The Seaboard Parish Volume 1
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George MacDonald >> The Seaboard Parish Volume 1
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"Don't you enjoy all this grandeur, Wynnie?"
"I told you I was very wicked, papa."
"And I told you not to say so, Wynnie."
"You see I cannot enjoy it, papa. I wonder why it is."
"I suspect it is because you haven't room, Wynnie."
"I know you mean something more than I know, papa."
"I mean, my dear, that it is not because you are wicked, but because you do
not know God well enough, and therefore your being, which can only live in
him, is 'cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in.' It is only in him that the
soul has room. In knowing him is life and its gladness. The secret of your
own heart you can never know; but you can know Him who knows its secret.
Look up, my darling; see the heavens and the earth. You do not feel them,
and I do not call upon you to feel them. It would be both useless and
absurd to do so. But just let them look at you for a moment, and then tell
me whether it must not be a blessed life that creates such a glory as this
All."
She stood silent for a moment, looked up at the sky, looked round on the
earth, looked far across the sea to the setting sun, and then turned her
eyes upon me. They were filled with tears, but whether from feeling, or
sorrow that she could not feel, I would not inquire. I made haste to speak
again.
"As this world of delight surrounds and enters your bodily frame, so does
God surround your soul and live in it. To be at home with the awful source
of your being, through the child-like faith which he not only permits, but
requires, and is ever teaching you, or rather seeking to rouse up in you,
is the only cure for such feelings as those that trouble you. Do not say it
is too high for you. God made you in his own image, therefore capable of
understanding him. For this final end he sent his Son, that the Father
might with him come into you, and dwell with you. Till he does so, the
temple of your soul is vacant; there is no light behind the veil, no cloudy
pillar over it; and the priests, your thoughts, feelings, loves, and
desires, moan, and are troubled--for where is the work of the priest when
the God is not there? When He comes to you, no mystery, no unknown feeling,
will any longer distress you. You will say, 'He knows, though I do not.'
And you will be at the secret of the things he has made. You will feel what
they are, and that which his will created in gladness you will receive
in joy. One glimmer of the present God in this glory would send you home
singing. But do not think I blame you, Wynnie, for feeling sad. I take it
rather as the sign of a large life in you, that will not be satisfied with
little things. I do not know when or how it may please God to give you the
quiet of mind that you need; but I tell you that I believe it is to be had;
and in the mean time, you must go on doing your work, trusting in God even
for this. Tell him to look at your sorrow, ask him to come and set it
right, making the joy go up in your heart by his presence. I do not know
when this may be, I say, but you must have patience, and till he lays his
hand on your head, you must be content to wash his feet with your tears.
Only he will be better pleased if your faith keep you from weeping and from
going about your duties mournful. Try to be brave and cheerful for the sake
of Christ, and for the sake of your confidence in the beautiful teaching of
God, whose course and scope you cannot yet understand. Trust, my daughter,
and let that give you courage and strength."
Now the sky and the sea and the earth must have made me able to say these
things to her; but I knew that, whatever the immediate occasion of her
sadness, such was its only real cure. Other things might, in virtue of the
will of God that was in them, give her occupation and interest enough for a
time, but nothing would do finally, but God himself. Here I was sure I was
safe; here I knew lay the hunger of humanity. Humanity may, like other
vital forms, diseased systems, fix on this or that as the object not merely
of its desire but of its need: it can never be stilled by less than the
bread of life--the very presence in the innermost nature of the Father and
the Son.
We walked on together. Wynnie made me no reply, but, weeping silently,
clung to my arm. We walked a long way by the edge of the cliffs, beheld
the sun go down, and then turned and went home. When we reached the house,
Wynnie left me, saying only, "Thank you, papa. I think it is all true. I
will try to be a better girl."
I went straight to Connie's room: she was lying as I saw her last, looking
out of her window.
"Connie," I said, "Wynnie and I have had such a treat--such a sunset!"
"I've seen a little of the light of it on the waves in the bay there, but
the high ground kept me from seeing the sunset itself. Did it set in the
sea?"
"You do want the General Gazetteer, after all, Connie. Is that water the
Atlantic, or is it not? And if it be, where on earth could the sun set but
in it?"
"Of course, papa. What a goose I am! But don't make game of me--_please_. I
am too deliciously happy to be made game of to-night."
"I won't make game of you, my darling. I will tell you about the
sunset--the colours of it, at least. This must be one of the best places in
the whole world to see sunsets."
"But you have had no tea, papa. I thought you would come and have your
tea with me. But you were so long, that mamma would not let me wait any
longer."
"O, never mind the tea, my dear. But Wynnie has had none. You've got a
tea-caddy of your own, haven't you?"
"Yes, and a teapot; and there's the kettle on the hob--for I can't do
without a little fire in the evenings."
"Then I'll make some tea for Wynnie and myself, and tell you at the same
time about the sunset. I never saw such colours. I cannot tell you what it
was like while the sun was yet going down, for the glory of it has burned
the memory of it out of me. But after the sun was down, the sky remained
thinking about him; and the thought of the sky was in delicate translucent
green on the horizon, just the colour of the earth etherealised and
glorified--a broad band; then came another broad band of pale rose-colour;
and above that came the sky's own eternal blue, pale likewise, but so sure
and changeless. I never saw the green and the blue divided and harmonised
by the rose-colour before. It was a wonderful sight. If it is warm enough
to-morrow, we will carry you out on the height, that you may see what the
evening will bring."
"There is one thing about sunsets," returned Connie--"two things, that make
me rather sad--about themselves, not about anything else. Shall I tell you
them?"
"Do, my love. There are few things more precious to learn than the effects
of Nature upon individual minds. And there is not a feeling of yours, my
child, that is not of value to me."
"You are so kind, papa! I am so glad of my accident. I think I should never
have known how good you are but for that. But my thoughts seem so little
worth after you say so much about them."
"Let me be judge of that, my dear."
"Well, one thing is, that we shall never, never, never, see the same sunset
again."
"That is true. But why should we? God does not care to do the same thing
over again. When it is once done, it is done, and he goes on doing
something new. For, to all eternity, he never will have done showing
himself by new, fresh things. It would be a loss to do the same thing
again."
"But that just brings me to my second trouble. The thing is lost. I forget
it. Do what I can, I cannot remember sunsets. I try to fix them fast in my
memory, that I may recall them when I want them; but just as they fade out
of the sky, all into blue or gray, so they fade out of my mind and leave it
as if they had never been there--except perhaps two or three. Now, though
I did not see this one, yet, after you have talked about it, I shall never
forget _it_."
"It is not, and never will be, as if they had never been. They have their
influence, and leave that far deeper than your memory--in your very being,
Connie. But I have more to say about it, although it is only an idea,
hardly an assurance. Our brain is necessarily an imperfect instrument. For
its right work, perhaps it is needful that it should forget in part. But
there are grounds for believing that nothing is ever really forgotten. I
think that, when we have a higher existence than we have now, when we are
clothed with that spiritual body of which St. Paul speaks, you will be able
to recall any sunset you have ever seen with an intensity proportioned to
the degree of regard and attention you gave it when it was present to you.
But here comes Wynnie to see how you are.--I've been making some tea for
you, Wynnie, my love."
"O, thank you, papa--I shall be so glad of some tea!" said Wynnie, the
paleness of whose face showed the red rims of her eyes the more plainly.
She had had what girls call a good cry, and was clearly the better for it.
The same moment my wife came in. "Why didn't you send for me, Harry, to get
your tea?" she said.
"I did not deserve any, seeing I had disregarded proper times and seasons.
But I knew you must be busy."
"I have been superintending the arrangement of bedrooms, and the unpacking,
and twenty different things," said Ethelwyn. "We shall be so comfortable!
It is such a curious house! Have you had a nice walk?"
"Mamma, I never had such a walk in my life," returned Wynnie. "You would
think the shore had been built for the sake of the show--just for a
platform to see sunsets from. And the sea! Only the cliffs will be rather
dangerous for the children."
"I have just been telling Connie about the sunset. She could see something
of the colours on the water, but not much more."
"O, Connie, it will be so delightful to get you out here! Everything is
so big! There is such room everywhere! But it must be awfully windy in
winter," said Wynnie, whose nature was always a little prospective, if not
apprehensive.
But I must not keep my reader longer upon mere family chat.
CHAPTER XIV.
MORE ABOUT KILKHAVEN.
Our dining-room was one story below the level at which we had entered the
parsonage; for, as I have said, the house was built into the face of the
cliff, just where it sunk nearly to the level of the shores of the bay.
While at dinner, on the evening of our arrival, I kept looking from the
window, of course, and I saw before me, first a little bit of garden,
mostly in turf, then a low stone wall; beyond, over the top of the wall,
the blue water of the bay; then beyond the water, all alive with light and
motion, the rocks and sand-hills of the opposite side of the little bay,
not a quarter of a mile across. I could likewise see where the shore went
sweeping out and away to the north, with rock after rock standing far into
the water, as if gazing over the awful wild, where there was nothing to
break the deathly waste between Cornwall and Newfoundland. But for the
moment I did not regard the huge power lying outside so much as the merry
blue bay between me and those rocks and sand-hills. If I moved my head a
little to the right, I saw, over the top of the low wall already mentioned,
and apparently quite close to it the slender yellow masts of a schooner,
her mainsail hanging loose from the gaff, whose peak was lowered. We must,
I thought, be on the very harbour-quay. When I went out for my walk with
Wynnie, I had turned from the bay, and gone to the brow of the cliffs
overhanging the open sea on our own side of it.
When I came down to breakfast in the same room next morning, I stared. The
blue had changed to yellow. The life of the water was gone. Nothing met my
eyes but a wide expanse of dead sand. You could walk straight across
the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from the
perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking,
concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was high-water,
or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was over a long
reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe of the waves
was visible, as if there was their _hitherto_, and further towards us they
could not come. Beyond the fringe lay the low hill of the Atlantic. To add
to my confusion, when I looked to the right, that is, up the bay towards
the land, there was no schooner there. I went out at the window, which
opened from the room upon the little lawn, to look, and then saw in a
moment how it was.
"Do you know, my dear," I said to my wife, "we are just at the mouth of
that canal we saw as we came along? There are gates and a lock just outside
there. The schooner that was under this window last night must have gone in
with the tide. She is lying in the basin above now."
"O, yes, papa," Charlie and Harry broke in together. "We saw it go up
this morning. We've been out ever so long. It was so funny," Charlie
went on--everything was _funny_ with Charlie--"to see it rise up like a
Jack-in-the-box, and then slip into the quiet water through the other
gates!"
And when I thought about the waves tumbling and breaking away out there,
and the wide yellow sands between, it was wonderful--which was what Charlie
meant by funny--to see the little vessel lying so many feet above it all,
in a still plenty of repose, gathering strength, one might fancy to rush
out again, when its time was come, into the turmoil beyond, and dash its
way through the breasts of the billows.
After breakfast we had prayers, as usual, and after a visit to Connie, whom
I found tired, but wonderfully well, I went out for a walk by myself, to
explore the neighbourhood, find the church, and, in a word, do something to
shake myself into my new garments. The day was glorious. I wandered along
a green path, in the opposite direction from our walk the evening before,
with a fir-wood on my right hand, and a belt of feathery tamarisks on my
left, behind which lay gardens sloping steeply to a lower road, where stood
a few pretty cottages. Turning a corner, I came suddenly in sight of the
church, on the green down above me--a sheltered yet commanding situation;
for, while the hill rose above it, protecting it from the east, it looked
down the bay, and the Atlantic lay open before it. All the earth seemed to
lie behind it, and all its gaze to be fixed on the symbol of the infinite.
It stood as the church ought to stand, leading men up the mount of vision,
to the verge of the eternal, to send them back with their hearts full of
the strength that springs from hope, by which alone the true work of the
world can be done. And when I saw it I rejoiced to think that once more
I was favoured with a church that had a history. Of course it is a happy
thing to see new churches built wherever there is need of such; but to the
full idea of the building it is necessary that it should be one in which
the hopes and fears, the cares and consolations, the loves and desires of
our forefathers should have been roofed; where the hearts of those through
whom our country has become that which it is--from whom not merely the
life-blood of our bodies, but the life-blood of our spirits, has come down
to us, whose existence and whose efforts have made it possible for us to
be that which we are--have before us worshipped that Spirit from whose
fountain the whole torrent of being flows, who ever pours fresh streams
into the wearying waters of humanity, so ready to settle down into a
stagnant repose. Therefore I would far rather, when I may, worship in an
old church, whose very stones are a history of how men strove to realise
the infinite, compelling even the powers of nature into the task--as I
soon found on the very doorway of this church, where the ripples of the
outspread ocean, and grotesque imaginations of the monsters of its deeps,
fixed, as it might seem, for ever in stone, gave a distorted reflex, from
the little mirror of the artist's mind, of that mighty water, so awful, so
significant to the human eye, which yet lies in the hollow of the Father's
palm, like the handful that the weary traveller lifts from the brook by the
way. It is in virtue of the truth that went forth in such and such like
attempts that we are able to hold our portion of the infinite reality which
God only knows. They have founded our Church for us, and such a church as
this will stand for the symbol of it; for here we too can worship the
God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob--the God of Sidney, of Hooker, of
Herbert. This church of Kilkhaven, old and worn, rose before me a history
in stone--so beaten and swept about by the "wild west wind,"
"For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms,"
and so streamed upon, and washed, and dissolved, by the waters lifted from
the sea and borne against it on the upper tide of the wind, that you could
almost fancy it one of those churches that have been buried for ages
beneath the encroaching waters, lifted again, by some mighty revulsion of
nature's heart, into the air of the sweet heavens, there to stand marked
for ever with the tide-flows of the nether world--scooped, and hollowed,
and worn like aeonian rocks that have slowly, but for ever, responded to
the swirl and eddy of the wearing waters. So, from the most troublous of
times, will the Church of our land arise, in virtue of what truth she
holds, and in spite, if she rises at all, of the worldliness of those who,
instead of seeking her service, have sought and gained the dignities which,
if it be good that she have it in her power to bestow them, need the
corrective of a sharply wholesome persecution which of late times she has
not known. But God knows, and the fire will come in its course--first in
the form of just indignation, it may be, against her professed servants,
and then in the form of the furnace seven times heated, in which the true
builders shall yet walk unhurt save as to their mortal part.
I looked about for some cottage where the sexton might be supposed to live,
and spied a slated roof, nearly on a level with the road, at a little
distance in front of me. I could at least inquire there. Before I reached
it, however, an elderly woman came out and approached me. She was dressed
in a white cap and a dark-coloured gown. On her face lay a certain repose
which attracted me. She looked as if she had suffered but had consented to
it, and therefore could smile. Her smile lay near the surface. A kind word
was enough to draw it up from the well where it lay shimmering: you could
always see the smile there, whether it was born or not. But even when she
smiled, in the very glimmering of that moonbeam, you could see the deep,
still, perhaps dark, waters under. O! if one could but understand what
goes on in the souls that have no words, perhaps no inclination, to set it
forth! What had she endured? How had she learned to have that smile always
near? What had consoled her, and yet left her her grief--turned it,
perhaps, into hope? Should I ever know?
She drew near me, as if she would have passed me, as she would have done,
had I not spoken. I think she came towards me to give me the opportunity of
speaking if I wished, but she would not address me.
"Good morning," I said. "Can you tell me where to find the sexton?"
"Well, sir," she answered, with a gleam of the smile brightening underneath
her old skin, as it were, "I be all the sexton you be likely to find this
mornin', sir. My husband, he be gone out to see one o' Squire Tregarva's
hounds as was took ill last night. So if you want to see the old church,
sir, you'll have to be content with an old woman to show you, sir."
"I shall be quite content, I assure you," I answered. "Will you go and get
the key?"
"I have the key in my pocket, sir; for I thought that would be what you'd
be after, sir. And by the time you come to my age, sir, you'll learn to
think of your old bones, sir. I beg your pardon for making so free. For
mayhap, says I to myself, he be the gentleman as be come to take Mr.
Shepherd's duty for him. Be ye now, sir?"
All this was said in a slow sweet subdued tone, nearly of one pitch. You
would have felt that she claimed the privilege of age with a kind of
mournful gaiety, but was careful, and anxious even, not to presume upon it,
and, therefore, gentle as a young girl.
"Yes," I answered. "My name is Walton I have come to take the place of my
friend Mr. Shepherd; and, of course, I want to see the church."
"Well, she be a bee-utiful old church. Some things, I think, sir, grows
more beautiful the older they grows. But it ain't us, sir."
"I'm not so sure of that," I said. "What do you mean?"
"Well, sir, there's my little grandson in the cottage there: he'll never be
so beautiful again. Them children du be the loves. But we all grows uglier
as we grows older. Churches don't seem to, sir."
"I'm not so sure about all that," I said again.
"They did say, sir, that I was a pretty girl once. I'm not much to look at
now."
And she smiled with such a gracious amusement, that I felt at once that if
there was any vanity left in this memory of her past loveliness, it was
sweet as the memory of their old fragrance left in the withered leaves of
the roses.
"But it du not matter, du it, sir? Beauty is only skin-deep."
"I don't believe that," I answered. "Beauty is as deep as the heart at
least."
"Well to be sure, my old husband du say I be as handsome in his eyes as
ever I be. But I beg your pardon, sir, for talkin' about myself. I believe
it was the old church--she set us on to it."
"The old church didn't lead you into any harm then," I answered. "The
beauty that is in the heart will shine out of the face again some day--be
sure of that. And after all, there is just the same kind of beauty in a
good old face that there is in an old church. You can't say the church is
so trim and neat as it was the day that the first blast of the organ filled
it as with, a living soul. The carving is not quite so sharp, the timbers
are not quite so clean. There is a good deal of mould and worm-eating and
cobwebs about the old place. Yet both you and I think it more beautiful now
than it was then. Well, I believe it is, as nearly as possible, the same
with an old face. It has got stained, and weather-beaten, and worn; but if
the organ of truth has been playing on inside the temple of the Lord, which
St. Paul says our bodies are, there is in the old face, though both form
and complexion are gone, just the beauty of the music inside. The wrinkles
and the brownness can't spoil it. A light shines through it all--that of
the indwelling spirit. I wish we all grew old like the old churches."
She did not reply, but I thought I saw in her face that she understood my
mysticism. We had been walking very slowly, had passed through the quaint
lych-gate, and now the old woman had got the key in the lock of the door,
whose archway was figured and fashioned as I have described above, with a
dozen mouldings or more, most of them "carved so curiously."
CHAPTER XV.
THE OLD CHURCH.
The awe that dwells in churches fell upon me as I crossed the threshold--an
awe I never fail to feel--heightened in many cases, no doubt, by the sense
of antiquity and of art, but an awe which I have felt all the same in
crossing the threshold of an old Puritan conventicle, as the place where
men worship and have worshipped the God of their fathers, although for art
there was only the science of common bricklaying, and for beauty staring
ugliness. To the involuntary fancy, the air of petition and of holy need
seems to linger in the place, and the uncovered head acknowledges the
sacred symbols of human inspiration and divine revealing. But this was no
ordinary church into which I followed the gentlewoman who was my guide. As
entering I turned my eyes eastward, a flush of subdued glory invaded them
from the chancel, all the windows of which were of richly stained glass,
and the roof of carved oak lavishly gilded. I had my thoughts about this
chancel, and thence about chancels generally which may appear in another
part of my story. Now I have to do only with the church, not with the
cogitations to which it gave rise. But I will not trouble my reader with
even what I could tell him of the blending and contradicting of styles
and modes of architectural thought in the edifice. Age is to the work of
contesting human hands a wonderful harmoniser of differences. As nature
brings into harmony all fractures of her frame, and even positive
intrusions upon her realm, clothes and discolours them, in the old sense of
the word, so that at length there is no immediate shock at sight of that
which in itself was crude, and is yet coarse, so the various architecture
of this building had been gone over after the builders by the musical hand
of Eld, with wonder of delicate transition and change of key, that one
could almost fancy the music of its exquisite organ had been at work
_informing_ the building, half melting the sutures, wearing the sharpness,
and blending the angles, until in some parts there was but the gentle
flickering of the original conception left, all its self-assertion vanished
under the file of the air and the gnawing of the worm. True, the hand of
the restorer had been busy, but it had wrought lovingly and gently, and
wherein it had erred, the same influences of nature, though as yet their
effects were invisible, were already at work--of the many making one. I
will not trouble my reader, I say, with any architectural description,
which, possibly even more than a detailed description of natural beauty
dissociated from human feeling, would only weary him, even if it were not
unintelligible. When we are reading a poem, we do not first of all examine
the construction and dwell on the rhymes and rhythms; all that comes after,
if we find that the poem itself is so good that its parts are therefore
worth examining, as being probably good in themselves, and elucidatory of
the main work. There were carvings on the ends of the benches all along
the aisle on both sides, well worth examination, and some of them even
of description; but I shall not linger on these. A word only about the
columns: they supported arches of different fashion on the opposite
sides, but they were themselves similar in matter and construction, both
remarkable. They were of coarse granite of the country, chiselled, but very
far from smooth, not to say polished. Each pillar was a single stone with
chamfered sides.
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