Weighed and Wanting

G >> George MacDonald >> Weighed and Wanting

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Produced by David Garcia, Jonathan Ingram and Distributed Proofreaders

[Illustration: Hester at her piano.]

WEIGHED AND WANTING

BY GEORGE MACDONALD

CONTENTS.

I. Bad Weather

II. Father, Mother and Son

III. The Magic Lantern

IV. Hester alone

V. Truly the Light is sweet

VI. The Aquarium

VII. Amy Amber

VIII. Cornelius and Vavasor

IX. Songs and Singers

X. Hester and Amy

XI. At Home

XII. A Beginning

XIII. A private Exhibition

XIV. Vavasor and Hester

XV. A small Failure

XVI. The Concert Room

XVII. An uninvited Guest

XVIII. Catastrophe

XIX. Light and Shade

XX. The Journey

XXI. Mother and Daughter

XXII. Gladness

XXIII. Down the Hill

XXIV. Out of the Frying pan

XXV. Was it into the Fire?

XXVI. Waiting a Purpose

XXVII. Major H. G. Marvel

XXVIII. The Major and Vavasor

XXIX. A brave Act

XXX. In another Light

XXXI. The Major and Cousin Helen's Boys

XXXII. A distinguished Guest

XXXIII. Courtship in earnest

XXXIV. Calamity

XXXV. In London

XXXVI. A Talk with the Major

XXXVII. Rencontres

XXXVIII. In the House

XXXIX. The Major and the Small-pox

XL. Down and down

XLI. Difference

XLII. Deep calleth unto Deep

XLIII. Deliverance

XLIV. On the Way up

XLV. More yet

XLVI. Amy and Corney

XLVII. Miss Vavasor

XLVIII. Mr. Christopher

XLIX. An Arrangement

L. Things at Home

LI. The Return

LII. A heavenly Vision

LIII. A sad Beginning

LIV. Mother and Son

LV. Miss Dasomma and Amy

LVI. The sick Room

LVII. Vengeance is Mine

LVIII. Father and Daughter-in-law

LIX. The Message

LX. A birthday Gift

CHAPTER I.

BAD WEATHER.

It was a gray, windy noon in the beginning of autumn. The sky and the
sea were almost of the same color, and that not a beautiful one. The
edge of the horizon where they met was an edge no more, but a bar thick
and blurred, across which from the unseen came troops of waves that
broke into white crests, the flying manes of speed, as they rushed at,
rather than ran towards the shore: in their eagerness came out once more
the old enmity between moist and dry. The trees and the smoke were
greatly troubled, the former because they would fain stand still, the
latter because it would fain ascend, while the wind kept tossing the
former and beating down the latter. Not one of the hundreds of fishing
boats belonging to the coast was to be seen; not a sail even was
visible; not the smoke of a solitary steamer ploughing its own miserable
path through the rain-fog to London or Aberdeen. It was sad weather and
depressing to not a few of the thousands come to Burcliff to enjoy a
holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the
labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter,
while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful
vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a
day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was
every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains,
seemed a huge bite snatched by that vague enemy against whom the
grumbling of the world is continually directed out of the cake that by
every right and reason belonged to them. For were they not born to be
happy, and how was human being to fulfill his destiny in such
circumstances?

There are men and women who can be happy in any--even in such
circumstances and worse, but they are rare, and not a little better
worth knowing than the common class of mortals--alas that they
_will_ be common! _content_ to be common they are not and cannot
be. Among these exceptional mortals I do not count such as, having
secured the corner of a couch within the radius of a good fire,
forget the world around them by help of the magic lantern of a novel
that interests them: such may not be in the least worth knowing for
their disposition or moral attainment--not even although the noise of
the waves on the sands, or the storm in the chimney, or the rain on the
windows but serves to deepen the calm of their spirits. Take the novel
away, give the fire a black heart; let the smells born in a
lodging-house kitchen invade the sitting-room, and the person, man or
woman, who can then, on such a day, be patient with a patience pleasant
to other people, is, I repeat, one worth knowing--and such there are,
though not many. Mrs. Raymount, half the head and more than half the
heart of a certain family in a certain lodging house in the forefront of
Burcliff, was one of such.

It was not a large family, yet contained perhaps as many varieties of
character and temper as some larger ones, with as many several ways of
fronting such a misfortune--for that is what poor creatures, the slaves
of the elements, count it--as rainy weather in a season concerning which
all men agree that it ought to be fine, and that something is out of
order, giving ground of complaint, if it be not fine. The father met it
with tolerably good humor; but he was so busy writing a paper for one of
the monthly reviews, that he would have kept the house had the day been
as fine as both the church going visitors, and the mammon-worshipping
residents with income depending on the reputation of their weather,
would have made it if they could, nor once said _by your leave_;
therefore he had no credit, and his temper must pass as not proven. But
if you had taken from the mother her piece of work--she was busy
embroidering a lady's pinafore in a design for which she had taken
colors and arrangement from a peacock's feather, but was disposing them
in the form of a sun which with its rays covered the stomacher, the
deeper tints making the shadow between the golden arrows--had you taken
from her this piece of work, I say, and given her nothing to do instead,
she would yet have looked and been as peaceful as she now looked, for
she was not like Doctor Doddridge's dog that did not know who made him.

A longish lad stood in the bow window, leaning his head on the shutter,
in a mood of smouldering rebellion against the order of things. He was
such a mere creature of moods, that individual judgments of his
character might well have proved irreconcilable. He had not yet begun by
the use of his will--constantly indeed mistaking impulse for will--to
blend the conflicting elements of his nature into one. He was therefore
a man much as the mass of flour and raisins, etc., when first put into
the bag, is a plum-pudding; and had to pass through something analogous
to boiling to give him a chance of becoming worthy of the name he would
have arrogated. But in his own estimate of himself he claimed always the
virtues of whose presence he was conscious in his good moods letting the
bad ones slide, nor taking any account of what was in them. He
substituted forgetfulness for repudiation, a return of good humor for
repentance, and at best a joke for apology.

Mark, a pale, handsome boy of ten, and Josephine, a rosy girl of seven,
sat on the opposite side of the fire, amusing themselves with a puzzle.
The gusts of wind, and the great splashes of rain on the glass, only
made them feel the cosier and more satisfied.

"Beastly weather!" remarked Cornelius, as with an effort half wriggle,
half spring, he raised himself perpendicular, and turned towards the
room rather than the persons in it.

"I'm sorry you don't like it, Cornie," said his elder sister, who sat
beside her mother trimming what promised to be a pretty bonnet. A
concentrated effort to draw her needle through an accumulation of silken
folds seemed to take something off the bloom of the smile with which she
spoke.

"Oh, it's all very well for girls!" returned Cornelius. "You don't do
anything worth doing; and besides you've got so many things you like
doing, and so much time to do them in, that it's all one to you whether
you go out or stay at home. But when a fellow has but a miserable three
weeks and then back to a rot of work he cares no more for than a felon
for the treadmill, then it is rather hard to have such a hole made in
it! Day after day, as sure as the sun rises--if he does rise--of weather
as abominable as rain and wind can make it!"

"My dear boy!" said his mother without looking up.

"Oh, yes, mother! I know! You're so good you would have had Job himself
take it coolly. But I'm not like you. Only you needn't think me so
very--what you call it! It's only a breach in the laws of nature I'm
grumbling at. I don't mean anything to offend you."

"Perhaps you mean more than you think," answered his mother with a
deep-drawn breath, which, if not a sigh, was very nearly one. "I should
be far more miserable than any weather could make me, not to be able to
join in the song of the three holy children."

"I've heard you say that before, mother," said the youth, in a tone that
roused his sister's anger; for much that the mother let pass was by the
daughter for her sake resented. "But you see," he went on, "the three
holy children, as you call them, hadn't much weather of any sort where
they sung their song. Precious tired one gets of it before the choir's
through with it!"

"They would have been glad enough of some of the weather you call
beastly," said Hester, again pulling through a stiff needle, this time
without any smile, for sometimes that brother was more than she could
bear.

"Oh, I dare say! But then, you see, they knew, when they got out, they
wouldn't have to go back to a beastly bank, where notes and gold all day
went flying about like bats--nothing but the sight and the figures of it
coming their way!"

The mother's face grew very sad as it bent over her work. The youth saw
her trouble.

"Mother, don't be vexed with a fellow," he said more gently. "I wasn't
made good like you."

"I think you were right about the holy children," she said quietly.

"What!" exclaimed Cornelius. "Mother, I never once before heard you say
I was right about any mortal thing! Come, this is pleasant! I begin to
think strong ale of myself! I don't understand it, though."

"Shall I tell you? Would you care to know what I mean?"

"Oh, yes, mother! if you want to tell me."

"I think you were right when you implied it was the furnace that made
them sing about the world outside of it: one can fancy the idea of the
frost and the snow and the ice being particularly pleasant to them. And
I am afraid, Cornelius, my dear son, you need the furnace to teach you
that the will of God, even in weather, is a thing for rejoicing in, not
for abusing. But I dread the fire for your sake, my boy!"

"I should have thought this weather and the bank behind it furnace
enough, mother!" he answered, trying to laugh off her words.

"It does not seem to be," she said, with some displeasure. "But then,"
she added with a sigh, "you have not the same companion that the three
holy children had."

"Who was that?" rejoined Cornelius, for he had partly forgotten the
story he knew well enough in childhood.

"We will not talk about him now," answered his mother. "He has been
knocking at your chamber-door for some time: when he comes to the
furnace-door, perhaps you will open that to him."

Cornelius returned no answer; he felt his mother's seriousness awkward,
and said to himself she was unkind; why couldn't she make some allowance
for a fellow? He meant no harm!

He was still less patient with his mother's not very frequent
admonitions, since going into the bank, for, much as he disliked it, he
considered himself quite a man of the world in consequence. But he was
almost as little capable of slipping like a pebble among other pebbles,
the peculiar faculty of the man of the world, as he was of perceiving
the kind of thing his mother cared about--and that not from moral lack
alone, but from dullness and want of imagination as well. He was like
the child so sure he can run alone that he snatches his hand from his
mother's and sets off through dirt and puddles, so to act the part of
the great personage he would consider himself.

With all her peace of soul, the heart of the mother was very anxious
about her son, but she said no more to him now: she knew that the shower
bath is not the readiest mode of making a child friendly with cold
water.

Just then broke out the sun. The wind had at last blown a hole in the
clouds, and through that at once, as is his wont, and the wont of a
greater light than the sun, he shone.

"Come! there's something almost like sunshine!" said Cornelius, having
for a few moments watched the light on the sands. "Before it goes in
again, as it's sure to do in five minutes at the farthest, get on your
bonnet, Hester, and let's have an attempt at a walk."

Before Hester could answer came a sudden spatter of rain on the window.

"There! I told you so! That's always the way! Just my luck! For me to
set my heart on a thing is all one with being disappointed of it."

"But if the thing was not worth setting your heart on?" said Hester,
speaking with forced gentleness.

"What does that signify? The thing is that your heart is set on it. What
you think nothing other people may yet be bold enough to take for
something."

"Well, at least, if I had to be disappointed, I should like it to be in
something that would be worth having."

"Would you now?" returned Cornelius spitefully. "I hope you may have
what you want. For my part I don't desire to be better than my neighbor.
I think it downright selfish."

"Do you want to be as good as your neighbor, Cornie?" said his mother,
looking up through a film of tears. "But there is a more important
question than that," she went on, having waited a moment in vain for an
answer, "and that is, whether you are content with being as good as
yourself, or want to be better."

"To tell you the truth, mother, I don't trouble my head about such
things. Philosophers are agreed that self consciousness is the bane of
the present age: I mean to avoid it. If you had let me go into the army,
I might have had some leisure for what you call thought, but that
horrible bank takes everything out of a fellow. The only thing it leaves
is a burning desire to forget it at any cost till the time comes when
you must endure it again. If I hadn't some amusement in between, I
should cut my throat, or take to opium or brandy. I wonder how the
governor would like to be in my place!"

Hester rose and left the room, indignant with him for speaking so of his
father.

"If your father were in your place, Cornelius," said his mother with
dignity, "he would perform the duties of it without grumbling, however
irksome they might be."

"How do you know that, mother? He was never tried."

"I know it because I know him," she answered.

Cornelius gave a grunt.

"If you think it hard," his mother resumed, "that you have to follow a
way of life not of your own choosing, you must remember that you never
could be got to express a preference for one way over another, and that
your father had to strain every nerve to send you to college--to the
disadvantage, for a time at least, of others of the family. I am sorry
to have to remind you also that you did not make it any easier for him
by your mode of living while there."

"I didn't run up a single bill!" cried Cornelius with indignation; "and
my father knows it!"

"He does; but he knows also that your cousin Robert did not spend above
two-thirds of what you did, and made more of his time too."

"He was in _rather_ a different set," sneered the youth.

"And you know," his mother went on, "that his main design in placing you
in your uncle's bank was that you might gain such a knowledge of
business as will be necessary to the proper management of the money he
will leave behind him. When you have gained that knowledge, there will
be time to look farther, for you are young yet."

Now his father's money was the continuous occasion of annoyance to
Cornelius, for it was no secret from his family how he meant to dispose
of it. He intended, namely, to leave it under trustees, of whom he
wished his son to be one until he married, when it was to be divided
equally among his children.

This arrangement was not agreeable to Cornelius, who could not see, he
said, what advantage in that case he had from being the eldest of the
family.

He broke out in a tone of expostulation, ready to swell into indignant
complaint.

"Now, mother," he said "do you think it fair that I should have to look
after the whole family as if they were my own?"

This was by no means his real cause of complaint, but he chose to use it
as his grievance for the present.

"You will have the other trustees to advise with," said his mother. "It
need not weigh on you very heavily."

"Well, of course, I could do better with it than anybody out of the
family."

"If you have your father's love of fair play, Cornelius, you will. What
you can do to that end now is to make yourself thoroughly acquainted
with business."

"A bank's not the place to get the knowledge of business necessary for
that sort of thing."

"Your father has reasons for preferring a general to any special
knowledge. The fitness resulting will depend upon yourself. And when you
marry you will, as you know, be rid of the responsibility. So far your
father and you are of one mind; he does not think it fair that a married
man should be burdened with any family but his own."

"What if I should marry before my father's death?"

"I hope, indeed, you will, Cornelius. The arrangements your father has
made is one of provision against the unlikely. When you are married, I
don't doubt he will make another, to meet the new circumstances."

"Now," said Cornelius to himself, "I do believe if I was to marry
money--as why shouldn't I?--my father would divide my share amongst the
rest, and not give me a farthing!"

Full of the injury of the idea, he rose and left the room. His mother,
poor woman, wept as he vanished. She dared not allow herself to ask why
she wept--dared not allow to herself that her first-born was not a
lovely thought to her--dared not ask where he could have got such a mean
nature--so mean that he did not know he was mean.

Although the ill-humor in which he had been ever since he came was by
himself attributed to the weather, and had been expended on the cooking,
on the couches, on the beds, and twenty different things that displeased
him, he had nevertheless brought it with him; and her experience gave
her the sad doubt that the cause of it might lie in his own conduct--for
the consciousness may be rendered uneasy without much rousing of the
conscience proper.

He had always been fitful and wayward, but had never before behaved so
unpleasantly. Certainly his world had not improved him for his home. Yet
amongst his companions he bore the character of the best-natured fellow
in the world. To them he never showed any of the peevishness arising
from mental discomfort, but kept it for those who loved him a thousand
times better, and would have cheerfully parted with their own happiness
for his. He was but one of a large herd of youths, possessing no will of
their own, yet enjoying the reputation of a strong one; for moved by
liking or any foolish notion, his pettiness made a principle of, he
would be obstinate; and the common philosophy always takes obstinacy for
strength of will, even when it springs from utter inability to will
against liking.

Mr. Raymount knew little of the real nature of his son. The youth was
afraid of his father--none the less that he spoke of him with so little
respect. Before him he dared not show his true nature. He knew and
dreaded the scorn which the least disclosure of his feeling about the
intended division of his father's money would rouse in him. He knew also
that his mother would not betray him--he would have counted it
betrayal--to his father; nor would any one who had ever heard Mr.
Raymount give vent to his judgment of any conduct he despised, have
wondered at the reticence of either of them.

Whether in his youth he would have done as well in a position like his
son's as his worshipping wife believed, may be doubtful; but that he
would have done better than his son must seem more than probable.

CHAPTER II.

FATHER, MOTHER, AND SON.

Gerald Raymount was a man of an unusual combination of qualities. There
were such contradictions in his character as to give ground for the
suspicion, in which he certainly himself indulged, that there must be in
him at least one strain not far removed from the savage, while on the
other hand there were mental conditions apparently presupposing ages of
culture. At the university he had indulged in large reading outside the
hedge of his required studies, and gained thus an acquaintance with and
developed a faculty in literature destined to stand him in good stead.

Inheriting earthly life and a history--nothing more--from a long line of
ancestors, and a few thousand pounds--less than twenty--from his father,
who was a country attorney, a gentle, quarrelsome man, who yet never,
except upon absolute necessity, carried a case into court, he had found,
as his family increased, that his income was not sufficient for their
maintenance in accustomed ease. With not one expensive personal taste
between them, they had neither of them the faculty for saving
money--often but another phrase for doing mean things. Neither husband
nor wife was capable of _screwing_. Had the latter been, certainly
the free-handedness of the former would have driven her to it; but while
Mrs. Raymount would go without a new bonnet till an outcry arose in the
family that its respectability was in danger, she could not offer two
shillings a day to a sempstress who thought herself worth half-a-crown;
she could not allow a dish to be set on her table which was not as
likely to encourage hunger as allay it; neither because some richer
neighbors gave so little, would she take to herself the spiritual fare
provided in church without making a liberal acknowledgment in carnal
things. The result of this way of life was the deplorable one that Mr.
Raymount was compelled to rouse himself, and, from the chair of a
somewhat self-indulgent reader of many books, betake himself to his
study-table, to prove whether it were not possible for him to become the
writer of such as might add to an income showing scantier every quarter.
Here we may see the natural punishment of liberal habits; for this man
indulging in them, and, instead of checking them in his wife, loving her
the more that she indulged in them also, was for this reason condemned
to labor--the worst evil of life in the judgment of both the man about
Mayfair and the tramp of the casual ward. But there are others who dare
not count that labor an evil which helps to bring out the best elements
of human nature, not even when the necessity for it outlasts any impulse
towards it, and who remember the words of the Lord: "My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work."

For Gerald Raymount, it made a man of him--which he is not who is of no
service to his generation. Doubtless he was driven thereto by necessity;
but the question is not whether a man works upon more or less
compulsion, but whether the work he is thus taught to do he makes good
honest work for which the world is so much the better. In this matter of
work there are many first that shall be last. The work of a baker for
instance must stand higher in the judgment of the universe than that of
a brewer, let his ale be ever so good. Because the one trade brings more
money than the other the judgment of this world counts it more
honorable, but there is the other judgment at hand.

In the exercise of his calling Raymount was compelled to think more
carefully than before, and thus not only his mind took a fresh start,
but his moral and spiritual nature as well. He slid more and more into
writing out the necessities and experiences of his own heart and
history, and so by degrees gained power of the only true kind--that,
namely, of rousing the will, not merely the passions, or even the
aspirations of men. The poetry in which he had disported himself at
college now came to the service of his prose, and the deeper poetic
nature, which is the prophetic in every man, awoke in him. Till after
they had lived together a good many years the wife did not know the
worth of the man she had married, nor indeed was he half the worth when
she married him that he had now grown to be. The longer they lived the
prouder she grew of him and of his work; nor was she the less the
practical wisdom of the house that she looked upon her husband as a
great man. He was not a great man--only a growing man; yet was she
nothing the worse for thinking so highly of him; the object of it was
not such that her admiration caused her to deteriorate.

The daughter of a London barrister, of what is called a good family, she
had opportunity of knowing something of what is called life before she
married, and from mere dissatisfaction had early begun to withdraw from
the show and self-assertion of social life, and seek within herself the
door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most. For a
time she found thus a measure of quiet--not worthy of the name of rest;
she had not heeded a certain low knocking as of one who would enter and
share it with her; but now for a long time he who thus knocked had been
her companion in the chamber whose walls are the infinite. Why is it
that men and women will welcome any tale of love, devotion, and
sacrifice from one to another of themselves, but turn from the least
hint at the existence of a perfect love at the root of it all? With such
a message to them, a man is a maundering prophet. Is it not that their
natures are yet so far from the ideal, the natural, the true, that the
words of the prophet rouse in them no vision, no poorest perception of
spiritual fact?

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