Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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George MacDonald >> Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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The outside weather, although she was far past heeding that, was in
harmony with her soul's weather. A dull dark-grey fog hung from the
sky, and without much obscuring the earth altogether hid the sun.
The air was very cold. There was neither joy nor hope anywhere. The
bushes were leafless and budless, the summer gone, the spring not
worth hoping for, because it also would go: spring after spring
came--for nothing but to go again! Things were so empty and wretched
that pain and grief, almost fear itself, would have been welcome.
The world around her, yes, all her life, all herself, was but the
cold dead body of a summer-world. And Leopold was going to be buried
with the summer. His smiles had all gone with the flowers. The weeds
of his troubles were going also, for they would die with him. But he
would not know it and be glad, any more than she, who was left
caring for neither summer nor winter, joy nor sorrow, love nor hate,
the past nor the future.
Many such thoughts wandered hazily through her mind as she now sat
holding the hand of him who was fast sleeping away from her into
death. Her eyes were fixed on the window through which he had
entered that terrible night, but she saw nothing beyond it.
"He is gone" said Polwarth in a voice that sounded unknown to the
ears of Helen, and as he spoke he kneeled.
She started up with a cry, and looked in her brother's face. She had
never seen anyone die, and yet she saw that he was dead.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE SUNSET.
How the terrible time, terrible for its very dulness and
insensibility, passed until it brought the funeral, Helen could not
have told. It seemed to her, as she looked back upon it, a bare
blank, yet was the blank full of a waste weariness of heart. The
days were all one, outside and inside. Her heart was but a lonely
narrow bay to the sea of cold immovable fog that filled the world.
No one tried to help, no one indeed knew her trouble. Everyone took
it for grief at the loss of her brother, while to herself it was the
oppression of a life that had not even the interest of pain. The
curate had of course called to inquire after her, but had not been
invited to enter. George had been everywhere with help, but had no
word to speak.
The day of the funeral came, in thin fog and dull cold. The few
friends gathered. The body was borne to the Abbey. The curate
received it at the gate in the name of the church--which takes our
children in its arms, and our bodies into its garden--save indeed
where her gardener is some foolish priest who knows not the heart of
his mother, and will pick and choose among her dead;--the lovely
words of the last-first of the apostles, were read; and earth was
given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great
workman works withal. Cold was Helen's heart, cold her body, cold
her very being. The earth, the air, the mist, the very light was
cold. The past was cold, the future yet colder. She would have
grudged Leopold his lonely rest in the grave, but that she had not
feeling enough even for that. Her life seemed withering away from
her, like an autumn flower in the frosts of winter; and she, as if
she had been but a flower, did not seem to care. What was life
worth, when it had not strength to desire even its own continuance?
Heartless she returned from the grave, careless of George's mute
attentions, not even scornful of her aunt's shallow wail over the
uncertainty of life and all things human,--so indifferent to the
whole misery that she walked straight up to the room, hers once
more, from which the body had just been carried, and which, for so
many many weary weeks, had been the centre of loving pain, sometimes
agony. Once more she was at peace--but what a peace!
She took off her cloak and bonnet, laid them on the bed, went to the
window, sat down, and gazed, hardly seeing, out on the cold garden
with its sodden earth, its leafless shrubs, and perennial trees of
darkness and mourning. The meadow lay beyond, and there she did see
the red cow busily feeding, and was half-angry with her. Beyond the
meadow stood the trees, with the park behind them. And yet further
behind lay the hollow with the awful house in its bosom, its dismal
haunted lake and its ruined garden. But nothing moved her. She could
have walked over every room in that house without a single quaver of
the praecordia. Poldie was dead, but was it not well? Even if he had
not been in trouble, what should his death matter? She would die
soon herself and for ever: what did that or anything else matter?
Might she but keep this dulness of spirit, and never more wake to
weep foolish tears over an existence the whole upstanding
broad-based fact of which was not worth one drop in the rivers of
weeping that had been flowing ever since the joyless birth of this
unconceived, ill-fated, unfathered world! To the hour of death
belonged jubilation and not mourning; the hour of birth was the hour
of sorrow. Back to the darkness! was the cry of a life whose very
being was an injury, only there was no one to have done the injury.
Thus she sat until she was summoned to dinner--early for the sake of
the friends whose home lay at a distance. She ate and drank and took
her share in the talk as matter of course, believing all at the
table would judge her a heartless creature, and careless of what
they might think or say. But they judged her more kindly and more
truly than she judged herself. They saw through her eyes the deeps
whose upward ducts were choked with the frost of an unknown despair.
No sooner was she at liberty than again she sought her room, not
consciously from love to her brother who had died there, but because
the deadness of her heart chose a fitting loneliness: and again she
seated herself at the window.
The dreary day was drawing to a close, and the night, drearier it
could not be, was at hand. The gray had grown darker, and she sat
like one waiting for the night like a monster coming to claim its
own and swallow her up.
Something--was it an invasion of reviving light? caused her to lift
her eyes. Away, sideways from her window, in the west, the mist had
cleared a little--somewhere about the sun. Thinner and thinner it
grew. No sun came forth: he was already down; but a canopy of faint
amber grew visible, stretched above his tomb. It was the stuff of
which sad smiles are made, not a thing that belonged to gladness.
But only he who has lost his sorrow without regaining his joy, can
tell how near sorrow lieth to joy. Who that has known the dull paths
of listless no-feeling, would not have his sorrow back with all its
attendant agonies?
The pale amber spread, dilute with light, and beneath it lay the
gray of the fog, and above it the dark blue of cloud--not of sky.
The soul of it was so still, so resigned, so sad, so forsaken, that
she who had thought her heart gone from her, suddenly felt its wells
were filling, and soon they overflowed. She wept. At what? A colour
in the sky! Was there then a God that knew sadness--and was that a
banner of grief he hung forth to comfort the sorrowful with
sympathy? Or was it but a godless colour which the heart varnished
with its own grief? Or if the human heart came from nothing and was
sad, why might not the aspects of nature come from nothing and be
sad too--wrought in harmony with the unutterable woe of humanity?
Then either is man the constructive centre of the world, and its
meanings are but his own face looking back upon him from the mirror
of his own projected atmosphere, and comfort there is none; or he is
not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and
colours the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man
the one conscious point and object of a vast derision--insentient
nature grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks
and makes mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all,
being at once that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but
writhes in agony under the mockery. Such as Bascombe reply that they
find it not so. I answer--For the best of reasons, that it is not
so.
Helen's doubts did not stay her weeping, as doubt generally does;
for the sky with its sweet sadness was before her, and deep in her
heart a lake of tears, which, now that it had begun to flow, would
not be stayed. She knew not why she wept, knew not that it was the
sympathy of that pale amber of sad resignation which brought her
relief: but she wept and wept, until her heart began to stir, and
her tears came cooler and freer.
"Oh Poldie! my own Poldie!" she cried at length, and fell upon her
knees--not-to worship the sky--not to pray to Poldie, or even for
Poldie--not indeed to pray at all, so far as she knew; yet I doubt
if it was merely and only from the impulse of the old childish habit
of saying prayers.
But in a moment she grew restless. There was no Poldie! She rose and
walked about the room. And he came back to her soul, her desolate
brother, clothed, alas! in the rags and tatters of all the unkind
and unjust thoughts she had ever had concerning him, and wearing on
his face the reflection of her worse deeds. She had stood between
him and the only poor remnant of peace, consolation, and hope that
it was possible he should have; and it was through the friends whom
she had treated with such distance and uncordiality that he did
receive it. Then out rushed from the chamber of her memory the
vision of the small dark nervous wild-looking Indian boy who gazed
at her but for one questioning moment, then shot into her arms and
nestled in her bosom. How had she justified that faith? She had
received, and sheltered, and shielded him, doubtless, and would have
done so with her life, yet, when it came to the test, she had loved
herself better than him, and would have doomed him to agony rather
than herself to disgrace. Oh Poldie! Poldie! But he could not hear!
Never, for evermore, should she utter to him word of sorrow or
repentance! never beg his forgiveness, or let him know that now she
knew better, and had risen above such weakness and selfishness!
She stopped, and looked sadly from the window. The sky was cloudless
overhead, and the amber pall was fainter and clearer over the tomb
of the sun. She turned hastily to the bed where lay her cloak and
bonnet, put them on with trembling hands, and went out by that same
window into the garden. She could not help a shudder as she stood in
the dark passage unlocking the door in the sunk fence, but the next
minute she was crossing the meadow through the cold frosty twilight
air, now clear of its fog, and seeming somehow to comfort, uplift,
and strengthen her. The red cow was still feeding there. She stopped
and talked to her a little. She seemed one of Poldie's friends, and
Poldie had come back to her heart if he might never more to her
arms, and she was now on her way to one of his best friends, whom,
as more worthy, he had loved even better than her, and whom she had
not honoured as they deserved or as he must have desired. To get
near them, would be to get nearer to Poldie. At least she would be
with those whom he had loved, and who, she did not doubt, still
loved him, believing him still alive. She could not go to the
curate, but she could go to the Polwarths; no one would blame her
for that-except indeed George. But even George should not come
between her and what mere show of communion with Poldie was left
her! She would keep her freedom--would rather break with George than
lose an atom of her liberty! She would be no clay for his hands to
mould after his pleasure!
She opened the door in the fence and entered the park, seeming to
recover strength with every step she took towards Poldie's friends.
It was almost dark when she stood at the lodge-door and knocked.
CHAPTER XXVI.
AN HONEST SPY.
No one answered Helen's knock. She repeated it, and still no answer
came. Her heart might have failed her, but that she heard voices:
what if they were talking about Leopold? At length, after knocking
four or five times, she heard the step as of a child coming down a
stair; but it passed the door. Clearly no one had heard her. She
knocked yet again, and immediately it was opened by Rachel. The
pleasured surprise that shone up in her face when she saw who it was
that stood without, was lovely to see, and Helen, on whose miserable
isolation it came like a sunrise of humanity, took no counsel with
pride, but, in simple gratitude for the voiceless yet eloquent
welcome, bent down and kissed her. The little arms were flung about
her neck, and the kiss returned with such a gentle warmth and
restrained sweetness as would have satisfied the most fastidious in
the matter of salute--to which class, however, Helen did not belong,
for she seldom kissed anyone. Then Rachel took her by the hand, and
led her into the kitchen, placed a chair for her near the fire, and
said,
"I AM sorry there is no fire in the parlour. The gentlemen are in my
uncle's room. Oh, Miss Lingard, I do wish you could have heard how
they have been talking!"
"Have they been saying anything about my brother?" asked Helen.
"It's all about him," she replied.
"May I ask who the gentlemen are?" said Helen doubtfully.
"Mr. Wingfold and Mr. Drew. They are often here."
"Is it--do you mean Mr. Drew, the draper?"
"Yes. He is one of Mr. Wingfold's best pupils. He brought him to my
uncle, and he has come often ever since."
"I never heard that--Mr. Wingfold--took pupils.--I am afraid I do
not quite understand you.
"I would have said DISCIPLES," returned Rachel smiling; "but that
has grown to feel such a sacred word--as if it belonged only to the
Master, that I didn't like to use it. It would say best what I mean
though; for there are people in Glaston that are actually mending
their ways because of Mr. Wingfold's teaching, and Mr. Drew was the
first of them. It is long since such a thing was heard of in the
Abbey. It never was in my time."
Helen sighed. She wished it had remained possible for her also to
become one of Mr. Wingfold's pupils, but how could she now when she
had learned that what he had to teach was at best but a lovely
phantasm, sprung of the seething together of the conscience and
imagination. George could give account of the whole matter: religion
invariably excited the imagination and weakened the conscience;--witness
the innumerable tales concerning Jesus invented in the first of the
Christian centuries, and about this and that saint in those that
followed! Helen's experience in Leopold's case had certainly been
different, but the other fact remained. Alas, she could not be a pupil
of Mr. Wingfold! She could no longer deceive herself with such comfort.
And yet!--COME UNTO ME, AND _I_ WILL GIVE YOU REST.
"I do wish I could hear them," she said.
"And why not?" returned Rachel. "There is not one of them would not
be glad to see you. I know that."
"I am afraid I should hinder their talk. Would they speak just as
freely as if I were not there? Not that I know why they shouldn't,"
she added; "only the presence of any stranger--"
"You are no stranger to Mr. Wingfold or my uncle," said Rachel, "and
I daresay you know Mr. Drew?"
"To tell you the truth, Miss Polwarth, I have not behaved as I
should either to your uncle or Mr. Wingfold. I know it now that my
brother is gone. They were so good to him! I feel now as if I had
been possessed with an evil spirit. I could not bear them to be more
to him than I was. Oh, how I should like to hear what they are
saying! I feel as if I should get a glimpse of Leopold--almost, if I
might. But I couldn't face them all together. I could not go into
the room."
Rachel was silent for a moment, thinking. Then she said:
"I'll tell you what then: there's no occasion. Between my uncle's
room and mine there's a little closet, where you shall sit and hear
every word. Nothing will divide you from them but a few thin old
boards."
"That would hardly be honourable though--would it?"
"I will answer for it. I shall tell my uncle afterwards. There may
be cases where the motive makes the right or the wrong. It's not as
if you were listening to find out secrets. I shall be in the room,
and that will be a connecting link, you know: they never turn me
out. Come now. We don't know what we may be losing."
The desire to hear Leopold's best friends talk about him was strong
in Helen, but her heart misgave her: was it not unbecoming? She
would be in terror of discovery all the time. In the middle of the
stair, she drew Rachel back and whispered,
"I dare not do it."
"Come on," said Rachel. "Hear what I shall say to them first. After
that you shall do as you please."
Evidently, so quick was her response, her thoughts had been going in
the same direction as Helen's.
"Thank you for trusting me," she added, as Helen again followed her.
Arrived at the top, the one stood trembling, while the other went
into the room.
"Uncle," said Rachel, "I have a friend in the house who is very
anxious to hear you and our friends speak your minds to each other,
but for reasons does not wish to appear: will you allow my friend to
listen without being seen?"
"Is it your wish, Rachel, or are you only conveying the request of
another?" asked her uncle.
"It is my wish," answered Rachel. "I really desire it--if you do not
mind."
She looked from one to another as she spoke. The curate and the
draper indicated a full acquiescence.
"Do you know quite what you are about, Rachel?" asked Polwarth.
"Perfectly, uncle," she answered. "There is no reason why you should
not talk as freely as if you were talking only to me. I will put my
friend in the closet, and you need never think that anyone is in the
house but ourselves."
"Then I have no more to say," returned her uncle with a smile. "Your
FRIEND, whoever he or she may be, is heartily welcome."
Rachel rejoined Helen, who had already drawn nearer to the door of
the closet, and now seated herself right willingly in its shelter,
amidst an atmosphere odorous of apples and herbs. Already the talk
was going on just as before. At first each of the talkers did now
and then remember there was a listener unseen but found, when the
conversation came to a close, that he had for a long time forgotten
it.
CHAPTER XXVII.
WHAT HELEN HEARD,
Although satisfied that, after what Rachel had said to the men,
there could be no impropriety in her making use of the privilege
granted her, Helen felt oddly uncomfortable at first. But soon the
fancy came, that she was listening at the door of the other world to
catch news of her Leopold, and that made her forget herself and put
her at peace. For some time, however, the conversation was
absolutely unintelligible to her. She understood the words and
phrases, and even some of the sentences, but as she had no clue to
their drift, the effort to understand was like attempting to realize
the span of a rainbow from a foot or two of it appearing now and
then in different parts and vanishing again at once. It was chiefly
Polwarth, often Wingfold, and now and then Drew that spoke, Rachel
contributing only an occasional word. At length broke something of a
dawn over the seeming chaos. The words from which the light that
first reached Helen flowed, were the draper's.
"I can't think, for all that," he said, "why, if there be life
beyond the grave, and most sincerely I trust there is--I don't see
why we should know so little about it. Confess now, Mr.
Polwarth!--Mr. Wingfold!" he said appealingly, "--does it not seem
strange that, if our dearest friends go on living somewhere else,
they should, the moment they cease to breathe, pass away from us
utterly--so utterly that from that moment neither hint nor trace nor
sign of their existence ever reaches us? Nature, the Bible, God
himself says nothing about how they exist or where they are, or why
they are so silent--cruelly silent if it be in their power to
speak,--therefore, they cannot; and here we are left not only with
aching hearts but wavering faith, not knowing whither to turn to
escape the stare of the awful blank, that seems in the very
intensity of its silence to shout in our ears that we are but dust
and return to the dust!"
The gate-keeper and curate interchanged a pleased look of surprise
at the draper's eloquence, but Polwarth instantly took up his
answer.
"I grant you it would be strange indeed if there were no good reason
for it," he said.
"Then do you say," asked Wingfold. "that until we see, discover, or
devise some good reason for the darkness that overhangs it, we are
at liberty to remain in doubt as to whether there be any life within
the cloud?"
"I would say so," answered Polwarth, "were it not that we have the
story of Jesus, which, if we accept it, is surely enough to satisfy
us both as to the thing itself, and as to the existence of a good
reason, whether we have found one or not, for the mystery that
overshadows it."
"Still I presume we are not forbidden to seek such a reason," said
the curate.
The draper was glancing from the one to the other with evident
anxiety.
"Certainly not," returned the gate-keeper. "For what else is our
imagination given us but the discovery of good reasons that are, or
the invention of good reasons that may perhaps be?"
"Can you then imagine any good reason," said Drew, "why we should be
kept in such absolute ignorance of everything that befalls the
parted spirit from the moment it quits its house with us?"
"I think I know one," answered Polwarth. "I have sometimes fancied
it might be because no true idea of their condition could possibly
be grasped by those who remain in the tabernacle of the body; that
to know their state it is necessary that we also should be clothed
in our new bodies, which are to the old as a house to a tent. I
doubt if we have any words in which the new facts could be imparted
to our knowledge, the facts themselves being beyond the reach of any
senses whereof we are now in actual possession. I expect to find my
new body provided with new, I mean OTHER senses beyond what I now
possess: many more may be required to bring us into relation with
all the facts in himself which God may have shadowed forth in
properties, as we say, of what we call matter. The spaces all around
us, even to those betwixt star and star, may be the home of the
multitudes of the heavenly host, yet seemingly empty to all who have
but our provision of senses. But I do not care to dwell upon that
kind of speculation. It belongs to a lower region, upon which I
grudge to expend interest while the far loftier one invites me,
where, if I gather not the special barley of which I am in search, I
am sure to come upon the finest of wheat.--Well, then, for my
reason: There are a thousand individual events in the course of
every man's life, by which God takes a hold of him--a thousand
breaches by which he would and does enter, little as the man may
know it; but there is one universal and unchanging grasp he keeps
upon the race, yet not as the race, for the grasp is upon every
solitary single individual that has a part in it: that grasp
is--death in its mystery. To whom can the man who is about to die in
absolute loneliness and go he cannot tell whither, flee for refuge
from the doubts and fears that assail him, but to the Father of his
being?"
"But," said Drew, "I cannot see what harm would come of letting us
know a little--as much at least as might serve to assure us that
there was more of SOMETHING on the other side."
"Just this," returned Polwarth, "that, their fears allayed, their
hopes encouraged from any lower quarter, men would, as usual, turn
away from the fountain to the cistern of life, from the ever fresh
original creative Love to that drawn off and shut in. That there are
thousands who would forget God if they could but be assured of such
a tolerable state of things beyond the grave as even this wherein we
now live, is plainly to be anticipated from the fact that the doubts
of so many in respect of religion concentrate themselves now-a-days
upon the question whether there is any life beyond the grave; a
question which, although no doubt nearly associated with
religion,--as what question worth asking is not?--does not
immediately belong to religion at all. Satisfy such people, if you
can, that they shall live, and what have they gained? A little
comfort perhaps--but a comfort not from the highest source, and
possibly gained too soon for their well-being. Does it bring them
any nearer to God than they were before? Is he filling one cranny
more of their hearts in consequence? Their assurance of immortality
has not come from a knowledge of him, and without him it is worse
than worthless. Little indeed has been gained, and that with the
loss of much. The word applies here which our Lord in his parable
puts into the mouth of Abraham: If they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the
dead. He does not say they would not believe in a future state
though one rose from the dead--although most likely they would soon
persuade themselves that the apparition after all was only an
illusion--[Footnote: See Lynch's admirable sermon on this subject.]
but that they would not be persuaded to repent, though one rose from
the dead; and without that, what great matter whether they believed
in a future state or not? It would only be the worse for them if
they did. No, Mr. Drew! I repeat, it is not a belief in immortality
that will deliver a man from the woes of humanity, but faith in the
God of life, the father of lights, the God of all consolation and
comfort. Believing in him, a man can leave his friends, and their
and his own immortality, with everything else--even his and their
love and perfection, with utter confidence in his hands. Until we
have the life in us, we shall never be at peace. The living God
dwelling in the heart he has made, and glorifying it by inmost
speech with himself--that is life, assurance, and safety. Nothing
less is or can be such."
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