St. George and St. Michael Vol. III

G >> George MacDonald >> St. George and St. Michael Vol. III

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'Ah! how good and kind art thou, Richard.'

'How should I be other to thee, beloved Dorothy?'

'Thou art not then angry with me that I did deceive thee?'

'If thou didst right, wherefore should I be angry? If thou didst
wrong, I am well content to know that thou wilt be sorry therefor as
soon as thou seest it, and before that thou canst not, thou must
not, be sorry. I am sure that what thou knowest to be right that
thou will do, and it seemeth as if God himself were content with
that for the time. What the very right thing is, concerning which we
may now differ, we must come to see together one day--the same, and
not another, to both, and this doing of what we see, is to each of
us the path thither. Let God judge us, Dorothy, for his judgment is
light in the inward parts, showing the truth and enabling us to
judge ourselves. For me to judge thee and thee me, Dorothy, would
with it bear no light. Why, Dorothy, knowest thou not--yet how
shouldst thou know? that this is the very matter for the which we,
my father and his party, contend--that each man, namely, in matters
of conscience, shall be left to his God, and remain unjudged of his
brother? And if I fight for this on mine own part, unto whom should
I accord it if not to thee, Dorothy, who art the highest in soul and
purest in mind and bravest in heart of all women I have known?
Therefore I love thee with all the power of a heart that loves that
which is true before that which is beautiful, and that which is
honest before that which is of good report.'

What followed I leave to the imagination of such of my readers as
are capable of understanding that the truer the nature the deeper
must be the passion, and of hoping that the human soul will yet
burst into grander blossoms of love than ever poet has dreamed, not
to say sung. I leave it also to the hearts of those who understand
that love is greater than knowledge. For those who have neither
heart nor imagination--only brains--to them I presume to leave
nothing, knowing what self-satisfying resources they possess of
their own.

The pair wandered all over the ruins together, and Dorothy had a
hundred places to take Richard to, and tell him what they had been
and how they had looked in their wholeness and use--amongst the rest
her own chamber, whither Marquis had brought her the letter which
mistress Upstill had found so badly concealed.

Then Richard's turn came, and he gave Dorothy a sadly vivid account
of what he had seen of the destruction of the place; how, as if with
whole republics of ants, it had swarmed all over with men paid to
destroy it; how in every direction the walls were falling at once;
how they dug and drained at fish-ponds and moat in the wild hope of
finding hidden treasure, and had found in the former nothing but mud
and a bunch of huge old keys, the last of some lost story of ancient
days,--and in the latter nothing but a pair of silver-gilt spurs,
which he had himself bought of the fellow who found them. He told
her what a terrible shell the Tower of towers had been to break--how
after throwing its battlemented crown into the moat, they had in
vain attacked the walls, might almost as well have sought with
pickaxes and crowbars to tear asunder the living rock, and at
last--but this was hearsay, he had not seen it--had undermined the
wall, propped it up with timber, set the timber on fire, and so
succeeded in bringing down a portion of the hard, tough massy
defence.

'What became of the wild beasts in the base of the kitchen-tower,
dost know, Richard?'

'I saw their cages,' answered Richard, 'but they were empty. I asked
what they were, and what had become of the animals, of which all the
country had heard, but no one could tell me. I asked them questions
until they began to puzzle themselves to answer them, and now I
believe all Gwent is divided between two opinions as to their
fate--one, that they are roaming the country, the other that lord
Herbert, as they still call him, has by his magic conveyed them away
to Ireland to assist him in a general massacre of the Protestants.'

Mighty in mutual faith, neither politics, nor morals, nor even
theology was any more able to part those whose plain truth had
begotten absolute confidence. Strive they might, sin they could not,
against each other. They talked, wandering about, a long time,
forgetting, I am sorry to say, even their poor shivering horses,
which, after trying to console themselves with the renewal of a
friendship which a broad white line across Lady's face had for a
moment, on Dick's part, somewhat impeded, had become very restless.
At length an expostulatory whinny from Lady called Richard to his
duty, and with compunctions of heart the pair hurried to mount. They
rode home together in a bliss that would have been too deep almost
for conscious delight but that their animals were eager after
motion, and as now the surface of the fields had grown soft, they
turned into them, and a tremendous gallop soon brought their
gladness to the surface in great fountain throbs of joy.

CHAPTER LIX.

AVE! VALE! SALVE!

And now must I bury my dead out of my sight--bid farewell to the old
resplendent, stately, scarred, defiant Raglan, itself the grave of
many an old story, and the cradle of the new, and alas! in contrast
with the old, not merely the mechanical, but the unpoetic and
commonplace, yes vulgar era of our island's history. Little did lord
Herbert dream of the age he was initiating--of the irreverence and
pride and destruction that were about to follow in his footsteps,
wasting, defiling, scarring, obliterating, turning beauty into
ashes, and worse! That divine mechanics should thus, through
selfishness and avarice, be leagued with filth and squalor and
ugliness! When one looks upon Raglan, indignation rises--not at the
storm of iron which battered its walls to powder, hardly even at the
decree to level them with the dust, but at the later destroyer who
could desecrate the beauty yet left by wrath and fear, who with the
stones of my lady's chamber would build a kennel, or with the carved
stones of chapel or hall a barn or cowhouse! What would the inventor
of the water-commanding engine have said to the pollution of our
waters, the destruction of the very landmarks of our history, the
desecration of ruins that ought to be venerated for their loveliness
as well as their story! Would he not have broken it to pieces, that
the ruin it must occasion might not be laid to his charge? May all
such men as for the sake of money constitute themselves the creators
of ugliness, not to speak of far worse evils in the land, live--or
die, I care not which--to know in their own selves what a lovely
human Psyche lies hid even in the chrysalis of a railway-director,
and to loathe their past selves as an abomination--incredible but
that it had been. He who calls such a wish a curse, must undergo it
ere his being can be other than a blot.

But this era too will pass, and truth come forth in forms new and
more lovely still.

The living Raglan has gone from me, and before me rise the broken,
mouldering walls which are the monument of their own past. My heart
swells as I think of them, lonely in the deepening twilight, when
the ivy which has flung itself like a garment about the bareness of
their looped and windowed raggedness is but as darker streaks of the
all prevailing dusk, and the moon is gathering in the east. Fain
would the soul forsake the fettersome body for a season, to go
flitting hither and thither, alighting and flitting, like a bat or a
bird--now drawing itself slow along a moulding to taste its curve
and flow, now creeping into a cranny, and brooding and thinking back
till the fancy feels the tremble of an ancient kiss yet softly
rippling the air, or descries the dim stain which no tempest can
wash away. Ah, here is a stair! True there are but three steps, a
broken one and a fragment. What said I? See how the phantom-steps
continue it, winding up and up to the door of my lady's chamber! See
its polished floor, black as night, its walls rich with tapestry,
lovelily old, and harmoniously withered, for the ancient time had
its ancient times, and its things that had come down from solemn
antiquity--see the silver sconces, the tall mirrors, the part-open
window, long, low, carved latticed, and filled with lozenge panes of
the softest yellow green, in a multitude of shades! There stands my
lady herself, leaning from it, looking down into the court! Ah,
lovely lady! is not thy heart as the heart of my mother, my wife, my
daughters? Thou hast had thy troubles. I trust they are over now,
and that thou art satisfied with God for making thee!

The vision fades, and the old walls rise like a broken cenotaph. But
the same sky, with its clouds never the same, hangs over them; the
same moon will fold them all night in a doubtful radiance, befitting
the things that dwell alone, and are all of other times, for she too
is but a ghost, a thing of the past, and her light is but the light
of memory; into the empty crannies blow the same winds that once
refreshed the souls of maiden and man-at-arms, only the yellow
flower that grew in its gardens now grows upon its walls. And
however the mind, or even the spirit of man may change, the heart
remains the same, and an effort to read the hearts of our
forefathers will help us to know the heart of our neighbour.

Whoever cares to distinguish the bones of fact from the drapery of
invention in the foregone tale, will find them all in the late Mr.
Dirck's 'Life of the Marquis of Worcester,' and the 'Certamen
Religiosum' and 'Golden Apophthegms' of Dr. Bayly.

THE END.

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