The End of a Coil

Dolly did not say, Do; she did not say anything; she stood pondering and anxious by the window. Neither did Rupert ask further; he acted.

It came by degrees to be a pretty regular thing, that Mr. Copley spent the evening abroad, excused himself from going anywhere with his family, and when they did see him wore an uncertain, purposeless, vagrant sort of look and air. By degrees this began to strike even Mrs. Copley.

"I wish you would just make up your mind to marry Mr. St. Leger!" she said almost weepingly one day. "Then all would go right. I believe it would make me well, to begin with; and it would bring your father right back to his old self."

"How, mother?" Dolly said sadly.

"It would give him spirit at once. It is because he is out of spirits that he does so." (Mrs. Copley did not explain herself.) "I know, if he were once sure of seeing you Mrs. St. Leger, all would come right. Lawrence would help him; he could help him then."

"Who would help me?"

"Nonsense, Dolly! Who would help you choose your dresses and wear your diamonds; that is all the difficulty you would have. But all's going wrong!" said Mrs. Copley, sinking into tears; "and you are selfish, like everybody else, and think only of yourself."

Dolly bore this in silence. It startled her, however, greatly, to find her own view of things held by her much less sharp-sighted mother. She pondered on what was best to do. Should she sit still and quietly see her father lost irretrievably in the bad habits which were creeping upon him? But what step could she take? She asked herself this question evening after evening.

It was late one night, and Lawrence as well as her father had been out ever since dinner. Mrs. Copley, weary and dispirited, had gone to bed. Dolly stood at the window looking out, not to see how the moonlight sparkled on the water and glanced on the vessels, but in a hopeless sort of expectancy watching for her father to come. The stream of passers-by had grown thin, and was growing thinner.

"Rupert," Dolly spoke after a long silence, "do you know where my father is?"

"Can't say I do. I could give a pretty fair guess, though, if you asked me."

"Could you take me to him?"

"Take you to him!" exclaimed the young man, starting.

"Can you find the way? Where is it?"

"I've been there often enough," said Rupert.

"What place is it?"

"The queerest place you ever saw. Do you recollect Mr. St. Leger telling us once about wine-shops in Venice? You and he were talking" —

"Yes, yes, I remember. Is it one of those? Not a café?"

"Not a café at all; neither a café nor a trattoria. Just a wine-shop. Nothing in it but wine casks, and the mugs or jugs of white and blue crockery that they draw the wine into; it's the most ridiculous place altogether I ever was in. I haven't been in it now, that's a fact."

"What were you there for so often, then?"

"Well," said Rupert, "I was looking after things."

"Drink wine and eat nothing!" said Dolly again. "Are there many people there?"

"Well, you can eat if you have a mind to; there are folks enough to sell you things; though they don't belong to the establishment. They come in from the street, with ever so many sorts of things, directly they see a customer sit down; fish and oysters, and cakes and fruit. But the shop sells nothing but wine. Mr. St. Leger says that is good."

"Not many people there?" Dolly asked again.

"No; not unless at a busy time. There won't be many there now, I guess."

"What makes you think my father is there?"

"I've seen him there pretty often," Rupert said in a low voice.

Dolly stood some minutes silent, thinking, and struggling with herself. When she turned to Rupert at the end of those minutes, her air was quite composed and her voice was clear and calm.

"Can you take me there, Rupert? Can you find the way?"

"I know it as well as the way to my mouth. You see, I didn't know but maybe – I couldn't tell what you might take a notion to want me to do; so I just practised, till I had got the ins and outs of the thing. And there are a good many ins and outs, I can tell you. But I know them."

"Then we will go," said Dolly. "I'll be ready in two minutes."

It was a brilliant moonlight night, as I said. Venice, the bride of the Adriatic, lay as if robed in silver for her wedding. The air was soft, late as the time of year was; Dolly had no need of any but a light wrap to protect her in her midnight expedition. Rupert called a gondola, and presently they were gliding along, as still as ghosts, under the shadow of bridges, past glistening palace fronts, again in the deep shade of a wall of buildings. Wherever the light struck it was like molten silver; façades and carvings stood sharply revealed; every beauty of the weird city seemed heightened and spiritualised; almost glorified; while the silence, the outward peace, gave still more the impression of a place fair-like and unreal. It was truly a wonderful sail, a marvellous passage through an enchanted city, never to be forgotten by either of the two young people; who went for some distance in a silence as if a spell were upon them too.

At Dolly's age, with all its elasticity, some aspects of trouble are more overwhelming than in later years. When one has not measured life, not learned yet the relations and proportions of things, one imagines the whole earth darkened by the cloud which is but hiding the sun from the spot where our feet stand. And before one has seen what wonders Time can do, the ruin wrought by an avalanche or a flood seems irreparable. It is inconceivable, that the bare and torn rocks should be clothed again, the choking piles of rubbish ever be anything but dismal and unsightly, the stripped fields ever be green and flourishing, or the torn-up trees be ever replaced. Yet Time does it all. Come after a while to look again, and the traces of past devastation are not easy to find; nature's weaving has so covered, and nature's embroidery has so adorned, the bald places. In human life there is something like this often done; though, as I said, youth wots not of it and does not believe in it. So Dolly this night saw her little life a wilderness, which had been a garden of flowers. Some flowers might be lifting their heads yet, but what Dolly looked at was the destruction. Wrought by her own father's hand! I cannot tell how that thought stung and crushed Dolly. What would anything else in the world have mattered, so she could have kept him? help could have been found; but to lose him, her father, and not by death, but by change, by dishonour, by loss of his identity – Dolly felt indeed that a storm had come upon the little garden of her life from the sweeping ruin of which there could be no revival. She could hardly hold her head up for a long distance of that midnight sail; yet she did, and noted as they passed the fairy glories of the scene. Just noted them, to deepen, if possible, the pangs at her heart. All this beauty, all this outward delight, mocked the inner reality; and made sharp the sense of it with the contrast of what might have been. As they went along, Venice became to her fancy a grave and monument of lost things, which floated together in her mind's vision. Past struggles for freedom, beaten back or faded out; vanished patriotism and art, with their champions; extinct ambitions and powers; historical glories evaporated, as it were, leaving only a scent upon the air; what was left at Venice but monuments? and like it now her own little life gone out and gone down! For so it seemed to Dolly. Even if she succeeded in her mission, and brought her father home, what safety, what security could she have? And if she did not bring him – then all was lost indeed. It was lost anyhow, she thought, as far as her own life was concerned. Her father could not be what he had been again. "O father! my father!" was poor Dolly's bitter cry, "if you had taken anything else from me, and only left me yourself!"

After a long time, when she spoke to Rupert, it was in a quiet, unaltered voice.

"Is this the shortest way, Rupert?"

"As like as not it's the longest. But, you see, it's the only way I know. I've always got there starting from the Place of St. Mark; and that way I know what I am about; but though I daresay there's a short cut home, I've never been it, and don't know it."

Dolly added no more.

"It's a bit of a walk from St. Mark's," Rupert went on. "Do you mind?"

"No," said Dolly, sighing. "Rupert, I wish you were a Christian friend! You are a good friend, but I wish you were a Christian!"

"Why just now?"

"Nobody else can give one comfort. You cannot, Rupert, with all the will in the world; there is no comfort in anything you could tell me. I have only one Christian friend on this side of the Atlantic; and that is Mrs. Jersey; and she might as well be in America too, where Aunt Hal is!"

Dolly was crying. It went to Rupert's heart.

"What could a Christian friend say to you?" he asked at length.

"Remind me of something, or of some words, that I ought to remember," said Dolly, still weeping.

"Of what?" said Rupert. "If you know, tell me. Remind yourself; that's as good as having some one else remind you. What comfort is there in religion for a great trouble? Is there any?"

"Yes," said Dolly.

"What then? Tell us, Miss Dolly. I may want it some time, as well as you."

"I suppose everybody is pretty sure to want it, some time in his life," said Dolly sadly, but trying to wipe away her tears.

"Let's have the comfort then," said Rupert, "if you've got it."

"Why, are you in trouble, Rupert?" she said, rousing up. "What about?"

"Never mind; let's have the comfort; that's the thing wanted just now. What would you say to me now if I wanted it pretty bad?"

"The trouble is, it is so hard to believe what God says," Dolly said, speaking half to herself and half to her companion.

"What does He say? Is it anything a fellow can take hold of and hold on to? I never could make out much by what I've heard folks tell; and I never heard much anyhow, to begin with."

"One of the things that are good to me," said Dolly, bowing her face on her hand, "is – that Jesus knows."

"Knows what?"

"All about it – everything – my trouble, and your trouble, if you have any."

"I don't see the comfort in that. If He knows, why don't He hinder? I suppose He can hinder?"

"He does hinder whatever would be real harm to His people; He has promised that."

"Well, ain't this real harm, that is worrying you?" said Rupert. "What do you call harm?"

"Pain and trouble are not always harm," said Dolly, "for His children often have them, I know; and no trouble seems sweet at the minute, but bitter; and the sweet fruits come afterward. Oh, it's so bitter now!" cried poor Dolly, unable to keep the tears back again; – "but He knows. He knows."

"If He knows," said Rupert, wholly unable to understand this reasoning, "why doesn't He hinder? That's what I look at."

"I don't know," said Dolly faintly.

"What comforts you in that, then?" said Rupert almost impatiently. "That's too big a mouthful for me."

"No, you're wrong," said Dolly. "He knows why. I have the comfort of that, and so I am sure there is a why. It is not all vague chance and confusion, with no hand to rule anything. Don't you see what a difference that makes?"

"Do you mean to say, that everything that happens is for the best?"

"No," said Dolly. "Wrong can never be as good as right. Only, Rupert, God will so manage things that to His children – to His children – good shall come out of evil, and nothing really hurt them."

"Then the promise is only for them?"

"That's all. How could it be for the others?"

"I don't see it," said Rupert. "Seems to my eyes as if black was black and white white; it's the fault of my eyes, I s'pose. It is only moonshine to my eyes, that makes black white."

"Rupert, you do not understand. I will tell you. You know the story of Joseph. Well, when his brothers tried to murder him, that was what you call evil, wasn't it?"

"Black, and no moonshine on it."

"Yet it led to his being sold into Egypt."

"What was the moonshine on that? He was a slave, warn't he?"

"But that brought him to be governor of Egypt; he was the means of the plenty in the land through those years of famine; and by his power and influence his family was placed in the best of the land when starvation drove them down there."

"But why must he be sold a slave to begin with?"

"Good reasons. As a servant of Potiphar he learned to know all about the land and its produce and its cultivation, and the peasant people that cultivated it. If it had not been for the knowledge he gained as a slave, Joseph could never have known what to do as a governor."

"I never thought of that," said Rupert, his tone changing.

"Then when he was thrown into prison, you would have said that was a black experience too?"

"I should, and no mistake."

"And there, among the great prisoners of state, he learned to know about the politics of the country, and heard what he never could have heard talked about anywhere else; and there, by interpreting their dreams, he recommended himself to the high officers of Pharaoh. Except through the prison, it is impossible to see how he, a poor foreigner, could ever have come to be so distinguished at the king's court; for the Egyptians hated and despised foreigners."

"I'll be whipped if that ain't a good sermon," said Rupert drily; "and what's more, I can understand it, which I can't most sermons I've heard. But look here, – do you think God takes the same sort of look-out for common folks? Joseph was Joseph."

"The care comes of His goodness, not out of our worthiness," said Dolly, the tears dripping from her eyes. "To Him, Dolly is Dolly, and Rupert is Rupert, just as truly. I know it, and yet I am so ungrateful!"

"But tell me, then," Rupert went on, "how comes it that God, who can do everything, does not make people good right off? Half the trouble in the world comes of folks' wrong-headedness; why don't He make 'em reasonable?"

"He tries to make them reasonable."

"Tries! Why don't He do it?"

"You, for instance," said Dolly – "because He has given you the power of choice, Rupert; and you know yourself that obedience would not be obedience if it were not voluntary."

On this theological nut Rupert ruminated, without finding anything to say.

"You have comforted me," Dolly went on presently. "Thank you, Rupert. You have made me remember what I had forgotten. Just look at that palace front in the moonlight!"

"The world's a queer place, though," said Rupert, not heeding the palace front.

"What are you thinking of?"

"This city, for one thing. I've been, reading that book you lent me. Hasn't there been confusion enough, though, up and down these canals, and in and out of those palaces! and the rest of the world is pretty much in the same way. Only in America it ain't quite so bad. I suppose because we haven't had time enough."