Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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George MacDonald >> Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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"Poor woman!" said Mr. Drew again, who for once had been inattentive
to the curate. "Well! she is sorely punished too."
"She will be worse punished yet," said the curate, "if I can read
the signs of character. SHE is not repentant yet--though I did spy
in her just once a touch of softening."
"It is an awful retribution," said the draper, "and I may yet have
to bear my share--God help me!"
"I suspect it is the weight of her own crime that makes her so
fierce to avenge her daughter. I doubt if anything makes one so
unforgiving as guilt unrepented of."
"Well, I must try to find out where she is, and keep an eye upon
her."
"That will be easy enough. But why?"
"Because, if, as you think, there is more evil in store for her, I
may yet have it in my power to do her some service.--I wonder if Mr.
Polwarth would call that DIVINE SERVICE," he added, with one of his
sunny smiles.
"Indeed he would," answered the curate.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE BEDSIDE.
George Bascombe, when he went to Paris, had no thought of deserting
Helen. But he had good ground for fearing that it might be ruinous
both to Lingard and himself to undertake his defence. From Paris he
wrote often to Helen, and she replied--not so often, yet often
enough to satisfy him; and as soon as she was convinced that Leopold
could not recover, she let him know, whereupon he instantly began
his preparations for returning.
Before he came, the weather had changed once more. It was now cold,
and the cold had begun at once to tell upon the invalid. There are
some natures to which cold, moral, spiritual, or physical, is
lethal, and Lingard's was of the class. When the dying leaves began
to shiver in the breath of the coming winter, the very brightness of
the sun to look gleamy, and nature to put on the unfriendly aspect
of a world not made for living in but for shutting out--when all
things took the turn of reminding man that his life lay not in them,
Leopold began to shrink and withdraw. He could not face the ghastly
persistence of the winter, which would come, let all the souls of
the summer-nations shrink and protest as they might; let them creep
shivering to Hades; he would have his day.
His sufferings were now considerable, but he never complained.
Restless and fevered and sick at heart, it was yet more from the
necessity of a lovely nature than from any virtue of will that he
was so easy to nurse, accepting so readily all ministrations. Never
exacting and never refusing, he was always gently grateful, giving a
sort of impression that he could have been far more thankful had he
not known the object of the kindnesses so unworthy. Next to
Wingfold's and his sister's, the face he always welcomed most was
that of the gate-keeper--indeed I ought hardly to say NEXT to
theirs; for if the curate was to him as a brother, Polwarth was like
a father in Christ. He came every day, and every day, almost till
that of his departure, Leopold had something to ask him about or
something to tell him.
"I am getting so stupid, Mr. Polwarth!" he said once. "It troubles
me much. I don't seem to care for anything now. I don't want to hear
the New Testament: I would rather hear a child's story--something
that did not want thinking about. If I am not coughing, I am
content. I could lie for hours and hours and never think more than
what goes creeping through my mind no faster than a canal in
Holland. When I am coughing,--I don't think about anything then
either--only long for the fit to be over and let me back again into
Sleepy Hollow. All my past life seems to be gone from me. I don't
care about it. Even my crime looks like something done ages ago. I
know it is mine, and I would rather it were not mine, but it is as
if a great cloud had come and swept away the world in which it took
place. I am afraid sometimes that I am beginning not to care even
about that. I say to myself, I shall be sorry again by and by, but I
can't think about it now. I feel as if I had handed it over to God
to lay down where I should find it again when I was able to think
and be sorry."
This was a long utterance for him to make, but he had spoken slowly,
and with frequent pauses. Polwarth did not speak once, feeling that
a dying man must be allowed to ease his mind after his own fashion,
and take as much time to it as he pleased. Helen and Wingfold both
would have told him he must not tire himself, but that Polwarth
never did. The dying should not have their utterances checked, or
the feeling of not having finished forced upon them. They will
always have plenty of the feeling without that.
A fit of coughing compelled him to break off, and when it was over,
he lay panting and weary, but with his large eyes questioning the
face of Polwarth. Then the little man spoke.
"He must give us every sort of opportunity for trusting him," he
said. "The one he now gives you, is this dulness that has come over
you. Trust him through it, submitting to it and yet trusting against
it, and you get the good of it. In your present state perhaps you
cannot even try to bring about by force of will any better state of
feeling or higher intellectual condition; but you can say to God
something like this: "See, Lord, I am dull and stupid, and care for
nothing: take thou care of everything for me, heart and mind and
all. I leave all to thee. Wilt thou not at length draw me out of
this my frozen wintery state? Let me not shrink from fresh life and
thought and duty, or be unready to come out of the shell of my
sickness when thou sendest for me. I wait thy will. I wait even the
light that I feel now as if I dared not encounter for weariness of
body and faintness of spirit."
"Ah!" cried Leopold, "there you have touched it! How can you know so
well what I feel?"
"Because I have often had to fight hard to keep death to his own
province, and not let him cross over into my spirit."
"Alas! I am not fighting at all; I am only letting things go."
"You are fighting more than you know, I suspect, for you are
enduring, and that patiently. Suppose Jesus were to knock at the
door now, and it was locked; suppose you knew it was he, and there
was no one in the room to open it for him; suppose you were as weak
as you are now, and seemed to care as little about him or anything
else: what would you do?"
Leopold looked half amazed, as if wondering what his friend could be
driving at with such a question.
"What else could I do but get up and open it?" he said.
"Would you not be tempted to lie still and wait till some one came."
"No."
"Would you not say in your heart, 'The Lord knows I am very weak,
and I should catch cold, and the exertion would make me cough
dreadfully, and he won't mind if I lie still?'"
"That I wouldn't! What should I care what came to me? What would it
matter so long as I got one look at him! Besides, if he didn't want
me to get up, he wouldn't knock."
"But suppose you knew that the moment you turned the key you would
drop down, and when the Lord came in you would not see him."
"I can't think where you want to take me, Mr. Polwarth!" said the
youth. "Even if I knew I should drop dead the moment I got out on
the floor, what would it matter! I should get to him the sooner
then, and tell him why I didn't open the door. Can you suppose for a
moment I should let any care for this miserable body of mine come
between my eyes and the face of my Lord?"
"You see then that you do care about him a little, though a minute
ago you didn't think it! There are many feelings in us that are not
able to get up stairs the moment we call them. Be as dull and stupid
as it pleases God to let you be, and trouble neither yourself nor
him about that, only ask him to be with you all the same."
The little man dropped on his knees by the bedside, and said,
"O Lord Jesus, be near when it seems to us, as it seemed to thee
once, that our Father has forsaken us, and gathered back to himself
all the gifts he once gave us. Even thou who wast mighty in death,
didst need the presence of thy Father to make thee able to endure:
forget not us the work of thy hands, yea, the labour of thy heart
and spirit. O remember that we are his offspring, neither
accountable for our own being, nor able to comfort or strengthen
ourselves. If thou wert to leave us alone, we should cry out upon
thee as on the mother who threw her babes to the wolves--and there
are no wolves able to terrify thee. Ah Lord! we know thou leavest us
not, only in our weakness we would comfort our hearts with the music
of the words of faith. Thou canst not do other than care for us,
Lord Christ, for whether we be glad or sorry, slow of heart or full
of faith, all the same are we the children of thy Father. He sent us
here, and never asked us if we would; therefore thou must be with
us, and give us repentance and humility and love and faith, that we
may indeed be the children of thy Father who is in heaven. Amen."
While Polwarth was yet praying, the door had opened gently behind
him, and Helen, not knowing that he was there, had entered with
Bascombe. He neither heard their entrance, nor saw the face of
disgust that George made behind his back. What was in Bascombe's
deepest soul who shall tell? Of that region he himself knew nothing.
It was a silent, holy place into which he had never yet entered--
therefore lonely and deserted as the top of Sinai after the cloud
had departed. No--I will not say that: who knows what is where man
cannot or will not look? If George had sought there, perhaps he
might have found traces of a presence not yet altogether vanished.
In what he called and imagined his deeepest soul, however, all he
was now conscious of was a perfect loathing of the monstrous
superstition so fitly embodied before him. The prayer of the
kneeling absurdity was to him an audacious mockery of the
infrangible laws of Nature: this hulk of misshapen pottery actually
presuming to believe that an invisible individual heard what he said
because he crooked his hinges to say it! It did not occur to George
that the infrangible laws of Nature she had herself from the very
first so agonizingly broken to the poor dwarf, she had been to him
such a cruel step-mother, that he was in evil case indeed if he
could find no father to give him fair play and a chance of the
endurable. Was he so much to blame if he felt the annihilation
offered by such theorists as George, not altogether a satisfactory
counterpoise either to its existence or its loss? If, even, he were
to fancy in his trouble that the old fable of an elder brother,
something more humble than grand handsome George Bascombe and more
ready to help his little brothers and sisters, might be true, seeing
that an old story is not necessarily a false one, and were to try
after the hints it gave, surely in his condition such folly, however
absurd to a man of George Bascombe's endowments, might of the more
gifted ephemeros be pardoned if not pitied. Nor will I assert that
he was altogether unaware of any admixture of the sad with the
ludicrous when he saw the amorphous agglomerate of human shreds and
patches kneeling by the bedside of the dying murderer, to pray some
comfort into his passing soul. But his "gorge rose at the nonsense
and stuff of it," while through Helen ran a cold shudder of disgust
at the familiarity and irreverence of the little spiritual prig.
How many of the judgments we are told not to judge and yet do judge,
must make the angels of the judging and the judged turn and look at
each other and smile a sad smile, ere they set themselves to forget
that which so sorely needs to be forgotten.
Polwarth rose from his knees unaware of a hostile presence.
"Leopold," he said, taking his hand, "I would gladly, if I might,
walk with you through the shadow. But the heart of all hearts will
be with you. Rest in your tent a little while, which is indeed the
hollow of the Father's hand turned over you, with your strong
brother watching the door. Your imagination cannot go beyond the
truth of him who is the Father of lights, or of him who is the Elder
Brother of men."
Leopold answered only with his eyes. Polwarth turned to go, and saw
the on-lookers. They stood between him and the door, but parted and
made room for him to pass. Neither spoke. He made a bow first to one
and then to the other, looking up in the face of each, unabashed by
smile or scorn or blush of annoyance, but George took no notice,
walking straight to the bed the moment the way was clear. Helen's
conscience, however, or heart, smote her, and, returning his bow,
she opened the door for her brother's friend. He thanked her, and
went his way.
"Poor dear fellow!" said George kindly, and stroked the thin hand
laid in his: "can I do anything for you?"
"Nothing but be good to Helen when I am gone, and tell her now and
then that I'm not dead, but living in the hope of seeing her again
one day before long. She might forget sometimes--not me, but that,
you know."
"Yes, yes, I'll see to it," answered George, in the evil tone of one
who faithfully promises a child an impossibility. Of course there
was no more harm in lying to a man who was just on the verge of
being a man no more, and becoming only an unpleasant mass of
chemicals, which a whole ant-heap of little laws would presently be
carrying outside the gates of the organic, than there had been in
lying to him when he supposed him a madman. Neither could anyone
blame him for inconsistency; for had he not always said in the
goodness of his heart, that he would never disturb the faith of old
people drawing nigh their end, because such no more possessed the
needful elasticity of brain to accommodate themselves to the
subversion of previous modes of feeling and thought, unavoidable to
the adoption of his precious revelation. Precious he did believe it,
never having himself one of those visions of infinite hope, which,
were his theory once proved as true as he imagined it, must then
indeed vanish for ever.
"Do you suffer much?" asked George.
"Yes--a good deal."
"Pain?"
"Not so much;--sometimes. The weakness is the worst. But it doesn't
matter: God is with me."
"What good does that do you?" asked George, forgetting himself, half
in contempt, half in a curiosity which he would have called, and
which perhaps was, scientific.
But Leopold took it in good faith, and answered,
"It sets it all right, and makes me able to be patient."
George laid down the hand he held, and turned sadly to Helen, but
said nothing.
The next moment Wingfold entered. Helen kissed the dying hand, and
left the room with George.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE GARDEN.
Tenderly he led her into the garden, and down the walks now bare of
bordering flowers. To Helen it looked like a graveyard; the dry
bushes were the memorials of the buried flowers, and the cypress and
box trees rose like the larger monuments of shapely stone. The day
was a cold leaden one, that would have rained if it could, to get
rid of the deadness at its heart, but no tears came. To the
summer-house they went, under the cedar, and sat down. Neither spoke
for some time.
"Poor Leopold!" said George at length, and took Helen's hand.
She burst into tears, and again for some time neither spoke.
"George, I can't bear it!" she said at length.
"It is very sad," answered George. "But he had a happy life, I don't
doubt, up to--to--"
"What does that matter now? It is all a horrible farce.--To begin so
fair and lovely, and end so stormy and cold and miserable!"
George did not like to say what he thought, namely, that it was
Leopold's own doing. He did not see that therein lay the deepest
depth of the misery--the thing that of all things needed help: all
else might be borne; the less that COULD be borne the better.
"It IS horrible," he said. "But what can be done? What's done is
done, and nobody can help it."
"There should be somebody to help it," said Helen.
"Ah! Should be!" said George. "--Well, it's a comfort it will soon
be over!"
"Is it?" returned Helen almost sharply. "--But he's not your
brother, and you don't know what it is to lose him! Oh, how desolate
the world will be without my darling!"
And again her tears found way.
"All that I can do to make up for the loss, dearest Helen," said
George,--
"Oh George!" she cried, starting to her feet, "is there NO hope? I
don't mean of his getting better--that we do know the likelihoods
of--but is there no hope of SOME TIME seeing him again? We know so
little about all of it! MIGHT there not be some way?"
But George was too honest in himself, and too true to his
principles, to pretend anything to Helen. Hers was an altogether
different case from Leopold's. Here was a young woman full of health
and life and hope, with all her joys before her! Many suns must set
before her sun would go down, many pale moons look lovely in her
eyes, ere came those that would mock her with withered memories--a
whole hortus siccus of passion-flowers. Why should he lie to HER of
a hope beyond the grave? Let the pleasures of the world be the
dearer to her for the knowledge that they must so soon depart; let
love be the sweeter for the mournful thought that it is a thing of
the summer, and that when the winter comes it shall be no more! But
perhaps George forgot one point. I will allow that the insects of a
day, dying in a moment of delightful fruition, are blessed; but when
the delicate Psyche, with her jewel-feathered wings, is beat about
by a wind full of rain until she lies draggled in the dirt; when
there are no more flowers, or if there be, the joy of her hovering
is over, and yet death comes but slowly; when the mourners are going
about the streets ere ever the silver cord is loosed; when the past
looks a mockery and the future a blank;--then perhaps, even to the
correlatives of the most triumphant natural selection, it may not
merely seem as if something were wrong somewhere, but even as if
there ought to be somebody to set wrong right. If Psyche should be
so subdued to circumstance as to accept without question her
supposed fate, then doubly woe for Psyche!
But if George could not lie, it was not necessary for him to speak
the truth: silence was enough. A moment of it was all Helen could
endure. She rose hastily, left the wintered summer-house, and walked
back to the sick-chamber. George followed a few paces behind, so far
quenched that he did not overtake her to walk by her side, feeling
he had no aid to offer her. Doubtless he could have told her of help
at hand, but it was help that must come, that could neither be given
nor taken, would not come the sooner for any prayer, and indeed
would not begin to exist until the worst should be over: the nearest
George came to belief in a saving power, was to console himself with
the thought that TIME would do everything for Helen.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE DEPARTURE.
As Leopold slowly departed, he seemed to his sister to draw along
with him all that was precious in her life. She felt herself grow
dull and indifferent. It was to no purpose that she upbraided
herself with heartlessness; seemingly heartless her bosom remained.
It was not that her mind was occupied with anything else than her
brother, or drew comfort from another source; her feelings appeared
to be dying with him who had drawn them forth more than any other.
The battle was ending without even the poor pomp and circumstance of
torn banners and wailful music.
Leopold said very little during the last few days. His fits, of
coughing were more frequent, and in the pauses he had neither
strength nor desire to speak. When Helen came to his bedside, he
would put out his hand to her, and she would sit down by him and
hold it warm in hers. The hand of his sister was the point of the
planet from which, like his mount of ascension, the spirit of the
youth took its departure;--when he let that go, he was gone. But he
died asleep, as so many do; and fancied, I presume, that he was
waking into his old life, when he woke into his new one.
Wingfold stood on the other side of the bed, with Polwarth by him,
for so had the departing wished it, and although he made no sign, I
cannot but think he reaped some content therefrom. While yet he
lingered, one of Helen's listless, straying glances was arrested by
the countenance of the gate-keeper. It was so still and so rapt that
she thought he must be seeing within the veil, and regarding what
things were awaiting her brother on the reverse of the two-sided
wonder. But it was not so. Polwarth saw no more than she did: he was
ONLY standing in the presence of him who is not the God of the
dead but of the living. Whatever lay in that Will was the life of
whatever came of that Will, that is, of every creature, and no to
that Will, to the face of the Father, he lifted, in his prayerful
thought, the heart and mind and body of the youth now passing
through the birth of death. "I know not," he would have said, had he
been questioned concerning his spiritual attitude, "how my prayer
should for another work anything with the perfect Giver, but at
least I will not leave my friend behind when I go into the presence
of his Father and my Father. And I believe there is something in it
I cannot yet see."
Wingfold's anxiety was all for Helen. He could do no more for
Leopold, nor did he need more from man. As to many of the things
that puzzled them most, he was on his way to know more; he would
soon be in the heart of what seemed likely to remain a long secret
to him. But there was his sister, about to be left behind him
without his hopes; for her were dreary days at hand; and the curate
prayed the God of comfort and consolation to visit her.
Mrs. Ramshorn would now and then look in at the noiseless door of
the chamber of death, but she rightly felt her presence was not
desired, and though ready to help, did not enter. Neither did
George--not from heartlessness, but that he judged it better to
leave the priests of falsehood undisturbed in the exercise of their
miserable office. What did it matter how many comforting lies were
told to a dying man? What COULD it matter? There was small danger of
their foolish prayers and superstitious ceremonies evoking a deity
from the well-ordered, self-evolved sphericity of interacting law,
where not a pin-hole of failure afforded space out of which he might
creep. No more could they deprive the poor lad of the bliss of
returning into the absolute nothingness whence he had crept--to
commit a horrible crime against immortal society, and creep back
again, with a heart full of love and remorse and self-abhorrence,
into the black abyss. Therefore, why should he not let them tell
their lies and utter their silly incantations? Aloof and unharmed he
stood, safe on the shore, all ready to reach the rescuing hand to
Helen, the moment she should turn her eyes to him, for the help she
knew he had to give her. Certainly, for her sake, he would rather
she were not left unprotected to such subtle and insinuating
influences; but with the power of his mind upon her good sense, he
had no fear of the result. Not that he expected her to submit at
once to the wholesome regimen and plain diet he must prescribe her:
the soft hand of Time must first draw together the edges of her
heart's wound.
But the deadness of Helen's feelings, the heartlessness because of
which she cried out against herself, seemed, in a vague way, by
herself unacknowledged yet felt, if not caused by, yet associated
with some subtle radiation from the being of George Bascombe. That
very morning when he came into the breakfast-room so quietly that
she had not heard him, and, looking up, saw him unexpectedly, he
seemed for a moment, she could not tell why, the dull fountain of
all the miserable feeling--not of loss, but of no loss, which
pressed her heart flat in her bosom. The next moment she accused
herself of the grossest injustice, attributing it to the sickness of
soul which the shadow of death had wrought in her; for was not
George the only true friend she had ever had? If she lost him she
must be lonely indeed!--The feeling lingered notwithstanding, and
when she thought it dispelled, began to gather again immediately.
At the same time she shrunk from Wingfold as hard and unsympathetic.
True he had been most kind, even tender, to her brother, but to him
he had taken a fancy, having found in him one whom he could work
upon and fashion to his own liking: poor Poldie had never been one
of the strongest of men. But to her, whom he could not model after
his own ideas, who required a reason for the thing anyone would have
her believe--to her he had shown the rough side of his nature, going
farther than any gentleman ought, even if he was a clergyman, in
criticizing her conduct. He might well take example of her cousin
George! What a different sort of artillery HE had brought to bear
upon the outstanding fortress of her convictions!
So would she say within herself, again and again, in different
forms, not knowing how little of conviction there was in the
conclusions she seemed to come to--how much of old habit and
gratitude on the one hand, and pride and resentment upon the
other.-And there still was that feeling! she could not drive it
away. It was like trying to disperse a fog with a fan.
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