Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2
G >>
George MacDonald >> Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
"The Lord said: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do
to you, do ye even so to them. Ye that buy and sell, do you obey
this law? Examine yourselves and see. Ye would that men should deal
fairly by you; do you deal fairly by them as ye would count fairness
in them to you?--If conscience makes you hang the head inwardly,
however you sit with it erect in the pew, dare you add to your crime
against the law and the prophets the insult to Christ of calling
yourselves his disciples?
"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the
kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is
in heaven. He will none but those who with him do the will of the
Father."
CHAPTER IV.
NURSING.
I have of course given but the spine and ribs, as it were, of the
sermon. There is no place for more. It is enough however to show
that he came to the point--and what can be better in preaching?
Certainly he was making the best of the blunder that had led him up
into that pulpit! And on the other hand, whatever might be the
various judgments and opinions of his hearers in respect of the
sermon--a thing about which the less any preacher allows himself to
think the better--many of them did actually feel that he had been
preaching to them, which is saying much. Even Mrs. Ramshorn was more
silent than usual as they went home, and although--not having
acquainted herself, amongst others, with the sermons of Latimer--she
was profoundly convinced that such preaching was altogether contrary
to the tradition, usage, and tone of the English Church, of which
her departed dean remained to her the unimpeachable embodiment and
type, the sole remark she made was, that Mr. Wingfold took quite too
much pains to prove himself a pagan. Mr. Bascombe was in the same
mind as before.
"I like the fellow," he said. "He says what he means, fair and full,
and no shilly-shallying. It's all great rubbish, of course!"
And the widow of the dean of blessed memory had not a word to say in
defence of the sermon, but, for her, let it go as the great rubbish
he called it. Indeed, not knowing the real mind of her nephew, she
was nothing less than gratified to hear from him an opinion so
comfortably hostile to that of this most uncomfortable of curates,
whom you never could tell where to have, and whom never since he had
confessed to wrong in the reading of his uncle's sermons, and thus
unwittingly cast a reproach upon the memory of him who had departed
from the harassed company of deans militant to the blessed company
of deans triumphant, had she invited to share at her table of the
good things left behind.
"Why don't you ask him home to dinner, aunt?" said Bascombe, after a
pause unbroken by Mrs. Ramshorn.
"Why should I, George?" returned his aunt. "Has he not been abusing
us all at a most ignorant and furious rate?"
"Oh! I didn't know," said the nephew, and held his peace. Nor did
the aunt perceive the sarcasm for the sake of pointing which he was
silent. But it was not lost, and George was paid in full by the
flicker of a faint smile across Helen's face.
As for Helen, the sermon had indeed laid a sort of feebly electrical
hold upon her, the mere nervous influence of honesty and
earnestness. But she could not accuse herself of having ever made a
prominent profession of Christianity, confirmation and communion
notwithstanding; and besides, had she not now all but abjured the
whole thing in her heart? so that, if every word of what he said was
true, not a word of it could be applied to her! And what time had
she to think about such far-away things as had happened eighteen
centuries ago, when there was her one darling pining away with a
black weight on his heart!
For, although Leopold was gradually recovering, a supreme dejection,
for which his weakness was insufficient to account, prostrated his
spirit, and at length drove Mr. Faber to ask Helen whether she knew
of any disappointment or other source of mental suffering that could
explain it. She told him of the habit he had formed, and asked
whether his being deprived of the narcotic might not be the cause.
He accepted the suggestion, and set himself, not without some
success, to repair the injury the abuse had occasioned. Still,
although his physical condition plainly improved, the dejection
continued, and Mr. Faber was thrown back upon his former conjecture.
Learning nothing, however, and yet finding that, as he advanced
towards health, his dejection plainly deepened, he began at length
to fear softening of the brain, but could discover no other symptom
of such disease.
The earnestness of the doctor's quest after a cause for what anyone
might observe, added greatly to Helen's uneasiness; and besides, the
fact itself began to undermine the hope of his innocence which had
again sprung up and almost grown to assurance in the absence of any
fresh contradiction from without. Also, as his health returned, his
sleep became more troubled; he dreamed more, and showed by his
increased agitation in his dreams that they were more painful. In
this respect his condition was at the worst always between two and
three o'clock in the morning; and having perceived this fact, Helen
would never allow anyone except herself to sit up with him the first
part of the night.
Increased anxiety and continued watching soon told upon her health
yet more severely, and she lost appetite and complexion. Still she
slept well during the latter part of the morning, and it was in vain
that aunt and doctor and nurse all expostulated with her upon the
excess of her ministration: nothing should make her yield the post
until her brother was himself again. Nor was she without her reward,
and that a sufficing one--in the love and gratitude with which
Leopold clung to her.
During the day also she spent every moment, except such as she
passed in the open air, and at table with her aunt, by his bedside,
reading and talking to him; but as yet not a single allusion had
been made to the frightful secret.
At length he was so much better that there was no longer need for
anyone to sit up with him; but then Helen had her bed put in the
dressing-room, that at one o'clock she might be by his side, to sit
there until three should be well over and gone.
Thus she gave up her whole life to him, and doubtless thereby gained
much fresh interest in it for herself. But the weight of the secret,
and the dread of the law, were too much for her, and were gradually
undermining that strength of dissimulation in which she had trusted,
and which, in respect of cheerfulness, she had to exercise towards
her brother as well as her aunt. She struggled hard, for if those
weak despairing eyes of his were to encounter weakness and despair
in hers, madness itself would be at the door for both. She had come
nearly to the point of discovering that the soul is not capable of
generating its own requirements, that it needs to be supplied from a
well whose springs lie deeper than its own soil, in the infinite
All, namely, upon which that soil rests. Happy they who have found
that those springs have an outlet in their hearts--on the hill of
prayer.
It was very difficult to lay her hands on reading that suited him.
Gifted with a glowing yet delicate eastern imagination, pampered and
all but ruined, he was impatient of narratives of common life, whose
current bore him to a reservoir and no sea; while, on the other
hand, some tales that seemed to Helen poverty-stricken flats of
nonsense, or jumbles of false invention, would in her brother wake
an interest she could not understand, appearing to afford him
outlooks into regions to her unknown. But from the moral element in
any story he shrunk visibly. She tried the German tales collected by
the brothers Grimm, so popular with children of all ages; but on the
very first attempt she blundered into an awful one of murder and
vengeance, in which, if the drawing was untrue, the colour was
strong, and had to blunder clumsily out of it again, with a hot face
and a cold heart. At length she betook herself to the Thousand and
One Nights, which she had never read, and found very dull, but which
with Leopold served for what book could do.
In the rest of the house things went on much the same. Old friends
and their daughters called on Mrs. Ramshorn, and inquired after the
invalid, and George Bascombe came almost every Saturday, and stayed
till Monday. But the moment the tide of her trouble began again to
rise, Helen found herself less desirous of meeting one from whom she
could hope neither help nor cheer. It might be that future
generations of the death-doomed might pass their poor life a little
more comfortably that she had not been a bad woman, and she might be
privileged to pass away from the world, as George taught her,
without earning the curses of those that came after her; but there
was her precious brother lying before her with a horrible worm
gnawing at his heart, and what to her were a thousand generations
unborn! Rather with Macbeth she might well "wish the estate o' the
world were now undone"--most of all when, in the silent watches of
the night, as she sat by the bedside of her beloved and he slept,
his voice would come murmuring out of a dream, sounding so far away
that it seemed as if his spirit only and not his lips had spoken the
words, "Oh Helen, darling, give me my knife. Why will you not let me
die?"
CHAPTER V.
GLASTON AND THE CURATE.
Outside, the sun rose and set, never a crimson thread the less in
the garment of his glory that the spirit of one of the children of
the earth was stained with blood-guiltiness; the moon came up and
knew nothing of the matter; the stars minded their own business; and
the people of Glaston were talking about their curate's sermons.
Alas, it was about his sermons, and not the subject of them, that
men talked, their interest mainly roused by their PECULIARITY, and
what some called the oddity of the preacher.
What had come to him? He was not in the least like that for months
after his appointment, and the change came all at once! Yes--it
began with those extravagant notions about honesty in writing his
own sermons! It might have been a sunstroke, but it took him far too
early in the year for that! Softening of the brain it might be, poor
fellow! Was not excessive vanity sometimes a symptom?--Poor fellow!
So said some. But others said he was a clever fellow, and
long-headed enough to know that that sort of thing attracted
attention, and might open the way to a benefice, or at least an
engagement in London, where eloquence was of more account than in a
dead-and-alive country place like Glaston, from which the tide of
grace had ebbed, leaving that great ship of the church, the Abbey,
high and dry on the shore.
Others again judged him a fanatic--a dangerous man. Such did not all
venture to assert that he had erred from the way, but what man was
more dangerous than he who went too far? Possibly these forgot that
the narrow way can hardly be one to sit down in comfortably, or
indeed to be entered at all save by him who tries the gate with the
intent of going all the way--even should it lead up to the
perfection of the Father in heaven. "But," they would in effect have
argued, "is not a fanatic dangerous? and is not an enthusiast always
in peril of becoming a fanatic?--Be his enthusiasm for what it
may--for Jesus Christ, for God himself, such a man is dangerous--
most dangerous! There are so many things, comfortably settled like
Presumption's tubs upon their own bottoms, which such men would, if
they could, at once upset and empty!"
Others suspected a Romanizing drift in the whole affair. "Wait until
he gathers influence," they said, "and a handful of followers, and
then you'll see! They'll be all back to Rome together in a month!"
As the wind took by the tail St. Peter's cock on the church spire
and whirled it about, so did the wind of words in Glaston rudely
seize and flack hither and thither the spiritual reputation of
Thomas Wingfold, curate. And all the time, the young man was
wrestling, his life in his hand, with his own unbelief; while upon
his horizon ever and anon rose the glimmer of a great aurora, or the
glimpse of a boundless main--if only he could have been sure they
were no mirage of his own parched heart and hungry eye--that they
were thoughts in the mind of the Eternal, and THRERFORE had appeared
in his, even as the Word was said to have become flesh and dwelt
with men! The next moment he would be gasping in that malarious
exhalation from the marshes of his neglected heart--the
counter-fear, namely, that the word under whose potent radiance the
world seemed on the verge of budding forth and blossoming as the
rose, was TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.
"Yes, much too good, if there be no living, self-willing Good," said
Polwarth one evening, in answer to the phrase just dropped from his
lips. "But if there be such a God as alone could be God, can
anything be too good to be true?--too good for such a God as
contented Jesus Christ?"
At one moment he was ready to believe everything, even to that
strangest, yet to me right credible miracle of the fish and the
piece of money, and the next to doubt whether man had ever dared
utter the words, "I and the Father are one." Tossed he was and
tormented in spirit, calling even aloud sometimes to know if there
was a God anywhere hearing his prayer, sure only of this, that
whatever else any being might be, if he heard not prayer, he could
not be the God for whom his soul cried and fainted. Sometimes there
came to him, it is true, what he would gladly have taken for an
answer, but it was nothing more than the sudden descent of a kind of
calmness on his spirit, which, for aught he could tell, might be but
the calm of exhaustion. His knees were sore with kneeling, his face
white with thinking, his eyes dim with trouble; for when once a man
has set out to find God, he must find him or die. This was the
inside reality whose outcome set the public of Glaston babbling. It
was from this that George Bascombe magisterially pronounced him a
hypochondriac, worrying his brain about things that had no
existence--as George himself could with confidence testify, not once
having seen the sight of them, heard the sound of them, or imagined
in his heart that they ought to be, or even that they might possibly
be. He pronounced indeed their existence inconsistent with his own.
The thought had never rippled the grey mass of his self-satisfied
brain that perhaps there was more of himself than what he counted he
himself yet knew, and that possibly these matters had a consistent
relation with parts unknown. Poor, poverty-stricken Wingfold!
--actually craving for things beneath Bascombe's notice! actually
crying for something higher and brighter than the moon! How
independent was George compared with Thomas!--content to live what
he called his life, be a benefactor to men, chiefly in ridding their
fancies of the goblins of aspiration, then die his death, and have
done with the business; while poor misguided, weak-brained,
hypochondriacal Thomas could be contented with nothing less than the
fulfilment of the promise of a certain man who perhaps never
existed: "The Father and I will come to him and make our abode with
him."
Yet Thomas too had his weakness for the testimony of the senses. If
he did not, like George, refuse to believe without it, he yet could
not help desiring signs and wonders that he might believe. Of this
the following poem was a result, and I give it the more willingly
because it will show how the intellectual nature of the man had
advanced, borne on the waves that burst from the fountains of the
great deep below it.
O Lord, if on the wind, at cool of day,
I heard one whispered word of mighty grace;
If through the darkness, as in bed I lay,
But once had come a hand upon my face;
If but one sign that might not be mistook,
Had ever been, since first thy face I sought,
I should not now be doubting o'er a book,
But serving thee with burning heart and thought.
So dreams that heart. But to my heart I say,
Turning my face to front the dark and wind:
Such signs had only barred anew His way
Into thee, longing heart, thee, wildered mind.
They asked the very Way, where lies the way;
The very Son, where is the Father's face;
How he could show himself, if not in clay,
Who was the lord of spirit, form, and space.
My being, Lord, will nevermore be whole
Until thou come behind mine ears and eyes,
Enter and fill the temple of my soul
With perfect contact--such a sweet surprise--
Such presence as, before it met the view,
The prophet-fancy could not once foresee,
Though every corner of the temple knew
By very emptiness its need of thee.
When I keep ALL thy words, no favoured some--
Heedless of worldly winds or judgment's tide,
Then, Jesus, thou wilt with thy Father come--
O ended prayers!--and in my soul abide.
Ah long delay!--ah cunning, creeping sin!
I shall but fail and cease at length to try:
O Jesus, though thou wilt not yet come in,
Knock at my window as thou passest by.
CHAPTER VI.
THE LINEN-DRAPER.
But there was yet another class amongst those who on that second day
heard the curate testify what honestly he might, and no more,
concerning Jesus of Nazareth. So far as he learned, however, that
class consisted of one individual.
On the following Tuesday morning he went into the shop of the chief
linen-draper of Glaston, for he was going to a funeral, and wanted a
new pair of gloves that he might decline those which would be
offered him. A young woman waited on him, but Mr. Drew, seeing him
from the other end of the shop, came and took her place. When he was
fitted, had paid for his purchase, and was turning to take his
leave, the draper, with what appeared a resolution suddenly forced
from hesitation, leaned over the counter and said:
"Would you mind walking up stairs for a few minutes, sir? I ask it
as a great favour. I want very much to speak to you."
"I shall be most happy," answered Wingfold--conventionally, it must
be allowed, for in reality he anticipated expostulation, and having
in his public ministrations to do his duty against his own grain, he
had no fancy for encountering other people's grain as well in
private. Mr. Drew opened certain straits in the counter, and the
curate followed him through them, then through a door, up a stair,
and into a comfortable dining-room, which smelt strongly of tobacco.
There Mr. Drew placed for him a chair, and seated himself in front
of him.
The linen-draper was a middle-aged, middle-sized, stoutish man, with
plump rosy cheeks, keen black eyes, and features of the not uncommon
pug-type, ennobled and harmonized by a genuine expression of kindly
good-humour, and an excellent forehead. His dark hair was a little
streaked with gray. His manner, which, in the shop, had been of the
shop, that is, more deferential and would-be pleasing than Wingfold
liked, settled as he took his seat into one more resembling that of
a country gentleman. It was courteous and friendly, but clouded with
a little anxiety.
An uncomfortable pause following, Wingfold stumbled in with the
question, "I hope Mrs. Drew is well," without reflecting whether he
had really ever heard of a Mrs. Drew.
The draper's face flushed.
"It is twenty years since I lost her, sir," he returned. In his tone
and manner there was something peculiar.
"I beg your pardon," said Wingfold, with self-accusing sincerity.
"I will be open with you sir," continued his host: "she left
me--with another--nearly twenty years ago."
"I am ashamed of my inadvertence," rejoined Wingfold. "I have been
such a short time here, and--"
"Do not mention it, sir. How could you help it? Besides, it was not
here the thing took place, but a hundred miles away. I hope I should
before long have referred to the fact myself. But now I desire, if
you will allow me, to speak of something different."
"I am at your service," answered Wingfold.
"Thank you, sir.--I was in your church last Sunday," resumed the
draper after a pause. "I am not one of your regular hearers, sir;
but your sermon that day set me thinking, and instead of thinking
less when Monday came, I have been thinking more and more ever
since; and when I saw you in the shop, I could not resist the sudden
desire to speak to you. If you have time, sir, I hope you will allow
me to come to the point my own way?"
Wingfold assured him that his time was at his own disposal, and
could not be better occupied. Mr. Drew thanked him and went on.
"Your sermon, I must confess, sir, made me uncomfortable--no fault
of yours, sir--all my own--though how much the fault is, I hardly
know: use and custom are hard upon a man, sir, and you would have a
man go by other laws than those of the world he lives in. The earth
is the Lord's and the fulness thereof--you will doubtless say. That
is over the Royal Exchange in London, I think; but it is not the
laws of the Lord that are specially followed inside for all that.
However, it is not with other people we have to do, but with
ourselves--as you will say. Well then it is for myself I am
troubled now. Mr. Wingfold, sir, I am not altogether at ease in my
own mind as to the way I have made my money--what little money I
have--no great sum, but enough to retire upon when I please. I would
not have you think me worse than I am, but I am sincerely desirous
of knowing what you would have me do."
"My dear sir," returned Wingfold, "I am the very last to look to for
enlightenment. I am as ignorant of business as any child. I am not
aware that I ever bought anything except books and clothes, or ever
sold anything except a knife to a schoolfellow. I had bought it the
day before for half-a-crown, but there was a spot of rust on one of
the blades, and therefore I parted with it for twopence. The only
thing I can say is: if you have been in the way of doing anything
you are no longer satisfied with, don't do it any more."
"But just there comes my need of help. You must do something with
your business, and DON'T DO IT, don't tell me what to do. Mind I do
not confess to having done anything the trade would count
inadmissible, or which is not done in the largest establishments.
What I now make a question of I learned in one of the most
respectable of London houses."
"You imply that a man in your line who would not do certain things
the doing of which has contributed to the making of your fortune,
would by the ordinary dealer be regarded as Quixotic?"
"He would; but that there may be such men I am bound to allow, for
here am I wishing with all my heart that I had never done them.
Right gladly would I give up the money I have made by them to be rid
of them. I am unhappy about it. But I should never have dared to
confess it to you, sir, or, I believe, to anyone, but for the
confession you made in the pulpit some time ago. I was not there,
but I heard of it. I foolishly judged you unwise to accuse yourself
before an unsympathizing public--but here am I in consequence
accusing myself to you!"
"To no unsympathising hearer, though," said the curate.
"It made me want to go and hear you preach," pursued the draper;
"for no one could say but it was plucky--and we all like pluck,
sir," he added, with a laugh that puckered his face, showed the
whitest of teeth, and swept every sign of trouble from the
half-globe of his radiant countenance.
"Then you know sum and substance of what I can do for you, Mr. Drew:
I can sympathize with you;--not a whit more or less am I capable of.
I am the merest beginner and dabbler in doing right myself, and have
more need to ask you to teach me than to set up for teaching you."
"That's the beauty of you!--excuse me, sir," cried the draper
triumphantly. "You don't pretend to teach us anything, but you make
us so uncomfortable that we go about ever after asking ourselves
what we ought to do. Till last Sunday, I had always looked upon
myself as an honest man: let me see: it would be more correct to say
I looked on myself as a man QUITE HONEST ENOUGH. That I do not feel
so now, is your doing, sir. You said in your sermon last Sunday, and
specially to business men: 'Do you do to your neighbour as you would
have your neighbour do to you? If not, how can you suppose that the
lord of Christians will acknowledge you as a disciple of his, that
is, as a Christian?' Now I was even surer of being a Christian than
of being an honest man. You will hardly believe it, and what to
think of it myself I now hardly know, but I had satisfied myself,
more or less, that I had gone through all the necessary stages of
being born again, and it is now many years since I was received into
a Christian church--dissenting of course, I mean; for what I count
the most important difference after all between church and dissent
is that the one, right or wrong, requires for communion a personal
profession of faith, and credible proof of conversion--which I
believed I gave them, and have been for years, I shame to say it,
one of the deacons of that community. But it shall not be for long.
To return to my story, however: I was indignant at being called upon
from a church-pulpit to raise in myself the question whether or not
I was a Christian;--for had I not put my faith in the--? But I will
avoid theology, for I have paid more regard to that than has proved
good for me. Suffice it to say that I was now driven from the tests
of the theologians to try myself by the words of the Master: he must
be the best theologian after all, mustn't he, sir?--and so there and
then I tried the test of doing to your neighbour AS. But I could NOT
get it to work; I could not see how to use it, and while I was
trying how to make it apply, you were gone, and I lost all the rest
of the sermon.
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12