Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3

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"'And scarce had I turned in thither when, lo! thither came the maiden
also, flying in my footsteps, and driven of the self-same mighty
wind. And I turned in pity and said, Fear not, my child. Here is but
an old man with a sore and withered heart, and he will not harm
thee.--I fear thee not, she answered, else would I not have
followed thee.--Thou didst not follow me of thine own inclining, I
said, but the wind that came from the mountains and swept me before
it, did bear thee after me.--Truly I know of no wind, she said, but
the wind of my own following of thee. Wherefore didst thou flee from
me?--Nay! but wherefore didst thou follow me, maiden?--That I might
tell thee my dream to the which thou didst desire to hearken. For,
lo! as I slept I dreamed that a man came unto me and said, Behold, I
am the unresting and undying one, and my burden is greater than I
can bear, for Death who befriendeth all is my enemy, and will not
look upon me in peace. And with that came the cry, and I awoke, and
ran out to see whence came the cry, and found thee alone in the
street. And as God liveth, such as was the man in my dream, such art
thou in my waking sight.--Not the less must I ask thee again, I
said, wherefore didst thou follow me?--That I may comfort thee, she
answered.--And how thinkest thou to comfort one whom God hath
forsaken?--That cannot be, she said, seeing that in a vision of the
night he sent thee unto me, and so now hath sent me unto thee.
Therefore will I go with thee, and minister unto thee.--Bethink thee
well what thou doest, I said; and before thou art fully resolved,
sit thee down by me in this cave, that I may tell thee my tale. And
straightway she sat down, and I told her all. And ere I had finished
the sun had risen.--Then art thou now alone, said the maiden, and
hast no one to love thee?--No one, I answered, man, woman, or
child.--Then will I go with thee, for I know neither father nor
mother, and no one hath power over me, for I keep goats on the
mountains for wages, and if thou wilt but give me bread to eat I
will serve thee. And a great love arose in my heart to the maiden.
And I left her in the cave, and went to the nearest city, and
returned thence with garments and victuals. And I loved the maiden
greatly. And although my age was then marvellous being over and
above a thousand and seven hundred years, yet found she my person
neither pitiful nor uncomely, for I was still in body even such as
when the Lord Jesus spake the word of my doom. And the damsel loved
me, and was mine. And she was as the apple of mine eye. And the
world was no more unto me as a desert, but it blossomed as the rose
of Sharon. And although I knew every city upon it, and every highway
and navigable sea, yet did all become to me fresh and new because of
the joy which the damsel had in beholding its kingdoms and the
glories thereof.

"'And it came to pass that my heart grew proud within me, and I said
to myself that I was all-superior to other men, for Death could not
touch me; that I was a marvel upon the face of the world; and in
this yet more above all men that had ever lived, that at such an age
as mine I could yet gain the love, yea, the absolute devotion, of
such an one as my wife, who never wearied of my company and
conversation. So I took to me even the free grace of love as my
merit unto pride, and laid it not to the great gift of God and the
tenderness of the heart of my beloved. Like Satan in Heaven I was
uplifted in the strength and worthiness and honour of my demon-self,
and my pride went not forth in thanks, for I gloried not in my God,
but in Ahasuerus. Then the thought smote me like an arrow of
lightning: She will die, and thou shalt live--live--live--and as he
hath delayed, so will he yet delay his coming. And as Satan from the
seventh heaven, I fell prone.

"'Then my spirit began again to revive within me, and I said, Lo! I
have yet many years of her love ere she dieth, and when she is gone,
I shall yet have the memory of my beloved to be with me, and cheer
me, and bear me up, for I may never again despise that which she
hath loved as she hath loved me. And yet again a thought smote me,
and it was as an arrow of the lightning, and its barb was the truth:
But she will grow old, it said, and will wither before thy face, and
be as the waning moon in the heavens. And my heart cried out in an
agony. But my will sought to comfort my heart, and said, Cry not
out, for, in spite of old age as in spite of death, I will love her
still. Then something began to writhe within me, and to hiss out
words that gathered themselves unto this purpose: But she will grow
unlovely, and wrinkled, and dark of hue, and the shape of her body
will vanish, and her form be unformed, and her eyes will grow small
and dim, and creep back into her head, and her hair will fall from
her, and she shall be as the unsightly figure of Death with a skin
drawn over his unseemly bones; and the damsel of thy love, with the
round limbs and the flying hair, and the clear eyes out of which
looketh a soul clear as they, will be nowhere--nowhere, for
evermore, for thou wilt not be able to believe that she it is who
standeth before thee: how will it be with thee then? And what mercy
is his who hath sent thee a growing loss in the company of this
woman? Thereupon I rose in the strength of my agony and went forth.
And I said nothing unto my wife, but strode to the foot of the great
mountain, whose entrails were all aglow, and on whose sides grew the
palm and the tree-bread and the nut of milk. And I climbed the
mountain, nor once looked behind me, but climbed to the top. And
there for one moment I stood in the stock-dullness of despair. And
beneath me was the great fiery gulf, outstretched like a red lake
skinned over with black ice, through the cracks wherein shone the
blinding fire. Every moment here and there a great liquid bubbling
would break through the crust, and make a wallowing heap upon the
flat, then sink again, leaving an open red well-pool of fire whence
the rays shot up like flame, although flame there was none. It lay
like the back of some huge animal upheaved out of hell, which was
wounded and bled fire.--Now, in the last year of my long sojourn,
life had again, because of the woman that loved me, become precious
unto me, and more than once had I laughed as I caught myself
starting back from some danger in a crowded street, for the thing
was new to me, so utterly had the care of my life fallen into disuse
with me. But now again in my misery I thought no more of danger, but
went stalking and sliding down the sindery slope of the huge
fire-cup, and out upon the lake of molten earth--molten as when
first it shot from the womb of the sun, of whose ardour, through all
the millions of years, it had not yet cooled. And as once St. Peter
on the stormy water to find the Lord of Life, so walked I on the
still lake of fire, caring neither for life nor death. For my heart
was withered to the roots by the thought of the decay of her whom I
had loved; for would not then her very presence every hour be
causing me to forget the beauty that had once made me glad?--I had
walked some ten furlongs, and passed the middle of the lake, when
suddenly I bethought me that she would marvel whither I had gone,
and set out to seek me, and something might befall her, and I should
lose my rose ere its leaves had begun to drop. And I turned and
strode again in haste across the floor of black heat, broken and
seamed with red light. And lo! as I neared the midst of the lake, a
form came towards me, walking in the very footsteps I had left
behind me, nor had I to look again to know the gracious motion of my
beloved. And the black ice broke at her foot, and the fire shone up
on her face, and it was lovely as an angel of God, and the glow of
her love outshone the glow of the nether fire. And I called not to
stay her foot, for I judged that the sooner she was with me, the
sooner would she be in safety, for I knew how to walk thereon better
than she. And my heart sang a song within me in praise of the love
of woman, but I thought only of the love of my woman to me, whom the
fires of hell could not hold back from him who was worthy of her
love; and my heart sent the song up to my lips; but, as the first
word arose, sure itself a red bubble from the pit of glowing hell,
the black crust burst up between us, and a great hillock of
seething, slow-spouting, slow-falling, mad red fire arose. For a
moment or two the molten mound bubbled and wallowed, then sank--and
I saw not my wife. Headlong I plunged into the fiery pool at my
feet, and the clinging torture hurt me not, and I caught her in my
arms, and rose to the surface, and crept forth, and shook the fire
from mine eyes, and lo! I held to my bosom but as the fragment of a
cinder of the furnace. And I laughed aloud in my madness, and the
devils below heard me, and laughed yet again. O Age! O Decay! I
cried, see how I triumph over thee: what canst thou do to this? And
I flung the cinder from me into the pool, and plunged again into the
grinning fire. But it cast me out seven times, and the seventh time
I turned from it, and rushed out of the valley of burning, and threw
myself on the mountain-side in the moonlight, and awoke mad.

"'And what I had then said in despair, I said yet again in
thankfulness. O Age! O Decay! I cried, what canst thou now do to
destroy the image of her which I bear nested in my heart of hearts?
That at least is safe, I thank God. And from that hour I never more
believed that I should die when at length my body dropped from me.
If the thought came, it came as a fear, and not as a thing
concerning which a man may say I would or I would not. For a mighty
hope had arisen within me that yet I should stand forgiven in the
eyes of him that was crucified, and that in token of his forgiveness
he would grant me to look again, but in peace, upon the face of her
that had loved me. O mighty Love, who can tell to what heights of
perfection thou mayest yet rise in the bosom of the meanest who
followeth the Crucified!'"

CHAPTER XIII.

REMARKS.

Polwarth closed the manuscript, and for a time no one spoke.

"The man who wrote that book," said Wingfold, "could not have been
all out of his right mind."

"I must confess to you," returned Polwarth, "that I have chosen some
of the more striking passages--only some of them however. One thing
is pretty clear--that, granted the imagined conditions, within that
circle the writer is sane enough--as sane at least as the Wandering
Jew himself could well have been."

"Could you trust me with the manuscript, Mr. Polwarth?" said the
curate.

"Willingly," said Polwarth, handing it to him.

"And I may carry it home with me?"

"Certainly."

"I shall take right good care of it. Are there any further memorials
of struggle with unbelief?"

"Yes, there are some; for mood and not conviction must, in such a
mind, often rule the hour. Sometimes he can believe; sometimes he
cannot: he is a great man indeed who can always rise above his own
moods! There is one passage I specially remember in which after his
own fashion he treats of the existence of a God. You will know the
one I mean when you come to it."

"It is indeed a treasure!" said the curate, taking the book and
regarding it with prizing eyes. In his heart he was thinking of
Leopold and Helen. And while he thus regarded the book, he was
himself regarded of the gray luminous eyes of Rachel. What shone
from those eyes may have been her delight at hearing him so speak of
the book, for the hand that wrote it was that of her father; but
there was a lingering in her gaze, not unmixed with questioning, and
a certain indescribable liquidity in its light, reminding one of the
stars as seen through a clear air from which the dew settles thick,
that might have made a mother anxious. Alas for many a woman whose
outward form is ungainly--she has a full round heart under the
twisted ribs!

Why then should I say alas? Were it better that the heart were like
the shape? or are such as Rachel forgotten before the God of the
sparrows? No, surely; but he who most distinctly believes that from
before the face of God every sorrow shall vanish, that they that sow
in tears shall reap in joy, that death is but a mist that for a
season swathes the spirit, and that, ever as the self-seeking
vanishes from love, it groweth more full of delight--even he who
with all his heart believes this, may be mournful over the aching of
another heart while yet it lasts; and he who looks for his own death
as his resurrection, may yet be sorrowful at every pale sunset that
reminds him of the departure of the beloved before him.

The curate rose and took his departure, but the light of the gaze
that had rested upon him lingered yet on the countenance of Rachel,
and a sad half-smile hung over the motions of the baby-like fingers
that knitted so busily.

The draper followed the curate, and Polwarth went up to his own
room: he never could keep off his knees for long together. And as
soon as she was alone, Rachel's hands dropped on her lap, her eyes
closed, and her lips moved with solemn sweet motions. If there was a
hearing ear open to that little house, oh surely those two were
blessed! If not, then kind death was yet for a certainty drawing
nigh--only, what if in deep hell there should be yet a deeper hell?
And until slow Death arrive, what loving heart can bear the load
that stupid Chance or still more stupid Fate has heaped upon it? Yet
had I rather be crushed beneath the weight of mine, and die with my
friends in the moaning of eternal farewells, than live like George
Bascombe to carry lightly his little bag of content. A cursed
confusion indeed is the universe, if it be no creation, but the
helpless unhelpable thing such men would have us believe it--the
hotbed mother of the children of an iron Necessity. Can any
damnation be worse than this damning into an existence from which
there is no refuge but a doubtful death?

Drew overtook Wingfold, and they walked together into Glaston.

"Wasn't that splendid?" said the draper.

"Hath not God chosen the weak things of the world to confound the
mighty?" returned the curate. "Even through the play of a mad-man's
imagination, the spirit of a sound mind may speak. Did you not find
in it some stuff that would shape into answers to your questions?

"I ought to have done so, I dare say," answered the draper, "but to
tell the truth, I was so taken up with the wild story, and the style
of the thing, and the little man's way of reading it, that I never
thought of what I was full of when I came."

They parted at the shop, and the curate went on.

CHAPTER XIV.

STRUGGLES.

He stopped at the Manor House, for it was only beginning to be late,
to inquire after Leopold. Helen received him with her usual
coldness--a manner which was in part assumed for self-protection,
for in his presence she always felt rebuked, and which had the
effect of a veil between them to hide from her much of the curate's
character that might otherwise have been intelligible to her.
Leopold, she said, was a little better, but Wingfold walked home
thinking what a happy thing it would be if God were to take him
away.

His interest in Helen deepened and deepened. He could not help
admiring her strength of character even when he saw it spent for
worse than nought; and her devotion to her brother was lovely,
notwithstanding the stains of selfishness that spotted it. Her moral
standard was indeed far from lofty, and as to her spiritual nature,
that as yet appeared nowhere. And yet the growth in her was
marvellous when he thought of what she had seemed before this
trouble came. One evening as he left Leopold, he heard her singing,
and stood on the stair to listen. And to listen was to marvel. For
her voice, instead of being hard and dry, as when he heard it
before, was, without any loss of elasticity, now liquid and
mellifluous, and full of feeling. Its tones were borne along like
the leaves on the wild west wind of Shelley's sonnet. And the
longing of the curate to help her from that moment took a fresh
departure, and grew and grew. But as the hours and days and weeks
passed, and the longing found no outlet, it turned to an almost
hopeless brooding upon the face and the form, yea the heart and soul
of the woman he so fain would help, until ere long he loved her with
the passion of a man mingled with the compassion of a prophet. He
saw that something had to be done IN her--perhaps that some saving
shock in the guise of ruin had to visit her; that some door had to
be burst open, some roof blown away, some rock blasted, that light
and air might have free course through her soul's house, without
which that soul could never grow stately like the house it
inhabited. Whatever might be destined to effect this, for the chance
of rendering poorest and most servile aid, he would watch and did
watch, in silence and self-restraint, lest he should be betrayed
into any presumptuous word that might breathe frost instead of balm
upon the buds of her delaying Spring. If he might but be allowed to
minister when at length the sleeping soul should stir! If its waking
glance--ah! if it might fall on him! As often as the thought
intruded, his heart would give one delirious bound, then couch
ashamed of its presumption. He would not, he dared not look in that
direction. He accused himself of mingling earthly motives and
feelings with the unselfish and true, and scorned himself because of
it. And was not Bascombe already the favoured friend of her heart?

Yet how could it be of her heart? for what concern had hearts in a
common unbelief? None; but there were the hearts--the man and the
woman--notwithstanding, who might yet well be drawn together by the
unknown divine which they also shared; and that Helen, whose foot
seemed now to approach and now to shun the line betwixt the kingdom
of this world and the kingdom of heaven, should retire with such a
guide into the deserts of denial and chosen godlessness, was to
Wingfold a thought of torture almost unendurable. The thought of its
possibility, nay, probability--for were not such unfitnesses
continually becoming facts?--threatened sometimes to upset the
whole fabric of his faith, although reared in spite of theology,
adverse philosophy, and the most honest and bewildering doubt. That
such a thing should be possible seemed at those times to bear more
against the existence of a God than all the other grounds of
question together. Then a shudder would go to the very deeps of his
heart, and he would lay himself silent before the presence for a
time; or make haste into the solitudes--not where the sun shone and
the water ran, but where the light was dim and the wind low in the
pine woods. There, where the sombre green vaults were upheld by a
hundred slender columns, and the far-receding aisles seemed to lead
to the ancestral home of shadows, there, his own soul a shadow of
grief and fear among the shades of the gloomy temple, he bowed his
heart before the Eternal, gathered together all the might of his
being, and groaned forth in deepest effort of a will that struggled
to be: "Thy will be done, and not mine." Then would his spirit again
walk erect, and carry its burden as a cross and not as a gravestone.

Sometimes he was sorely perplexed to think how the weakness, as he
called it, had begun, and how it had grown upon him. He could not
say it was his doing, and what had he ever been aware of in it
against which he ought to have striven? Came not the whole thing of
his nature, a nature that was not of his design, and was beyond him
and his control--a nature that either sprung from a God, or grew out
of an unconscious Fate? If from the latter, how was such as he to
encounter and reduce to a constrained and self-rejecting reason a
Self unreasonable, being an issue of the Unreasoning, which Self was
yet greater than he, its vagaries the source of his intensest
consciousness and brightest glimpses of the ideal and all-desirable.
If on the other hand it was born of a God, then let that God look to
it, for, sure, that which belonged to his nature could not be evil
or of small account in the eyes of him who made him in his own
image. But alas! that image had, no matter how, been so defaced,
that the will of the man might even now be setting itself up against
the will of the God! Did his love then spring from the God-will or
the man-will? Must there not be some God-way of the thing, all
right and nothing wrong?--But he could not compass it, and the
marvel to himself was that all the time he was able to go on
preaching, and that with some sense of honesty and joy in his work.

In this trouble more than ever Wingfold felt that if there was no
God, his soul was but a thing of rags and patches out in the
masterless pitiless storm and hail of a chaotic universe. Often
would he rush into the dark, as it were, crying for God, and ever he
would emerge therefrom with some tincture of the light, enough to
keep him alive and send him to his work. And there, in her own seat,
Sunday after Sunday, sat the woman whom he had seen ten times, and
that for no hasty moments, during the week, by the bedside of her
brother, yet to whom only now, in the open secrecy of the pulpit,
did he dare utter the words of might he would so fain have poured
direct into her suffering heart. And there, Sunday after Sunday, the
face he loved bore witness to the trouble of the heart he loved yet
more: that heart was not yet redeemed! oh, might it be granted him
to set some little wind a blowing for its revival and hope! As often
as he stood up to preach, his heart swelled with the message he
bore--a message of no private interpretation, but for the healing of
the nations, yet a message for her, and for the healing of every
individual heart that would hear and take, and he spoke with the
freedom and dignity of a prophet. But when he saw her afterwards, he
scarcely dared let his eyes rest a moment on her face, would only
pluck the flower of a glance flying, or steal it at such moments
when he thought she would not see. She caught his glance however far
oftener than he knew, and was sometimes aware of it without seeing
it at all. And there was that in the curate's behaviour, in his
absolute avoidance of self-assertion, or the least possible
intrusion upon her mental privacy--in the wrapping of his garments
around him as it were, that his presence might offend as little as
might be, while at the same time he was full of simple direct
ministration to her brother, without one side-glance that sought
approval of her, which the nobility of the woman could not fail to
note, and seek to understand.

It was altogether a time of great struggle with Wingfold. He seemed
to be assailed in every direction, and to feel the strong house of
life giving way in every part, and yet he held on--lived, which he
thought was all, and, without knowing it, grew. Perhaps it may be
this period that the following verses which I found among his papers
belong: he could not himself tell me.--

Out of my door I run to do the thing
That calls upon me. Straight the wind of words
Whoops from mine ears the sounds of them that sing
About their work--My God! my Father-King.

I turn in haste to see thy blessed door,
But lo! a cloud of flies and bats and birds,
And stalking vapours, and vague monster herds,
Have risen and lighted, rushed and swollen between.

Ah me! the house of peace is there no more.
Was it a dream then? Walls, fireside, and floor,
And sweet obedience, loving, calm, and free,
Are vanished--gone as they had never been.

I labour groaning. Comes a sudden sheen!--
And I am kneeling at my Father's knee,
Sighing with joy, and hoping utterly.

CHAPTER XV.

THE LAWN.

Leopold had begun to cough, and the fever continued. Every afternoon
came the red flush to his cheek, and the hard glitter into his eye.
His talk was then excited, and mostly about his coming trial. To
Helen it was terribly painful, and she confessed to herself that but
for Wingfold she must have given way. Leopold insisted on seeing Mr.
Hooker every time he called, and every time expressed the hope that
he would not allow pity for his weak state to prevent him from
applying the severe remedy of the law to his moral condition. But in
truth it began to look doubtful whether disease would not run a race
with law for his life, even if the latter should at once proceed to
justify a claim. From the first Faber doubted if he would ever
recover from the consequences of that exposure in the churchyard,
and it soon became evident that his lungs were more than affected.
His cough increased, and he began to lose what little flesh he had.

One day Faber expressed his conviction to Wingfold that he was
fighting the disease at the great disadvantage of having an unknown
enemy to contend with.

"The fellow is unhappy," he said, "and if that lasts another month,
I shall throw up the sponge. He has a good deal of vitality, but it
is yielding, and by that time he will be in a galloping
consumption."

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