Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2
G >>
George MacDonald >> Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 | 8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
"Would this help to satisfy you that, whatever my advice may be
worth, at least my discretion may be trusted?" he said.
They were at the moment passing through a little thicket in the
park, where nobody could see them, and as he spoke, he took the
knife-sheath from his pocket, and held it out to her.
She started like a young horse at something dead: she had never seen
it, but the shape had an association. She paled, retreated a step,
with a drawing back of her head and neck and a spreading of her
nostrils, stared for a moment, first at the sheath, then at the
curate, gave a little moan, bit her under lip hard, held out her
hand, but as if she were afraid to touch the thing, and said:
"What is it? Where did you find it?"
She would have taken it, but Wingfold held it fast.
"Give it me," she said imperatively. "It is mine. I lost it."
"There is something dark on the lining of it," said the curate, and
looked straight into her eyes.
She let go her hold. But almost the same moment she snatched the
sheath out of his hand and held it to her bosom, while her look of
terror changed into one of defiance. Wingfold made no attempt to
recover it. She put it in her pocket, and drew herself up.
"What do you mean?" she said, in a voice that was hard yet trembled.
She felt like one that sees the vultures gathering above him, and
lifts a moveable finger in defence. Then with sudden haughtiness
both of gesture and word:
"You have been acting the spy, sir!"
"No," returned the curate quietly. "The sheath was committed to my
care by one whom certain facts that had come to his knowledge--
certain words he had overheard--"
He paused. She shook visibly, but still would hold what ground might
yet be left her.
"Why did you not give it me before?" she asked.
"In the public street, or in your aunt's presence?"
"You are cruel!" she panted. Her strength was going. "What do you
know?"
"Nothing so well as that I want to serve you, and you may trust me."
"What do you mean to do?"
"My best to help you and your brother."
"But to what end?"
"To any end that is right."
"But how? What would you tell him to do?"
"You must help me to discover what he ought to do."
"Not--" she cried, clasping her hands and dropping on her knees
before him, "--you WILL not tell him to give himself up? Promise me
you will not, and I will tell you everything. He shall do anything
you please but that! Anything but that!"
Wingfold's heart was sore at sight of her agony. He would have
raised her with soothing words of sympathy and assurance, but still
she cried, "Promise me you will not make him give himself up."
"I dare not promise anything." he said. "I MUST do what I may see to
be right. Believe me, I have no wish to force myself into your
confidence, but you have let me see that you are in great trouble
and in need of help, and I should be unfaithful to my calling if I
did not do my best to make you trust me."
A pause followed. Helen rose despairingly, and they resumed their
walk. Just as they reached the door in the fence which would let
them out upon the meadow in sight of the Manor-house, she turned to
him and said,
"I will trust you, Mr. Wingfold. I mean, I will take you to my
brother, and he shall do as he thinks proper."
They passed out and walked across the meadow in silence. In the
passage under the fence, as she turned from closing the door behind
them, she stood and pressed her hand to her side.
"Oh! Mr. Wingfold," she cried, "my heart will break! He has no one
but me! No one but me to be mother and sister and all to him! He is
NOT wicked--my poor darling!"
She caught the curate by the arm with a grasp which left its mark
behind it, and gazed appealingly into his face: in the dim tomb-like
light, her wide-strained eyes, white agonized countenance, and
trembling roseless lips made her look like one called back from
death "to speak of horrors."
"Save him from madness," she said, in forced and unnatural
utterance. "Save him from the remorse gnawing at his heart. But do
not, DO not counsel him to give himself up."
"Would it not be better you should tell me about it," said the
curate, "and save him the pain and excitement?"
"I will do so, if he wishes it, not otherwise. Come; we must not
stay longer. He can hardly bear me out of his sight. I will leave
you for one moment in the library, and then come to you. If you
should see my aunt, not a word of all this, please. All she knows is
that he has had brain-fever, and is recovering only very slowly. I
have never given her even a hint of anything worse. Indeed,
honestly, Mr. Wingfold, I am not at all certain he did do what he
will tell you. But there is his misery all the same. Do have pity on
us, and don't be hard upon the poor boy. He is but a boy--only
twenty."
"May God be to me as I am to him!" said Wingfold solemnly.
Helen withdrew her entreating eyes, and let go his arm. They went up
into the garden and into the house.
Afterwards, Wingfold was astonished at his own calmness and decision
in taking upon him--almost, as it were, dragging to him--this
relation with Helen and her brother. But he had felt that not to do
so would be to abandon Helen to her grief, and that for her sake he
must not hesitate to encounter whatever might have to be encountered
in doing so.
Helen left him in the library, as she had said, and there he waited
her return in a kind of stupor, unable to think, and feeling as if
he were lost in a strange and anxious dream.
CHAPTER XXIV.
WILLING CONFIDENCE.
"Come," said Helen, re-entering, and the curate rose and followed
her.
The moment he turned the corner of the bed and saw the face on the
pillow, he knew in his soul that Helen was right, and that that was
no wicked youth who lay before him--one, however, who might well
have been passion-driven. There was the dark complexion and the
great soft yet wild eyes that came of tropical blood. Had not Helen
so plainly spoken of her brother, however, he would have thought he
saw before him a woman. The worn, troubled, appealing light that
overflowed rather than shone from his eyes, went straight to the
curate's heart.
Wingfold had had a brother, the only being in the world he had ever
loved tenderly; he had died young, and a thin film of ice had since
gathered over the well of his affections; but now suddenly this ice
broke and vanished, and his heart yearned over the suffering youth.
He had himself been crying to God, not seldom in sore trouble, and
now, ere, as it seemed, he had himself been heard, here was a sad
brother crying to him for help. Nor was this all; the reading of the
gospel story had roused in his heart a strange yet most natural
longing after the face of that man of whom he read such lovely
things, and thence, unknown to himself, had come a reverence and a
love for his kind, which now first sprang awake to his consciousness
in the feeling that drew him towards Leopold.
Softly he approached the bed, his face full of tenderness and strong
pity. The lad, weak with protracted illness and mental torture, gave
one look in his face, and stretched out both his arms to him. How
could the curate give him but a hand? He put his arms round him as
if he had been a child.
"I knew you would come," sobbed Lingard.
"What else should I do but come?" returned Wingfold.
"I have seen you somewhere before," said Lingard--"in one of my
dreams, I suppose."
Then, sinking his voice to a whisper, he added:
"Do you know you came in close behind HER? She looked round and saw
you, and vanished!"
Wingfold did not even try to guess at his meaning.
"Hush, my dear fellow!" he said; "I must not let you talk wildly, or
the doctor might forbid my seeing you."
"I am not talking a bit wildly," returned Leopold. "I am as quiet as
a mountain-top. Ah! when I AM wild--if you saw me then, you might
say so!"
Wingfold sat down on the side of the bed, and took the thin, hot
hand next him in his own firm, cool one.
"Come now," he said, "tell me all about it. Or shall your sister
tell me?--Come here, please, Miss Lingard."
"No, no!" cried Leopold hastily; "I will tell you myself. My poor
sister could not bear to tell it you. It would kill her.--But how am
I to know you will not get up and walk out the moment you have a
glimpse of what is coming?"
"I would as soon leave a child burning in the fire, and go out and
shut the door," said Wingfold.
"You can go now, Helen," said Lingard very quietly. "Why should you
be tortured over again? You needn't mind leaving me. Mr. Wingfold
will take care of me."
Helen left the room, with one anxious look at her brother as she
went.
Without a moment's further delay, Leopold began, and in wonderfully
direct and unbroken narrative, told the sad evil tale as he had
formerly told it to his sister, only more consecutively and quietly.
Possibly his anxiety as to how the listener would receive it,
served, by dividing him between two emotions, to keep the reuttered
tale from overpowering him with freshened vividness. All the time,
he kept watching Wingfold's face, the expressions of which the
curate felt those eyes were reading like a book.
He was so well prepared, however, that no expression of surprise, no
reflex of its ghastfulness met Leopold's gaze, and he went on to the
end without a pause even. When he had finished, both sat silent,
looking in each other's eyes, Wingfold's beaming with compassion,
and Lingard's glimmering with doubtful, anxious inquiry and appeal.
At length Wingfold said:
"And what do you think I can do for you?"
"I don't know. I thought you could tell me something. I cannot live
like this! If I had but thought before I did it, and killed myself
instead of her! It would have done so much better! Of course I
should be in hell now, but that would be all right, and this is all
wrong. I have no right to be lying here and Emmeline in her grave. I
know I deserve to be miserable for ever and ever, and I don't want
not to be miserable--that is all right--but there is something in
this wretchedness that I cannot bear. Tell me something to make me
able to endure my misery. That is what you can do for me. I don't
want to go mad. And what is worst of all, I have made my sister
miserable, and I can't bear to see it. She is wasting away with it.
And besides I fancy she loves George Bascombe--and who would marry
the sister of a murderer? And now she has begun to come to me
again--in the daytime--I mean Emmeline!--or I have begun to see her
again--I don't know which;--perhaps she is always there, only I
don't always see her--and it don't much matter which. Only if other
people were to see her!--While she is there nothing could persuade
me I do not see her, but afterwards I am not so sure that I did. And
at night I keep dreaming the horrible thing over and over again; and
the agony is to think I shall never get rid of it, and never never
feel clean again. To be for ever and ever a murderer and people not
know it, is more than I CAN bear."
CHAPTER XXV.
THE CURATE'S COUNSEL.
Not seeing yet what he had to say, but knowing that scintillation
the smallest is light, the curate let the talk take its natural
course, and said the next thing that came to him.
"How do you feel when you think that you may yet be found out?" he
asked.
"At first I was more afraid of that than of anything else. Then
after that danger seemed past, I was afraid of the life to come.
That fear left me next, and now it is the thing itself that is
always haunting me. I often wish they would come and take me, and
deliver me from myself. It would be a comfort to have it all known,
and never need to start again. I think I could even bear to see her
in the prison. If it would annihilate the deed, or bring Emmeline
back, I cannot tell you how gladly I would be hanged. I would,
indeed, Mr. Wingfold. I I hope you will believe me, though I don't
deserve it."
"I do believe you," said the curate, and a silence followed.
"There is but one thing I can say with confidence at this moment,"
he resumed: "it is, that I am your friend, and will stand by you.
But the first part of friendship sometimes is to confess poverty,
and I want to tell you that, of the very things concerning which I
ought to know most, I knew least. I have but lately begun to feel
after God, and I dare not say that I have found him, but I think I
know now where to find him. And I do think, if we could find him,
then we should find help. All I can do for you now is only to be
near you, and talk to you, and pray to God for you, that so together
we may wait for what light may come.--Does anything ever look to
you as if it would make you feel better?"
"I have no right to feel better or take comfort from anything."
"I am not sure about that.--Do you feel any better for having me
come to see you?"
"Oh, yes, indeed I do!"
"Well, there is no wrong in that, is there?"
"I don't know. It seems a sneaking kind of thing: she has got none
of it. My sister makes excuses for me, but the moment I begin to
listen to them I only feel the more horrid."
"I have said nothing of that kind to you."
"No, sir."
"And yet you like to have me here?"
"Yes, indeed, sir," he answered, earnestly.
"And it does not make you think less of your crime?"
"No. It makes me feel it worse than ever to see you sitting there, a
clean, strong, innocent man, and think what I might have been."
"Then the comfort you get from me does you no harm, at least. If I
were to find my company made you think with less hatred of your
crime, I should go away that instant."
"Thank you, sir," said Leopold humbly. "Oh, sir!" he resumed after a
little silence, "--to think that never more to all eternity shall I
be able to think of myself as I used to think!"
"Perhaps you used to think too much of yourself," returned the
curate. "For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a
worse condition, and that is--not to know it, but think himself a
respectable man. As the event proves, though you would doubtless
have laughed at the idea, you were then capable of committing a
murder. I have come to see--at least I think I have--that except a
man has God dwelling in him, he may be, or may become, capable of
any crime within the compass of human nature."
"I don't know anything about God," said Leopold. "I daresay I
thought I did before this happened--before I did it, I mean," he
added in correction,"--but I know now that I don't, and never did."
"Ah, Leopold!" said the curate, "think, if my coming to you comforts
you, what would it be to have him who made you always with you!"
"Where would be the good? I daresay he might forgive me, if I were
to do this and that, but where would be the good of it? It would not
take the thing off me one bit."
"Ah! now," said Wingfold, "I fear you are thinking a little about
your own disgrace and not only of the bad you have done. Why should
you not be ashamed? Why would you have the shame taken off you? Nay;
you must humbly consent to bear it. Perhaps your shame is the hand
of love washing the defilement from off you. Let us keep our shame,
and be made clean from the filth!"
"I don't know that I understand you, sir. What do you mean by the
defilement? Is it not to have done the deed that is the defilement?"
"Is it not rather to have that in you, a part, or all but a part of
your being, that makes you capable of doing it? If you had resisted
and conquered, you would have been clean from it; and now, if you
repent and God comes to you, you will yet be clean. Again I say, let
us keep our shame and be made clean! Shame is not defilement, though
a mean pride persuades men so. On the contrary, the man who is
honestly ashamed has begun to be clean."
"But what good would that do to Emmeline? It cannot bring her up
again to the bright world out of the dark grave."
"Emmeline is not in the dark grave."
"Where is she, then?" he said with a ghastly look.
"That I cannot tell. I only know that, if there be a God, she is in
his hands," replied the curate.
The youth gazed on in his face and made no answer. Wingfold saw that
he had been wrong in trying to comfort him with the thought of God
dwelling in him. How was such a poor passionate creature to take
that for a comfort? How was he to understand or prize the idea, who
had his spiritual nature so all undeveloped? He would try another
way.
"Shall I tell you what seems to me sometimes the only one thing I
want to help me out of my difficulties?"
"Yes, please, sir," answered Leopold, as humbly as a child.
"I think sometimes, if I could but see Jesus for one moment--"
"Ah!" cried Leopold, and gave a great sigh.
'YOU would like to see him then, would you?"
"Oh, Mr. Wingfold!"
"What would you say to him if you saw him?"
"I don't know. I would fall down on my face and hold his feet lest
he should go away from me."
"Do you think then he could help you?"
"Yes. He could make Emmeline alive again. He could destroy what I
have done."
"But still, as you say, the crime would remain."
"But, as you say, he could pardon that, and make me that I would
never never sin again."
"So you think the story about Jesus Christ is true?"
"Yes. Don't you?" said Leopold with an amazed, half-frightened look.
"Yes, indeed I do.--Then do you remember what he said to his
disciples as he left them: 'I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS UNTO THE END OF THE
WORLD'?--If that be true, then he can hear you just as well now as
ever he could. And when he was in the world, he said, 'COME UNTO ME
ALL YE THAT LABOUR AND ARE HEAVY-LADEN, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST.'
It is rest you want, my poor boy--not deliverance from danger or
shame, but rest--such peace of mind as you had when you were a
child. If he cannot give you that, I know not where or how it is to
be had. Do not waste time in asking yourself how he can do it: that
is for him to understand, not you--until it is done. Ask him to
forgive you and make you clean and set things right for you. If he
will not do it, then he is not the saviour of men, and was wrongly
named Jesus."
The curate rose. Leopold had hid his face. When he looked again he
was gone.
CHAPTER XXVI.
SLEEP.
As Wingfold came out of the room, which was near the stair, Helen
rose from the top of it, where she had been sitting all the time he
had been with her brother. He closed the door gently behind him, and
stepped softly along the landing. A human soul in guilt and agony is
an awful presence, but there was more than that in the hush of the
curate: he felt as if he had left the physician of souls behind him
at the bedside; that a human being lay on the rack of the truth, but
at his head stood one who watched his throes with the throbs of such
a human heart as never beat in any bosom but his own, and the
executioners were angels of light. No wonder if with such a feeling
in his breast Wingfold walked softly, and his face glistened! He was
not aware that the tears stood in his eyes, but Helen saw them.
"You know all!" she faltered.
"I do. Will you let me out by the garden again? I wish to be alone."
She led the way down the stair, and walked with him through the
garden. Wingfold did not speak.
"You don't think very badly of my poor brother, do you, Mr.
Wingfold?" said Helen, meekly.
"It is a terrible fate," he returned. "I think I never saw a
lovelier disposition. I do hope his mind will soon be more composed.
I think he knows where alone he can find rest. I am well aware how
foolish that of which I speak seems to some minds, Miss Lingard; but
when a man is once overwhelmed in his own deeds, when they have
turned into spectres to mock at him, when he loathes himself and
turns with sickness from past, present, and future, I know but one
choice left, and that is between the death your friend Mr. Bascombe
preaches, and the life preached by Jesus, the crucified Jew. Into
the life I hope your brother will enter."
"I am so glad you don't hate him."
"Hate him! Who but a demon could hate him?"
Helen lifted a grateful look from eyes that swam in tears. The
terror of his possible counsel for the moment vanished. He could
never tell him to give himself up!
"But, as I told you, I am a poor scholar in these high matters,"
resumed the curate, "and I want to bring Mr. Polwarth to see him."
"The dwarf!" exclaimed Helen, shuddering at the remembrance of what
she had gone through at the cottage.
"Yes. That man's soul is as grand and beautiful and patient as his
body is insignificant and distorted and troubled. He is the wisest
and best man I have ever known.
"I must ask Leopold," returned Helen, who, the better the man was
represented, felt the more jealous and fearful of the advice he
might give. Her love and her conscience were not yet at one with
each other.
They parted at the door from the garden, and she returned to the
sick-room.
She paused, hesitating to enter. All was still as the grave. She
turned the handle softly and peeped in: could it be that Wingfold's
bearing had communicated to her mind a shadow of the awe with which
he had left the place where perhaps a soul was being born again?
Leopold did not move. Terror laid hold of her heart. She stepped
quickly in, and round the screen to the side of the bed. There, to
her glad surprise, he lay fast asleep, with the tears not yet dried
upon his face. Her heart swelled with some sense unknown before: was
it rudimentary thankfulness to the Father of her spirit?
As she stood gazing with the look of a mother over her sick child,
he lifted his eyelids, and smiled a sad smile.
"When did you come into the room?" he said.
"A minute ago," she answered.
"I did not hear you," he returned.
"No, you were asleep."
"Not I! Mr. Wingfold is only just gone."
"I have let him out on the meadow since."
Leopold stared, looked half alarmed, and then said,
"Did God make me sleep, Helen?"
She did not answer. The light of a new hope in his eye, as if the
dawn had begun at last to break over the dark mountains, was already
reflected from her heart.
"Oh! Helen," he said, "that IS a good fellow, SUCH a good fellow!"
A pang of jealousy, the first she had ever felt, shot to her heart:
she had hitherto, since his trouble, been all in all to her Leopold!
Had the curate been a man she liked, she would not perhaps have
minded it so much.
"You will be able to do without me now," she said sadly. "I never
could understand taking to people at first sight!"
"Some people are made so, I suppose, Helen. I know I took to you at
first sight! I shall never forget the first time I saw you--when I
came to this country a lonely little foreigner,--and you, a great
beautiful lady, for such you seemed to me, though you have told me
since you were only a great gawky girl--I know that could never have
been--you ran to meet me, and took me in your arms, and kissed me. I
was as if I had crossed the sea of death and found paradise in your
bosom! I am not likely to forget you for Mr. Wingfold, good and kind
and strong as he is! Even SHE could not make me forget you, Helen.
But neither you nor I can do without Mr. Wingfold any more, I fancy.
I wish you liked him better!--but you will in time. You see he's not
one to pay young ladies compliments, as I have heard some parsons
do; and he may be a little--no, not unpolished, not that--that's not
what I mean--but unornamental in his manners! Only, you see,--"
"Only, you see, Poldie," interrupted Helen, with a smile, a rare
thing between them, "you know all about him, though you never saw
him before."
"That is true," returned Leopold; "but then he came to me with his
door open, and let me walk in. It doesn't take long to know a man
then. He hasn't got a secret like us, Helen," he added, sadly.
"What did he say to you?"
"Much what he said to you from the pulpit the other day, I should
think."
Then she was right! For all his hardness and want of sympathy, the
curate had yet had regard to her entreaties, and was not going to
put any horrid notions about duty and self-sacrifice into the poor
boy's head!
"He's coming again to-morrow," added Leopold, almost gleefully, "and
then perhaps he will tell me more, and help me on a bit!"
"Did he tell you he wants to bring a friend with him?"
"No."
"I can't see the good of taking more people into our confidence."
"Why should he not do what he thinks best, Helen? You don't
interfere with the doctor--why should you with him? When a man is
going to the bottom as fast as he can, and another comes diving
after him--it isn't for me to say how he is to take hold of me. No,
Helen; when I trust, I trust out and out."
Helen sighed, thinking how ill that had worked with Emmeline.
Ever since George Bascombe had talked about the Polwarths that day
they met him in the park, she had felt a sort of physical horror of
them, as if they were some kind of unclean creature that ought not
to be in existence at all. But when Leopold uttered himself thus,
she felt that the current of events had seized her, and that she
could only submit to be carried along.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 | 8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12