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Polwarth did not much relish Mrs. Ramshorn’s style, and was considerably surprised at receiving such a hearty approval of a proposed reformation in clerical things, reaching even to the archiepiscopal, which he had put half-humorously, and yet in thorough earnest, for the ear of Wingfold only. He was little enough desirous of pursuing the conversation with Mrs. Ramshorn: Charity herself does not require of a man to cast his precious things at the feet of my lady Disdain; but he must reply.
“Yes,” he said, “the great evil in the church has always been the presence in it of persons unsuited for the work there required of them. One very simple sifting rule would be, that no one should be admitted to holy orders who had not first proved himself capable of making a better living in some other calling.”
“I cannot go with you so far as that—so few careers are opened to gentlemen,” rejoined Mrs. Ramshorn. “Besides—take the bar, for instance: the forensic style a man must there acquire would hardly become the pulpit. But it would not be a bad rule that everyone, for admission to holy orders, should be possessed of property sufficient at least to live upon. With that for a foundation, his living would begin at once to tell, and he would immediately occupy the superior position every clergyman ought to have.”
“What I was thinking of,” said Polwarth, “was mainly the experience in life he would gather by having to make his own living; that, behind the counter or the plough, or in the workshop, he would come to know men and their struggles and their thoughts—”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Mrs. Ramshorn. “But I must be under some misapprehension! It is not possible you can be speaking of the CHURCH—of the clerical PROFESSION. The moment that is brought within the reach of such people as you describe, that moment the church sinks to the level of the catholic priesthood.”
“Say rather, to the level of Jeremy Taylor,” returned Polwarth, “who was the son of a barber; or of Tillotson, who was the son of a clothier, or something of the sort, and certainly a fierce dissenter. His enemies said the archbishop himself was never baptized. By-the-way, he was not ordained till he was thirty—and that bears on what I was just saying to Mr. Wingfold, that I would have no one ordained till after forty, by which time he would know whether he had any real call or only a temptation to the church, from the base hope of an easy living.”
By this time Mrs. Ramshorn had had more than enough of it. The man was a leveller, a chartist, a positivist—a despiser of dignities!
“Mr.—, Mr.—, I don’t know your name—you will oblige me by uttering no more such vile slanders in my company. You are talking about what you don’t in the least understand. The man who does not respect the religion of his native country is capable of—of—of ANYTHING.—I am astonished, Mr. Wingfold, at your allowing a member of your congregation to speak with so little regard for the feelings of the clergy.—You forget, sir, when you attribute what you call base motives to the cloth—you forget who said the labourer was worthy of his hire.”
“I hope not, madam. I only venture to suggest that, though the labourer is worthy of his hire, not every man is worthy of the labour.”
Wingfold was highly amused at the turn things had taken. Polwarth looked annoyed at having allowed himself to be beguiled into such an utterly useless beating of the air.
“My friend HAS some rather peculiar notions, Mrs. Ramshorn,” said the curate; “but you must admit it was your approval that encouraged him to go on.”
“It is quite as well to know what people think,” answered Mrs. Ramshorn, pretending she had drawn him out from suspicion. “My husband used to say that very few of the clergy had any notion of the envy and opposition of the lower orders, both to them personally, and to the doctrines they taught. To low human nature the truth has always been unpalatable.”
What precisely she meant by THE TRUTH it would be hard to say, but if the visual embodiment of it was not a departed dean, it was at least always associated in her mind with a cathedral choir, and a portly person in silk stockings.
Here happily Leopold woke, and his eyes fell upon the gate-keeper.
“Ah, Mr. Polwarth! I am so glad to see you!” he said. “I am getting on, you see. It will be over soon.”
“I see,” replied Polwarth, going up to him, and taking his offered hand in both his. “I could almost envy you for having got so near the end of your troubles.”
“Are you sure it will be the end of them, sir?”
“Of some of them at least, I hope, and those the worst. I cannot be sure of anything but that all things work together for good to them that love God.”
“I don’t know yet whether I do love God.”
“Not the father of Jesus Christ?”
“If God is really just like him, I don’t see how any man could help loving him. But, do you know? I am terrified sometimes at the thought of seeing MY father. He was such a severe man! I am afraid he will scorn me.”
“Never—if he has got into heavenly ways. And you have your mother there too, have you not?”
“Oh! yes; I didn’t think of that. I don’t remember much of her.”
“Anyhow, you have God there, and you must rest in him. He will not forget you, for that would be ceasing to be God. If God were to forget for one moment, the universe would grow black—vanish—rush out again from the realm of law and order into chaos and night.”
“But I have been wicked.”
“The more need you have, if possible, of your Father in heaven.”
Here Mrs. Ramshorn beckoned the attendance of the curate where she sat a few yards off on the other side of Leopold. She was a little ashamed of having condescended to lose her temper, and when the curate went up to her, said, with an attempt at gaiety:
“Is your odd little friend, as you call him, all—?”
And she tapped her lace-cap carefully with her finger.
“Rather more so than most people,” answered Wingfold. “He is a very remarkable man.”
“He speaks as if he had seen better days—though where he can have gathered such detestable revolutionary notions, I can’t think.”
“He is a man of education, as you see,” said the curate.
“You don’t mean he has been to Oxford or Cambridge?”
“No. His education has been of a much higher sort than is generally found there. He knows ten times as much as most university men.”
“Ah! yes; but that goes for nothing: he hasn’t the standing. And if he had been to Oxford, he never could have imbibed such notions. Besides—his manners! To speak of the clergy as he did in the hearing of one whose whole history is bound up with the church!”
She meant herself, not Wingfold.
“But of course,” she went on, “there must be something VERY wrong with him to know so much as you say, and occupy such a menial position! Nothing but a gate-keeper, and talk like that about bishops and what not! People that are crooked in body are always crooked in mind too. I dare say now he has quite a coterie of friends and followers amongst the lower orders in Glaston. He’s just the sort of man to lead the working classes astray. No doubt he is a very interesting study for a young man like you, but you must take care; you may be misunderstood. A young clergyman CAN’T be too cautious—if he has any hope of rising in his profession.—A gate-keeper, indeed!”
“Wasn’t it something like that David wanted to be?” said the curate.
“Mr. Wingfold, I never allow any such foolish jests in my hearing. It was a DOOR-keeper the Psalmist said—and to the house of God, not a nobleman’s park.”
“A verger, I suppose,” thought Wingfold.—“Seriously, Mrs. Ramshorn, that poor little atom of a creature is the wisest man I know,” he said.
“Likely enough, in YOUR judgment, Mr. Wingfold,” said the dean’s widow, and drew herself up.
The curate accepted his dismissal, and joined the little man by Leopold’s chair.
“I wish you two could be with me when I am dying,” said Leopold.
“If you will let your sister know your wish, you may easily have it,” said the curate.
“It will be just like saying good-bye at the pier-head, and pushing off alone—you can’t get more than one into the boat—out, out, alone, into the infinite ocean of—nobody knows what or where,” said Leopold.
“Except those that are there already, and they will be waiting to receive you,” said Polwarth. “You may well hope, if you have friends to see you off, you will have friends to welcome you too. But I think it’s not so much like setting off from the pier-head, as getting down the side of the ocean-ship, to laud at the pier-head, where your friends are all standing looking out for you.”
“Well! I don’t know,” said Leopold, with a sigh of weariness. “I’m thankful sometimes that I’ve grown stupid. I suppose it’s with dying. I didn’t use to feel so. Sometimes I seem not to know or care anything about anything. I only want to stop coughing and aching and go to sleep.”
“Jesus was glad to give up his spirit into his Father’s hands. He was very tired before he got away.”
“Thank you. Thank you. I have him. He is somewhere. You can’t mention his name but it brings me something to live and hope for. If he is there, all will be well. And if I do get too tired to care for anything, he won’t mind; he will only let me go to sleep, and wake me up again by-and-by when I am rested.”
He closed his eyes.
“I want to go to bed,” he said.
They carried him into the house.
CHAPTER XIX. RACHEL AND LEOPOLD
Every day after this, so long as the weather continued warm, it was Leopold’s desire to be carried out to the meadow. Once at his earnest petition, instead of setting him down in the usual place, they went on with him into the park, but he soon wished to be taken back to the meadow. He did not like the trees to come between him and his bed: they made him feel like a rabbit that was too far from its hole, he said; and he was never tempted to try it again.
Regularly too every day, about one o’clock, the gnome-like form of the gate-keeper would issue from the little door in the park-fence, and come marching across the grass towards Leopold’s chair, which was set near the small clump of trees already mentioned. The curate was almost always there, not talking much to the invalid, but letting him know every now and then by some little attention or word, or merely by showing himself, that he was near. Sometimes he would take refuge from the heat, which the Indian never felt too great, amongst the trees, and there would generally be thinking out what he wanted to say to his people the next Sunday.
One thing he found strange, and could not satisfy himself concerning, namely, that although his mind was so much occupied with Helen that he often seemed unable to think consecutively upon any subject, he could always foresee his sermon best when, seated behind one of the trees, he could by moving his head see her at work beside Leopold’s chair. But the thing that did carry him through became plain enough to him afterwards: his faith in God was all the time growing—and that through what seemed at the time only a succession of interruptions. Nothing is so ruinous to progress in which effort is needful, as satisfaction with apparent achievement; that ever sounds a halt; but Wingfold’s experience was that no sooner did he set his foot on the lowest hillock of self-congratulation than some fresh difficulty came that threw him prostrate; and he rose again only in the strength of the necessity for deepening and broadening his foundations that he might build yet higher, trust yet farther: that was the only way not to lose everything. He was gradually learning that his faith must be an absolute one, claiming from God everything the love of a perfect Father could give, or the needs he had created in his child could desire; that he must not look to himself first for help, or imagine that the divine was only the supplement to the weakness and failure of the human; that the highest effort of the human was to lay hold of the divine. He learned that he could keep no simplest law in its loveliness until he was possessed of the same spirit whence that law sprung; that he could not love Helen aright, simply, perfectly, unselfishly, except through the presence of the originating Love; that the one thing wherein he might imitate the free creative will of God was to will the presence and power of that will which gave birth to his. It was the vital growth of this faith, even when he was too much troubled to recognize the fact, that made him strong in the midst of weakness; when the son of man in him cried out, Let this cup pass, the son of God in him could yet cry, Let thy will be done. He could “inhabit trembling,” and yet be brave.
Mrs. Ramshorn generally came to the meadow to see how the invalid was after he was settled, but she seldom staid: she was not fond of nursing, neither was there any need of her assistance; and as Helen never dreamed now of opposing the smallest wish of her brother, there was no longer any obstruction to the visits of Polwarth, which were eagerly looked for by Leopold.
One day the little man did not appear, but soon after his usual time the still more gnome-like form of his little niece came scrambling rather than walking over the meadow. Gently and modestly, almost shyly, she came up to Helen, made her a courtesy like a village school-girl, and said, while she glanced at Leopold now and then with an ocean of tenderness in her large, clear woman-eyes:
“My uncle is sorry, Miss Lingard, that he cannot come to see your brother to-day, but he is laid up with an attack of asthma. He wished Mr. Lingard to know that he was thinking of him:—shall I tell you just what he said?”
Helen bent her neck: she did not feel much interest in the matter. But Leopold said,
“Every word of such a good man is precious: tell me, please.”
Rachel turned to him with the flush of a white rose on her face.
“I asked him, sir—‘Shall I tell him you are praying for him?’ and he said, ‘No. I am not exactly praying for him, but I am thinking of God and him together.’”
The tears rose in Leopold’s eyes. Rachel lifted her baby-hand, and stroked the dusky, long-fingered one that lay upon the arm of the chair.
“Dear Mr. Lingard,” she said,—Helen stopped in the middle of an embroidery stitch, and gave her a look as if she were about to ask for her testimonials—“I could well wish, if it pleased God, that I were as near home as you.”
Leopold took her hand in his.
“Do you suffer then?” he said.
“Just look at me,” she answered with a smile that was very pitiful, though she did not mean it for such, “—shut up all my life in this epitome of deformity! But I ain’t grumbling: that would be a fine thing! My house is not so small but God can get into it. Only you can’t think how tired I often am of it.”
“Mr. Wingfold was telling me yesterday that some people fancy St. Paul was little and misshapen, and that that was his thorn in the flesh.”
“I don’t think that can be true, or he would never have compared his body to a tabernacle, for, oh dear! it won’t stretch an inch to give a body room. I don’t think either, if that had been the case, he would have said he didn’t want it taken off, but another put over it. I do want mine taken off me, and a downright good new one put on instead—something not quite so far off your sister’s there, Mr. Lingard. But I’m ashamed of talking like this. It came of wanting to tell you I can’t be sorry you are going when I should so dearly like to go myself.”
“And I would gladly stay a while, and that in a house no bigger than yours, if I had a conscience of the same sort in my back-parlour,” said Leopold smiling. “But when I am gone the world will be the cleaner for it.—Do you know about God the same way your uncle does, Miss Polwarth?”
“I hope I do—a little. I doubt if anybody knows as much as he does,” she returned, very seriously. “But God knows about us all the same, and he don’t limit his goodness to us by our knowledge of him. It’s so wonderful that he can be all to everybody! That is his Godness, you know. We can’t be all to any one person. Do what we will, we can’t let anybody see into us even. We are all in bits and spots. But I fancy it’s a sign that we come of God that we don’t like it. How gladly I would help you, Mr. Lingard, and I can do nothing for you.—I’m afraid your beautiful sister thinks me very forward. But she don’t know what it is to lie awake all night sometimes, think-thinking about my beautiful brothers and sisters that I can’t get near to do anything for.”
“What an odd creature!” thought Helen, to whom her talk conveyed next to nothing. “—But I daresay they are both out of their minds. Poor things! they must have a hard time of it with one thing and another!”
“I beg your pardon again for talking so much,” concluded Rachel, and, with a courtesy first to the one then to the other, walked away. Her gait was no square march like her uncle’s, but a sort of sidelong propulsion, rendered more laborious by the thick grass of the meadow.
CHAPTER XX. THE BLOOD-HOUND
I need not follow the steps by which the inquiry-office became able so far to enlighten the mother of Emmeline concerning the person and habits of the visitor to the deserted shaft, that she had now come to Glaston in pursuit of yet farther discovery concerning him. She had no plan in her mind, and as yet merely intended going to church and everywhere else where people congregated, in the hope of something turning up to direct inquiry. Not a suspicion of Leopold had ever crossed her. She did not even know that he had a sister in Glaston, for Emmeline’s friends had not all been intimate with her parents.
On the morning after her arrival, she went out early to take a walk, and brood over her cherished vengeance; and finding her way into the park, wandered about in it for some time. Leaving it at length by another gate, and inquiring the way to Glaston, she was directed to a footpath which would lead her thither across the fields. Following this, she came to a stile, and being rather weary with her long walk, sat down on it.
The day was a grand autumnal one. But nature had no charms for her. Indeed had she not been close shut in the gloomy chamber of her own thoughts, she would not thus have walked abroad alone; for nature was to her a dull, featureless void; while her past was scarcely of the sort to invite retrospection, and her future was clouded.
It so fell that just then Leopold was asleep in his chair,—every morning he slept a little soon after being carried out,—and that chair was in its usual place in the meadow, with the clump of trees between it and the stile. Wingfold was seated in the shade of the trees, but Helen, happening to want something for her work, went to him and committed her brother to his care until she should return, whereupon he took her place. Almost the same moment however, he spied Polwarth coming from the little door in the fence, and went to meet him. When he turned, he saw, to his surprise, a lady standing beside the sleeping youth, and gazing at him with a strange intentness. Polwarth had seen her come from the clump of trees, and supposed her a friend. The curate walked hastily back, fearing he might wake and be startled at sight of the stranger. So intent was the gazing lady that he was within a few yards of her before she heard him. She started, gave one glance at the curate, and hurried away towards the town. There was an agitation in her movements which Wingfold did not like; a suspicion crossed his mind, and he resolved to follow her. In his turn he made over his charge to Polwarth, and set off after the lady.
The moment the eyes of Emmeline’s mother fell upon the countenance of Leopold, whom, notwithstanding the change that suffering had caused, she recognized at once, partly by the peculiarity of his complexion, the suspicion, almost conviction, awoke in her that here was the murderer of her daughter. That he looked so ill seemed only to confirm the likelihood. Her first idea was to wake him and see the effect of her sudden presence. Finding he was attended, however, she hurried away to inquire in the town and discover all she could about him.
A few moments after Polwarth had taken charge of him, and while he stood looking on him tenderly, the youth woke with a start.
“Where is Helen?” he said.
“I have not seen her. Ah, here she comes!”
“Did you find me alone then?”
“Mr. Wingfold was with you. He gave you up to me, because he had to go into the town.”
He looked inquiringly at his sister as she came up, and she looked in the same way at Polwarth.
“I feel as if I had been lying all alone in this wide field,” said Leopold, “and as if Emmeline had been by me, though I didn’t see her.”
Polwarth looked after the two retiring forms, which were now almost at the end of the meadow, and about to issue on the high road.
Helen followed his look with hers. A sense of danger seized her. She trembled, and kept behind Leopold’s chair.
“Have you been coughing much to-day?” asked the gate-keeper.
“Yes, a good deal—before I came out. But it does not seem to do much good.”
“What good would you have it do?”
“I mean, it doesn’t do much to get it over. Oh, Mr. Polwarth, I am so tired!”
“Poor fellow! I suppose it looks to you as if it would never be over. But all the millions of the dead have got through it before you. I don’t know that that makes much difference to the one who is going through it. And yet it is a sort of company. Only, the Lord of Life is with you, and that is real company, even in dying, when no one else can be with you.”
“If I could only feel he was with me!”
“You may feel his presence without knowing what it is.”
“I hope it isn’t wrong to wish it over, Mr. Polwarth?”
“I don’t think it is wrong to wish anything you can talk to him about and submit to his will. St. Paul says, ‘In everything let your requests be made known unto God.’”
“I sometimes feel as if I would not ask him for anything, but just let him give me what he likes.”
“We must not want to be better than is required of us, for that is at once to grow worse.”
“I don’t quite understand you.”
“Not to ask may seem to you a more submissive way, but I don’t think it is so childlike. It seems to me far better to say, ‘O Lord, I should like this or that, but I would rather not have it if thou dost not like it also.’ Such prayer brings us into conscious and immediate relations with God. Remember, our thoughts are then, passing to him, sent by our will into his mind. Our Lord taught us to pray always and not get tired of it. God, however poor creatures we may be, would have us talk to him, for then he can speak to us better than when we turn no face to him.”
“I wonder what I shall do the first thing when I find myself out—out, I mean, in the air, you know.”
“It does seem strange we should know so little of what is in some sense so near us! that such a thin veil should be so impenetrable! I fancy the first thing I should do would be to pray.”
“Then you think we shall pray there—wherever it is?”
“It seems to me as if I should go up in prayer the moment I got out of this dungeon of a body. I am wrong to call it a dungeon, for it lies open to God’s fair world, and the loveliness of the earth comes into me through eyes and ears just as well as into you. Still it is a pleasant thought that it will drop off me some day. But for prayer—I think all will pray there more than here—in their hearts and souls I mean.”
“Then where would be the harm if you were to pray for me after I am gone?”
“Nowhere that I know. It were indeed a strange thing if I might pray for you up to the moment when you ceased to breathe, and therewith an iron gate close between us, and I could not even reach you through the ear of the Father of us both! It is a faithless doctrine, for it supposes either that those parted from us can do without prayer, the thing Jesus himself could not do without, seeing it was his highest joy, or that God has so parted those who are in him from these who are in him, that there is no longer any relation, even with God, common to them. The thing to me takes the form of an absurdity.”
“Ah, then, pray for me when I am dying, and don’t be careful to stop when you think I am gone, Mr. Polwarth.”
“I will remember,” said the little man.
And now Helen had recovered herself, and came and took her usual seat by her brother’s side. She cast an anxious glance now and then into Polwarth’s face, but dared not ask him anything.