Salted With Fire

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Once more in the open world, with which she had had so much intercourse
that was other than joyous, that same world began at once to work the will
of its Maker upon her poor lacerated soul; and afar in its hidden deeps
the process of healing was already begun. Agony would many a time return
unbidden, would yet often rise like a crested wave, with menace of
overwhelming despair, but the Real, the True, long hidden from her by the
lying judgments of men and women, was now at length beginning to reveal
itself to her tear-blinded vision; Hope was lifting a feeble head above the
tangled weeds of the subsiding deluge; and ere long the girl would see and
understand how little cares the Father, whose judgment is the truth of
things, what at any time his child may have been or, done, the moment that
child gives herself up to be made what He would have her! Looking down into
the hearts of men, He sees differences there of which the self-important
world takes no heed; many that count themselves of the first, He sees the
last--and what He sees, alone _is_: a gutter-child, a thief, a girl who
never in this world had even a notion of purity, may lie smiling in the
arms of the Eternal, while the head of a lordly house that still flourishes
like a green bay-tree, may be wandering about with the dogs beyond the
walls of the city.

Out in the open world, I say, the power of the present God began at once to
work upon Isobel, for there, although dimly, she yet looked into His open
face, sketched vaguely in the mighty something we call Nature--chiefly on
the great vault we call Heaven, the _Upheaved_. Shapely but undefined;
perfect in form, yet limitless in depth; blue and persistent, yet ever
evading capture by human heart in human eye; this sphere of fashioned
boundlessness, of definite shapelessness, called up in her heart the
formless children of upheavedness--grandeur, namely, and awe; hope, namely,
and desire: all rushed together toward the dawn of the unspeakable One,
who, dwelling in that heaven, is above all heavens; mighty and
unchangeable, yet childlike; inexorable, yet tender as never was mother;
devoted as never yet was child save one. Isy, indeed, understood little of
all this; yet she wept, she knew not why; and it was not for sorrow.

But when, the coach-journey over, she turned her back upon the house where
her child lay, and entered the desolate hill-country, a strange feeling
began to invade her consciousness. It seemed at first but an old mood, worn
shadowy; then it seemed the return of an old dream; then a painful,
confused, half-forgotten memory; but at length it cleared and settled into
a conviction that she had been in the same region before, and had had,
although a passing, yet a painful acquaintance with it; and at the last
she concluded that she must be near the very spot where she had left and
lost her baby. All that had, up to that moment, befallen her, seemed fused
in a troubled conglomerate of hunger and cold and weariness, of help and
hurt, of deliverance and returning pain: they all mingled inextricably with
the scene around her, and there condensed into the memory of that one
event--of which this must assuredly be the actual place! She looked upon
widespread wastes of heather and peat, great stones here and there,
half-buried in it, half-sticking out of it: surely she was waiting there
for something to come to pass! surely behind this veil of the Seen, a
child must be standing with outstretched arms, hungering after his mother!
In herself that very moment must Memory be trembling into vision! At
Length her heart's desire must be drawing near to her expectant soul!

But suddenly, alas! her certainty of recollection, her assurance of
prophetic anticipation, faded from her, and of the recollection itself
remained nothing but a ruin! And all the time it took to dawn into
brilliance and fade out into darkness, had measured but a few weary steps
by the side of her companion, lost in the meditation of a glad sermon for
the next Sunday about the lost sheep carried home with jubilance, and
forgetting how unfit was the poor sheep beside him for such a fatiguing
tramp up hill and down, along what was nothing better than the stony bed
of a winter-torrent.

All at once Isy darted aside from the rough track, scrambled up the steep
bank, and ran like one demented into a great clump of heather, which she
began at once to search through and through. The minister stopped
bewildered, and stood to watch her, almost fearing for a moment that she
had again lost her wits. She got on the top of a stone in the middle of the
clump, turned several times round, gazed in every direction over the moor,
then descended with a hopeless look, and came slowly back to him, saying--

"I beg your pardon, sir; I thought I had a glimpse of my infant through the
heather! This must be the very spot where I left him!"

The next moment she faltered feebly--

"Hae we far to gang yet, sir?" and before he could make her any answer,
staggered to the bank on the roadside, fell upon it, and lay still.

The minister immediately felt that he had been cruel in expecting her to
walk so far; he made haste to lay her comfortably on the short grass, and
waited anxiously, doing what he could to bring her to herself. He could see
no water near, but at least she had plenty of air!

In a little while she began to recover, sat up, and would have risen to
resume her journey. But the minister, filled with compunction, took her up
in his arms. They were near the crown of the ascent, and he could carry her
as far as that! She expostulated, but was unable to resist. Light as she
was, however, he found it no easy task to bear her up the last of the steep
rise, and was glad to set her down at the top--where a fresh breeze was
waiting to revive them both. She thanked him like a child whose father had
come to her help; and they seated themselves together on the highest point
of the moor, with a large, desolate land on every side of them.

"Oh, sir, but ye _are_ good to me!" she murmured. "That brae just minded me
o' the Hill of Difficulty in the Pilgrim's Progress!"

"Oh, you know that story?" said the minister.

"My old grannie used to make me read it to her when she lay dying. I
thought it long and tiresome then, but since you took me to your house,
sir, I have remembered many things in it; I knew then that I was come to
the house of the Interpreter. You've made me understand, sir!"

"I am glad of that, Isy! You see I know some things that make me very glad,
and so I want them to make you glad too. And the thing that makes me
gladdest of all, is just that God is what he is. To know that such a One is
God over us and in us, makes of very being a most precious delight. His
children, those of them that know him, are all glad just because he _is_,
and they are his children. Do you think a strong man like me would read
sermons and say prayers and talk to people, doing nothing but such
shamefully easy work, if he did not believe what he said?"

"I'm sure, sir, you have had hard enough work with me! I am a bad one to
teach! I thought I knew all that you have had such trouble to make me see!
I was in a bog of ignorance and misery, but now I am getting my head up out
of it, and seeing about me!--Please let me ask you one thing, sir: how is
it that, when the thought of God comes to me, I draw back, afraid of him?
If he be the kind of person you say he is, why can't I go close up to
him?"

"I confess the same foolishness, my child, _at times_," answered the
minister. "It can only be because we do not yet see God as he is--and that
must be because we do not yet really understand Jesus--do not see the glory
of God in his face. God is just like Jesus--exactly like him!"

And the parson fell a wondering how it could be that so many, gentle and
guileless as this woman-child, recoiled from the thought of the perfect
One. Why were they not always and irresistibly drawn toward the very idea
of God? Why, at least, should they not run to see and make sure whether
God was indeed such a one or not? whether he was really Love itself--or
only loved them after a fashion? It set him thinking afresh about many
things; and he soon began to discover that he had in fact been teaching a
good many things without _knowing_ them; for how could he _know_ things
that were not true, and therefore _could not_ be known? He had indeed been
_saying_ that God was Love, but he had yet been teaching many things about
him that were not lovable!

They sat thinking and talking, with silences between; and while they
thought and talked, the day-star was all the time rising unnoted in their
hearts. At length, finding herself much stronger, Isy rose, and they
resumed their journey.

The door stood open to receive them; but ere they reached it, a bright-
looking little woman, with delicate lines of ingrained red in a sorrowful
face, appeared in it, looking out with questioning eyes--like a mother-bird
just loosening her feet from the threshold of her nest to fly and meet
them. Through the film that blinded those expectant eyes, Marion saw what
manner of woman she was that drew nigh, and her motherhood went out to
her. For, in the love-witchery of Isy's yearning look, humbly seeking
acceptance, and in her hesitating approach half-checked by gentle apology,
Marion imagined she saw her own Isy coming back from the gates of Death,
and sprang to meet her. The mediating love of the minister, obliterating
itself, had made him linger a step or two behind, waiting what would
follow: when he saw the two folded each in the other's arms, and the
fountain of love thus break forth at once from their encountering hearts,
his soul leaped for joy of the new-created love--new, but not the less
surely eternal; for God is Love, and Love is that which is, and was, and
shall be for evermore--boundless, unconditioned, self-existent, creative!
"Truly," he said in himself, "God is Love, and God is all and in all! He
is no abstraction; he is the one eternal Individual God! In him Love
evermore breaks forth anew into fresh personality--in every new
consciousness, in every new child of the one creating Father. In every
burning heart, in everything that hopes and fears and is, Love is the
creative presence, the centre, the source of life, yea Life itself; yea,
God himself!"

The elder woman drew herself a little back, held the poor white-faced thing
at arms'-length, and looked her through the face into the heart.

"My bonny lamb!" she cried, and pressed her again to her bosom. "Come hame,
and be a guid bairn, and ill man sall never touch ye, or gar ye greit ony
mair! There's _my_ man waitin for ye, to tak ye, and haud ye safe!"

Isy looked up, and over the shoulder of her hostess saw the strong paternal
face of the farmer, full of silent welcome. For the strange emotion that
filled him he did not seek to account: he had nothing to do with that; his
will was lord over it!

"Come ben the hoose, lassie," he said, and led the way to the parlour,
where the red sunset was shining through the low gable window, filling the
place with the glamour of departing glory. "Sit ye doon upo the sofa there;
ye maun be unco tired! Surely ye haena come a' the lang ro'd frae Tiltowie
upo yer ain twa wee feet?"

"'Deed has she," answered the minister, who had followed them into the
room; "the mair shame to me 'at loot her dee 't!"

Marion lingered outside, wiping away the tears that would keep flowing. For
the one question, "What can be amiss wi' Jamie?" had returned upon her,
haunting and harrying her heart; and with it had come the idea, though
vague and formless, that their goodwill to the wandering outcast might
perhaps do something to make up for whatever ill thing Jamie might have
done. At last, instead of entering the parlour after them, she turned away
to the kitchen, and made haste to get ready their supper.

Isy sank back in the wide sofa, lost in relief; and the minister, when he
saw her look of conscious refuge and repose, said to himself--

"She is feeling as we shall all feel when first we know nothing near us but
the Love itself that was before all worlds!--when there is no doubt more,
and no questioning more!"

But the heart of the farmer was full of the old uncontent, the old longing
after the heart of his boy, that had never learned to cry "_Father!_"

But soon they sat down to their meal. While they ate, hardly any one spoke,
and no one missed the speech or was aware of the silence, until the
bereaved Isobel thought of her child, and burst into tears. Then the mother
who sorrowed with such a different, and so much bitterer sorrow, divining
her thought and whence it came, rose, and from behind her said--

"Noo ye maun jist come awa wi' me, and I s' pit ye til yer bed, and lea' ye
there!--Na, na; say gude nicht to naebody!--Ye'll see the minister again i'
the mornin!"

With that she took Isy away, half-carrying her close-pressed, and
half-leading her; for Marion, although no bigger than Isy, was much
stronger, and could easily have carried her.

That night both mothers slept well, and both dreamed of their mothers and
of their children. But in the morning nothing remained of their two dreams
except two hopes in the one Father.

When Isy entered the little parlour, she found she had slept so long that
breakfast was over, the minister smoking his pipe in the garden, and the
farmer busy in his yard. But Marion heard her, and brought her breakfast,
beaming with ministration; then thinking she would eat it better if left to
herself, went back to her work. In about five minutes, however, Isy joined
her, and began at once to lend a helping hand.

"Hoot, hoot, my dear!" cried her hostess, "ye haena taen time eneuch to
make a proaper brakfast o' 't! Gang awa back, and put mair intil ye. Gien
ye dinna learn to ate, we s' never get ony guid o' ye!"

"I just can't eat for gladness," returned Isy. "Ye're that good to me, that
I dare hardly think aboot it; it'll gar me greit!--Lat me help ye, mem, and
I'll grow hungry by dennertime!"

Mrs. Blatherwick understood, and said no more. She showed her what she
might set about; and Isy, happy as a child, came and went at her commands,
rejoicing. Probably, had she started in life with less devotion, she might
have fared better; but the end was not yet, and the end must be known
before we dare judge: result explains history. It is enough for the present
to say that, with the comparative repose of mind she now enjoyed, with the
good food she had, and the wholesome exercise, for Mrs. Blatherwick took
care she should not work too hard, with the steady kindness shown her, and
the consequent growth of her faith and hope, Isy's light-heartedness first,
and then her good looks began to return; so that soon the dainty little
creature was both prettier and lovelier than before. At the same time her
face and figure, her ways and motions, went on mingling themselves so
inextricably with Marion's impressions of her vanished Isy, that at length
she felt as if she never could be able to part with her. Nor was it long
before she assured herself that she was equal to anything that had to be
done in the house; and that the experience of a day or two would make her
capable of the work of the dairy as well. Thus Isy and her mistress, for
so Isy insisted on regarding and calling her, speedily settled into their
new relation.

It did sometimes cross the girl's mind, and that with a sting of doubt,
whether it was fair to hide from her new friends the full facts of her
sorrowful history; but to quiet her conscience she had only to reflect that
for the sake of the son they loved, she must keep jealous guard over her
silence. Further than James's protection, she had no design, cherished no
scheme. The idea of compelling, or even influencing him to do her justice,
never once crossed her horizon. On the contrary, she was possessed by the
notion that she had done him a great wrong, and shrank in horror from the
danger of rendering it irretrievable. She had never thought the thing out
as between her and him, never even said to herself that he too had been to
blame. Her exaggerated notion of the share she had in the fault, had lodged
and got fixed in her mind, partly from her acquaintance with the popular
judgment concerning such as she, and partly from her humble readiness to
take any blame to herself. Even had she been capable of comparing the
relative consequences, the injury she had done his prospects as a minister,
would have seemed to her revering soul a far greater wrong than any
suffering or loss he had brought upon her. For what was she beside him?
What was the ruin of her life to the frustration of such prospects as his?
The sole alleviation of her misery was that she seemed hitherto to have
escaped involving him in the results of her lack of self-restraint, which
results, she was certain, remained concealed from him, as from every one in
any way concerned with him in them. In truth, never was man less worthy of
it, or more devotedly shielded! And never was hidden wrong to the woman
turned more eagerly and persistently into loving service to the man's
parents! Many and many a time did the heart of James's mother, as she
watched Isy's deft and dainty motions, regret, even with bitterness, that
such a capable and love-inspiring girl should have rendered herself
unworthy of her son--for, notwithstanding what she regarded as the
disparity of their positions, she would gladly have welcomed Isy as a
daughter, had she but been spotless, and fit to be loved by him.

In the evenings, when the work of the day was done, Isy used to ramble
about the moor, in the lingering rays of the last of the sunset, and the
now quickly shortening twilight. In those hours unhasting, gentle, and so
spiritual in their tone that they seem to come straight from the eternal
spaces where is no recalling and no forgetting, where time and space are
motionless, and the spirit is at rest, Isy first began to read with
conscious understanding. For now first she fell into the company of books--
old-fashioned ones no doubt, but perhaps even therefore the more fit for
her, who was an old-fashioned, gentle, ignorant, thoughtful child. Among
the rest in the farmhouse, she came upon the two volumes of a book called
The Preceptor, which contained various treatises laying down "the first
principles of Polite Learning:" these drew her eager attention; and with
one or other of the not very handy volumes in her hand, she would steal out
of sight of the farm, and lapt in the solitude of the moor, would sit and
read until at last the light could reveal not a word more. Even the
Geometry she found in them attracted her not a little; the Rhetoric and
Poetry drew her yet more; but most of all, the Natural History, with its
engravings of beasts and birds, poor as they were, delighted her; and from
these antiquated repertories she gathered much, and chiefly that most
valuable knowledge, some acquaintance with her own ignorance. There also,
in a garret over the kitchen, she found an English translation of
Klopstock's Messiah, a poem which, in the middle of the last and in the
present century, caused a great excitement in Germany, and did not a
little, I believe, for the development of religious feeling in that
country, where the slow-subsiding ripple of its commotion is possibly not
altogether unfelt even at the present day. She read the volume through as
she strolled in those twilights, not without risking many a fall over bush
and stone ere practice taught her to see at once both the way for her feet
over the moor, and that for her eyes over the printed page. The book both
pleased and suited her, the parts that interested her most being those
about the repentant angel, Abaddon; who, if I remember aright, haunted the
steps of the Saviour, and hovered about the cross while he was crucified.
The great question with her for a long time was, whether the Saviour must
not have forgiven him; but by slow degrees it became at last clear to her,
that he who came but to seek and to save the lost, could not have closed
the door against one that sought return to his fealty. It was not until
she knew the soutar, however, that at length she understood the tireless
redeeming of the Father, who had sent men blind and stupid and ill-
conditioned, into a world where they had to learn almost everything.

There were some few books of a more theological sort, which happily she
neither could understand nor was able to imagine she understood, and which
therefore she instinctively refused, as affording nourishment neither for
thought nor feeling. There was, besides, Dr. Johnson's _Rasselas_, which
mildly interested her; and a book called _Dialogues of Devils_, which she
read with avidity. And thus, if indeed her ignorance did not become rapidly
less, at least her knowledge of its existence became slowly greater.

And all the time the conviction grew upon her, that she had been in that
region before, and that in truth she could not be far from the spot where
she laid her child down, and lost him.

CHAPTER XVIII

In the meantime the said child, a splendid boy, was the delight of the
humble dwelling to which Maggie had borne him in triumph. But the mind of
the soutar was not a little exercised as to how far their right in the boy
approached the paternal: were they justified in regarding him as their
love-property, before having made exhaustive inquiry as to who could claim,
and might re-appropriate him? For nothing could liberate the finder of
such a thing from the duty of restoring it upon demand, seeing there could
be no assurance that the child had been deliberately and finally
abandoned! Maggie, indeed, regarded the baby as absolutely hers by right of
rescue; but her father asked himself whether by appropriating him she
might not be depriving his mother of the one remaining link between her
and humanity, and so abandoning her helpless to the Enemy. Surely to take
and withhold from any woman her child, must be to do what was possible
toward dividing her from the unseen and eternal! And he saw that, for the
sake of his own child also, and the truth in her, both she and he must make
every possible endeavour to restore the child to his mother.

So the next time that Maggie brought the crowing infant to the kitchen, her
father, who sat as usual under the small window, to gather upon his work
all the light to be had, said, with one quick glance at the child--

"Eh, the bonny, glaid cratur! Wha can say 'at sic as he, 'at haena the twa
in ane to see til them, getna frae Himsel a mair partic'lar and carefu'
regaird, gien that war poassible, than ither bairns! I would fain believe
that same!"

"Eh, father, but ye aye think bonny!" exclaimed Maggie. "Some hae been
dingin 't in upo me 'at sic as he maist aye turn oot onything but weel,
whan they step oot intil the warl. Eh, but we maun tak care o' 'im, father!
Whaur _would_ I be wi'oot you at my back!"

"And God at the back o' baith, bairn!" rejoined the soutar. "It's thinkable
that the Almichty may hae special diffeeculty wi sic as he, but nane can
jeedge o' ony thing or body till they see the hin'er en' o' 't a'. But I'm
thinkin it maun aye be harder for ane that hasna his ain mither to luik
til. Ony ither body, be she as guid as she may, maun be but a makshift!--
For ae thing he winna get the same naitral disciplene 'at ilka mither cat
gies its kitlins!"

"Maybe! maybe!--I ken I couldna ever lay a finger upo' the bonny cratur
mysel!" said Maggie.

"There 'tis!" returned her father. "And I dinna think," he went on, "we
could expec muckle frae the wisdom o' the mither o' 'm, gien she had him. I
doobt she micht turn oot to be but a makshift hersel! There's mony aboot
'im 'at'll be sair eneuch upon 'im, but nane the wiser for that! Mony
ane'll luik upon 'im as a bairn in whause existence God has had nae share--
or jist as muckle share as gies him a grup o' 'im to gie 'im his licks!
There's a heap o' mystery aboot a'thing, Maggie, and that frae the vera
beginnin to the vera en'! It may be 'at yon bairnie's i' the waur danger
jist frae haein you and me, Maggie! Eh, but I wuss his ain mither war gien
back til him! And wha can tell but she's needin him waur nor he's needin
her--though there maun aye be something he canna get--'cause ye're no his
ain mither, Maggie, and I'm no even his ain gutcher!"

The adoptive mother burst into a howl.

"Father, father, ye'll brak the hert o' me!" she almost yelled, and laid
the child on the top of her father's hands in the very act of drawing his
waxed ends.

Thus changing him perforce from cobbler to nurse, she bolted from the
kitchen, and up the little stair; and throwing herself on her knees by the
bedside, sought, instinctively and unconsciously, the presence of him who
sees in secret. But for a time she had nothing to say even to _him_, and
could only moan on in the darkness beneath her closed eyelids.

Suddenly she came to herself, remembering that she too had abandoned her
child: she must go back to him!

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