Weighed and Wanting

G >> George MacDonald >> Weighed and Wanting

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35

"To make up a _call_, I think both impulse and possibility are
wanted," replied Mrs. Raymount. "The first you know well; but have you
sufficiently considered the second? One whose impulse or desire was
continually thwarted could scarcely go on believing herself called. The
half that lies in an open door is wanting. If a call come to a man in
prison it will be by an angel who can let him out. Neither does
inclination always determine fitness. When your father was an editor, he
was astonished at the bad verse he received from some who had a genuine
delight in good verse."

"I can't believe, mamma," returned Hester, "that God gives any special
gift, particularly when accompanied by a special desire to use it, and
that for a special purpose, without intending it should be used. That
would be to mock his creature in the very act of making her."

"You must allow there are some who never find a use for their special
gifts."

"Yes; but may not that be that they have not sufficiently cultivated
their gifts, or that they have not done their best to bring them into
use? Or may they not have wanted to use them for ends of their own and
not of God's? I feel as if I must stand up against every difficulty lest
God should be disappointed in me. Surely any frustration of the ends to
which their very being points must be the person's own fault? May it not
be because they have not yielded to the calling voice that they are all
their life a prey to unsatisfied longings? They may have gone picking
and choosing, instead of obeying."

"There must be truth in what you say, Hester, but I am pretty sure it
does not reach every case. At what point would you pronounce a calling
frustrated? You think yours is to help your poor friends: you are not
with them now: is your calling frustrated? Surely there may be delay
without frustration! Or, is it for you to say when you are _ready_?
Willingness is not everything. Might not one fancy her hour come when it
was not come? May not part of the preparation for work be the mental
discipline of imagined postponements? And then, Hester--now I think I
have found my answer--you do not surely imagine such a breach in the
continuity of our existence, that our gifts and training here have
nothing to do with our life beyond the grave. All good old people will
tell you they feel this life but a beginning. Cultivating your gift, and
waiting the indubitable call, you may be in active preparation for the
work in the coming life for which God intended you when he made you."

Hester gave a great sigh. Postponement indefinite is terrible to the
young and eager.

"That is a dreary thought, mother," she said.

"Is it, my child?" returned her mother. "Painful the will of God may
be--that I well know, as who that cares anything about it does not! but
_dreary_, no! Have patience, my love. Your heart's deepest desire
must be the will of God, for he cannot have made you so that your heart
should run counter to his will; let him but have his own way with you,
and your desire he will give you. To that goes his path. He delights in
his children; so soon as they can be indulged without ruin, he will heap
upon them their desires; they are his too."

I confess I have, chiefly by compression, put the utterance both of
mother and of daughter into rather better logical form than they gave
it; but the substance of it is thus only the more correctly rendered.
Hester was astonished at the grasp and power of her mother. The child
may for many years have but little idea of the thought and life within
the form and face he knows and loves better than any; but at last the
predestined moment arrives, the two minds meet, and the child
understands the parent. Hester threw herself on her knees, and buried
her face in her mother's lap. The same moment she began to discover that
she had been proud, imagining herself more awake to duty than the rest
around her. She began, too, to understand that if God has called, he
will also open the door. She kissed her mother as she had never kissed
her before, and went to her own room.

CHAPTER XXII.

GLADNESS.

Scarcely had she reached it, however, when the voices of the children
came shouting along some corridor, on their way to find their breakfast:
she must go and minister, postponing meditation on the large and distant
for action in the small and present. But the sight of the exuberance,
the foaming overflow of life and gladness in Saffy, and of the quieter,
deeper joy of Mark, were an immediate reward. They could hardly be
prevented from bolting their breakfast like puppies, in their eagerness
to rush into the new creation, the garden of Eden around them. But
Hester thought of the river flowing turbid and swift at the foot of the
lawn: she must not let them go loose! She told them they must not go
without her. Their faces fell, and even Mark began a gentle
expostulation.

A conscientious elder sister has to bear a good many hard thoughts from
the younger ones on whom, without a parent's authority and reverence,
she has to exercise a parent's restraint. Well for her if she come out
of the trial without having gathered some needless severity, some
seeming hardness, some tendency to peevishness! These weak evils are so
apt to gather around a sense at once of the need and of the lack of
power!

"No, Mark," she said, "I cannot let you go alone. You are like two
kittens, and might be in mischief or danger before you knew. But I won't
keep you waiting; I will get my parasol at once."

I will attempt no description of the beauties that met them at every
turn. But the joy of those three may well have a word or two. I doubt if
some of the children in heaven are always happier than Saffy and Mark
were that day. Hester had thoughts which kept her from being so happy as
they, but she was more blessed. Glorious as is the child's delight, the
child-heart in the grown woman is capable of tenfold the bliss. Saffy
pounced on a flower like a wild beast on its prey; she never stood and
gazed at one, like Mark. Hester would gaze till the tears came in her
eyes;

There are consciousnesses of lack which carry more bliss than any
possession.

Mark was in many things an exception--a curious mixture of child and
youth. He had never been strong, and had always been thoughtful. When
very small he used to have a sacred rite of his own--I would not have
called it a rite but that he made a temple for it. Many children like to
play at church, but I doubt if that be good: Mark's rite was neither
play nor church. He would set two chairs in the recess of a window--"one
for Mark and one for God"--then draw the window-curtains around and sit
in silence for a space.

When a little child sets a chair for God, does God take the chair or
does he not? God is the God of little children, and is at home with
them.

For Saffy, she was a thing of smiles and of tears just as they chose to
come. She had not a suspicion yet that the exercise of any operative
power on herself was possible to her--not to say required of her. Many
men and women are in the same condition who have grown cold and hard in
it; she was soft and warm, on the way to awake and distinguish and act.
Even now when a good thought came she would give it a stranger's
welcome; but the first appeal to her senses would drive it out of doors
again.

Before their ramble was over, what with the sweet twilight gladness of
Mark, the merry noonday brightness of Saffy, and the loveliness all
around, the heart of Hester was quiet and hopeful as a still mere that
waits in the blue night the rising of the moon. She had some things to
trouble her, but none of them had touched the quick of her being.
Thoughtful, therefore in a measure troubled, by nature, she did not know
what heart-sickness was. Nor would she ever know it as many must, for
her heart went up to the heart of her heart, and there unconsciously
laid up store against the evil hours that might be on their way to her.
And this day her thoughts kept rising to Him whose thought was the
meaning of all she saw, the center and citadel of its loveliness.

For if once the suspicion wake that God never meant the things that go
to and fro in us as we gaze on the world, that moment is the universe
worthless as a doll to a childless mother. If God be not, then
steam-engine and flower are in the same category. No; the steam-engine
is the better thing, for it has the soul of a man in it, and the flower
has no soul at all. It cannot mean if it is not meant. It is God that
means everything as we read it, however poor or mingled with mistake our
reading may be. And the soothing of his presence in what we call nature,
was beginning to work on Hester, helping her toward that quietness of
spirit without which the will of God can scarce be perceived.

CHAPTER XXIII.

DOWN THE HILL.

When Franks, the acrobat, and his family left Mrs. Baldwin's garret to
go to another yet poorer lodging, it was with heavy hearts: they crept
silent away, to go down yet a step of the world's stair. I have read
somewhere in Jean Paul of a curiously contrived stair, on which while
you thought you were going down you were really ascending: I think it
was so with the Frankses and the stair they were upon. But to many the
world is but a treadmill, on which while they seem to be going up and
up, they are only serving to keep things going round and round.

I think God has more to do with the fortunes of the poor a thousand fold
than with those of the rich. In the fortunes of the poor there are many
more changes, and they are of greater import as coming closer to the
heart of their condition. To careless and purblind eyes these fortunes
appear on an almost dead level of toil and privation; but they have more
variations of weather, more chequers of sunshine and shade, more storms
and calms, than lives passed on airier slopes. Who could think of God as
a God like Christ--and other than such he were not Godand imagine he
would not care as much for the family of John Franks as for the family
of Gerald Raymount? It is impossible to believe that he loves such as
Cornelius or Vavasor as he loves a Christopher. There must be a
difference! The God of truth cannot love the unlovely in the same way as
he loves the lovely. The one he loves for what he is and what he has
begun to be; the other he loves because he sorely needs love--as sorely
as the other, and must begin to grow lovely one day. Nor dare we forget
that the celestial human thing is in itself lovely as made by God, and
pitiably lovely as spoiled by man. That is the Christ-thing which is the
root of every man, created in his image--that which, when he enters the
men, he possesses. The true earthly father must always love those
children more who are obedient and loving--but he will not neglect one
bad one for twenty good ones. "The Father himself loveth you because ye
have loved me;" but "There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that
repenteth than over ninety and nine that need no repentance." The great
joy is the first rush of love in the new-opened channel for its issue
and entrance.

The Frankses were on the down-going side of the hill Difficulty, and
down they must go, unable to help themselves. They had found a cheaper
lodging, but entered it with misgiving; their gains had been very
moderate since their arrival in London, and their expenses greater than
in the country. Also Franks was beginning to feel or to fancy his
strength and elasticity not quite what they had been. The first
suspicion of the approach of old age and the beginning of that weakness
whose end is sure, may well be a startling one. The man has begun to be
a nobody in the world's race--is henceforth himself but the course of
the race between age and death--a race in which the victor is known ere
the start. Life with its self-discipline withdraws itself thenceforth
more to the inside, and goes on with greater vigor. The man has now to
trust and yield constantly. He is coming to know the fact that he was
never his own strength, had never the smallest power in himself at his
strongest. But he is learning also that he is as safe as ever in the
time when he gloried in his might--yea, as safe as then he imagined
himself on his false foundation. He lays hold of the true strength,
makes it his by laying hold of it. He trusts in the unchangeable thing
at the root of all his strength, which gave it all the truth it had--a
truth far deeper than he knew, a reality unfathomable, though not of the
nature he then fancied. Strength has ever to be made perfect in
weakness, and old age is one of the weaknesses in which it is perfected.

Poor Franks had not got so far yet as to see this, and the feeling of
the approach of old age helped to relax the springs of his hopefulness.
Also his wife had not yet got over her last confinement. The baby, too,
was sickly. And there was not much popular receptivity for acrobatics in
the streets; coppers came in slowly; the outlay was heavy; and the
outlook altogether was of the gray without the gold. But his wife's
words were always cheerful, though the tone of them had not a little of
the mournful. Their tone came of temperament, the words themselves of
love and its courage. The daughter of a gamekeeper, the neighbors
regarded her as throwing herself away when she married Franks; but she
had got an honest and brave husband, and never when life was hardest
repented giving herself to him.

For a few weeks they did pretty well in their new lodging. They managed
to pay their way, and had food enough--though not quite so good as
husband and wife wished each for the other, and both for their children.
The boys had a good enough time of it. They had not yet in London
exhausted their own wonder. The constant changes around made of their
lives a continuous novel--nay, a romance, and being happy they could eat
anything and thrive on it.

The lives of the father and mother over-vault the lives of the children,
shutting out all care if not all sorrow, and every change is welcomed as
a new delight. Their parents, where positive cruelty has not installed
fear and cast out love, are the divinities of even the most neglected.
They feel towards them much the same, I fancy, as the children of
ordinary parents in the middle class--love them more than children given
over to nurses and governesses love theirs. Nor do I feel certain that
the position of the children of the poor, in all its oppression, is not
more favorable to the development of the higher qualities of the human
mind, such as make the least show, than many of those more pleasant
places for which some religious moralists would have us give the thanks
of the specially favored. I suspect, for instance, that imagination,
fancy, perception, insight into character, the faculty of fitting means
to ends, the sense of adventure, and many other powers and feelings are
more likely to be active in the children of the poor, to the greater joy
of their existence, than in others. These Frankses, too, had a strict
rule over them, and that increases much the capacity for enjoyment. The
father, according to his lights, was, as we have seen, a careful and
conscientious parent, and his boys were strongly attached to him, never
thought of shirking their work, and endured a good deal of hardness and
fatigue without grumbling: their mother had opened their eyes to the
fact that their father took his full share in all he required of them,
and did his best for them. They were greatly proud of their father one
and all believing him not only the first man in his profession, but the
best man that ever was in the world; and to believe so of one's parent
is a stronger aid to righteousness than all things else whatever, until
the day-star of the knowledge of the great Father goes up in the heart,
to know whom, in like but better fashion, as the best more than man and
the perfect Father of men, is the only thing to redeem us from misery
and wrong, and lift us into the glorious liberty of the sons and
daughters of God.

They were now reduced to one room, and the boys slept on the floor. This
was no hardship, now that summer was nigh, only the parents found it
interfered a little with their freedom of speech. Nor did it mend the
matter to send them early to bed, for the earlier they went the longer
were they in going to sleep. At the same time they had few things to
talk of which they minded their hearing, and to the mother at least it
was a pleasure to have all her chickens in the nest with her.

One evening after the boys were in bed, the father and mother sat
talking. They had a pint of beer on the table between them, of which the
woman tasted now and then that the man might imagine himself sharing it
with her. Silence had lasted for some time. The mother was busy
rough-patching a garment of Moxy's. The man's work for the day was over,
but not the woman's!

"Well, I dunnow!" he said at last, and there ceased.

"What don ye know, John?" asked his wife, in a tone she would have tried
to make cheerful had she but suspected it half as mournful as it was.

"There's that Mr. Christopher as was such a friend!" he said: "--you
don't disremember what he used to say about the Almighty and that? You
remember as how he used to say a man could no more get out o' the sight
o' them eyes o' hisn than a child could get out o' sight o' the eyes on
his mother as was a watchin' of him!"

"Yes, John, I do remember all that very well, and a great comfort it was
to me at the time to hear him say so, an' has been many's the time
since, when I had no other--leastways none but you an' the children. I
often think over what he said to you an' me then when I was down, an'
not able to hold my head up, nor feelin' as if I should ever lift it no
more!"

"Well, I dunnow!" said Franks, and paused again.

But this time he resumed, "What troubles me is this:--if that there
mother as was a lookin' arter her child, was to see him doin' no better
'n you an' me, an' day by day gettin' furder on the wrong way, I should
say she wan't much of a mother to let us go on in that 'ere way as I
speak on."

"She might ha' got her reasons for it, John," returned his wife, in some
fear lest the hope she cherished was going to give way in her husband.
"P'r'aps she might see, you know, that the child might go a little
farther and fare none the worse. When the children want their dinner
very bad, I ha' heerd you say to them sometimes, 'Now kids, ha'
patience. Patience is a fine thing. What if ye do be hungry, you ain't a
dyin' o' hunger. You'll wear a bit longer yet!' Ain't I heerd you say
that John--more'n once, or twice, or thrice?"

"There ain't no need to put me to my oath like that, old woman! I ain't
a goin' for to deny it! You needn't go to put it to me as if I was the
pris'ner at the bar, or a witness as wanted to speak up for him!--But
you must allow this is a drivin' of it jest a _leetle_ too far!
Here we be come up to Lon'on a thinkin' to better ourselves--not wantin'
no great things--sich we don't look for to get--but jest thinkin' as how
it wur time'--as th' parson is allus a tellin' his prishioners, to lay
by a shillin' or two to keep us out o' th' workus, when 't come on to
rain, an' let us die i' the open like, where a poor body can
breathe!--that's all as we was after! an' here, sin' ever we come, fust
one shillin' goes, an' then another shillin' goes as we brought with us,
till we 'ain't got one, as I may almost say, left! An' there ain't no
luck! I'stead o' gitting more we git less, an' that wi' harder work, as
is a wearin' out me an' the b'ys; an'--"

Here he was interrupted by a cry from the bed. It was the voice of
little Moxy, the Sarpint o' the Prairies.

"I ain't wore out, father! I'm good for another go."

"I ain't neither, gov'nor. I got a lot more work in me!"

"No, nor me," cried the third. "I likes London. I can stand on my head
twice as long as Tommy Blake, an he's a year older 'n I am."

"Hold your tongues, you rascals, an' go to sleep," growled the father,
pretending to be angry with them. "What right have you to be awake at
this time o' the night--an' i' Lon'on too? It's not like the country, as
you very well know. I' the country you can do much as you like, but not
in the town! There's police, an' them's there for boys to mind what
they're about. You've no call to be awake when your father an' mother
want to be by theirselves--a listenin' to what they've got to say to one
another! Us two was man an' wife afore you was born!"

"We wasn't a listenin', father. We was only hearin' 'cause we wasn't
asleep. An' you didn't speak down as if it was secrets!"

"Well, you know, b'ys, there's things as fathers and mothers can
understand an' talk about, as no b'y's fit to see to the end on, an' so
they better go to sleep, an' wait till their turn comes to be fathers
an' mothers theirselves.--Go to sleep direc'ly, or I'll break every bone
in your bodies!"

"Yes, father, yes!" they answered together, nowise terrified by the
awful threat--which was not a little weakened by the fact that they had
heard it every day of their lives, and not yet known it carried into
execution.

But having been thus advised that his children were awake, the father,
without the least hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, changed his tone:
in the presence of his children he preferred looking at the other side
of the argument. After a few moments' silence he began again thus:--

"Yes, as you was sayin', wife, an' I knows as you're always in the
right, if the right be anyhows to be got at--as you was sayin', I say,
there's no sayin' when that same as we was a speakin' of--the Almighty
is the man I mean--no sayin', I say, when he may come to see as we have,
as I may say, had enough on it, an' turn an' let us have a taste o' luck
again! Luck's sweet; an' some likes, an' it may be as he likes to give
his childer a taste o' sweets now an' again, just as you and me, that is
when we can afford it, an' that's not often, likes to give ourn a
bull's-eye or a suck of toffy. I don't doubt _he_ likes to see us
enj'yin' of ourselves just as well as we like to see our little uns
enj'yin' o' _theirselves!_--It stands to reason, wife--don't it?"

"So it do seem to me, John!" answered the mother.

"Well," said Franks, apparently, now that he had taken up the defence of
the ways of the Supreme with men, warming to his subject, "I dessay he
do the best he can, an' give us as much luck as is good for us.
Leastways that's how the rest of us do, wife! We can't allus do as well
as we would like for to do for our little uns, but we _always_, in
general, does the best we can. It may take time--it may take time even
with all the infl'ence _he_ has, to get the better o' things as
stands in _his_ way! We'll suppose yet a while, anyhow, as how he's
a lookin' arter us. It can't be for nothink as he counts the hairs on
our heads--as the sayin' is!--though for my part I never could see what
good there was in it. But if it ain't for somethink, why it's no more
good than the census, which is a countin' o' the heads theirselves."

There are, or there used to be when I was a boy, who, in their reverence
for the name of the Most High, would have shown horror at the idea that
he could not do anything or everything in a moment as it pleased him,
but would not have been shocked at all at the idea that he might not
please to give this or that man any help. In their eyes power was a
grander thing than love, though it is nowhere said in the Book that God
is omnipotence. Such, because they are told that he is omnipotent, call
him Omnipotence; when told that he is Love, do not care to argue that he
must then be loving? But as to doing what he wills with a word--see what
it cost him to redeem the world! He did not find that easy, or to be
done in a moment without pain or toil. Yea, awfully omnipotent is God.
For he wills, effects and perfects the thing which, because of the bad
in us, he has to carry out in suffering and sorrow, his own and his
Son's Evil is a hard thing for God himself to overcome. Yet thoroughly
and altogether and triumphantly will he overcome it; and that not by
crushing it underfoot--any god of man's idea could do that!--but by
conquest of heart over heart, of life in life, of life over death.
Nothing shall be too hard for the God that fears not pain, but will
deliver and make true and blessed at his own severest cost.

For a time, then, the Frankses went on, with food to eat and money to
pay their way, but going slowly down the hill, and finding it harder and
harder to keep their footing. By and by the baby grew worse, pining
visibly. They sought help at the hospital, but saw no Mr. Christopher,
and the baby did not improve. Still they kept on, and every day the
husband brought home a little money. Several times they seemed on the
point of an engagement, but as often something came between, until at
length Franks almost ceased to hope, and grew more and more silent,
until at last he might well have appeared morose. The wonder to me is
that any such as do not hope in a Power loving to perfection, should
escape moroseness. Under the poisonous influences of anxiety, a loving
man may become unkind, even cruel to the very persons for whose sake he
is anxious. In good sooth what we too often count righteous care, but
our Lord calls the care of the world, consumes the life of the heart as
surely as the love of money. At the root they are the same. Yet evil
thing as anxiety is, it were a more evil thing to be delivered from it
by anything but the faith of the Son of God--that is faith in his Father
and our Father; it would be but another and worse, because more
comfortable form of the same slavery.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35