Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2
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George MacDonald >> Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2
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"The poor boy would see him."
"What made him want to see him?"
Helen held her peace. She saw George suspected the truth.
"Well, no matter," said George. "But one never knows what may come
of things. We ought always to look well ahead.--You had better go
and lie down awhile, Helen; you don't seem quite yourself."
"I am afraid to leave Leopold," she answered. "He will be telling
aunt and everybody now."
"That I will take care he does not," said George. "You go and lie
down a while."
Helen's strength had been sorely tried: she had borne up bravely to
the last; but now that she could do no more, and her brother had
taken himself out of her hands, her strength had begun to give way,
and, almost for the first time in her life, in daylight, she longed
to go to bed. Let George, or Wingfold, or who would, see to the
wilful boy! She had done what she could.
She gladly yielded to George's suggestion, sought an unoccupied
room, bolted the door, and threw herself upon the bed.
CHAPTER XXXI.
GEORGE AND LEOPOLD.
George went again to Leopold's room, and sat down by him. The youth
lay with his eyes half closed, and a smile--a faint sad
one--flickered over his face. He was asleep: from infancy he had
slept with his eyes open.
"Emmeline!" he murmured, in the tone of one who entreats
forgiveness.
"Strange infatuation!" said George to himself: "even his dreams are
mad! Good God! there can't be anything in it--can there? I begin to
feel as if I were not quite safe myself. Mad-doctors go mad
themselves, they say. I wonder what sort of floating sporule carries
the infection--reaching the brain by the nose, I fancy. Or perhaps
there is latent madness in us all, requiring only the presence of
another madness to set it free."
Leopold was awake and looking at him.
"Is it a very bad way of dying?" he asked.
"What is, old boy!"
"Hanging."
"Yes, very bad--choking, you know," answered George, who wanted to
make the worst of it.
"I thought the neck was broken and all was over," returned Leopold,
with a slight tremor in his voice.
"Yes, that's how it ought to be; but it fails so often!"
"At least there's no more hanging in public, and that's a comfort,"
said Leopold.
"What a queer thing," said George to himself, "that a man should be
ready to hang for an idea! Why should he not do his best to enjoy
what is left of the sunlight, seeing, as their own prophet says, the
night cometh when no man can work? A few more whiffs of his cigar
before it goes out, would hurt no one. It is one thing to hang a
murderer, and quite another to hang yourself if you happen to be the
man. But he's stark raving mad, and must be humoured. Dance upon
nothing for an idea! Well, it's not without plenty of parallels in
history!--I wonder whether his one idea would give way now, if it
were brought to the actual test of hanging! It is a pity it couldn't
be tried, just for experiment's sake. But a strait-waistcoat would
be better."
Leopold's acquaintance with George had been but small, and of his
favourite theories he knew nothing. But he had always known that he
was not merely his sister's cousin, but the trusted friend both of
her and of her aunt; and since he had come to know of his frequent
visits, he had begun to believe him more to Helen than a friend.
Hence the moment he had made up his mind to confess, he was ready to
trust George entirely, and although he was disappointed to find him
receive his communication in a spirit so different from that of
Wingfold and his friend, he felt no motion of distrust on that
account, seeing Helen, who had been to him true as steel, took the
same view of his resolution.
"What would you do yourself then, George, if you had committed a
crime like mine?" he asked, after lying silent for a while.
None of George's theories had greatly taxed his imagination. He had
not been in any habit of fancying himself in this or that
situation--and when he did, it was always in some pleasant one of
victory or recognition. Possible conditions of humanity other than
pleasant, he had been content to regard from the outside, and come
to logical conclusions concerning, without, as a German would say,
thinking himself into them at all; and it would have been to do the
very idea of George Bascombe a wrong to imagine him entangled in any
such net of glowing wire as a crime against society! Therefore,
although for most questions George had always an answer ready, for
this he had none at hand, and required a moment, and but a moment,
to think.
"I would say to myself," he replied, "'What is done, is done, and is
beyond my power to alter or help.' And so I would be a man and bear
it--not a weakling, and let it crush me. No, by Jove! it shouldn't
crush ME!"
"Ah, but you haven't tried the weight of it, George!" returned
Leopold.
"God forbid!" said George.
"God forbid! indeed," rejoined Leopold; "but there 'tis done for all
his forbidding!"
"What's done is done, God or devil, and must be borne, I say," said
Bascombe, stretching out his legs. He was aware it sounded
heartless, but how could he help it? What else was there to be said?
"But if you can't bear it? If it is driving you mad--mad--mad? If
you must do something or kill yourself?" cried Leopold.
"You haven't done your best at trying yet," returned George. "But
you are ill, and not very able to try, I daresay, and so we can't
help it. On Monday we shall go to Mr. Hooker, and see what he says
to it."
He rose and went to get a book from the library. On the stair he met
the butler: Mr. Wingfold had called to see Mr. Lingard.
"He can't see him to-day. He is too much exhausted," said Bascombe;
and the curate left the house thoughtful and sorry, feeling as if a
vulture had settled by the side of the youth--a good-natured
vulture, no doubt, but not the less one bent on picking out the eyes
of his mind.
He walked away along the street towards the church with down-bent
head, seeing no one. He entered the churchyard, not looking whither
he went: a lovely soul was in pain and peril, and he could not get
near to help it. They were giving it choke-damp to breathe, instead
of mountain-air. They were washing its sores with anodynes instead
of laying them open with the knife of honesty, that they might be
cleansed and healed. He found himself stumbling among the level
gravestones, and stopped and sat down.
He sat a while, seeming to think of nothing, his eyes resting on a
little tuft of moss that shone like green gold in the sunlight on
the shoulder of an awkward little cherub's wing. Ere long he found
himself thinking how not the soul of Leopold, but that of Helen, was
in chief danger. Poor Leopold had the serpent of his crime to sting
him alive, but Helen had the vampyre of an imperfect love to fan her
asleep with the airs of a false devotion. It was Helen he had to be
anxious about more than Leopold.
He rose and walked back to the house.
"Can I see Miss Lingard?" he asked.
It was a maid who opened the door this time. She showed him into the
library, and went to inquire.
CHAPTER XXXII.
WINGFOLD AND HELEN.
When Helen lay down, she tried to sleep, but she could not even lie
still. For all her preference of George and his counsel, and her
hope in the view he took of Leopold's case, the mere knowledge that
in the next room her cousin sat by her brother, made her anxious and
restless.
At first it was the bare feeling that they were together--the thing
she had for so long taken such pains to prevent. Next came the fear
lest Leopold should succeed in persuading George that he was really
guilty--in which case, what would George, the righteous man,
counsel? And last and chief of all, what hope of peace to Leopold
could he in any of his counsel--except indeed he led him up to the
door of death, and urged him into the nothingness behind it? Then
what if George should be wrong, and there WAS something behind it?
Whatever sort of a something it might be, could the teaching of
George be in the smallest measure a preparation for it? Were it not
better, so far as the POSSIBILITY which remained untouched by any of
George's arguments was concerned, that Leopold should die believing
after Mr. Wingfold's fashion, and not disbelieving after George's?
If then there were nothing behind, he would be nothing the worse; if
there were, the curate might have in some sort prepared him for it.
And now first she began to feel that she was a little afraid of her
cousin--that she had yielded to his influence, or rather allowed him
to assume upon the possession of influence, until she was aware of
something that somewhere galled. He was a very good fellow, but was
he one fit to rule her life? Would her nature consent to look up to
his always, if she were to marry him? But the thought only flitted
like a cloud across the surface of her mind, for all her care was
Leopold, and alas! with him she was now almost angry, and it grieved
her sorely.
All these feelings together had combined to form her mood, when her
maid came to the door with the message that Mr. Wingfold was in the
library. She resolved at once to see him.
The curate's heart trembled a little as he waited for her. He was
not quite sure that it was his business to tell her her duty--yet
something seemed to drive him to it: he could not bear the idea of
her going on in the path of crookedness. It is no easy matter for
one man to tell another his duty in the simplest relations of life;
and here was a man, naturally shy and self-distrustful, daring to
rebuke and instruct a woman, whose presence was mighty upon him, and
whose influence was tenfold heightened by the suffering that
softened her beauty!
She entered, troubled yet stately, doubtful, yet with a kind of
half-trust in her demeanour, white, and blue-eyed, with pained
mouth, and a droop of weariness and suffering in eyelids and neck--a
creature to be worshipped if only for compassion of dignified
distress.
Thomas Wingfold's nature was one more than usually bent towards
helpfulness, but his early history, his lack of friends, of
confidence, of convictions, of stand or aim in life, had hitherto
prevented the outcome of that tendency. But now, like issuing water,
which, having found way, gathers force momently, the pent-up
ministration of his soul was asserting itself. Now that he
understood more of the human heart, and recognised in this and that
human countenance the bars of a cage through which peeped an
imprisoned life, his own heart burned in him with the love of the
helpless; and if there was mingled therein anything of the ambition
of benefaction, anything of the love of power, anything of
self-recommendation, pride of influence, or desire to be a centre of
good, and rule in a small kingdom of the aided and aiding, these
marshy growths had the fairest chance of dying an obscure death; for
the one sun, potent on the wheat for life, and on the tares for
death, is the face of Christ Jesus, and in that presence Wingfold
lived more and more from day to day.
And now came Helen, who, more than anyone whose history he had yet
learned--more perhaps than even her brother, needed such help as he
confidently hoped he knew now where she might find! But when he saw
her stand before him wounded and tearful and proud, regarding his
behaviour in respect of her brother as cruel and heartless; when he
felt in his very soul that she was jealous of his influence, that
she disliked and even despised him; it was only with a strong effort
he avoided assuming a manner correspondent to the idea of himself he
saw reflected in her mind, and submitting himself, as it were, to be
what she judged him.
When, however, by a pure effort of will, he rose above this weakness
and looked her full and clear in the face, a new jealousy of himself
arose: she stood there so lovely, so attractive, so tenfold womanly
in her misery, that he found he must keep a stern watch upon
himself, lest interest in her as a woman should trespass on the
sphere of simple humanity, wherein with favouring distinction is
recognized neither Jew nor Greek, prince nor peasant--not even man
or woman, only the one human heart that can love and suffer. It
aided him in this respect however, that his inherent modesty caused
him to look up to Helen as to a suffering goddess, noble, grand,
lovely, only ignorant of the one secret, of which he, haunting the
steps of the Unbound Prometheus, had learned a few syllables, broken
yet potent, which he would fain, could he find how, communicate in
their potency to her. And besides, to help her now looking upon him
from the distant height of conscious superiority, he must persuade
her to what she regarded as an unendurable degradation! The
circumstances assuredly protected him from any danger of offering
her such expression of sympathy as might not have been welcome to
her.
It is true that the best help a woman can get is from a right
man--equally true with its converse; but let the man who ventures
take heed. Unless he is able to counsel a woman to the hardest thing
that bears the name of duty, let him not dare give advice even to
her asking.
Helen however had not come to ask advice of Wingfold. She was in no
such mood. She was indeed weary of a losing strife, and only for a
glimmer of possible help from her cousin, saw ruin inevitable before
her. But this revival of hope in George had roused afresh her
indignation at the intrusion of Wingfold with what she chose to lay
to his charge as unsought counsel. At the same time, through all the
indignation, terror, and dismay, something within her murmured
audibly enough that the curate and not her cousin was the guide who
could lead her brother where grew the herb of what peace might yet
be had. It was therefore with a sense of bewilderment, discord, and
uncertainty, that she now entered the library.
Wingfold rose, made his obeisance, and advanced a step or two. He
would not offer a hand that might be unwelcome, and Helen did not
offer hers. She bent her neck graciously, and motioned him to be
seated.
"I hope Mr. Lingard is not worse," he said.
Helen started. Had anything happened while she had been away from
him?
"No. Why should he be worse?" she answered. "Have they told you
anything?"
"I have heard nothing; only as I was not allowed to see him,--"
"I left him with Mr. Bascombe half an hour ago," she said, willing
to escape the imputation of having refused him admittance.
Wingfold gave an involuntary sigh.
"You do not think that gentleman's company desirable for my brother,
I presume," she said with a smile so lustreless that it seemed
bitter.
"He won't do him any harm--at least I do not think you need fear
it."
"Why not? No one in your profession can think his opinions harmless,
and certainly he will not suppress them."
"A man with such a weight on his soul as your brother carries, will
not be ready to fancy it lightened by having lumps of lead thrown
upon it. An easy mind may take a shroud on its shoulders for wings,
but when trouble comes and it wants to fly, then it knows the
difference. Leopold will not be misled by Mr. Bascombe."
Helen grew paler. She would have him misled--so far as not to betray
himself.
"I am far more afraid of your influence than of his," added the
curate.
"What bad influence do you suppose me likely to exercise?" asked
Helen, with a cold smile.
"The bad influence of wishing him to act upon your conscience
instead of his own."
"Is my conscience then a worse one than Leopold's?" she asked, but
as if she felt no interest in the answer.
"It is not his, and that is enough. His own and no other can tell
him what he ought to do."
"Why not leave him to it, then?" she said bitterly.
"That is what I want of you, Miss Lingard. I would have you fear to
touch the life of the poor youth."
"Touch his life! I would give him mine to save it. YOU counsel him
to throw it away."
"Alas, what different meanings we put on the word! You call the few
years he may have to live in this world his life; while I--"
"While you count it the millions of which yon know
nothing,--somewhere whence no one has ever returned to bring any
news!--a wretched life at best if it be such as you represent it."
"Pardon me, that is merely what you suppose I mean by the word. I do
not mean that; I mean something altogether different. When I spoke
of his life, I thought nothing about here or there, now or then. You
will see what I mean if you think how the light came back to his eye
and the colour to his cheek the moment he had made up his mind to do
what had long seemed his duty. When I saw him again that light was
still in his eyes, and a feeble hope looked out of every feature.
Existence, from a demon-haunted vapor, had begun to change to a
morning of spring; life, the life of conscious well-being, of law
and order and peace, had begun to dawn in obedience and
self-renunciation; his resurrection was at hand. But you then, and
now you and Mr. Bascombe, would stop this resurrection; you would
seat yourselves upon his gravestone to keep him down!--And
why?--Lest he, lest you, lest your family should be disgraced by
letting him out of his grave to tell the truth."
"Sir!" cried Helen, indignantly drawing herself to her full height
and something more.
Wingfold took one step nearer to her.
"My calling is to speak the truth," he said: "and I am bound to warn
you that you will never be at peace in your own soul until you love
your brother aright."
"Love my brother!" Helen almost screamed. "I would die for him."
"Then at least let your pride die for him," said Wingfold, not
without indignation.
Helen left the room, and Wingfold the house.
She had hardly shut the door, and fallen again upon the bed, when
she began to know in her heart that the curate was right. But the
more she knew it, the less would she confess it even to herself: it
was unendurable.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
A REVIEW.
The curate walked hurriedly home, and seated himself at his table,
where yet lay his Greek Testament open at the passage he had been
pondering for his sermon. Alas! all he had then been thinking with
such fervour had vanished. He knew his inspiring text, but the rest
was gone. Worst of all, feeling was gone with thought, and was, for
the time at least, beyond recall. Righteous as his anger was, it had
ruffled the mirror of his soul till it could no longer reflect
heavenly things. He rose, caught up his New Testament, and went to
the church-yard. It was a still place, and since the pains of a new
birth had come upon him, he had often sought the shelter of its
calm. A few yards from the wall of the rectory garden stood an old
yew-tree, and a little nearer on one side was a small thicket of
cypress; between these and the wall was an ancient stone upon which
he generally seated himself. It had already begun to be called the
curate's chair. Most imagined him drawn thither by a clerical love
of gloom, but in that case he could scarcely have had such delight
in seeing the sky through the dark foliage of the yew: he thought
the parts so seen looked more divinely blue than any of the rest. He
would have admitted, however, that he found quiet, for the soul as
well as the body, upon this edge of the world, this brink of the
gulf that swallowed the ever-pouring ever-vanishing Niagara of human
life. On the stone he now seated himself and fell a-musing.
What a change had come upon him--slow, indeed, yet how vast, since
the night when he sat in the same churchyard indignant and uneasy
with the words of Bascombe like hot coals in his heart! He had been
made ashamed of himself who had never thought much of himself, but
the more he had lost of worthiness in his own eyes the more he had
gained in worth. And the more his poor satisfaction with himself had
died out, the more the world had awaked around him. For it must be
remembered that a little conceit is no more to be endured than a
great one, but must be swept utterly away. Sky and wind and water
and birds and trees said to him, "Forget thyself and we will think
of thee. Sing no more to thyself thy foolish songs of decay, and we
will all sing to thee of love and hope and faith and resurrection."
Earth and air had grown full of hints and sparkles and vital
motions, as if between them and his soul an abiding community of
fundamental existence had manifested itself. He had never in the old
days that were so near and yet seemed so far behind him, consciously
cared for the sunlight: now even the shadows were marvellous in his
eyes, and the glitter the golden weather-cock on the tower was like
a cry of the prophet Isaiah. High and alone in the clear blue air it
swung, an endless warning to him that veers with the wind of the
world, the words of men, the summer breezes of their praise, or the
bitter blasts of their wintry blame; it was no longer to him a cock
of the winds, but a cock of the truth--a Peter-cock, that crew aloud
in golden shine its rebuke of cowardice and lying. Never before had
he sought acquaintance with the flowers that came dreaming up out of
the earth in the woods and the lanes like a mist of loveliness, but
the spring-time came in his own soul, and then he knew the children
of the spring. And as the joy of the reviving world found its way
into the throats of the birds, so did the spring in his reviving
soul find its way into the channels of thought and speech, and issue
in utterance both rhythmic and melodious.--But not in any, neither
in all of these things lay the chief sign and embodiment of the
change he recognised in himself. It was this: that, whereas in
former times the name Christ had been to him little more than a dull
theological symbol, the thought of him and of his thoughts was now
constantly with him; ever and anon some fresh light would break from
the cloudy halo that enwrapped his grandeur; ever was he growing
more the Son of Man to his loving heart, ever more the Son of God to
his aspiring spirit. Testimony had merged almost in vision: he saw
into, and partly understood the perfection it presented: he looked
upon the face of God and lived. Oftener and oftener, as the days
passed, did it seem as if the man were by his side, and at times, in
the stillness of the summer-eve, when he walked alone, it seemed
almost, as thoughts of revealing arose in his heart, that the Master
himself was teaching him in spoken words. What need now to rack his
soul in following the dim-seen, ever evanishing paths of
metaphysics! he had but to obey the prophet of life, the man whose
being and doing and teaching were blended in one three-fold harmony,
or rather, were the three-fold analysis of one white essence--he had
but to obey him, haunt his footsteps, and hearken after the sound of
his spirit, and all truth would in healthy process be unfolded in
himself. What philosophy could carry him where Jesus would carry his
obedient friends--into his own peace, namely, far above all fear and
all hate, where his soul should breathe such a high atmosphere of
strength at once and repose, that he should love even his enemies,
and that with no such love as condescendingly overlooks, but with
the real, hearty, and self-involved affection that would die to give
them the true life! Alas! how far was he from such perfection
now--from such a martyrdom, lovely as endless, in the consuming fire
of God! And at the thought, he fell from the heights of his
contemplation--but was caught in the thicket of prayer.
By the time he reached his lodging, the glow had vanished, but the
mood remained. He sat down and wrote the first sketch of the
following verses, then found that his sermon had again drawn nigh,
and was within the reach of his spiritual tentacles.
Father, I cry to thee for bread,
With hungered longing, eager prayer;
Thou hear'st, and givest me instead
More hunger and a half-despair.
O Lord, how long? My days decline;
My youth is lapped in memories old;
I need not bread alone, but wine--
See, cup and hand to thee I hold.
And yet thou givest: thanks, O Lord,
That still my heart with hunger faints!
The day will come when at thy board
I sit forgetting all my plaints.
If rain must come and winds must blow,
And I pore long o'er dim-seen chart,
Yet, Lord, let not the hunger go,
And keep the faintness at my heart.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A SERMON TO LEOPOLD.
When the curate stood up to read, his eyes as of themselves sought
Mrs. Ramshorn's pew. There sat Helen, with a look that revealed, he
thought, more of determination and less of suffering. Her aunt was
by her side, cold and glaring, an ecclesiastical puss, ready to
spring upon any small church-mouse that dared squeak in its own
murine way. Bascombe was not visible, and that was a relief. For an
unbelieving face, whether the dull dining countenance of a mayor, or
the keen searching countenance of a barrister, is a sad bone in the
throat of utterance, and has to be of set will passed over, and, if
that may be, forgotten. Wingfold tried hard to forget Mrs.
Ramshorn's, and one or two besides, and by the time he came to the
sermon, thought of nothing but human hearts, their agonies, and him
who came to call them to him.
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