold by much practice,
+her fingers instantly closed upon it, but, not a muscle belonging to
+any other part of her betrayed the intrusion of a foreign body: I do
+not believe her heart gave one beat the more to the next minute. She
+passed graceful on, her swan's-neck shining; and Leopold hastened
+out to one of the windows of the ball-room, there to feast his eyes
+upon her loveliness. But when he caught sight of her whirling in the
+waltz with the officer of dragoons whose name he had heard coupled
+with hers, and saw her flash on him the light and power of eyes
+which were to him the windows of all the heaven he knew, as they
+swam together in the joy of the rhythm, of the motion, of the music,
+suddenly the whole frame of the dream wherein he wandered, trembled,
+shook, fell down into the dreary vaults that underlie all the airy
+castles that have other foundation than the will of the eternal
+Builder. With the suddenness of the dark that follows the lightning,
+the music changed to a dissonant clash of multitudinous cymbals, the
+resounding clang of brazen doors, and the hundred-toned screams of
+souls in torture. The same moment, from halls of infinite scope,
+where the very air was a soft tumult of veiled melodies ever and
+anon twisted into inextricable knots of harmony--under whose skyey
+domes he swept upborne by chords of sound throbbing up against great
+wings mighty as thought yet in their motions as easy and subtle, he
+found himself lying on the floor of a huge vault, whose black slabs
+were worn into many hollows by the bare feet of the damned as they
+went and came between the chambers of their torture opening off upon
+every side, whence issued all kinds of sickening cries, and mingled
+with the music to which, with whips of steel, hellish executioners
+urged the dance whose every motion was an agony. His soul fainted
+within him, and the vision changed. When he came to himself, he lay
+on the little plot of grass amongst the lilacs and laburnums where
+he had asked Emmeline to meet him. Fevered with jealousy and the
+horrible drug, his mouth was parched like an old purse, and he found
+himself chewing at the grass to ease its burning and drought. But
+presently the evil thing resumed its sway and fancies usurped over
+facts. He thought he was lying in an Indian jungle, close by the
+cave of a beautiful tigress, which crouched within, waiting the
+first sting of reviving hunger to devour him. He could hear her
+breathing as she slept, but he was fascinated, paralyzed, and could
+not escape, knowing that, even if with mighty effort he succeeded in
+moving a finger, the motion would suffice to wake her, and she would
+spring upon him and tear him to pieces. Years upon years passed
+thus, and he still lay on the grass in the jungle, and still the
+beautiful tigress slept. But however far apart the knots upon the
+string of time may lie, they must pass: an angel in white stood over
+him, his fears vanished, the waving of her wings cooled him, and she
+was the angel whom he had loved and loved from all eternity, in whom
+was his ever-and-only rest. She lifted him to his feet, gave him her
+hand, they walked away, and the tigress was asleep for ever. For
+miles and miles, as it seemed to his exaltation, they wandered away
+into the woods, to wander in them for ever, the same violet blue,
+flashing with roseate stars, for ever looking in through the
+tree-tops, and the great leafy branches hushing, ever hushing them,
+as with the voices of child-watching mothers, into peace, whose
+depth is bliss.
+
+"Have you nothing to say now I am come?" said the angel.
+
+"I have said all. I am at rest," answered the mortal.
+
+"I am going to be married to Captain Hodges," said the angel.
+
+And with the word, the forests of heaven vanished, and the halls of
+Eblis did not take their place:--a worse hell was there--the cold
+reality of an earth abjured, and a worthless maiden walking by his
+side. He stood and turned to her. The shock had mastered the drug.
+They were only in the little wooded hollow, a hundred yards from the
+house. The blood throbbed in his head as from the piston of an
+engine. A horrid sound of dance-music was in his ears. Emmeline, his
+own, stood in her white dress, looking up in his face, with the
+words just parted from her lips, "I am going to be married to
+Captain Hodges." The next moment she threw her arms round his neck,
+pulled his face to hers, and kissed him, and clung to him.
+
+"Poor Leopold!" she said, and looked in his face with her electric
+battery at full power; "does it make him miserable, then?--But you
+know it could not have gone on like this between you and me for
+ever! It was very dear while it lasted, but it must come to an end."
+
+Was there a glimmer of real pity and sadness in those wondrous eyes?
+She laughed--was it a laugh of despair or of exultation?--and hid
+her face on his bosom. And what was it that awoke in Leopold? Had
+the drug resumed its power over him? Was it rage at her mockery, or
+infinite compassion for her despair? Would he slay a demon, or
+ransom a spirit from hateful bonds? Would he save a woman from
+disgrace and misery to come? or punish her for the vilest falsehood?
+Who can tell? for Leopold himself never could. Whatever the feeling
+was, its own violence erased it from his memory, and left him with a
+knife in his hand, and Emmeline lying motionless at his feet. It was
+a knife the Scotch highlanders call a skean-dhu, sharp-pointed as a
+needle, sharp-edged as a razor, and with one blow of it he had cleft
+her heart, and she never cried or laughed any more in that body
+whose charms she had degraded to the vile servitude of her vanity.
+The next thing he remembered was standing on the edge of the shaft
+of a deserted coalpit, ready to cast himself down. Whence came the
+change of resolve, he could not tell, but he threw in his cloak and
+mask, and fled. The one thought in his miserable brain was his
+sister. Having murdered one woman, he was fleeing to another for
+refuge. Helen would save him.
+
+How he had found his way to his haven, he had not an idea. Searching
+the newspapers, Helen heard that a week had elapsed between the
+"mysterious murder of a young lady in Yorkshire" and the night on
+which he came to her window.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+SISTERHOOD.
+
+
+
+
+
+"Well, Poldie, after all I would rather be you than she!" cried
+Helen indignantly, when she had learned the whole story.
+
+It was far from the wisest thing to say, but she meant it, and
+clasped her brother to her bosom.
+
+Straightway the poor fellow began to search for all that man could
+utter in excuse, nay in justification, not of himself, but of the
+woman he had murdered, appropriating all the blame. But Helen had
+recognised in Emmeline the selfishness which is the essential
+murderer, nor did it render her more lenient towards her that the
+same moment, with a start of horror, she caught a transient glimpse
+of the same in herself. But the discovery wrought in the other
+direction, and the tenderness she now lavished upon Leopold left all
+his hopes far behind. Her brother's sin had broken wide the
+feebly-flowing springs of her conscience, and she saw that in
+idleness and ease and drowsiness of soul, she had been forgetting
+and neglecting even the being she loved best in the universe. In the
+rushing confluence of love, truth, and indignation, to atone for
+years of half-love, half-indifference, as the past now appeared to
+her, she would have spoiled him terribly, heaping on him caresses
+and assurances that he was far the less guilty and the more injured
+of the two; but Leopold's strength was exhausted, and he fell back
+in a faint.
+
+While she was occupied with his restoration many things passed
+through her mind. Amongst the rest she saw it would be impossible
+for her to look after him sufficiently where he was, that the
+difficulty of feeding him even would be great, that very likely he
+was on the borders of an illness, when he would require constant
+attention, that the danger of discovery was great--in short, that
+some better measures must be taken for his protection and the
+possibility of her ministrations. If she had but a friend to
+consult! Ever that thought returned. Alas! she had none on whose
+counsel or discretion either she could depend. When at length he
+opened his eyes, she told him she must leave him now, but when it
+was dark she would come again, and stay with him till dawn. Feebly
+he assented, seeming but half aware of what she said, and again
+closed his eyes. While he lay thus, she gained possession of his
+knife. It left its sheath behind it, and she put it naked in her
+pocket. As she went from the room, feeling like a mother abandoning
+her child in a wolf-haunted forest, his eyes followed her to the
+door with a longing, wild, hungry look, and she felt the look
+following her still through the wood and across the park and into
+her chamber, while the knife in her pocket felt like a spellbound
+demon waiting his chance to work them both a mischief. She locked
+her door and took it out, and as she put it carefully away, fearful
+lest any attempt to destroy it might lead to its discovery, she
+caught sight of her brother's name engraved in full upon the silver
+mounting of the handle. "What if he had left it behind him!" she
+thought with a shudder.
+
+But a reassuring strength had risen in her mind with Leopold's
+disclosure. More than once on her way home she caught herself
+reasoning that the poor boy had not been to blame at all--that he
+could not help it--that she had deserved nothing less. Her
+conscience speedily told her that in consenting to such a thought,
+she herself would be a murderess. Love her brother she must; excuse
+him she might, for honest excuse is only justice; but to uphold the
+deed would be to take the part of hell against heaven. Still the
+murder did not, would not seem so frightful after she had heard the
+whole tale, and she found it now required far less effort to face
+her aunt. If she was not the protectress of the innocent, she was of
+the grievously wronged, and the worst wrong done him was the crime
+he had been driven to do. She lay down and slept until dinner time,
+woke refreshed, and sustained her part during the slow meal,
+neartened by the expectation of seeing her brother again and in
+circumstance of less anxiety when the friendly darkness had come,
+and all eyes but theirs were closed. She talked to her aunt and a
+lady who dined with them as if she had the freest heart in the
+world; the time passed; the converse waned; the hour arrived; adieus
+were said; drowsiness came. All the world of Glaston was asleep; the
+night on her nest was brooding upon the egg of to-morrow; the moon
+was in darkness; and the wind was blowing upon Helen's hot forehead,
+as she slid like a thief across the park.
+
+Her mind was in a tumult of mingled feelings, all gathered about the
+form of her precious brother. One moment she felt herself
+ministering to the father she had loved so dearly, in protecting his
+son; the next the thought of her father had vanished, and all was
+love for the boy whose memories filled the shadow of her childhood;
+about whom she had dreamed night after night as he crossed the great
+sea to come to her; who had crept into her arms timidly, and
+straightway turned into the daintiest merriest playmate; who had
+charmed her even in his hot-blooded rages, when he rushed at her
+with whatever was in his hand at the moment. Then she had laughed
+and dared him; now she shuddered to remember. Again, and this was
+the feeling that generally prevailed, she was a vessel overflowing
+with the mere woman-passion of protection: the wronged, abused,
+maddened, oppressed, hunted human thing was dependent upon her, and
+her alone, for any help or safety he was ever to find. Sometimes it
+was the love of a mother for her sick child; sometimes that of a
+tigress crouching over her wounded cub and licking its hurts. All
+was coloured with admiration of his beauty and grace, and mingled
+with boundless pity for their sad overclouding and defeature! Nor
+was the sense of wrong to herself in wrong to her own flesh and
+blood wanting. The sum of all was a passionate devotion of her being
+to the service of her brother.
+
+I suspect that at root the loves of the noble wife, the great-souled
+mother, and the true sister, are one. Anyhow, they are all but
+glints on the ruffled waters of humanity of the one changeless
+enduring Light.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+THE SICK-CHAMBER.
+
+
+
+
+
+She had reached the little iron gate, which hung on one hinge only,
+and was lifting it from the ground to push it open, when sudden
+through the stillness came a frightful cry. Had they found him
+already? Was it a life-and-death struggle going on within? For one
+moment she stood rooted; the next she flew to the door. When she
+entered the hall, however, the place was silent as a crypt. Could it
+have been her imagination? Again, curdling her blood with horror,
+came the tearing cry, a sort of shout of agony. All in the dark, she
+flew up the stair, calling him by name, fell twice, rose as if on
+wings, and flew again until she reached the room. There all was
+silence and darkness. With trembling hands she found her match-box
+and struck a light, uttering all the time every soothing word she
+could think of, while her heart quavered in momentary terror of
+another shriek. It came just as the match flamed up in her fingers,
+and an answering shriek from her bosom tore its way through her
+clenched teeth, and she shuddered like one in an ague. There sat her
+brother on the edge of the bedstead staring before him with fixed
+eyes and terror-stricken countenance. He had not heard her enter,
+and saw neither the light nor her who held it. She made haste to
+light the candle, with mighty effort talking to him still, in gasps
+and chokings, but in vain; the ghastly face continued unchanged, and
+the wide-open eyes remained fixed. She seated herself beside him,
+and threw her arms around him. It was like embracing a marble
+statue, so moveless, so irresponsive was he. But presently he gave a
+kind of shudder, the tension of his frame relaxed, and the soul
+which had been absorbed in its own visions, came forward to its
+windows, cast from them a fleeting glance, then dropped the
+curtains.
+
+"Is it you, Helen?" he said, shuddering, as he closed his eyes and
+laid his head on her shoulder. His breath was like that of a
+furnace. His skin seemed on fire. She felt his pulse: it was
+galloping. He was in a fever--brain-fever, probably, and what was
+she to do? A thought came to her. Yes, it was the only possible
+thing. She would take him home. There, with the help of the
+household, she might have a chance of concealing him--a poor one,
+certainly! but here, how was she even to keep him to the house in
+his raving fits?
+
+"Poldie, dear!" she said, "you must come with me. I am going to take
+you to my own room, where I can nurse you properly, and need not
+leave you. Do you think you could walk as far?"
+
+"Walk! Yes--quite well: why not?"
+
+"I am afraid you are going to be ill, Poldie; but, however ill you
+may feel, you must promise me to try and make as little noise as you
+can, and never cry out if you can help it. When I do like this," she
+went on, laying her finger on his lips, "you must be silent
+altogether."
+
+"I will do whatever you tell me, Helen, if you will only promise not
+to leave me, and, when they come for me, to give me poison."
+
+She promised, and made haste to obliterate every sign that the room
+had been occupied. She then took his arm and led him out. He was
+very quiet--too quiet and submissive, she thought--seemed sleepy,
+revived a little when they reached the open air, presently grew
+terrified, and kept starting and looking about him as they crossed
+the park, but never spoke a word. By the door in the sunk fence they
+reached the garden, and were soon in Helen's chamber, where she left
+him to get into bed while she went to acquaint her aunt of his
+presence in the house. Hard and unreasonable, like most human
+beings, where her prejudices were concerned, she had, like all other
+women, sympathy with those kinds of suffering which by experience
+she understood. Mental distress was beyond her, but for the solace
+of another's pain she would even have endured a portion herself.
+When therefore, she heard Helen's story, how her brother had come to
+her window, that he was ill with brain-fever, as she thought, and
+talked wildly, she quite approved of her having put him to bed in
+her own room, and would have got up to help in nursing him. But
+Helen persuaded her to have her night's rest, and begged her to join
+with her in warning the servants not to mention his presence in the
+house, on the ground that it might get abroad that he was out of his
+mind. They were all old and tolerably faithful, and Leopold had been
+from childhood such a favourite, that she hoped thus to secure their
+silence.
+
+"But, child, he must have the doctor," said her aunt.
+
+"Yes, but I will manage him. What a good thing old Mr. Bird is gone!
+He was such a gossip! We must call in the new doctor, Mr. Faber. I
+shall see that he understands. He has his practice to make, and will
+mind what I say."
+
+"Why, child, you are as cunning as an old witch!" said her aunt. "It
+is very awkward," she went on. "What miserable creatures men
+are--from first to last! Out of one scrape into another from babies
+to old men! Would you believe it, my dear?--your uncle, one of the
+best of men, and most exemplary of clergymen--why, I had to put on
+his stockings for him every day he got up! Not that my services
+stopped there either, I can tell you! Latterly I wrote more than
+half his sermons for him. He never would preach the same sermon
+twice, you see. He made that a point of honour; and the consequence
+was that at last he had to come to me. His sermons were nothing the
+losers, I trust, or our congregation either. I used the same
+commentaries he did, and you would hardly believe how much I enjoyed
+the work.--Poor dear boy! we must do what we can for him."
+
+"I will call you if I find it necessary, aunt. I must go to him now,
+for he cannot bear me out of his sight. Don't please send for the
+doctor till I see you again."
+
+When she got back to her room, to her great relief she found Leopold
+asleep. The comfort of the bed after his terrible exhaustion and the
+hardships he had undergone, had combined with the drug under whose
+influences he had more or less been ever since first he appeared at
+Helen's window, and he slept soundly.
+
+But when he woke, he was in a high fever, and Mr. Faber was
+summoned. He found the state of his patient such that no amount of
+wild utterance could have surprised him. His brain was burning and
+his mind all abroad: he tossed from side to side and talked
+vehemently--but even to Helen unintelligibly.
+
+Mr. Faber had not attended medical classes and walked the hospitals
+without undergoing the influences of the unbelief prevailing in
+those regions, where, on the strength of a little knowledge of the
+human frame, cartloads of puerile ignorance and anile vulgarity, not
+to mention obscenity, are uttered in the name of truth by men who
+know nothing whatever of the things that belong to the deeper nature
+believed in by the devout and simple, and professed also by many who
+are perhaps yet farther from a knowledge of its affairs than those
+who thus treat them with contempt. When therefore he came to
+practise in Glaston, he brought his quota of yeast into the old
+bottle of that ancient and slumberous town. But as he had to gain
+for himself a practice, he was prudent enough to make no display of
+the cherished emptiness of his swept and garnished rooms. I do not
+mean to blame him. He did not fancy himself the holder of any
+Mephistophelean commission for the general annihilation of belief
+like George Bascombe, only one from nature's bureau of ways and
+means for the cure of the ailing body--which, indeed, to him,
+comprised all there was of humanity. He had a cold, hard,
+business-like manner, which, however admirable on some grounds,
+destroyed any hope Helen had cherished of finding in him one to whom
+she might disclose her situation.
+
+He proved himself both wise and skilful, yet it was weeks before
+Leopold began to mend. By the time the fever left him, he was in
+such a prostrate condition, that it was very doubtful whether yet he
+could live, and Helen had had to draw largely even upon her fine
+stock of health.
+
+Her ministration continued most exhausting. Yet now she thought of
+her life as she had never thought of it before, namely as a thing of
+worth. It had grown precious to her since it had become the stay of
+Leopold's. Notwithstanding the terrible state of suspense and horror
+in which she now lived, seeming to herself at times an actual sharer
+in her brother's guilt, she would yet occasionally find herself
+exulting in the thought of being the guardian angel he called her.
+Now that by his bedside hour plodded after hour in something of
+sameness and much of weariness, she yet looked back on her past as
+on the history of a slug.
+
+During all the time she scarcely saw her cousin George, and indeed,
+she could hardly tell why, shrunk from him. In the cold, bright,
+shadowless, north-windy day of his presence, there was little
+consolation to be gathered, and for strength--to face him made a
+fresh demand upon the little she had. Her physical being had
+certainly lost. But the countenance which, after a long interval of
+absence, the curate at length one morning descried in the midst of
+the congregation, had, along with its pallor and look of hidden and
+suppressed trouble, gathered the expression of a higher order of
+existence. Not that she had drawn a single consoling draught from
+any one of the wells of religion, or now sought the church for the
+sake of any reminder of something found precious: the great quiet
+place drew her merely with the offer of its two hours' restful
+stillness. The thing which had elevated her was simply the fact
+that, without any thought, not to say knowledge of him, she had yet
+been doing the will of the Heart of the world. True she had been but
+following her instinct, and ministering--not to humanity from an
+enlarged affection, but only to the one being she best loved in the
+world--a small merit surely!--yet was it the beginning of the way of
+God, the lovely way, and therefore the face of the maiden had begun
+to shine with a light which no splendour of physical health, no
+consciousness of beauty, however just, could have kindled there.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+THE CURATE'S PROGRESS.
+
+
+
+
+
+The visits of Wingfold to the little people at the gate not only
+became frequent, but more and more interesting to him, and as his
+office occasioned few demands on his attention, Polwarth had plenty
+of time to give to one who sought instruction in those things which
+were his very passion. He had never yet had any pupil but his niece,
+and to find another, and one whose soul was so eager after that of
+which he had such long-gathered store to dispense, was a keen, pure,
+and solemn delight. It was that for which he had so often prayed--
+an outlet for the living waters of his spirit into dry and thirsty
+lands. He had not much faculty for writing, although now and then he
+would relieve his heart in verse; and if he had a somewhat
+remarkable gift of discourse, to attempt public utterance would have
+been but a vain exposure of his person to vulgar mockery. In
+Wingfold he had found a man docile and obedient, both thirsting
+after, and recognizant of the truth, and if he might but aid him in
+unsealing the well of truth in his own soul, the healing waters
+might from him flow far and near. Not as the little Zacchæus who
+pieced his own shortness with the length of the sycamore tree, so to
+rise above his taller brethren and see Jesus, little Polwarth would
+lift tall Wingfold on his shoulders, first to see, and then cry
+aloud to his brethren who was at hand.
+
+For two or three Sundays, the curate, largely assisted by his
+friend, fed his flock with his gleanings from other men's harvests,
+and already, though it had not yet come to his knowledge, one
+consequence was, that complaints, running together, made a pool of
+discontent, and a semi-public meeting had been held, wherein was
+discussed, and not finally negatived, the propriety of communicating
+with the rector on the subject. Some however held that, as the
+incumbent paid so little attention to his flock, it would be better
+to appeal to the bishop, and acquaint him with the destitution of
+that portion of his oversight. But things presently took a new turn,
+at first surprising, soon alarming to some, and at length, to not a
+few, appalling.
+
+Obedient to Polwarth's instructions, Wingfold had taken to his New
+Testament. At first, as he read and sought to understand, ever and
+anon some small difficulty, notably, foremost of all, the
+discrepancy in the genealogies--I mention it merely to show the sort
+of difficulty I mean--would insect-like shoot out of the darkness,
+and sting him in the face. Some of these he pursued, encountered,
+crushed--and found he had gained next to nothing by the victory; and
+Polwarth soon persuaded him to let such, alone for the present,
+seeing they involved nothing concerning the man at a knowledge of
+whom it was his business to arrive. But when it came to the
+perplexity caused by some of the sayings of Jesus himself, it was
+another matter. He MUST understand these, he thought, or fail to
+understand the man. Here Polwarth told him that, if, after all, he
+seemed to fail, he must conclude that possibly the meaning of the
+words was beyond him, and that the understanding of them depended on
+a more advanced knowledge of Jesns himself; for, while words reveal
+the speaker, they must yet lie in the light of something already
+known of the speaker to be themselves intelligible. Between the mind
+and the understanding of certain hard utterances, therefore, there
+must of necessity lie a gradation of easier steps. And here Polwarth
+was tempted to give him a far more important, because more
+immediately practical hint, but refrained, from the dread of
+weakening, by PRESENTATION, the force of a truth which, in
+DISCOVERY, would have its full effect. For he was confident that the
+curate, in the temper which was now his, must ere long come
+immediately upon the truth towards which he was tempted to point
+him.
+
+On one occasion when Wingfold had asked him whether he saw the
+meaning of a certain saying of our Lord, Polwarth answered thus:
+
+"I think I do, but whether I could at present make you see it, I
+cannot tell. I suspect it is one of those concerning which I have
+already said that you have yet to understand Jesus better before you
+can understand them. Let me, just to make the nature of what I state
+clearer to you, ask you one question: tell me, if you can, what,
+primarily, did Jesus, from his own account of himself, come into the
+world to do?"
+
+"To save it," answered Wingfold.
+
+"I think you are wrong," returned Polwarth. "Mind I said PRIMARILY.
+You will yourself come to the same conclusion by and by. Either our
+Lord was a phantom--a heresy of potent working in the minds of many
+who would be fierce in its repudiation--or he was a very man,
+uttering the heart of his life that it might become the life of his
+brethren; and if so, an honest man can never ultimately fail of
+getting at what he means. I have seen him described somewhere as a
+man dominated by the passion of humanity--or something like that.
+The description does not, to my mind, even shadow the truth. Another
+passion, if such I may dare to call it, was the light of his life,
+dominating even that which would yet have been enough to make him
+lay down his life."
+
+Wingfold went away pondering.
+
+Though Polwarth read little concerning religion except the New
+Testament, he could yet have directed Wingfold to several books
+which might have lent him good aid in his quest after the real
+likeness of the man he sought; but he greatly desired that on the
+soul of his friend the dawn should break over the mountains of
+Judæa--the light, I mean, flow from the words themselves of the Son
+of Man. Sometimes he grew so excited about his pupil and his
+progress, and looked so anxiously for the news of light in his
+darkness, that he could not rest at home, but would be out all day
+in the park--praying, his niece believed, for the young parson. And
+little did Wingfold suspect that, now and again when his lamp was
+burning far into the night because he struggled with some hard
+saying, the little man was going round and round the house, like one
+muttering charms, only they were prayers for his friend: ill
+satisfied with his own feeble affection, he would supplement it with
+its origin, would lay hold upon the riches of the Godhead, crying
+for his friend to "the first stock-father of gentleness;"--folly
+all, and fair subject of laughter to such as George Bascombe, if
+there be no God; but as Polwarth, with his whole, healthy, holy soul
+believed there is a God--it was for him but simple common sense.
+
+Still no daybreak--and now the miracles had grown troublesome! Could
+Mr. Polwarth honestly say that he found no difficulty in believing
+things so altogether out of the common order of events, and so
+buried in the darkness and dust of antiquity that investigation was
+impossible?
+
+Mr. Polwarth could not say that he had found no such difficulty.
+
+"Then why should the weight of the story," said Wingfold, "the
+weight of its proof, I mean, to minds like ours, coming so long
+after, and by their education incapacitated for believing in such
+things, in a time when the law of everything is searched into---"
+
+"And as yet very likely as far from understood as ever," interposed
+but not interrupted Polwarth.
+
+"Why should the weight of its proof, I ask, be laid upon such
+improbable things as miracles? That they are necessarily improbable,
+I presume you will admit."
+
+"Having premised that I believe every one recorded," said Polwarth,
+"I heartily admit their improbability. But the WEIGHT of proof is
+not, and never was laid upon them. Our Lord did not make much of
+them, and did them far more for the individual concerned than for
+the sake of the beholders. I will not however talk to you about them
+now. I will merely say that it is not through the miracles you will
+find the Lord, though, having found him, you will find him there
+also. The question for you is not, Are the miracles true? but, Was
+Jesus true? Again I say, you must find him--the man himself. When
+you have found him, I may perhaps retort upon you the question--Can
+you believe such improbable things as the miracles, Mr. Wingfold?"
+
+The little man showed pretty plainly by the set of his lips that he
+meant to say no more, and again Wingfold had, with considerable
+dissatisfaction and no answer, to go back to his New Testament.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+THE CURATE MAKES A DISCOVERY.
+
+
+
+
+
+At length, one day, as he was working with a harmony, comparing
+certain passages between themselves, and as variedly given in the
+gospels, he fell into a half-thinking, half-dreaming mood, in which
+his eyes, for some time unconsciously, rested on the verse, "Ye will
+not come unto me that ye might have life:" it mingled itself with
+his brooding, and by and by, though yet he was brooding rather than
+meditating, the form of Jesus had gathered, in the stillness of his
+mental quiescence, so much of reality that at length he found
+himself thinking of him as of a true-hearted man, mightily in
+earnest to help his fellows, who could not get them to mind what he
+told them.
+
+"Ah!" said the curate to himself, "if I had but seen him, would not
+I have minded him!--would I not have haunted his steps, with
+question upon question, until I got at the truth!"
+
+Again the more definite thought vanished in the seething chaos of
+reverie, which dured unbroken for a time,--until again suddenly rose
+from memory to consciousness and attention the words: "Why call ye
+me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?"
+
+"Good God!" he exclaimed, "here am I bothering over words, and
+questioning about this and that, as if I were testing his fitness
+for a post I had to offer him, and he all the time claiming my
+obedience! I cannot even, on the spur of the moment at least, tell
+one thing he wants me to do; and as to doing anything because he
+told me--not once did I ever! But then how am I to obey him until I
+am sure of his right to command? I just want to know whether I am to
+call him Lord or not. No, that won't do either, for he says, Why
+even of yourselves judge ye not what is right? And do I not
+know--have I ever even doubted that what he said we ought to do was
+the right thing to do? Yet here have I, all these years, been
+calling myself a Christian, ministering, forsooth, in the temple of
+Christ, as if he were a heathen divinity, who cared for songs and
+prayers and sacrifices, and cannot honestly say I ever once in my
+life did a thing because he said so, although the record is full of
+his earnest, even pleading words! I have NOT been an honest man, and
+how should a dishonest man be a judge over that man who said he was
+the Christ of God? Would it be any wonder if the things he uttered
+should be too high and noble to be by such a man recognized as
+truth?"
+
+With this, yet another saying dawned upon, him: IF ANY MAN WILL DO
+HIS WILL, HE SHALL KNOW OF THE DOCTRINE, WHETHER IT BE OF GOD, OR
+WHETHER I SPEAK OF MYSELF.
+
+He went into his closet and shut to the door--came out again, and
+went straight to visit a certain grievous old woman.
+
+The next open result was, that, on the following Sunday, a man went
+up into the pulpit who, for the first time in his life, believed he
+had something to say to his fellow-sinners. It was not now the
+sacred spoil of the best of gleaning or catering that he bore
+thither with him, but the message given him by a light in his own
+inward parts, discovering therein the darkness and the wrong.
+
+He opened no sermon-case, nor read words from any book, save, with
+trembling voice, these:
+
+"WHY CALL YE ME LORD, LORD, AND DO NOT THE THINGS WHICH I SAY?"
+
+I pause for a moment in my narrative to request the sympathy of such
+readers as may be capable of affording it, for a man whose honesty
+makes him appear egotistic. When a man, finding himself in a false
+position, is yet anxious to do the duties of that position until
+such time as, if he should not in the meantime have verified it, and
+become able to fill it with honesty, he may honourably leave it, I
+think he may well be pardoned if, of inward necessity, he should
+refer to himself in a place where such reference may be either the
+greatest impiety, or the outcome of the truest devotion. In him it
+was neither: it was honesty--and absorption in the startled gaze of
+a love that believed it had caught a glimmer of the passing garment
+of the Truth. Thus strengthened--might I not say inspired? for what
+is the love of truth and the joy therein, if not a breathing into
+the soul of the breath of life from the God of truth?--he looked
+round upon his congregation as he had never dared until now--saw
+face after face, and knew it--saw amongst the rest that of Helen
+Lingard, so sadly yet not pitifully altered, with a doubt if it
+could be she; trembled a little with a new excitement, which one
+less modest or less wise might have taken--how foolishly!--instead
+of the truth perceived, for the inspiration of the spirit; and,
+sternly suppressing the emotion, said,
+
+"My hearers, I come before you this morning to utter the first word
+of truth it has ever been given to ME to utter."
+
+His hearers stared both mentally and corporeally.
+
+"Is he going to deny the Bible?" said some.
+
+--"It will be the last," said others, "if the rector hear in time
+how you have been disgracing yourself and profaning his pulpit."
+
+"And," the curate went on, "it would be as a fire in my bones did I
+attempt to keep it back.
+
+"In my room, three days ago, I was reading the strange story of the
+man who appeared in Palestine saying that he was the Son of God, and
+came upon those words of his which I have now read in your hearing.
+At their sound the accuser, Conscience, awoke in my bosom, and
+asked, 'Doest thou the things he saith to thee?' And I thought with
+myself,--'Have I this day done anything he says to me?--when did I
+do anything I had heard of him? Did I ever'--to this it came at
+last--'Did I ever, in all my life, do one thing because he said to
+me DO THIS?' And the answer was NO, NEVER. Yet there I was, not only
+calling myself a Christian, but on the strength of my Christianity,
+it was to be presumed, living amongst you, and received by you, as
+your helper on the way to the heavenly kingdom--a living falsehood,
+walking and talking amongst you!"
+
+"What a wretch!" said one man to himself, who made a large part of
+his living by the sale of under-garments whose every stitch was an
+untacking of the body from the soul of a seamstress. "Bah!" said
+some. "A hypocrite, by his own confession!" said others.
+"Exceedingly improper!" said Mrs. Ramshorn. "Unheard-of and most
+unclerical behaviour! And actually to confess such paganism!" For
+Helen, she waked up a little, began to listen, and wondered what he
+had been saying that a wind seemed to have blown rustling among the
+heads of the congregation.
+
+"Having made this confession," Wingfold proceeded, "you will
+understand that whatever I now say, I say to and of myself as much
+as to and of any other to whom it may apply."
+
+He then proceeded to show that faith and obedience are one and the
+same spirit, passing as it were from room to room in the same heart:
+what in the heart we call faith, in the will we call obedience. He
+showed that the Lord refused absolutely the faith that found its
+vent at the lips in the worshipping words, and not at the limbs in
+obedient action--which some present pronounced bad theology, while
+others said to themselves surely that at least was common sense. For
+Helen, what she heard might be interesting to clergymen, or people
+like her aunt who had to do with such matters, but to her it was
+less than nothing and vanity, whose brother lay at home "sick in
+heart and sick in head."
+
+But hard thoughts of him could not stay the fountain of Wingfold's
+utterance, which filled as it flowed. Eager after a right
+presentation of what truth he saw, he dwelt on the mockery it would
+be of any man to call him the wisest, the best, the kindest, yea and
+the dearest of men, yet never heed either the smallest request or
+the most urgent entreaty he made.
+
+"A Socinian!" said Mrs. Ramshorn.
+
+"There's stuff in the fellow!" said the rector's churchwarden, who
+had been brought up a Wesleyan.
+
+"He'd make a fellow fancy he did believe all his grandmother told
+him!" thought Bascombe.
+
+As he went on, the awakened curate grew almost eloquent. His face
+shone with earnestness. Even Helen found her gaze fixed upon him,
+though she had not a notion what he was talking about. He closed at
+length with these words:
+
+"After the confession I have now made to you, a confession which I
+have also entreated everyone to whom it belongs to make to himself
+and his God, it follows that I dare not call myself a Christian. How
+should such a one as I know anything about that which, if it be true
+at all, is the loftiest, the one all-absorbing truth in the
+universe? How should such a fellow as I"--he went on, growing
+scornful at himself in the presence of the truth--"judge of its
+sacred probabilities? or, having led such a life of simony, be heard
+when he declares that such a pretended message from God to men seems
+too good to be true? The things therein contained I declare good,
+yet went not and did them. Therefore am I altogether out of court,
+and must not be heard in the matter.
+
+"No, my hearers, I call not myself a Christian, but I call everyone
+here who obeys the word of Jesus, who restrains anger, who declines
+judgment, who practises generosity, who loves his enemies, who prays
+for his slanderers, to witness my vow, that I will henceforth try to
+obey him, in the hope that he whom he called God and his Father,
+will reveal to him whom you call your Lord Jesus Christ, that into
+my darkness I may receive the light of the world!"
+
+"A professed infidel!" said Mrs. Ramshorn. "A clever one too! That
+was a fine trap he laid for us, to prove us all atheists as well as
+himself! As if any mere mortal COULD obey the instructions of the
+Saviour! He was divine; we are but human!"
+
+She might have added, "And but poor creatures as such," but did not
+go so far, believing herself more than an average specimen.
+
+But there was one shining face which, like a rising sun of love and
+light and truth, "pillowed his chin," not "on an orient wave," but
+on the book-board of a free seat. The eyes of it were full of tears,
+and the heart behind it was giving that God and Father thanks, for
+this was more, far more than he had even hoped for, save in the
+indefinite future. The light was no longer present as warmth or
+vivification alone, but had begun to shine as light in the heart of
+his friend, to whom now, praised be God! the way lay open into all
+truth. And when the words came, in a voice that once more trembled
+with emotion--"Now to God the Father,"--he bent down his face, and
+the poor, stunted, distorted frame and great grey head were
+grievously shaken with the sobs of a mighty gladness. Truth in the
+inward parts looked out upon him from the face of one who stood
+before the people their self-denied teacher! How would they receive
+it? It mattered not. Those whom the Father had drawn, would hear.
+
+Polwarth neither sought the curate in the vestry, waited for him at
+the church-door, nor followed him to his lodging. He was not of
+those who compliment a man on his fine sermon. How grandly careless
+are some men of the risk of ruin their praises are to their friends!
+"Let God praise him!" said Polwarth; "I will only dare to love him."
+He would not toy with his friend's waking Psyche.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+HOPES.
+
+
+
+
+
+It was the first Sunday Helen had gone to church since her brother
+came to her. On the previous Sunday he had passed some crisis and
+begun to improve, and by the end of the week was so quiet, that
+longing for a change of atmosphere, and believing he might be left
+with the housekeeper, she had gone to church. On her return she
+heard he was no worse, although he had "been a-frettin' after her."
+She hurried to him as if he had been her baby.
+
+"What do you go to church for?" he asked, half-petulantly, like a
+spoilt child, with languid eyes whence the hard fire had vanished.
+"What's the use of it?"
+
+He looked at her, waiting an answer.
+
+"Not much," replied Helen. "I like the quiet and the music. That's
+all."
+
+He seemed disappointed, and lay still for a few moments.
+
+"In old times," he said at last, "the churches used to be a refuge:
+I suppose that is why one can't help feeling as if some safety were
+to be got from them yet.--Was your cousin George there this
+morning?"
+
+"Yes, he went with us," answered Helen.
+
+"I should like to see him. I want somebody to talk to."
+
+Helen was silent. She was more occupied however in answering to
+herself the question why she shrank so decidedly from bringing
+Bascombe into the sick-room, than in thinking what she should say to
+Leopold. The truth was the truth, and why should she object to
+Leopold's knowing, or at least being told as well as herself, that
+he need fear no punishment in the next world, whatever he might have
+to encounter in this; that there was no frightful God who hated
+wrong-doing to be terrified at; that even the badness of his own
+action need not distress him, for he and it would pass away as the
+blood he had shed had already vanished from the earth? Ought it not
+to encourage the poor fellow?--But to what? To live on and endure
+his misery, or to put an end to it and himself at once? Or perhaps
+to plunge into vice that he might escape the consciousness of guilt
+and the dread of the law?
+
+I will not say that exactly such a train of thought as this passed
+through her mind, but of whatever sort it was, it brought her no
+nearer to a desire for the light of George Bascombe's presence by
+the bedside of her guilty brother. At the same time her partiality
+for her cousin made her justify his exclusion thus: "George is so
+good himself, he is only fit for the company of good people. He
+would not in the least understand my poor Poldie, and would be too
+hard upon him."
+
+Since her brother's appearance, in fact, she had seen very little of
+her cousin, and this not merely because her presence was so much
+required in the sick-chamber, but because she was herself unwilling
+to meet him. She had felt, almost without knowing it, that his
+character was unsympathetic, and that his loud, cold good-nature
+could never recognise or justify such love as she bore to her
+brother! Nor was this all; for, remembering how he had upon one
+occasion expressed himself with regard to criminals, she feared even
+to look in his face, lest his keen, questioning, unsparing eye
+should read in her soul that she was the sister of a murderer.
+
+Before this time however a hint of light had appeared in the clouds
+that enwrapped her and Leopold: she had begun to doubt whether he
+had really committed the crime of which he accused himself. There
+had been no inquiry after him, except from his uncle, concerning his
+absence from Cambridge, for which his sudden attack of brain fever
+served as more than sufficient excuse. That there had been such a
+murder, the newspapers left her no room to question--but might not
+the relation in which he stood to the victim--the horror of her
+death, the insidious approaches of the fever, and the influences of
+that hateful drug, have combined to call up an hallucination of
+blood-guiltiness? And what at length all but satisfied her of the
+truth of her conjecture was that, when he began to recover, Leopold
+seemed himself in doubt at times whether his sense of guilt had not
+its origin in some one or other of the many dreams which had haunted
+him throughout his illness, knowing only too well that it was long
+since dreams had become to him more real than the greater part of
+what was going on around him. To this blurring and confusing of
+consciousness it probably contributed, that, in the first stages of
+the fever, he was under the influence of the same drug which had
+been working upon his brain up to the very moment when he committed
+the crime.
+
+During the week the hope had almost settled into conviction; and one
+consequence was that, although she was not a whit more inclined to
+introduce George Bascombe to the sick-chamber, she found herself not
+only equal, but no longer averse to meeting him; and on the
+following Saturday, when he presented himself as usual, come to
+spend the Sunday, she listened to her aunt, and consented to go out
+with him for a ride--in the evening, however, when Mrs. Rainshorn
+herself, who had shown Leopold great and genuine kindness, would be
+able to sit with him. They therefore had dinner early, and Helen
+went again to her brother's room, unwilling to leave him a moment
+until she gave up her charge to her aunt.
+
+They had tea together, and Leopold was very quiet. It is wonderful
+with what success the mind will accommodate itself, in its effort
+after peace, to the presence of the most torturing thought. But
+Helen took this quietness for a sign of innocence, not knowing that
+the state of the feelings is neither test nor gauge of guilt. The
+nearer perfection a character is, the louder is the cry of
+conscience at the appearance of fault; and, on the other hand, the
+worst criminals have had the easiest minds.
+
+Helen also was quiet, and fell into a dreamy mood, watching her
+brother, who every now and then turned on her a look of love and
+gratitude which moved her heart to its very depths. Not until she
+heard the horses coming round from the stable, did she rise to go
+and change her dress.
+
+"I shall not be long away from you, Poldie," she said.
+
+"Do not forget me, Helen," he returned. "If you forget me, an enemy
+will think of me."
+
+His love comforted her, and yet further strengthened her faith in
+his innocence; and it was with a kind of half-repose, timid,
+wavering, and glad, upon her countenance--how different from the
+old, dull, wooden quiescence!--that she joined her cousin in the
+hall. A moment, and he had lifted her to the saddle, and was mounted
+by her side.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+THE RIDE.
+
+
+
+
+
+A soft west wind, issuing as from the heart of a golden vase filled
+with roses, met them the instant they turned out of the street,
+walking their horses towards the park-gate.
+
+Something--was it in the evening, or was it in his own soul?--had
+prevailed to the momentary silencing of George Bascombe:--it may
+have been but the influence of the cigar which Helen had begged him
+to finish. Helen too was silent: she felt as if the low red sun,
+straight into which they seemed to be riding, blotted out her being
+in the level torrent of his usurping radiance. Neither of them spoke
+a word until they had passed through the gate into the park.
+
+It was a perfect English summer evening--warm, but not sultry. As
+they walked their horses up the carriage way, the sun went down, and
+as if he had fallen like a live coal into some celestial magazine of
+colour and glow, straightway blazed up a slow explosion of crimson
+and green in a golden triumph--pure fire, the smoke and fuel gone,
+and the radiance alone left. And now Helen received the second
+lesson of her initiation into the life of nature: she became aware
+that the whole evening was thinking around her, and as the dusk grew
+deeper and the night grew closer, the world seemed to have grown
+dark with its thinking. Of late Helen had been driven herself to
+think--if not deeply, yet intensely--and so knew what it was like,
+and felt at home with the twilight.
+
+They turned from the drive on to the turf. Their horses tossed up
+their heads, and set off, unchecked, at a good pelting gallop,
+across the open park. On Helen's cheek the wind blew cooling,
+strong, and kind. As if flowing from some fountain above, in an
+unseen unbanked river, down through the stiller ocean of the air, it
+seemed to bring to her a vague promise, almost a precognition, of
+peace--which, however, only set her longing after something--she
+knew not what--something of which she only knew that it would fill
+the longing the wind had brought her. The longing grew and
+extended--went stretching on and on into an infinite of rest. And as
+they still galloped, and the light-maddened colours sank into smoky
+peach, and yellow green, and blue gray, the something swelled and
+swelled in her soul, and pulled and pulled at her heart, until the
+tears were running down her face: for fear Bascombe should see them,
+she gave her horse the rein, and fled from him into the friendly
+dusk that seemed to grade time into eternity.
+
+Suddenly she found herself close to a clump of trees, which overhung
+the deserted house. She had made a great circuit without knowing it.
+A pang shot to her heart, and her tears ceased to flow. The night,
+silent with thought, held THAT also in its bosom! She drew rein,
+turned, and waited for Bascombe.
+
+"What a chase you've given me, Helen!" he cried, while yet pounding
+away some score of yards off.
+
+"A wild-goose one you mean, cousin?"
+
+"It would have been if I had thought to catch you on this ancient
+cocktail."
+
+"Don't abuse the old horse, George: he has seen better days. I would
+gladly have mounted you more to your mind, but you know I could
+not--except indeed I had given you my Fanny, and taken the old horse
+myself. I have ridden him."
+
+"The lady ought always to be the better mounted," returned George
+coolly. "For my part, I much prefer it, because then I need not be
+anxious about whether I am boring her or not: if I am, she can run
+away."
+
+"You cannot suppose I thought you a bore to-night. A more sweetly
+silent gentleman none could wish for squire."
+
+"Then it was my silence bored you.--Shall I tell you what I was
+thinking about?"
+
+"If you like. I was thinking how pleasant it would be to ride on and
+on into eternity," said Helen.
+
+"That feeling of continuity," returned George, "is a proof of the
+painlessness of departure. No one can ever know when he ceases to
+be, because then he is not; and that is how some men come to fancy
+they feel as if they were going to live for ever. But the worst of
+it is that they no sooner fancy it, than it seems to them a probable
+as well as delightful thing to go on and on and never cease. This
+comes of the man's having no consciousness of ceasing, and when one
+is comfortable, it always seems good to go on. A child is never
+willing to turn from the dish of which he is eating to another. It
+is more he wants, not another."
+
+"That is if he likes it," said Helen.
+
+"Everybody likes it," said George, "--more or less."
+
+"I am not so sure of EVERYbody," replied Helen. "Do you imagine that
+twisted little dwarf-woman that opened the gate for us is content
+with her lot?"
+
+"No, that is impossible--while she sees you and remains what she is.
+But I said nothing of contentment. I was but thinking of the fools
+who, whether content or not, yet want to live for ever, and so, very
+conveniently, take their longing for immortality, which they call an
+idea innate in the human heart, for a proof that immortality is
+their rightful inheritance."
+
+"How then do you account for the existence and universality of the
+idea?" asked Helen, who had happened lately to come upon some
+arguments on the other side.
+
+But while she spoke thus indifferently she felt in her heart like
+one who wakes from a delicious swim in the fairest of rivers, to
+find that the clothes have slipped from the bed to the floor:--that
+was all his river and all his swim!
+
+"I account for its existence as I have just said; and for its
+universality by denying it. It is NOT universal, for _I_ haven't
+it."
+
+"At least you will not deny that men, even when miserable, shrink
+from dying?"
+
+"Anything, everything is unpleasant out of its due time. I will
+allow, for the sake of argument, that the thought of dying is always
+unpleasant. But wherefore so? Because, in the very act of thinking
+it, the idea must always be taken from the time that suits with
+it--namely, its own time, when it will at length, and ought at
+length to come--and placed in the midst of the lively present, with
+which assuredly it does not suit. To life, death must be always
+hateful. In the rush and turmoil of effort, how distasteful even the
+cave of the hermit--let ever such a splendid view spread abroad
+before its mouth! But when it comes it will be pleasant enough, for
+then its time will have come also--the man will be prepared for it
+by decay and cessation. If one were to tell me that he had that
+endless longing for immortality, of which hitherto I have only heard
+at second hand, I would explain it to him thus:--Your life, I would
+say, not being yet complete, still growing, feels in itself the
+onward impulse of growth, and, unable to think of itself as other
+than complete, interprets that onward impulse as belonging to the
+time around it instead of the nature within it. Or rather let me
+say, the man feels in himself the elements of more, and not being
+able to grasp the notion of his own completeness, which is so far
+from him, transposes the feeling of growth and sets it beyond
+himself, translating it at the same time into an instinct of
+duration, a longing after what he calls eternal life. But when the
+man is complete, then comes decay and brings its own contentment
+with it--as will also death, when it arrives in its own proper
+season of fulness and ripeness."
+
+Helen said nothing in reply. She thought her cousin very clever, but
+could not enjoy what he said--not in the face of that sky, and in
+the yet lingering reflection of the feelings it had waked in her. He
+might be right, but now at least she wanted no more of it. She even
+felt as if she would rather cherish a sweet deception for the
+comfort of the moment in which the weaver's shuttle flew, than take
+to her bosom a cold killing fact.
+
+Such were indeed an unworthy feeling to follow! Of all things let us
+have the truth--even of fact! But to deny what we cannot prove, not
+even casts into our ice-house a spadeful of snow. What if the warm
+hope denied should be the truth after all? What if it was the truth
+in it that drew the soul towards it by its indwelling reality, and
+its relations with her being, even while she took blame for
+suffering herself to be enticed by a sweet deception? Alas indeed
+for men if the life and the truth are not one, but fight against
+each other! Surely it says something for the divine nature of him
+that denies the divine, when he yet cleaves to what he thinks the
+truth, although it denies the life, and blots the way to the better
+from every chart!
+
+"And what were you thinking of, George?" said Helen, willing to
+change the subject.
+
+"I was thinking," he answered, "let me see!--oh! yes--I was
+thinking of that very singular case of murder. You must have seen it
+in the newspapers. I have long had a doubt whether I were better
+fitted for a barrister or a detective. I can't keep my mind off a
+puzzling case.--You must have heard of this one--the girl they found
+lying in her ball-dress in the middle of a wood--stabbed to the
+heart?"
+
+"I do remember something of it," answered Helen, gathering a little
+courage to put into her voice from the fact that her cousin could
+hardly see her face. "Then the murderer has not been discovered?"
+
+"That is the point of interest. Not a trace of him! Not a soul
+suspected even!"
+
+Helen drew a deep breath.
+
+"Had it been in Rome, now," George went on. "But in a quiet country
+place in England! The thing seems incredible! So artistically
+done!--no struggle!--just one blow right to the heart, and the
+assassin gone as if by magic!--no weapon dropped!--nothing to give a
+clue! The whole thing suggests a practised hand.--But why such a one
+for the victim? Had it been some false member of a secret society
+thus immolated, one could understand it. But a merry girl at a
+ball!--it IS strange! I SHOULD like to try the unravelling of it."
+
+"Has nothing then been done?" said Helen with a gasp, to hide which
+she moved in her saddle, as if readjusting her habit.
+
+"Oh, everything--of course. There was instant pursuit on the
+discovery of the body, but they seem to have got on the track of the
+wrong man--or, indeed, for anything certain, of no man at all. A
+coast-guardsman says that, on the night or rather morning in
+question, he was approaching a little cove on the shore, not above a
+mile from the scene of the tragedy, with an eye upon what seemed to
+be two fishermen preparing to launch their boat, when he saw a third
+man come running down the steep slope from the pastures above, and
+jump into the stern of it. Ere he could reach the spot, they were
+off, and had hoisted two lugsails. The moon was in the first of her
+last quarter, and gave light enough for what he reported. But, when
+inquiries founded on this evidence were made, nothing whatever could
+be discovered concerning boat or men. The next morning no
+fishing-boat was lacking, and no fisherman would confess to having
+gone from that cove. The marks of the boat's keel, and of the men's
+feet, on the sand, if ever there were any, had been washed out by
+the tide. It was concluded that the thing had been pre-arranged and
+provided for, and that the murderer had escaped, probably to
+Holland. Thereupon telegrams were shot in all directions, but no
+news could be gathered of any suspicious landing on the opposite
+coast. There the matter rests, or at least has rested for many
+weeks. Neither parents, relatives, nor friends appear to have a
+suspicion of anyone."
+
+"Are there no conjectures as to motives?" asked Helen, feeling with
+joy her power of dissimulation gather strength.
+
+"No end of them. She was a beautiful creature, they say,
+sweet-tempered as a dove, and of course fond of admiration--whence
+the conjectures all turn on jealousy. The most likely thing seems,
+that she had some squire of low degree, of whom neither parents nor
+friends knew anything. That they themselves suspect this, appears
+likely from their more than apathy with regard to the discovery of
+the villain. I am strongly inclined to take the matter in hand
+myself."
+
+"We must get him out of the country as soon as possible," thought
+Helen.
+
+"I should hardly have thought it worthy of your gifts, George," she
+said, "to turn police-man. For my part, I should not relish hunting
+down any poor wretch."
+
+"The sacrifice of individual choice is a claim society has upon each
+of its members," returned Bascombe. "Every murderer hanged, or
+better, imprisoned for life, is a gain to the community."
+
+Helen said no more, and presently turned homewards, on the plea that
+she must not be longer absent from her invalid.
+
+END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
+
+
+
+
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